I was running/hiking/walking up the side of a mountain the other day. I was feeling especially motivated and it would be made clear that I was not in great shape. As I was, we’ll be really generous and say running up this mountain, I began to feel light-headed.

I grew up playing sports and in sports, the toxic mantra is to push through the pain.

That had been my go-to philosophy for, well just about anything hard in life. Don’t get me wrong, there is value in pushing through something that is hard, but the essence of what I had learned. I learned to ignore my body. When I was playing basketball as a Sophomore in high school, I got these terrible shin splints. However, I knew with 100% certainty that our performance in practice affected our playing time, so I pushed through the pain until I was limping down the court and the coach told me to sit down.

This was how I had been trained and continued to train myself.

Ignore what my body told me. I had learned this same thing with emotions. Don’t show your emotions, shoot, don’t even feel your emotions. Ignore them. Push them down. Keep going.

However, as I was ascending this mountain and I began to feel light-headed, instead of ignoring the sensation, I thought about it for a moment. I’m not in great shape, I’m climbing this mountain at a fairly significant elevation. I need more oxygen! So I stopped and took some deep breaths. Like magic, I felt better. I could have pushed through and continued to feel terrible, but instead, I stopped for a moment, acknowledged my experience, and gave my body what it was telling me I needed.

This simple act of paying attention and addressing an emotional or physiological response is highly underrated.

Unfortunately, my experience of ignoring my emotions and my body is not uncommon at all.

It’s a toxic method many people learned to use to cope and how many parents are now teaching their children. “Don’t cry.” “Don’t be such a baby.” “You have nothing to be upset about.” “You have no reason to be mad.”

Our babies, toddlers, children, and teenagers feel these emotions and we tell them, stop! It is wrong to acknowledge your emotions. Push it down! Pretend it didn’t happen.

The problem is, we can’t do that.

Emotions originate in the amygdala within the limbic system in our brain. Located directly above our brainstem it is part of the ancient brain. This is the part of the brain directly related to survival–feeding, reproduction, and self-preservation. When an emotion arises it occurs as an automatic response, meaning we are not consciously thinking, okay, I’m going to be mad now. We just suddenly feel angry and we may not even be able to recognize why.

These emotions arise in ourselves or in our children and we very sternly tamp them down. In doing so, we honestly try to eliminate the emotions, but in reality, ignoring the emotion does not make them go away. What it does is make them stronger and can even cause physical stress leading to physiological reactions. Yes, ignoring your emotions can literally make you sick.

But, when I was growing up, I didn’t know any of this.

It seemed the toxic consensus was that emotions were bad.

Good people didn’t get mad. Strong people didn’t get sad and so I pushed them under until I was emotionally passing out. Now, you guessed it, I have a pretty strong and bad habit of ignoring my emotions and my physical sensations. I take scorching hot showers, and when I actually stop and feel the water is painfully hot, but I’ve done so good at ignoring my physiology that the scorching hot water is the only way I can actually feel it unless I step back and decide to be present for a moment. Then I realize it is painfully hot.

One element that goes hand in hand with your emotional response is how you feel physically.

It’s why you sweat when you are nervous, shake when you are angry, or get a headache when you are stressed. Emotional and physical responses are interconnected.

Growing up in our tough-it-out culture, not only did I learn to repress my emotions, I learned to ignore my body and the world around me celebrated it. We love the students who never miss a day of school, who don’t sleep to get all their homework done, and who push past what everyone else seems incapable of. They are labeled, as strong, successful, and special, when really what they are is unhealthy. They are losing their sense of attunement to their body and their minds.

This is no 80’s phenomenon.

We are doing it still to our kids today. We tell them to stop feeling and it’s like telling them to stop breathing because it’s something their body is automatically doing.

Emotional and physical repression is toxic, and it is harming our kids (and ourselves) no matter how much they can push past it, how celebrated they are because of it, or how “successful” they become in our society.

We don’t celebrate the emotional child. We don’t celebrate the child who has boundaries or the student who doesn’t turn in their homework because sleep was more important. They are the babies, the slackers, the losers.

Our children are full. We tell them to keep eating. They are bored. We tell them to be quiet. They are overwhelmed. We ask them to try harder. They are restless. We ask them to sit still. The message is the same. Ignore what you are feeling, repress your emotions and behave how we demand.

Ultimately we and our children deal with this toxic emotional repression in a number of ways.

Those of us who are not completely desensitized are reactive. The children misbehaving, and rocking the boat are still feeling, and they are screaming at us. Somethings wrong!

For the rest of us, we’ve developed potent coping mechanisms, some of you might recognize.

1. We tune out so we don’t have to be with ourselves–social media, television, work, daydreaming, or drug use. They all serve the same purpose, to get out of our heads and bodies so we don’t have to face the emotions we have repressed. We get away from our “bad” self and relieve ourselves of feeling these “gross,” “terrible” and wrong emotions.
2. We look for the next high. It doesn’t have to be a drug-induced high. Anything that gives us a hit of dopamine so we can get feel-good emotions works. We long for it. Likes on social media, shopping, accolades at work or school for overdoing it, eating, risk-taking, and yes, drug use. This is the easy way out. We don’t have to think about it. The emotional hit comes right from our ancient brain telling us we are okay, this is good. You are safe. At least for a minute until you plunge back down.

And the great irony is that it is a hard habit to change.

The way we have been emotionally programmed is how we emotionally respond. Our kids feel big emotions and act with big behaviors, and we respond with bigger ones.

Cut it out! Go to your bed! Get out of my sight! And even with adults, it is the automatic response that has been programmed into us. It is so easy to act this way and have these unrealistic expectations that we ourselves cannot meet and it is also so toxic.

Here’s the good news.

We can develop response flexibility–that is we can gain the skill of choosing how to address our experiences, and teach our children the same. But first, we have to get our emotional responses to our cerebrum, the thinking part of our brain where we can reason and make judgments.

The first step to emotional diffusion and moving our emotional responses out of the ancient brain is surprisingly simple.

Label the emotion.

That’s right. Consciously think about the emotion that you are feeling. This step alone will diffuse the intensity of your emotion. Even just acknowledging, “I’m stressed” can give you a sigh of relief. It gives you a moment to breathe. As you transfer your emotion to your thinking brain, you can well, start to think about the emotion.

Look at where the emotion stemmed from.

“Oh, I’m yelling at my kids because I’m angry at my spouse. Well, I clearly am headed in the wrong direction.” Now that you know the origin of the emotion, you can address it or deal with it instead of hiding from it.

Pay attention to your physiology.

That can tell you about your emotions. It can also help you diffuse them. One of the secret weapons is deep breathing! You can read more about that here.

Mind your behavior.

Emotions are neither good nor bad. They simply are. As we now know, until we can learn to change our automatic responses, we don’t have a lot of say in them. However, behavior is another issue entirely. There is good and bad behavior. Yes, feel your anger, but it’s not okay for you to slug your sister. Find another way to release the emotion. What we might think is bad behavior, like crying, is an absolutely normal physiological response to feeling sad or disappointed.

Now it’s time to remove the toxic traditions from our children.

The first step is to remove the toxic association with experiencing emotions. Teach your children to feel, and identify their emotions. Help them learn to sit with their emotions. You don’t need to fix them (this is actually a huge problem I have–note to self). Be okay with hard emotions.

Listen to your children. If your child says they don’t want to go to school today, there is probably a deeper message they are trying to share with you. Not all listening is with words.

Encourage bodily awareness. If your child is falling asleep in class, all the adults around them should be paying attention to this. The correct response to tiredness is to rest, not to push through harder.