Intimate moments in a former foster youth's life after foster care, healing generational trauma and becoming a mother.
The Downside of Intense Emotion and Learning to Love Them
Healing From Trauma
The Downside of Intense Emotion and Learning to Love Them
For as long as I can remember I've felt emotions intensely. What used to feel like a curse, I now see as a gift.
Healing From Trauma

The Downside of Intense Emotion and Learning to Love Them

Intense emotion flooded me the first time I heard Sia’s “Chandelier,” I can remember

The goosebumps as though it were yesterday. The lyrics spooked me, bringing me back to a season in my life when I, too, was holding on for dear life as I tried to make it through a round of PTSD. A junior in college, It was by far the darkest and one of the worst periods of my life. To combat the immense pain I was in; I took it out on everyone around me. 

Hurt people, hurt people, and I made it a point to ensure that others understood exactly how I felt. I was so broken, lashing out at those closest to me in an attempt to feel anything aside from the intensity of the emotions plaguing me. 

I took sleeping pills for insomnia, anti-anxiety meds for anxiety, antidepressants for depression, and a whole lot of vodka to drown out the intensity of the emotions—both the good and the not-so-good ones. 

Like Sia noted in her song, I started swinging from the Chandelier or doing whatever I could to avoid further feelings. Not wanting to feel anymore, I did anything I could to feel numb. 

Feeling numb allowed me not to care. I didn’t care about my life, and I didn’t care if the next day came. The least destructive decision I could often make was drinking well into the morning. Drinking kept me from feeling the extreme lows I was living in at that moment and somehow kept me from being more destructive. 

From then on, alcohol played an active role in my life. The daughter of addicts, I never actually saw myself as an alcoholic because I felt that I was the one in control. I was only drinking to make life and my intense feelings just a little bit more bearable. 

Going back as far as I remember, I struggled with my feelings because every feeling was felt with such intensity. I’ve felt everything from what was and wasn’t said to me and others. Add that to a trauma-riddled life, And I internalized it all. 

As a kid, I didn’t yet understand this. I felt like I didn’t belong, and it felt like a curse. Eventually, the loneliness coupled with the abandonment trauma spiraled me into that same dark abyss I experienced later in college. Only then, with no resources at my disposal and no one around who understood the effects of trauma, I quickly fell prey to my intense emotions. 

I wanted to feel anything but that emotional intensity, so I started cutting myself as a distraction. I’d feel relief at the moment, but once that fleeting moment was over, I’d begin contemplating suicide. In the aftermath, as the wounds healed, I hated myself for being “weak.” I understand now that this, too, was an early round of PTSD. 

In my later round of PTSD, when the darkness began to creep in and I was seeking to feel numb again, I thought about teenage me and the release I felt when I cut. Every fiber of my being wanted to feel that again, but adult me knew it would do nothing for me, and so instead, I opted to get a tattoo in the same area of my wrists I used to cut. 

I was hoping that it would deter me from cutting. If not, because I didn’t want to ruin the tattoo, then for the reminder that I’d been through the fire before and made it out. It is tough to remember that anything else exists when surrounded by darkness. So the tattoo, different characters making up the definition of fortitude, would remind me that I had overcome before and could do it again. 

This isn’t my favorite story. And I wish I could hug both teenage and college me when I remember the emotional intensity I felt in those days. I wish I could tell her that self-sabotage would never make her feel better. I wish I could say to her that being able to feel emotions intensely is actually a gift.

It took me until my thirties to embrace my emotions, let alone understand that I felt so profoundly. I imagined that everyone felt emotions intensely like I did until I had to legit relearn emotions after decades of suppressing them. 

Unbeknownst to me, suppressing emotions intensifies them. Emotions are like energy in motion; that energy needs to go somewhere. Even if you choose not to feel them, they stay stored in the body and can make you sick. Which is precisely the place I got to that sparked some inward reflection. 

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