Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a Project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. Yesterday, the esteemed Dr. David Katzenstein, our chief clinical officer, spoke about two extremes when a person deals with emotions. The first is that people might suppress their emotions, and not let them come up. They might have a feeling of being taken advantage of, for example, but they just suppress it. That's one approach. The other approach, on the other extreme, is explosion, when a person can't handle those negative feelings and just explodes.
So what's the middle ground? As the Rambam writes, the middle ground is the golden path. What is the middle ground between suppression and explosion? There are two basic healthy middle grounds. One is called acceptance. That means I have a feeling and I don't like it, but I'm just going to hold it. Rav Wolbe calls that Savlanut. Sovel means to carry.
We use the term Sovel as tolerate, like, to tolerate pain, but it's all one theme. We spoke about this a while back. It's the concept of carrying a negative emotion or feeling. If someone's upsetting me, can I carry that feeling? Can I just hold it and allow it to be, even though it's uncomfortable?
When you're walking outside, on a very hot day, can you tolerate that heat? Can you just allow it to be, or do you let it grow on you and grow on you until you get extremely upset, like the guy that punches the other fellow, because he opened (or closed) the window in the synagogue. That's the approach of acceptance. That means you're not really dealing with the emotion; you're just allowing it to be.
The second approach is what we call processing. You have an emotion, resentment, let's say, and you process it. You work it through.
I first appreciated this from Rav Wolbe, when he speaks about accepting the yoke of God's kingdom in Keriat Shema.
He says, there's one approach, where a person closes his eyes and says, “I'm ready to jump through a fiery furnace for the name of God,” and so on and so forth. Rav Wolbe says that's really a little fake, because- get real, on one hand, you can't even control yourself from saying something you shouldn't say, and now you’re ready to die for the cause?
That's a case where the person's not even allowing his emotions to come to be. If he's really paying attention, he should hear part of himself saying, “No, I don't want to accept the yoke of God upon me. I want to do what I want to do.” That's not suppressing a feeling, that's paying attention to your feelings. Then comes the processing, when the person says, “Hold on, what do you mean you don't want to listen to God? He created you. He gave you everything that you have. Whatever He tells you to do is for your own good.”
You're working through the emotion, you're talking it through. That's the second approach, which we call processing.
Neither extreme is healthy. Suppressing the emotion is not healthy, because, as we've said in the past, it's like pushing a spring down- that’s suppression. The explosion is when the spring bounces out. That's not healthy either. So, you have to be able to allow that emotion to be. Accept it, or better yet, work it through and process it.
That's the healthy way to deal with a negative emotion. Have a wonderful day.