Living on the west coast of Canada, you’re taught earthquake preparedness from an early age. I distinctly remember doing earthquake drills in elementary school, the whole class crawling under our desks or tables while we waited for the teacher to give us the all clear. I’ve felt earthquakes probably at least a half dozen times since then, and I can say with assurity that I’ve never crawled underneath a table in response. Despite these childhood drills, all I’ve ever done is experienced the shaking, waited for it to stop, and then asked every person I possibly could for an unreasonable amount of time afterward if they, too, had felt it.

Truth be told, I have memories of feeling earthquakes that I’m actually pretty sure I never felt. Instead, the post-quake chatter restructured my memory so that, when looking back on it, I’m convinced that I did feel it. My scientific brain kicks in because earthquakes are utterly fascinating and it makes me want to be in the thick of any conversation about it.

In the case of earthquakes, this isn’t particularly troublesome — I’m not harming myself or anyone else by thinking that I felt it when, in fact, all I did was talk about it afterward. In my experience, the talking about it creates longer term excitement than the event itself (recognizing that I’ve never experienced a “big one” that has resulted in the loss of life or property).

If you substitute the word “earthquake” for the word “emotions”, however, things look a little different.

I want to drill down on what I said about earthquakes stoking my scientific brain. If you read my previous post, you can probably see the connection here between Intelligence and Curiosity: that in the aftermath of an earthquake my instinct is to want to learn more about the mechanics of how it all works. This is an instinct that is reflected across pretty much every area of my life; it has made me a serial DIY’er, a hobby hoe, and the owner of what are probably too many tools. It drove me to study Environmental Science and into a job where using an analytical, systems thinking approach is my daily bread and butter. I LOVE trying to figure out how things work and, more often than not, the pursuit of that understanding scratches the itch in my brain more than whatever the thing is that I’m trying to understand.

This instinct also comes out to play when faced with emotions, from others or within myself. I’ve found that, on many occasions, I’ve been someone that others come to for emotional support. This is something I’ve always been very humbled by, and these moments make up more or less the sum total of the times when I’ve felt that I’ve been able to provide any value to others. These are conversations where, by and large, I find that I can demonstrate a degree of emotional intelligence (or, at least, what appears to be emotional intelligence), because something about it just clicks. It’s like when someone is sharing their big, confusing emotions with me I can see the pattern, looking beyond the confluence by teasing apart each stream and following them back to their sources.

In the past, this has led me to oftentimes being too “solutions-oriented” when others open up to me about what they’re feeling. My mind decides that it has worked out the pattern and, as such, knows not only what is causing it, but also what should be done to stop it from happening any longer. It took me a long time to figure out the two key ingredients I was missing in this particular soup:

I’ve since learned how to manage these things and I do truly believe that I am a good support person for the people I love. But that’s not what this post is about. Let’s get my brain back on topic.

You might read that and think, “well that all sounds pretty reasonable”, and, up until recently, I would’ve agreed with you. The issue arises when I turn this approach inward to my own emotions. What I’ve learned is this very important lesson:

Analysing emotions is NOT the same as feeling them.

Coming back to what I was saying about earthquakes, my tenuous analogy of the day is this: after analysing my emotions and understanding where they came from, I can look back on them and easily convince myself that I’ve felt them, in the same way I can convince myself that I felt an earthquake. Once I’ve done this, I can effectively give myself carte blanche to never have to come back to them, or to the event that caused them in the first place.

It’s like buying a piece of IKEA furniture, reading the assembly instructions until you’ve completely figured out how to build the thing, and then walking away with all of the pieces still in the box. Sure, you have a solid understanding of how to build the Känslor shelf, but you’re no closer to putting any plants on it.

And that really is the crux of it. I perpetually put myself in a place where I set my emotions aside having convinced myself that I’ve not only felt them, but also processed them.

I recently started going to somatic therapy to try to break this habit. I was skeptical not because I don’t believe in therapy (because hooooo boy do I ever and I strongly believe everyone should go to therapy), but because I wasn’t sure that I would be able to bypass my instinct for analysis. I was also fearful that, while I was in a therapy session, I’d put on a mask to make myself the best possible therapy patient because don’t you know that you can fail at therapy and then your therapist will hate you forever and will break patient confidentiality and tell everyone in your life that you’re the worst and you’re faking everything?

I know I’m not the only one who has thought that.

What I will say is this: it was probably my third or fourth therapy session when a somewhat innocuous question from my therapist caused me to have a proper emotional breakdown. Somehow, her question had dredged up the memory of a very close friend of mine who died in 2014. I was overwhelmed by a profound sense of loss, and found myself feeling anger, regret, and deep, deep grief. As I sat with those emotions I realized that it was the first time I’d felt them in connection with the loss of my friend. It also opened a previously sealed up well of emotion related to friendship in general, which I discuss more in this post.

Yeah, I’ve been hurting because of this, and I’d be lying if I said that I’ve been having a good time over the past couple of months. But, and it’s a very big but (and I cannot lie), I now know that I am capable of doing more than just reading the assembly instructions. The shelf might be wonky, and it probably won’t hold a plant, but at least I made it past the instructions.

At the risk of sounding like a dumb, stubborn man (which I unequivocally am), you don’t always need the instructions. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just try building the thing and see where you get to. It’ll probably be messy and you might need to fix it later, but at least you moved past the pictures of tiny people with giant screwdrivers.

In the Triangle of Self I talked about how the points of the triangle can be directed outward. What’s cool, though, is that I can direct them inwards as well. I believe that what true emotional intelligence looks like for me is an ability to balance my Intelligence, Curiosity, and Creativity and use them all to truly process what I’m feeling. Emotions require space, and the Triangle creates that space.

What’s even better is that the Triangle centres on joy. How empowering to know that letting myself feel the big, scary, overwhelming emotions puts me firmly on the path to joy?

There’s probably something clever I could use to close this out that ties triangles being the strongest shape to the intro about earthquakes, and probably something about shaking foundations as well, but, honestly, at this point I’m tired, you’re done with analogies, and the post is already too long.

The end.

Anyway, here’s a poem for today. It’s called I am creaky in my youth.