Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness
Part 1: Chapter 6—Emotional Guardrails
Dear reader: Did you see the movie “Inside Out,” where each emotion is a character?
Hand to God dess— I had this idea first! And I used this technique for “Embodying Soul!”
Why? I don’t know — other than I just saw my emotions as characters in my mind’s eye as I wrote, and they simply insisted on taking up some space. (Probably because of all the years I spent trying to tamp them down and ignoring them…yeah, maybe…)
Most of my emotions take the shape of snakes in my book. Some are male, some are female (and which are which was very deliberate.) I don’t know if we can say that my emotions are “personified” when they were actually “reptilified.” <Bad Joke, so sorry!>
Anyway, you’ll meet Fear, as well as my parents, in this chapter, entitled Emotional Guardrails.
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Chapter 6: Emotional Guardrails
Growing up, I rarely saw my mom express her emotions, and certainly not uncontrollably. My dad, his eyes often welling with unfallen tears of pride or nostalgia, fought back his emotions as if they were lions and he had only a chair to keep them at bay. My dad might’ve been a successful general manager at work, but when it came to emotional management my mom was more successful.
One day when I was in my early teens I got a close-up look at her method. My mom, my brothers, and I were driving home from my grandparents’ house on a summer evening, our bellies rounded with Grandma’s stuffed pork chops, baked beans, and banana cream pie. We didn’t need the tornado warnings on the radio or the sirens blaring around us to recognize that we faced danger. We only needed to peer out the windshield, through which we saw torrential rain, sky-splitting lightning, and black, menacing clouds blowing closer and closer, threatening to sweep us away.
I imagined the inhabitants of nearby houses hunkered down in their basements, and I wished we were safe in our basement, too. If it had been daytime, that drive would’ve proffered sun-kissed fields of wheat and corn waving in the breeze under a sky spotted with puffy clouds looking like white angels, dogs, elephants, and giant birds. But that black stormy night all I could make out was a green sign on the side of the road that read “Christine City Limit.” Having recently read Stephen King’s Christine, about a possessed car bent toward death, I felt my heart begin to pound and hot tears well up in my eyes.
My mom stopped under an overpass as a haven from the pelting rain and asked us if we would rather wait out the storm here or slowly drive the last twenty-five miles home. We kids chose the latter. So we drove onward, behind a semitruck to help stave off the rain and not stray from our lane, and finally arrived home safely.
After we’d been home for some time, the phone rang. It was my dad calling from work.
I listened for my mom to tell him how we almost died, to confess how scared we all had been. But she said as brightly as usual, “Yes, everything is fine here.” I swallowed my tears and absorbed the lesson: don’t let anyone see your fear or anxiety.
My mom’s ability to drive straight through the storms of life threads back to at least 1962, a time before weather warnings and storm watchers. She was twelve years old when another powerful storm threatened. Her parents, taking a well-deserved night off, had driven into town for a card party, while she and her older sister had been left in charge of the house and their younger siblings. It began to rain harder, then hail — not dime- or marble-size hail but hail large and strong enough to shatter two kitchen windows. Water began to stream inside the house.
Her parents, given the hazardous road conditions, explained over the phone that they could not drive home. My aunt began to panic and cry. My mom, frustrated by her older sister’s paralysis, put everyone to work shoving pillows into the broken windows. From the barns to the sheds to the garage, that hailstorm broke over sixty windows, but it stood no chance of so much as denting my mom’s defenses against her emotions.
Seeing her this way, it does not surprise me that she chose nursing as her vocation. Her ability to focus on the task at hand and not get swept up in emotion served her well for several decades. But she only worked part-time so she could be there for us kids when we got home from school. She filled her free time with creative projects: crocheting, quilting, and sewing. Over the years she made me a Christmas stocking with my name on it, a pink and white summer shawl, and a faux fur coat that I wore every winter day. She was also a part-time businesswoman, selling some of the things she made, like stuffed Care Bears — with official names like Cheer Bear, Sunshine Bear, Wish Bear, Tenderheart Bear, and Share Bear — on whose white bellies were sewn rainbows, sunshine, hearts, and flowers. While she often recruited me to join in her business projects, I never caught her in the act of making something personal for me. She must’ve done this only after I had gone to bed, for even demonstrations or words of love were kept quiet, revealed only at times deemed appropriate such as holidays or birthdays.
No one could’ve known that this capable, independent, uncomplaining woman selling happy Care Bears was quietly suffering symptoms of kidney failure, including fatigue and shortness of breath. No one could’ve known because she wouldn’t have confided in anyone. When I later discovered that in traditional Chinese medicine the kidneys relate to the emotion of fear, I wondered if my mom’s kidneys were themselves a kind of stuffed bear.
Finally, though, my mom could ignore her physical symptoms no longer. In 1996, doctors diagnosed her condition as glomerulonephritis — an inflammation of the kidneys — and said she would need a kidney transplant to save her life. Luckily, the needed kidney came quickly from an excellent match: her younger sister. To this day, my mom still has this kidney, though doctors told her not to expect it to last more than ten years. If the doctors had known my mom better, they’d have realized that if she decided the kidney was going to last, it would last.
***
On holidays and many Sundays, I watched my dad, sometimes joined by uncles, brothers, and cousins, alternate between cheering and booing while watching sports games on TV and drinking cheap beer, a male bonding ritual I envied while I was relegated to the kitchen with my mom and aunts to help dry dishes and scoop leftovers into plastic containers. As I contemplate sports today, I wonder if in our culture sports provide an opportunity to feel and express, without judgment or ridicule, pent-up emotions, allowing everyone to go back to work on Mondays purged.
However, I was not able to do with my emotions what my dad did with his — shout at the TV. And I couldn’t do with my emotions what my mom did with hers — simply hide them. I cried easily and all the time. Anytime I got in trouble, had a fight with a friend, received a bad grade, skinned a knee, or heard an unkind word on the playground, my stomach ached from sobbing.
As I grew older, a cunning emotion, who had been waiting for a moment of confusion over how or if I fit in with my stoic and reserved family lineage, cleared his throat, rapped on the door to my mind and said, “Let me in! I am the oldest — and the wisest — of all the human emotions, and I’m here to protect you.”
“I can protect myself,” I asserted.
In an effort to persuade me of my need for him, Fear began to reveal his observations about me, saying, “There is a little girl different from all the others. She stands at the edge of a world that is not truly hers to live in, not hers to change, not hers to call home. She has thoughts and ideas that stray too far outside the boundaries of safe or acceptable. She has dangerous dreams and imaginings that are best kept hidden. Her only hope is to lay low, not let it be known that she is a highly emotional person. You, my dear, are that girl. Look around. Everyone else fits in. See their knowing smiles, their confident interactions, their genuine happiness? Understand this: you have no important purpose in this world. Everything that needs to be created has already been created. Everything that needs to be said has already been said. You can read about those amazing people who have said or created valuable things in textbooks, but you cannot become one. Because you, my dear, are an outsider.”
I gulped, and Fear continued, “Put your trust in me. Who do you think was there for you when your uncle asked you about the dead cat? Who was there to tell you that you must lie to stay safe? That was easy. I can do more. I can show you how to hide yourself like a chameleon in this world. Let me help you fall in line, be invisible.”
“Tell me what I need to do to be safe,” I acquiesced. “I don’t want anything more than that.”
Fear nodded approvingly and closed his proposal with what seemed like a logical series of statements: “Feeling too much makes you vulnerable. Vulnerability weakens you. The weak do not survive. And life is about survival. So you must do what you can to not feel too much, or, at the very least, do not let anyone see you in such a weakened state.”
Fear’s arguments for my need of him were convincing enough that, after this appeal, I developed an inner motto of my very own, one that fused so tightly with my identity that it took me many years to realize that it was separate, let alone that it could be observed, understood, and ultimately discarded. It echoed in the voice of Fear: To be safe in this dangerous world, outsider, and to have any chance at belonging, don’t ever tell or show anyone how you truly feel. If you do, you will be neglected, discarded, forgotten.”
Books are always best in their embodied form, if you ask me! “Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness” is available for purchase here (I’m soon rolling off of a BOGO promotion, so now’s your chance!)
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