Our experience of emotion is something we generally take for granted. Afterall, feelings just tend to happen. Our hearts beat, our lungs breath, our legs move us forward, and we feel stuff. Unless we’re actively struggling with one those things, we don’t often give them much thought or effort. But maybe we should. Emotions and our relationships with them can actually be really complex, and by exploring them more fully we gain a much richer understanding of ourselves and our experience of the world. If you’d like to support us on Patreon you can find us at www.patreon.com/differentfunctional And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a rating and review. Thanks for listening!

AUTUMN

0:00

Welcome to the Different Functional podcast, where we explore the triumphs and challenges of trauma recovery and being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. In today's episode, we're going to be talking all about identifying, experiencing, and expressing emotions.

I am Autumn, the older sister, and when it comes to emotions, I can't not feel my emotions. Like, I know some people have always felt separated from them, or they have a really great ability to control them or push them aside or regulate them. That's not me. Emotions for me are like my heartbeat or my breath. They are just naturally occurring parts of me existing.

IVY

1:22

I don't know if that sounds more or less exhausting than how emotions work for me. I am Ivy, the younger sister, and while Autumn cannot not feel emotions, I don't feel them. I won't say that I can't feel them. I will say that I don't. I have capacity for feeling them. Sometimes I do feel them. Sometimes I want to, and other times it's against my will. I don't generally feel emotions much, and I overall tend to prefer it that way.

The way Autumn experiences emotions, that sounds exhausting to me. I don't think I would want to live like that. No offense. I'm sure it works for you. I don't think that would work for me. I'm a little afraid of it, actually.

AUTUMN

1:32

It actually can be pretty exhausting, especially at some times. But the interesting thing is we both grew up in an environment which did not allow us to express our emotions at all. Because the way our family unit was set up, our parents’ emotions were so extreme and so big that they had to take the center stage. So when Ivy or I felt anything, it really couldn't be expressed or brought out into the open.

And Ivy somehow - which that's one of those things of being completely different people. It's unfathomable to me how Ivy was able to separate herself from them and shut herself down - because I was able to somewhat repress the expression of them, which just made them so much worse because they never disappeared. They were constantly in my awareness.

And so it was kind of almost, for me, like a sensory issue. For those of you out there that deal with that hypersensitivity, my emotions at that time were like that tag that keeps touching you or the clock that keeps ticking. And I was constantly, constantly aware of them on such an escalated level, but I just could not escape them. And I never understood how Ivy was able to almost divorce herself from them or bury them. That was always really weird to me

IVY

3:09

I can tell you exactly how that happened. I remember for a big chunk of our childhood that, yes, you did repress your emotions, and therefore you did not get any negative attention. I did not repress my emotions. I expressed them through temper tantrums and crying. And I had a lot of emotional expression as a small child and was very emotionally sensitive. And I either got completely ignored when I expressed those things or I got negative reactions.

And so I just learned that I was not allowed to not only express emotions, I was not allowed to feel emotions. And so as a survival tactic, I shut down my emotions. And also because I kind of got the message that that's what was expected of me, that for whatever reason, I was not allowed to have emotions. So my little kid brain, I guess, was like, okay, well, I guess I don't have emotions anymore because I'm not supposed to. So I didn't. And I just internalized everything. But in that process of internalizing everything, I also heavily compartmentalized everything and divorced myself from my feelings because I didn't know what else to do since I wasn't allowed to express them or to have them.

AUTUMN

4:05

It almost sounds like, in a way, that's a piece of the dissociation that you've used to cope with a lot of the trauma and a lot of your experiences. Would you say that's accurate?

IVY

4:14

Absolutely. I mean, that is pretty much how I dealt with all of our trauma when I was a kid. And even now, that's how I kind of experience life is through dissociation and internal compartmentalizing.

I do not have dissociative identity disorder. That I'm aware of. That's not been something that's ever crossed my mind as a possibility of something that I have. But I feel like a lot of times my internal - my understanding anyway, of how Dissociative Identity Disorder works, even though I am always aware of all the different parts. I mean, there's never any times where I'm not aware of what's going on or not in control to a certain degree. All of my internal parts are separated out almost as though they are their own separate entities and have their own identities.

Like, I have vision visuals of what these different parts of me look like and what they represent and what their hobbies are and where they live and how they dress, what their names are. They have their own identities. And emotional expression ends up being compartmentalized within those inner parts of me. So different internal parts of me will express emotions in different ways.

So, like, I have three internal personalities, if you want to call them that, that are in charge of the emotion, anger, but they deal with anger and express anger in three completely different ways, which I know it's kind of complex and difficult to understand. But that's how my brain dealt with the trauma from childhood and found workarounds for not being allowed to feel emotions.

Because Ivy, on the surface, Ivy, as I am sitting here talking right now, is not allowed to have emotions or to express them. But these other individual personalities within me, those are allowed to have and express emotions. And it's almost like a workaround that I had to do, and it is very much tied into the dissociation that I had to do as a child in order to survive the trauma of our childhood and to avoid being abused any more than I already was.

AUTUMN

6:22

I feel like that's just so crazy because, like I said when we started out, for me, emotions have always been like my breath or my heartbeat. For me to stop those is extremely uncomfortable, and it almost feels, like, detrimental to me. And I feel like this major difference really, though, does speak to how differently everybody experiences emotions, because, yes, emotions and feelings, that is a human experience, but the way we personally experience them is so uniquely different from individual to individual, from situation to situation.

And I would even go so far as to say that even though Ivy and I experienced a lot of trauma and we are neurodivergent and that affected how our emotions are experienced and expressed, I feel like, overall, even for neurotypical people or individuals that grew up in healthy backgrounds and healthy arenas, they also have very unique emotional experience and expression. And I would also say that all of us, at least within the American culture I don't know about other cultures, are never really given the proper education or skills to deal with emotions at all. I mean, we're not told how to identify what an emotion is. We're not taught how to really express it.

I mean, at least when I was growing up, for the most part, even in the healthy environments and the things I saw in the psychological world, it was more about repression and oppression. It was just well, anger was bad, and so you just don't do that. But there was never really anything given to you of, well, how do you manage it? Because anger is a human experience. So when you feel it, what the fuck are you supposed to do with it?

When I first got into the mental health industry, I was working with a lot of kids. And one of the great things that I saw was we were teaching these kids emotional identification and emotional expression. And you did break out the emotion wheel, because in my mind, that's kind of where it starts is you look at that and say, okay, what am I even feeling? What is my body telling me? And what can I call that so that I can communicate it with other people?

Because I feel like that's a very important part of this emotional expression is even knowing what you're feeling. And then once you know it, being able to communicate that with other people. Because we are social creatures, even those of us that would prefer not to be. And so that communication of it comes in. And then, of course, the piece on top of that is how do you express that without losing control to the emotion? Because those of us that are neurodivergent or did not grow up in healthy backgrounds, there's a lot of us that we have extreme emotions. And so it can be extremely crippling for us because, one, we're not - as an entire culture - we're not given any sort of education or skills around emotions, but then we are infused with these extreme, overwhelming. Ocean depths of emotion and we're just left trying to struggle with those on our own.

And that's part of why we are talking about emotions today, why we're talking about identifying them and experiencing them and expressing them. But because, like we said, emotion is such a unique personal experience, what we're going to be doing is talking about this from our personal perspective of it, which should give really varied range of how-to kind of go about doing this because Ivy has difficulty accessing and expressing and feeling and identifying her emotions, and I just bleed emotion all over the place.

And so today we're going to look at three of the most major, often noted emotions happiness, anger, and sadness. And we're going to look at how do we know that we're feeling them? What does that experience feel like? How can we express this healthily?

So let's go ahead and jump into this with the very first emotion on our list, which is happiness. Let's start out light, right? Nothing too heavy to get us out. Now, when you look up happiness or happy in the dictionary, it talks a lot about pleasure or contentment or having a sense of confidence or satisfaction. What does happiness mean to you, Ivy, outside of that dictionary definition?

IVY

When you first asked me what my definition of happiness was, I didn't know. What I did know was what happiness was not. And so I kind of had to define happiness in reverse, think about what the opposite of that happy feeling is and what negative things are absent when I do feel happy. And what things are absent is a sense of unsafety, insecurity, depression, heaviness. So I guess if you look at the flip side of that, then I guess that means when I'm happy, I feel all of those things that are in that dictionary definition. I do feel contented and I feel confident and I feel safe and just a general sense of well being. So I guess I do feel all of those things, but was interesting to me that I am so, I guess in some ways, separated from the concept of happiness that I couldn't define it directly. I could only define the absence of negative things.

What is happiness to you? Because I'm sure you probably have a much more clear picture of happiness than I do.

AUTUMN

You know, oddly though that was my initial gut reaction to defining happiness too was the absence of certain things. And I think that in fact speaks to what emotions you typically feel because if you, unfortunately, have had a background of trauma or you have had a lot of negative experiences in your life, you're more likely to have things like sadness and anger and disgruntlement and all of these other things. And so when happiness does come along, it does feel foreign and it is kind of noticeable by the absence of. The absence of tension in my body, the absence of anxiety, the absence of intrusive thoughts.

You would think because I breathe emotion that happiness like, oh, I can just tell you what that is. But it is very much the absence of things for me. And initially because our childhood was rather problematic when I first started out on my journey, I didn't really understand what happiness was at all. I thought it was pleasure and passion and excitement and buzz. Now that I've further along on my journey and I've got really a better understanding of myself and psychology and so many things, it is more for me now just it is contentment, it is feeling at peace and it's being quiet. And it is the absence of a lot of the negatives that I still experience, the absence of anxiety, the absence of depression or apathy. That's kind of my experience with it.

IVY

You would think that I would have been able to give you a definition of happiness at this point, because recently in therapy, that is one of the things that I've been tackling. My therapist did have to give me a reality check after one of my previous sessions because it was a really hard session and it was very cathartic and I was, like, crying a lot and expressing a lot of just feeling overwhelmed and stressed out and unsafe, which has really increased since I was in the car accident earlier this year. And at the end of the session, the last ten minutes of the session, she kind of gave me a talking to. I won't say she lectured me, but she kind of gave me a talking to where she forced me to challenge the ways that I was thinking, and she basically told me, okay, well, you are at the point that you're at right now, keeping yourself stuck by not allowing yourself to be happy. So I need you to tell me what happiness would look like for you.

And I completely froze up because I had no fucking clue. And I am still trying to unravel that. And it's been two months since I had that conversation with her. I am still trying to unravel what happiness actually is because I don't have a solid concept of it. Embarrassingly. I didn't even realize I didn't have a solid concept of it until she challenged me on it a couple of months ago. So maybe I shouldn't be too hard on myself for not figuring out an answer in two months.

But I feel like happiness is something that should be so simplistic of an emotion that I should be able to pin it down. But it's actually really hard to pin it down when you have lived in survival mode for most of your life and you have felt like your trauma and your mental health struggles have largely dominated your inner space, your inner psyche, and your inner monologue. It is in some ways, deeply unsettling to realize how little I understand about happiness and my relationship to it at this point.

I think the two things that I can say I definitely feel with, well, three things that I definitely feel with happiness: confidence, contentedness, and light heartedness. It's the only emotion that I have that does not feel heavy. And I feel like in the coming weeks and months, as I wrap my head around the concept of happiness more, I will expand upon that. But right now, those are the only three things that I know for sure.

AUTUMN

Happiness does, like you said, seem very simplistic and we should just be able to identify it. But that goes right back to what I was saying that we're not given the education and the training necessary to even tango with emotions at all, even something as assumingly simplistic as happiness. And I would also say with that though, that that's part of the emotional experience is emotions are emotions. They are not necessarily logical, they're not necessarily processed through our prefrontal cortex like a lot of other things are. And so sometimes it can be very hard to verbalize or understand these things with the logical parameters we're given.

And for that reason, one of the things I usually encourage people to do is when you're trying to identify an emotion and like, what is this I'm feeling? So that you can begin knowing even how to deal with it or express it or process it, is find a way to relate it to something in life that is understandable, basically an analogy. And now if you're big into art or movies, you could relate it to that, to a certain sunset picture or a Monet or you could relate it to a blockbuster film. But for Ivy and I, one of the ways that we have really learned to process and identify emotion is through songs.

And so one of the songs that I associate most with happiness and I'm like, yes, this is how Happy feels, is a song called Home by Blue October. And now the lyrics aren't spot for spot because part of it is talking about their kids and all of this. But the overall feeling of the song is having gone through a history of shit but being at an okay point. And not like an exciting, wonderful point, but just an oatmeal day of sharing a moment in the kitchen with a loved one and having everything just be all right. And a total awareness that tomorrow is going to be all right too. And that's part of why Blue October Home does feel like happiness to me because it is just this quiet sense of golly, gosh, things are okay and hell, they might be okay tomorrow. That's kind of what happiness is for me. Do you have a song, Ivy, for Happy?

IVY

I do have a song for Happy. Although I want to say as a note to what you were talking about earlier about emotions not being processed analytically, the only thing that I could think when you were saying that was like, ain't that a bitch? For all of us that are analytically minded and don't like things to be ambiguous.

All right, my song for Happiness. And I specifically picked this song because, as I have looked back over my adult life, this is one of the songs that I have listened to at almost every time that I have genuinely felt happy, because happiness for me is often a very personal thing. Like, I don't really express emotions around other people in general. And so I spend a lot of time when I am experiencing happiness, which tends to be very fleeting for me. And so I really try to make the most of it when I feel it and I like to go outside and do things or I like to go for long drives.

And one of the songs that I have consistently listened to all of these years is Put Your Records On by Corinne Bailey Ray. It's not just the lyrical content of the song, which is about just kind of making peace with reality and where you're at in your life and having confidence in yourself. The lyrics are great and I love them, but it's also the entire vibe of the song, musically and lyrically. It really does represent to me what happiness is. And it is hard to put that into words.

But when I'm in that headspace and I'm listening to that song, it's that feeling of sunshine on your face and just warmth and feeling light and unburdened and feeling confident singing along with the radio and feeling like your heart is just open and free and safe within itself and safe in your little corner of the world. And so that's why that's the song, for me, is just overall on every level. It is really what happiness is to me. Again, hard to really verbalize, but there's so much feeling in that song for me.

AUTUMN

I love that song, and I actually end up listening to that song a lot when I am happy as well. That's part of the reason I love music as an expression of emotion, because to me, music is a direct expression of emotion. So it's a way to be like, hey, here's a feeling, without me having to take the time and energy to analyze it so that I can communicate it to someone else.

Now, another thing that can impact how we experience emotion and how we're able to identify emotion is our relationship to that specific emotion. So if we have a complicated relationship with that emotion, like a lot of us do with anger, that can really affect our experience of it. It can make us hesitant to identify that's what it is or make us feel guilty or shameful about feeling it. And so let's talk a little bit about our relationship with happiness here, Ivy.

So, to start out with, I'll go and I'll just say because of my initial belief that happiness was all about the buzz and the excitement and passion, I used to be very mistrustful of happiness because buzz excitement and passion usually led me to reckless behavior. That was things I usually regretted and were not healthy for me. And so I, for a longest time, thought happiness was not a good thing, actually, and I was very hesitant when I started feeling that way.

Now, though, that I understand what it is, I have a very - a very peaceful relationship with happiness. Initially, once I did redefine it, I was scared when happiness came because I was scared of losing it because it was so fleeting and I felt it so randomly. Whenever I would feel happiness, there was always right behind this just this thump thump heartbeat of fear that, oh, my God, it's going to go. How long will I have it? Will I ever get it back?

And I'm so thankful to say that where I'm at in my journey and all the work I've done, I know it's going to come back. It may not be this week or this month, but happiness will come back to me. And so now when I feel happiness, I do have a relationship with it where I can go, oh, hey, happiness, I'm so glad to see you. No, I would love to chill. I would just love to hang out with you today. And that's my current relationship with it. If it shows up, great. If it doesn't, that's okay too. And when it's here, we can just hang out. We can hang out in silence or we can do things, but it's just we're here together, and it's all good.

IVY

I appreciate that there towards the end of your relationship with happiness talk, you started to personify happiness as though we're a person. And since that is how I also tend to relate to emotions and express emotions and identify them, happiness for me is like a friend crush. And basically what that is, it's this one person that maybe you're not really friends with. You don't know them super well, but you really like being around them. You like their energy. You think they're super cool. You just really like being around them. You enjoy their company, you're fascinated by everything that they do, and you just really, really want to be their friend.

And that is how I feel about happiness. I have a friend crush on happiness. I don't see it very often where we're more on like a casual acquaintanceship sort of basis. I would like to get closer to happiness. I would like to be around it more. I would like to feel it more, be more in its presence because I do enjoy feeling happy. Even though those feel feelings are brief and fleeting and they are temporary for everybody. Happiness, like any other emotion, is something that comes and goes.

But I would like to experience it more because I feel like it is not something I have experienced much of in my life. And I would like to fix that because when happiness does come around, not only do I have that sense of contentedness and confidence and all of that, but I also just feel a sense of relief. I feel unburdened. I feel like for a time I can release the other things that usually weigh me down and just be in that moment and sing along with the radio and feel the sun on my face and just feel free.

So I have a huge friend crush on happiness. I want to go for a long drive with happiness and sing along to the radio with happiness. That's, that is how I feel about it. I have the biggest friend crush on happiness.

AUTUMN

I love that you use that analogy, Ivy, because I feel like this really underscores the concept of exploring your relationship with that emotion. And I don't want to step on your therapist's toes at all here, but you said you had a friend crush with happiness. And when you've talked about friend crushes in the past, you've also talked about your social anxiety that keeps you from speaking with that person because you're scared you're going to do something to screw it up or you're going to be an idiot and scare them away. And so when you use that analogy of I feel like I have a friend crush on happiness, it makes me wonder then it's some of the underpinnings of your relationship with happiness that I'm going to do something to fuck it up. I'm going to do something to make it go away. You know what I'm saying? You don't have to respond if you don't want.

IVY

It’s fine. I don't feel like you've painted me into a corner or besmirched anything I said. No, I mean, that's definitely part of it. And honestly, I think that's kind of the point that my therapist was getting at in her lecture to me is that I have shut myself off from happiness all of these years. When I have experienced it, no matter how brief it was, there was a part of me that was afraid. I was afraid it was going to go away. I was afraid that I was going to do something that would mess it up. I was just fearful of even feeling it at all because it was out of the ordinary and it felt foreign and I didn't know what to do with it. And I overthought it a lot, which I do with friend crushes.

But I'm trying to take the approach with happiness that I took with my now friend Stacy, who I had a friend crush on for the longest time. I did not act on it, but she came and sought me out and pursued a friendship with me. And I feel like maybe I'm at a space in my life where maybe happiness is doing the same thing. Where maybe it's time for me to experience of happiness. And instead of running away from it or being fearful of it going away, maybe I just need to let it in and appreciate it when it's here and understand that like any other friend, it won't be with you 24/7 but it always comes back around. And the more time you spend with it, the stronger that relationship is.

AUTUMN

That is awesome. And I think I heard some tears in your voice, and I have a little tears now. So just goes to show that the way we express happiness differs quite a bit and can get mixed up with some other emotions as well.

So now another important part of really being able to basically identify emotions is knowing that you're even feeling it. And that seems like, well, shouldn't you know when you're feeling an emotion? Well, I usually do, but some people, like Ivy, don't. And even when I am feeling emotions, I can't always directly tell what it is initially. And this is actually one of the important parts of teaching emotional skills to children. At least it was back in the day when I was in mental health working with kids is learning to know how you even are feeling this feeling. And that means looking at your behavior, looking at how this emotion feels inside of you, looking at your thoughts.

So when it comes to happiness, for me, one of the ways I know I'm happy is my face leaks. I'm not, you know, crying. But I usually have some tears initially when happiness comes to sit with me. And part of the reason for that is because I am such an anxious, intense person. When happiness comes, it comes with a feeling of lightness and a release of that tension. And part of that is it feels so amazingly wonderful, and part of it is it allows me to breathe out some of the other negativity I've been holding. And so I do have some tears, and my face leaks a little bit is what I call it.

I also have this feeling like I can breathe, which a lot of times I feel like there's an elephant on my chest or I can't quite catch a breath. So when happiness comes to me, I physically feel like I can breathe. And then I also tend to feel secure, warm, not necessarily physically warm, but like cuddly, cozy, kind of warm. And I feel greater connection with people around me, and part of that comes because I feel safer to connect with other people. Ivy, how do you know you're feeling happiness?

IVY

Similar to how your face leaks, my face hurts. I am somebody who generally is fairly monotone, both in the tone of my voice but also kind of bland with body language and facial expressions. I know it sounds stupid, but since I have had fairly minimal interactions with happiness over the years, I don't always recognize that I'm happy until my face starts to hurt. And I realize that it hurts because I've been smiling for a while now. And so that is one of the first indications to me that I'm actually feeling happy.

The other main thing is just that I don't feel heavy. Because most of the time I feel as though I am weighted down to some degree. And I feel a lot of constriction in my chest. When I do, like, somatic work with my therapist and we do EMDR and all that stuff. Every single time she asks me what I'm feeling in my body, it almost always is, like, tightness in my chest, constriction in my chest. And when I'm happy, that is the only time when that releases. And it feels like my rib cage actually opens up and like I can breathe and there's space within me. And when I feel like the weight gets lifted off of me. So that's how I know that I feel happy. Other than my face hurting, everything else feels better. Everything else feels lighter and more open and more receptive and safe enough to be open and receptive.

AUTUMN

It is interesting also that our physical feelings of happiness as well are a lot of the absence of the physical feelings we normally have. So that's kind of interesting.

Another important question that we have to ask ourselves when we're looking at really identifying these emotions is how do you differentiate this particular emotion from a closely related to or similar one that you experience? So in the case of happiness, this might be how do I differentiate happiness from mania or hypomania or how do I differentiate happiness from love, or how do I differentiate happiness from possibly depression? Which may seem weird, but one of the things that can come with depression is an apathy. And at least for me, apathy also helps relax my anxiety because I just don't fucking care about anything anymore. But that's obviously a very different experience than happiness. So how do we differentiate happiness from other similar emotions?

For me, I can usually differentiate it from a lot of this other stuff because there's a lack of restlessness. When I get lustful or excited, there's usually this urge or drive to do things and I don't feel that as much with happiness. Instead, I feel more calm and I don't feel like I need to get up and move.

Also differentiating it from depression. When I'm happy, I don't feel apathetic. I actually still care about out what's going on. I just feel more secure and confident in my ability to handle it. What about you, Ivy? What do you have to differentiate happiness from and how do you do that?

IVY

I guess in some ways it's actually pretty similar to how happiness is differentiated for you. For me, the main thing that I notice is that I'm not frantic. I have a couple of default modes. One default is just kind of shut off and just apathetic and monotone. The other one is some level of drive and anxiety that pushes me towards something. And happiness is the only time that I don't experience either of those things. I do genuinely feel something when I am happy, but there's no frenzy behind it, there's no anxiety behind it.

When I was younger, before I got my bipolar under control, I often mistook hypomania for happiness. But that was more like euphoria. It was more like being high on something. And it's not quite the same, because every time that I would feel euphoric there was still this underlying, like a restlessness. There was still this frenzy feeling. There was still kind of chaos and anxiety that was driving that. Yes, it felt good, but it also compelled me to do things that were maybe reckless as well. So I didn't have a sense of peace when I felt euphoric. So that's how I differentiate happiness now, is that happiness is the only thing that I really feel with any intensity that's just peaceful, that's just contented. It's just a general sense of well being and being pleased with myself and where I'm at in my life. There is no frantic energy behind it, and it's not numbed or dulled out in any way.

AUTUMN

And I do want to make the point right now that the way Ivy and I feel happiness may not be the way that you feel happiness. And for some people, it may come with a sense of restlessness or excitement or a rush to want to do things. There is no wrong or right way to feel it. It's just important for you to really dive into your personal experiences so that you can differentiate these emotions, so that you can then if you need to process them or deal with them or learn how to express them in a safe, healthy way. Nothing that we're saying is supposed to guide you as far as what these emotions are supposed to feel like. This is more just a tutorial in how to explore those things for yourself.

And the next piece of that tutorial comes in with behavior. And so when we're talking about emotions, identifying it and expressing the emotions, you want to start looking at how you behave when you feel that emotion. And this is going to do two things for you. One, it's going to help you pinpoint what you are feeling. Because a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times, we'll express behaviorally emotions slightly differently or drastically differently. And then if you actually know what emotion you're feeling, it also gives you a starting point for knowing whether or not your expression of that emotion is healthy for you and other people.

So when it comes to happiness, my behavior shifts in that I am less frantic, like I said, and also less judgmental. I find myself judgmental a lot. Like there's a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things, and most people are doing them wrong. And when I feel happy, that judgment lessens. And you see me making less remarks to other people. I'm more accepting, I'm more able to see the positive qualities of other people.

And verbally I start expressing my gratitude and love more openly to other people. And you also see me become more I wouldn't say quiet because happiness doesn't necessarily make me quiet, but it does make me calmer. So I don't have necessarily the pressure of beach and the go go. I'm able to actually seem somewhat relaxed. And so that's the behavior I start seeing when I am happy.

IVY

Yeah, we definitely diverge on this one as far as how happiness kind of comes out behaviorally. So for me, part of this is because I am somebody who is very independent and I spend a lot of time just with myself and I do have social anxiety and all of that stuff that I have talked about in many episodes before. But I tend to experience happiness on a very personal, solo, independent kind of level. And some of it is for all those reasons that I just mentioned.

But I think another part of it goes back to the relationship that I have with happiness and the bond that I am trying to build with it right now. That connection that I have with happiness still feels a little fragile and new and vulnerable. I don't like to be around other people, really, when I'm happy. I like to just be with myself in that moment. I want to form a connection with happiness one on one.

I am not somebody that can make friends at a party because I get really overwhelmed with everything going on around me and I have all the same anxiety and sensory overload and all of those things. And it's very similar in the relationship that I am building with happiness where I am not at a space where I could feel comfortable exploring these themes and emotions and sensations of happiness within the context of social interactions with other people.

I am very protective of the experience of happiness when it does come to me. And so mostly how act when I am happy is that I withdraw more into myself because I just want to be in the moment with it. I just want to experience it and not be distracted by anything else, not be anxious or nervous about anything else, not get sensory overload. So I really do withdraw into myself and I do a lot of solitary things. I listen to music, I go for a drive, I go hiking. I just want to be by myself and insular because this is something that feels still very new and vulnerable.

AUTUMN

As you're saying all that, I realize I don't think I'm usually happy alone, which I think right there says something. That I should probably explore that concept. Because usually when I feel happiness, it is with my emotional support boyfriend because that's kind of what he is sometimes. And that's usually when I experience happiness is with my boyfriend. And so I'm usually with somebody else, even if it's just my dogs or my cat that I feel happiness with. So that's probably something I should look into on that level.

So now another thing you want to look at when it comes to emotional expression is now how do you want to act? So you know how you act when this emotion comes, but how do you want to actually behaviorally express this emotion? Because this is going to, one, inform you of your ideals and your expectations that you have built around the emotion so you know what other obstacles you may run into when you're trying to process and express this. And it's also going to help inform possibly your journey. Because if your ideal for how you'd like to act is a healthier way, then it's something that you can work towards.

Now when it comes to happiness, as I just said, I don’t really experience happiness alone. So I think, how would I like to act? I would like to see if I could experience happiness by myself without having the connection with another entity around me. And then another thing that comes with how I express happiness is when I get happy, I'm kind of like a friendly drunk. So I'm all, “you're really great. I love you so much, you're just the best.” That's how I get. And I'm aware of that. And it can actually be a little embarrassing to be happy then around anybody that's not a very strict, intimate, accepting acquaintance. And so I think part of me in some ways would like to be able to be happier in a more coherent, less mushy sort of way.

IVY

Opposite of Autumn here. We're going to diverge again because we have opposite things to learn here. I would like to be able to be happy within the context of other social interactions. I would like to be able to take happiness as my plus one to a party and still feel safe and secure that that relationship and bond is solid and that they're going to be there even if they're floating around the party and they're not right next to me every single second. I would like to feel comfortable and confident that happiness will stick around if I take them as a plus one to a party. That's what I would like. I'd like to be able to be happy comfortably around other people without being afraid, that that feeling is going to run away from me, that happiness is going to abandon me at the party. I don't trust it enough yet. I'm working on it.

AUTUMN

Again, this just underscores why it is so helpful to use analogies when we're talking about emotion, because it can be so hard to pin it down with words and logic. So when you can create these stories and these ideas, it really does help you get into those emotions and dig a little bit deeper.

All right, so now that we've kind of set our expectation for, well, this is my ideal, this is how I want to act. Well, now you have to ask yourself, is this ideal for the emotion - is that really a reasonable, healthy one?

And so for me, when it comes to happiness, wanting to experience that on my own, I feel like that is definitely a healthy aspect that I should pursue. Like, I should look into that going, okay, why am I not experiencing happiness on my own, and how do I start experiencing it that way?

Now, as to the other piece that I would like to be less mushy with it. I don't necessarily know. That's maybe reasonable, but not necessarily healthy in that I think instead of changing my mushiness, what I need to work on more in this area is building my confidence that I can be authentically myself with other people. Because that mushy happy, expressiveness is who Autumn is at her core. And the reason I want to hide that is because I'm scared of other people's reactions of me. And so curbing my friendly drunkenness of happiness I don't necessarily think is a healthy objective for me.

Instead, it highlights that, well, maybe I need to work on being more authentic in my interactions with acquaintances and friends that aren't extremely intimate so that I can be that friendly drunk and not be ashamed of being that type of person.

IVY

You definitely should not be ashamed of being that kind of person. And if anybody makes you feel ashamed about that or insecure about that, they'll have to rumble with me because I rather like that part of you. It's not something that I can't relate to in terms of expression because it's just not how I operate or how I roll. But when I am around you and you are like that, I know I'm happy because my face hurts, because I'm smiling a lot. So I think you should definitely not curb that part of you. I think that is one of the best parts of you.

Personally, my expectation or my ideal of being able to be happy around other people, I think that's pretty fucking reasonable. I laugh because it's silly in my mind to think that that wouldn't be reasonable. But it's also silly that I struggle with it so much. Like, okay, maybe not silly because we all have our challenges, we all have our struggles, we all got our things. This just happens to be mine.

But there is a little absurdity that I can see in it now at the space that I'm at in my life right now as I'm challenging my ideas about happiness and about how I should be feeling and allowing myself to feel now that I'm in this space in my life. I can see the absurdity in thinking that I have to be so protective of my experience of happiness all the time. And not just happiness, but other emotions too. It is hard for me to connect and to express emotions and be truly intimate even with the people that I care about most in this world. And that is something that I would like to see change in myself and that I want to work on. And I think that is a very reasonable and healthy thing to want to be able to have more intimate connections to the people that I love most and to open myself up to the possibility that my social circle could expand even beyond that and that I could be safe expressing emotions around other people that I don't have a ton of shared history with. It is very reasonable and very healthy to want to get to a point where you can really be authentically yourself, like Autumn was saying, but also from my standpoint, to even just be able to express emotion at all, all. Because a lot of times that feels very foreign and very outside of my capacity and I need to stop holding myself back, as my therapist says, and stop limiting the ways that I can express emotion and the ways that I can connect and form bonds with people

AUTUMN

I will also say that is much easier said than done. But it sounds like you're already on the path to starting to do that work, which is awesome and difficult, but I believe in you.

Now, the next piece of this, when we're talking about identifying emotions and expressing emotions, is finding ways to effectively and healthily express these emotions. And I say effectively and healthy as separate things because when we're on the start of our journey, effective and healthy expression are not always the same thing. For those of us that have extreme emotions, if we don't yet have enough skills or understanding, we may need to find a way that effectively releases the emotion but it may not necessarily be a healthy one. Now, ideally, as we continue along this journey, we can find ways that are both healthy and effective.

But I do believe it is really necessary for us to express these emotions in some way that may not be verbal, but when we hold on to these emotions, when we bury them, when we refuse to allow them, they often cause a lot more issues for us. They become cancerous, they become traumatic, they become all of these things that are psychologically unhealthy. So it's important that we find effective ways to express the emotion. And as we continue on our journey, it's also important that we find healthy ways to express the emotion.

Now, luckily, when it comes to happiness, my expression of it is typically both healthy and effective. And that is like I said earlier, I am the friendly drunk. I am more touchy, I am more exuberant, I have bigger reactions and I'm very, very loving and open. And as long as this is with my intimate acquaintances and people that I love and trust, I think this is very healthy. Now, if I start doing this with people that I don't know very well, that can cause some potential issues there because I may seem overly friendly or flirty or send signals I don't want to. But as long as I express this in a loving relationship with people that actually know me and understand me and accept me, it's a really effective way for me to express it. Because it allows that emotion to flow through me. I'm not clinging to it scared that I'm going to lose it. It is my plus one at the party and I am dancing with it at the party. And maybe it's not just me and this emotion dancing, but it's a whole group dance that we're getting together, doing things

IVY

Before I get into the ways in which I now effectively and healthily express this emotion, I will share what used to happen back when I mistook euphoria for happiness. When the euphoria would come, there would be this anxiety and this driving force that would compel me to do things. And often the things that would compel me to do were not actually good for me. The two things that it tended to push me towards the most as far as reckless behavior was promiscuity and excessive bending. And I am not shaming anybody that has a healthy sex life. You do you. All I am saying was that for me, the way that I did it was reckless and dangerous and it was not healthy and it gave me more trauma than I already had and it was because of the way that I did it.

And part of the reason why I pursued sexual partners like that and I was so promiscuous was because that euphoria, that feeling high, it made me want to heighten those feelings even more. I guess I've never been on ecstasy, but I'm going to go with just based on how people have described it to me. It was like being on ecstasy and wanting to heighten that eye even more by being in that physical contact with that other person.

And I would throw myself into situations that were not particularly safe for me, that were actually quite dangerous and with people that took advantage and were not coming from a good space. And at the time I did not see that and I thought I was totally in control and I had all the power and I thought that I was doing good because I was riding high. And that was a really negative experience for me. In retrospect, that caused more damage than it did good.

And same thing with the excessive spending. I never went out and bought a boat or bought a house or did anything real big like that that completely messed up my credit and my finances. But I put myself in debt more with on unnecessary expenditures because I was feeling euphoric and I was chasing that high and trying to enhance that high even more. So that is what I used to do at the time I thought was just fine. That I look back on now and I recognize that for me was very unhealthy and not safe and was actually quite destructive.

Now that I am further along in my journey and I've got a little bit more life experience under my belt and I'm a little bit wiser, I have found much more benign ways to express happiness and ways in which there really are no, I guess, negative side effects. Because at this point, I recognize that happiness is not euphoria and it's not chasing a high. It's being more at peace with myself and feeling safer and feeling confident and just being in a good space.

And so now when I feel happiness, I find that I sing and I dance around to the radio, and I go do things that allow me to be physically active, because I do tend to express a lot of emotions through my body, which is kind of odd to me, because I've always felt kind of disconnected from my body. But maybe that's part of why maybe in connecting to my emotions, it also allows me to connect to my body. And so the best way for me to express happiness is through physical activity. Things that make me feel good, that are not destructive, they're not dangerous. They open me up to new, better experiences where I'm not being further traumatized and where I'm not chasing a high. I'm just being present in the moment and letting myself experience good vibes, just feeling in that moment, just being present there and just allowing myself to actually be happy.

I'm not chasing anything anymore. I'm just being and I think that's the difference for me now.

AUTUMN

And I'm really glad that you brought up how you used to express that happiness, which was actually more euphoria hypomania versus how you do now, because that really underscores is this last question we're going to look at with our emotional expression and identification, which is, how can I keep this emotion from impairing my functioning? Because even something as simple as happiness, it seems like, oh, well, how could that mess up my functioning? Well, Ivy just highlighted one of the ways that happiness can do that. When you start chasing it, when you're trying to constantly go after it and heighten it and heighten it. That can end up being destructive. And other emotions as well, when we express them, they can definitely begin to impair our functioning. Or when we refuse to express them, they can impair our functioning as well. This is especially true for those of us that have those deep, big, huge emotions. It's really vital for us to look at how does this emotion affect my functioning? And how can I keep it from impairing my functioning?

And much like Ivy, when it comes to happiness, I don't try to hold on to it anymore. Because I used to do that, too. It was like, let's chase it. Once I got past that, then it was the I'm going to put a stranglehold on happiness because it might not come back. Because happiness maybe just doesn't love me enough. Now that I'm more trusting with happiness, I simply don't try to hold on to it as much. And I just allow it to be present. And that's how I keep happiness from impairing my functioning. Because I'm not chasing the high anymore and I'm not putting a stranglehold on it and so the unsafe situations aren't happening. The additional trauma is not happening. And then also the increased anxiety isn't happening from fearing that happiness is going to go away. So those are the ways that I am currently keeping happiness from impairing my functioning.

IVY

For me, since I'm currently working so much on my relationship with happiness, I am not really even in a space where I am worrying about it impairing my functioning. I feel like I at least have the foundations of healthier ways of expressing it and a healthier overall perception of what happiness is and what it looks like for me. And since I'm really focused on building that bond, what I am noticing is that I am not being as rigid with it. I'm not really trying to stop it from impairing my function when it comes. I try to make time for it. That is what I do right now.

Because I feel like, in the long run, making time to experience happiness, to feel it, to process it, to express it, to become comfortable with it, to get close to it, that going to be such an important step for me later in improving my overall function in life. I feel like allowing myself the time to sit with happiness and just experience it without feeling guilt, without feeling rushed, without feeling anxious about it, without feeling like, oh, I got to go do -I have so much stuff I have to do.

I'm at a space right now where when happiness comes, I don't pull a rain check. I actually make time for it. Because if happiness is trying to invest in me, I'm going to try to invest in happiness as well and invest in building that relationship because that is going to benefit me more in the long run.

So right now, even when it seems like maybe it's impairing my productivity in this hustle culture, I'm choosing not to care. I am choosing to care more about building that relationship with happiness because it is so important and it's something that we deserve. Not just I deserve to be happy, but that we collectively deserve to be happy. And often I feel like I am not the only one who tends to put happiness on the back burner because of outside pressures to do other things or be there for other people or to deal with heavier emotions and work through things. I feel like a lot of us do that and maybe it's time to stop. I'm choosing to view my relationship with happiness as being something that improves my function overall instead of seeing it as a stumbling block that is stopping me from accomplishing super important, pressing tasks.

AUTUMN

Now that is an excellent point right there. And that is how do we even define functioning? And what functioning are we worried about impairing? Because if we do look at the idea of the hustle culture or just the general society culture of work, then emotions are almost always going to impair our functioning because they're going to disrupt our productivity. But if we're looking at being overall healthier, psychologically, physically, mentally, spiritually healthier, and that's what we're actually looking at as our functioning, then making time for these emotions, allowing them to disrupt our productivity, is a great ideal to allow for. Because it will improve that overall greater health.

And so this kind of gives you that overall idea of like, okay, how do I identify emotion? How do I express emotion? How do I work with emotions? Now that we've got this kind of framework laid out. Let's look at it with another couple of emotions. And the first of those is going to be sadness.

So to start us off, let's look at that definition of sadness. And again, we're just going to go straight to the dictionary and see what they have to say. And that Google dictionary that pops up at the very top of the search result says that sad is all about showing sorrow or being unhappy. And I actually find this definition really interesting to me because Ivy and I really defined happiness by what it is not and by the absence of certain things. And it looks like the rest of the world tends to define sadness by the absence of certain things, such as happiness.

And that is really curious to me, because sadness is not the absence of things. Sadness is something I am intimately familiar with. I know all the curves and ins and outs and quirks and foibles of sadness. So sadness for me is not the absence of, it is a full embodied presence. For me, sadness is about pain, physical pain to some degree, as well as just a sense of mental anguish. It's about being oversensitive to the world's pain. So when I feel sad, I can't scroll through Facebook, because if somebody posts a story about a dog they rescued, I will start breaking down in tears because I feel so much for the pain that that dog had to go through being abandoned.

I have a lot of tearfulness. I think all my emotions just come with tears. My face just enjoys leaking. Any excuse it has, it's going to leak. Usually my sadness, there's a lot more snot involved. It's not like a gentle, pretty leaky. It's more of [snotty snorty noises]kind of leaking. It's snotty. It's really snotty. And then there's also this more internal tenderness to who I am. I feel really vulnerable about things, and I feel really almost naked to the world, like there's nothing there to protect me. And it's just this heavy weight. So sadness for me, it's not the absence of happiness. Sadness is so much more. And I am so familiar with her or him, depending on what gender it decides to present as that day.

IVY

If you are a pretty crier or know a pretty crier, please let us know. I'm very curious if that is just a myth or if it's legit, if it's the real thing.

Sadness for me is defined by heaviness and extreme exhaustion, which then pretty quickly turns into apathy. I feel sadness really intensely, and I always have. And it's something that I have also recently been working with my therapist on. I used to think that I was just a really cold person and that I was really shut down and shut off from everything and everyone and from myself. And as time has gone on and I've been in therapy for a while now, I'm realizing that, no, it's actually quite the opposite.

Like Autumn, I am very sensitive and I feel pain very intensely. My pain and the pain of others. I care a lot to the point that it is overwhelming and exhausting and I feel a lot of guilt around it. Even though I'm not inflicting that pain on other people, I feel a lot of guilt that there are people in the world that are feeling pain and there's either nothing I can do about it or I'm not doing anything about it. Because I am essentially protecting myself from the experience of pain and sadness by not feeling it.

So sadness for me is largely defined by that. It's defined by heaviness and exhaustion and pain and just aching. It's just like this deep, dull ache that you can't not notice. And so the only thing that I know to do with it is to numb it and shut it down. It's like having a really bad toothache, and you just keep putting on that numbing gel. That's what you do. You just keep putting on the numbing gel because you can't conceive of doing anything else.

Sadness is probably the most intense feeling that I have. It is definitely not something that is superficial. I can't fathom sadness being a superficial emotion. If anything, it's like my default.

AUTUMN

I do find the divergence between us very, very curious. Because when it comes to emotions, and I'm not talking depression here, because depression is a whole other thing for me - that does come with apathy - but when I'm just talking sadness, the emotion of sadness, and you talk about numbing it and placing that numb gel on it, it is such a foreign concept. Part of that sounds so appealing, the idea of being able to numb anything within me. And it just makes me so curious of what your experience is like in your head and in your body and in your life that that is even possible for you.

Because when it comes to emotion, and especially with sadness, I cannot escape it and I cannot numb it. It's just there. And so, again, that divergence between us is so interesting and I imagine there's a lot of people out there too, that it's very hard to fathom experiencing emotion any other way than you experience it.

So now let's move on to that next piece, which is what do we have out there that can really embody sadness? What piece of media or art really embodies sadness for us? And for me, sticking with that musical route, I'm going to go with a song called Broken by Anson Seabra. I have no idea how to pronounce his name, I've only ever found him on YouTube. But this song, the way it sung, where his voice - he doesn't even have the energy to quite sing. It's very slow and it's very heavy. And then the lyrics to the song as well really embody sadness for me.

And I'm just going to read just a few of these, starting with - which this is one of the strongest lines for sadness for me: “And feelings come but they won't go? Please won't someone take me home before I lose my mind? Am I broken? Am I flawed? Do I deserve a shred of worth? Or am I just another fake, fucked up lost cause? Am I human? Am I something else? Because I'm so scared and there's no one there to save me from the nightmare that I call myself?”

And this song, for me, is sadness. It's the pain and the self-doubt and the loss of energy and the feeling like you're silently drowning. Because to actively be drowning there would be so much more thrashing energy. But it's not that. It's almost like a giving up and slipping into the water like Ophelia for me.

IVY

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the way that you experience sadness too. I don't think I could do that. I don't think I could be that immersed in it and embedded in it and not able to shut it down. The way that you were saying that, in some ways, my way of dealing with it sounds so comforting. I guess, in some sense, the way that you deal with sadness, even though it sounds excruciating to me and I can't fathom it, at the same time, I also recognize that the way that I deal with sadness also causes problems for me.

I may not be so acutely immersed in it when I feel it. I may be able to shut down. But when I shut down, I shut down from everyone too, and I shut down from the world and I isolate myself more. And that is the downside to how I deal with sadness, is that in order for me to be apathetic, in order for me to numb myself out, I have to go media blackout. I have to isolate myself from nearly everybody. I need to just be on my own and not have much of any external anything coming in relationships, demands from the outside world. Like I have to go damn near catatonic in order for me to shut down, in order for me to deal with sadness. So as much as your way of dealing with it and feeling it and processing it sounds incredibly painful to me, there is also a part of me that wishes that my default way of coping was not to just completely shut down, because it also definitely impairs a lot of my other relationships.

And I'm going to talk about my song for this at the same time as I talk about my relationship with sadness, because it is very much one and the same. So my relationship with sadness is like having an extremely dependent friend that you have always known. They've always been a part of your life. You know they're not good for you to be around, you know that they drag you down. But you have so much shared history with them and you are so used to them being around that when they show up at your front door, you can't turn them away because it's normalized and because you feel obligated to stick it out to stay around them.

And for me, the song that encapsulates my relationship with sadness the best is Hello, Mr. Heartache by the Dixie Chicks. And I normally would not do this, but I'm going to try to sing the lines that fit with this the best, because the feeling of resignation that comes with this sense of obligation and normalization, I don't think I can capture just by reading it. So I'm going to try to sing it and we'll see how this goes.

[Singin] “Hello, Mr. Heartache. I've been expecting you. Come in and wear your welcome out the way you always do. You never say if you're here to stay or only passing through. So. Hello, Mr. Heartache. I've been expecting you.” [End Singing]

That is how I feel every time that sadness shows up. It's just like the sense of resignation. It's like, fuck, man, you're here again. Like you got kicked out of wherever else you were. You got no place else to go, so you show up at my door because you know I'm always going to let you in. And that's the relationship that I've always had with sadness is I feel so deeply entwined with it.

I don't really remember any point in my life that I did not feel that sadness was right there next to me. It is that toxic friend that never fucking goes away and they drain you and they take everything from you and they're completely dependent on you because they have no other friends. And you feel guilty and you feel obligated and you feel like there's no way out of this. That is what sadness is for me. That's what my relationship is with it. It's just resigned to it being there.

AUTUMN

I can most definitely relate to that analogy as well. And to go hand in hand with that, I think the piece of it as well is that when you hug that friend, that makes sense. That feeling of hugging and being with sadness fits because you've done it so much like an old shoe that your foot fits into, or the mattress that you've laid on for three straight weeks and you've got the little rut in it. Now that's the other piece of it too, is it's not just this toxic friend. And yes, they're super dependent, but you're also just a little bit dependent on them because of their familiarity.

And at least for me anyway, sadness is almost not anymore as much, but it was for the longest time, almost addictive. And so once sadness came, I did not want to let sadness go. And that goes right into my relationship with the emotion of sadness, which it also used to be my life. And when I got further along on my journey and I was able to not be sad for a certain amount of times and then it would come back, I was both terrified because I was afraid it was going to overtake my life, but also very comfortable because it was familiar and I knew it. And sometimes when you're on this healing journey, as unhealthy as, you know, certain things are, they feel so familiar and so comforting compared to all the scary new things you're pushing yourself through that you do want to just relax back into it.

And one of the things that I do like about how I am with emotions and now that I can actually express them and I found healthy and effective ways to express my emotions is I have learned that sadness will now leave me. Because when I express it, when I open myself up to the sadness and I allow it to fully dwell within me, to fully embrace me, and I don't keep clinging to it, I know that it will pass. Because that's how I process the emotion, itself, is that I allow it to come into me, I allow it to peak, to crescendo, and like any other wave, it then goes back down because I am not trying to bury it, because I'm not trying to cut myself off from it. And so it does go away.

And so I'm very happy to say that at this point in my life, when sadness does come, my relationship with it is very different in that, no, I don't really like it, but I'm not fighting its presence. I'm not resentful of its presence, which is a big thing anymore. I'm not terrified of it. I'm just this is what it is right now. And I know this will pass. And it took me, Jesus, almost near four decades now to get to the point where I could have sadness come into my life and be sure that it would not linger forever.

Now, even with that, though, I will say anytime I start feeling sad, I still do a mental health check with myself and be like, okay, holy shit, is something going on? Have I done something differently? Is this the begin of depression? Let's look and make sure. Because even though I know sadness will pass, I also know that I actively have to be doing things in order for sadness to move on, in order for me to not cling to sadness the way that sadness wants to cling to me.

IVY

I also tend to take action now, once sadness shows up. A little bit different of a way of thinking about it, though, for me. Yes, I know sadness will eventually wander off for a while before it comes back again. When sadness does show up, I'm more at a space now where I just try to coexist with it without letting its problems be my problems. Like using that example of that toxic friend who keeps showing up every time he kicked out of wherever they were staying at before. That's kind of the attitude that I take with it.

It's like, all right, sooner or later, they're going to find somebody else's couch to sleep on for a while, or they're going to get their own place for a while or whatever. I just got to deal with it for a little while while they're here. And whatever their problems are, I ain't letting them be my problems. Your drama is not my drama. I don't really want to hear about it. I don't want to hear your sob stories. I don't want to think about it. I got shit to do. Like, I have a life, have things that I'm doing. I have things that I'm working towards. If you want to lay around and do nothing, that's up to you. But that is not how I'm choosing to live my life. And that's kind of how I deal with sadness for the most part now.

I mean, yes, there are times that you need to sit with your emotions, and I understand that. But I'll tell you what, I have sat with sadness for so much of my fucking life. I am tired of spending all of my time with sadness, and I would like to make some friends with other emotions and have connections outside of those emotions as well. I would like to have a life.

And for most of my 35 years, sadness was my primary companion, often my only real companion that I felt that I had. And it was toxic for me to spend so much time with it, because, like Autumn said, can become addictive. They're familiar, they're comfortable. You know this person. And that's how I am with sadness. It's predictable, it's familiar, it's comfortable. It's normalized. I know it's not healthy, but at least it's a devil I know, and it's a devil I know how to dance with. But at this point in my life, while there are times when I will sit with the sadness because it is necessary to do that sometimes, I don't dwell on it the way that I used to. I don't let it consume my life.

Sometimes I leave Sadness sitting on my couch and I leave and I go live my life and I don't worry about what it's doing or when it's going to leave. And that's pretty much how I try to deal with it now.

AUTUMN

I think it sounds like you're setting some healthy boundaries with Sadness and learning to maybe start talking to your friend crush happiness and maybe some of the other emotions that have come to the party. So I think that's a good place to be on the healing journey.

And I know we've already touched on some of this briefly, but to put it all in one area here so let's go to the next piece of this checklist. How do we know we're feeling sadness? Like I said already, I've got the tears, I've got the heaviness. I'm overly sensitive to everything. The other piece I really didn't talk about is I also feel very vulnerable. I have a very childlike need for comfort and hugs and love and reassurance. I get a lot more rejection sensitivity. I assume whatever, if anybody's mad, I assume I am the reason that they are that. I assume I'm always fucking up. And so there's a lot more insecurity for me and a lot more - I mean, in my mind, I am almost like this little toddler reaching up with their hands, just wanting the hug, wanting to be picked up, wanting to be loved, wanting to be reassured. So those are the things that I start feeling that I'm like Hello, sadness, my old friend.

IVY

Yeah, we are definitely diverging on this one all the way through sadness. I feel like you and I are going to diverge and how we deal with it and feel about it. I do not seek reassurance. I seek solitude. Like with most other emotions, when I feel sadness, I want to be by myself. I don't want to interact with other people. I don't even want other people to remember that I exist. I just really withdraw into myself.

I do tend to fall into more negative head spaces, and I find myself wanting to sleep more. And that feeling of wanting solitude becomes so much stronger than at any other time. I literally do not want other people to be aware that I exist. Because the process of dealing with sadness, even though I'm trying to take a healthier approach to it now, even though I'm trying to still live my life, even though I'm trying not to dwell on it too much, it is still exhausting to fucking deal with when sadness shows up and it just brings down the energy of everything around you. And I don't want to spread that to other people. But I also don't need any other demands coming in.

And even though I have a really great relationship with my sister, when I'm in the depths of sadness, I don't even really want to interact with Autumn. Because as much as I love her and as much as she tries to be there for me and she's not really demanding anything of me, I am so exhausted by dealing with sadness. I have nothing left to offer to anybody, not even my time or attention or energy. I have nothing left. And so when sadness shows up and I'm really in the midst of dealing with it, I know that it's there and I know I'm feeling its effects because I am more negative and I just want to sleep away the time until it's gone and I don't want to be around anybody else. I don't have any motivation. I just want to get through.

AUTUMN

I can relate to that because sadness really does deplete your resources. And I will say when I do say I want reassurance it is only usually typically from my intimate partner and I don't talk much to anybody else beyond that. And half the time I don't even talk to him. I just lay on him and force him to hug me because I'm really sad. And luckily I have a really great relationship and a boyfriend that is willing to hug me whenever I demand it.

Now, the next piece of the checklist is how do we differentiate between sadness and another emotion? And of course, the biggest emotion, well state, I would say that sadness can get confused for is depression. Because really depression is pretty much sadness that's decided to come and stay. It's more the depth and the length that really differentiates these two. And that's kind of what I look at to differentiate sadness from depression for me is how long is this lasting? If this is going past a few days and we're starting into getting into weeks territory, then I start getting concerned that this is actually depression and not just sadness.

The other piece for me, which again, this is a divergent thing because I've already said that this is part of sadness for her, which is apathy. When I just feel sad, when I feel that emotional blip, that's not depression. I don't feel apathetic. When I start getting depressed, then the apathy sets in.

Another one that can sometimes get confused with sadness for me is like a frustration or an anger. Because anger and sadness are very much mixed a lot for me. They usually come from very much the same thing. I often say that anger is just my functional sadness. I've got to do shit, but I'm really sad so I get angry so I can actually function. That doesn't actually work very well, I have found. But usually if I am more angry or frustrated, I also have a lot more agitation.

How do you differentiate between sadness and other emotions, Ivy?

IVY

It's actually really hard for me to even verbalize how I differentiate it from other emotions. The only thing that I can say is this: sadness I differentiate it based on the relationship that I have with it because it's the only emotion I have this relationship with. It's the only one that when it shows up at the door, it's a sigh, a raised eyebrow, an eye roll, and a wave it in. That's it. That's how I differentiate it from any other emotion, because I don't feel that with anything else.

Sadness is the only emotion I have this kind of relationship with. Like, I know it's coming before it shows up at my door. It never calls first and never texts to see if I'm home. It just shows up at the door. But I always know it's coming before it shows up. I am that closely connected to this emotion. It feels so intertwined with me and my identity and my life up to this point that I am only able to differentiate it by the relationship that I have with it. And I know that probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I can't say that I have ever mistaken sadness for anything else.

AUTUMN

And there are some emotions that we are so intimately familiar with that we don't need to differentiate them because we know them so well. Maybe it's anger, maybe it's happiness. Maybe it's sadness for you. But there are some emotions that we know so well, you don't need to do the lineup to figure out who it is that door.

So now let's talk about how do you act when you feel it. One of the biggest, biggest things I notice, and that probably anybody around me notices when I get sad, I get quiet. And I am not a quiet person. I'm almost always talking or humming or singing or talking to my dogs. I have a lot of pressure of speech. Also, with my autism, part of my stimming is verbal stimming. So I'm always making noises. When I get sad, that all stops and I get really, really quiet.

I also feel like I need to be quiet, like I need to pull in on myself. So I make smaller movements. I actually walk around quieter than I usually would. I do my best to make myself small and pull in my energy. I end up apologizing a lot. I seek reassurance a lot, and I usually reduce a lot of my obligations. And then the other thing that I notice behaviorally is I get very lethargic and I lack a lot of motivation. And so I end up just kind of lying around and staring off or listening to sad music a lot more.

IVY

I also get that lethargy that comes with sadness because it's really hard to motivate myself when I'm feeling sad. I do it, but I definitely am a little bit more sluggish moving around and getting things done. As I mentioned before, I'm way more withdrawn when I'm feeling sad. Even with Kelvin, we live under the same roof. I can go an entire day and barely say a word to him when I'm feeling sad. It's just how I operate. When I'm sad, I just don't talk to really anybody, even people that live under the same roof with me. I withdraw completely into myself.

And again, like I said earlier, I'm just trying to get by. I'm just trying to get through it until it's gone, until the wave passes, until I can find an out, until sadness leaves. And I tend to alternate between crying and powering through and being nearly catatonic. Those three things come in waves. Which adds to the exhaustion to be alternating between sobbing now because I'm really sad to I have shit to do that still has to get done. So I'm going to autopilot and power my way through this and pull myself up by my bootstraps to now I am so exhausted that literally all I can fucking do is sit here and stare into space for a while and then I start that whole process over again.

AUTUMN

Sadness is pretty exhausting, I think, for a lot of people. And when you are alternating between those, it just makes it that much more exhausting.

So now comes the question, how do we want to act when sadness comes to visit? For me, I would like to be less dramatic and sappy. I think for so many of my emotions I really end up looking drunk. And I think that's because alcohol for a lot of people reduces their inhibitions around emotional expression. I don't have those inhibitions if I'm around my intimate partners. And so I look drunk because I'm not inhibited in my expression of emotion. And so I look like a sad drunk. I'm sappy and insecure and I'm dramatic and it's like “I know you can't love me because I'm just not good enough and you're going to leave me, but I really love you. And I want to hug and I wish [unintelligible fake crying noise].”

And I look like a sad drunk with that. It is what I act like sometimes, and I would like to have less of that. I'd like to be more nobly sad, just more nobly quiet with less of the interactional drama, I guess, sappiness that comes with it. That's what I would like.

IVY

I feel like on this one, maybe what you're wanting is to be like me to a certain degree anyway. I don't get sappy with sadness. I get stoic. I get resigned. I get annoyed. I do not get sappy.

I wish that with sadness, I did not feel so fucking obligated to accommodate it, because I do still feel that I'm working on it. I am starting to set better boundaries. Like I said, I'll leave sadness sitting on my couch and I'll go out and I'll live my life not worry about what it's doing or when it's going to leave. I wish that I had more gumption in me that when sadness showed up at the door, I could draw a firmer line and be like, dude, you can't stay here. I'm sick of this shit. You got to get your life together. Get your shit together. I wish that I had it in me to do that. I am not at that space right now.

Like I said earlier, yes, it is important sometimes to sit with sadness, just like any other emotion. There are times when you genuinely do need to sit with that. You need to process it. You need to see where it's coming from. You need to pick it apart. You need to analyze it. There are times and places for that. But when you have done it so much for so long and it's the same stories over and over again, just rehashing themselves, the same patterns rehashing themselves over and over and over again, it gets old. And at some point, if you want to be healthy and you want to be in a better head space and you want to be happier, you do have to draw some boundaries sometimes.

And I would like to get to a place with sadness where I can draw firmer boundaries and not just automatically let it in every time it shows up. This is not the time, this is not the place, and I'm not in the mood. I wish that I could do that. I would like to get to a point someday where I can do that. I have sat with it so fucking much. It's isolated me from so many other things and so many other people, and I am tired of this pattern.

AUTUMN

I also got tired of that cycle and that pattern, but I've always been more passive in my boundary setting, both in real life and just talking in analogies here. And so what I ended up doing with Sadness, for me, is I made the environment inhospitable. I kind of got rid of the couch, so Sadness had to sleep on the floor, and I made sure there wasn't any of the snacks that sadness liked around. And essentially, realistically speaking, I made a shit ton of life changes so that sadness doesn't want to stay when it comes.

And that's why, when the next question comes here is my ideal for this emotion a reasonable or healthy one? Would it actually be reasonable or healthy for me to be a quiet stoic sad? No, it wouldn't. Because for me personally, and this is not everybody but for me personally, the only way for me to get out of emotions is to go through them. I have to experience them. I have to delve into them. I have to let them crescendo. And if I don't do that, it's going to stick around forever. And so if I became stoic sad, I'd be putting the couch back in. I'd be buying its favorite Fritos. I'd be inviting all of these wonderful things that sadness loves about sticking around.

So my ideal for Sadness isn't going to work for me. I just have to accept it when it comes. You can come and visit me. That's great. We'll sit here and commiserate on the floor, and then you can get uncomfortable and hungry and get the fuck out, because I'm not really putting up with you anymore. But again, I'm a passive boundary setter that is passive, but also effective.

IVY

For the record, my sadness likes pizza rolls better than Fritos. But just goes to show you that even Sadness has different shades and different tastes.

Is my ideal realistic or reasonable or healthy? I'm going to say yes and no. It's a little bit of both. Because like I said, it is at times important to actually feel these things. As unpleasant as it is,

as worn out as it is, sometimes it has to be done. Sometimes you got to feel it. You got to move through it. You have to, like said, let it crescendo.

However, because sadness is something that is so familiar to me and it does have some addictive qualities to it, there have been times when Sadness showed up and I made the surroundings even more cushy trying to encourage it to stay. And there have been times when the sadness was gone and I felt so numb for so long, I didn't feel anything, really, that I missed feeling something. And I would call up Sadness and I would invite him over. And that's what I want to avoid. I don't want to ever get back to that space where I invite sadness in because I'm lonely or because I'm so numb that I can't seem to feel anything else. And so I'll take what I can get, never want to be in that space again. Because that is when I was codependent with Sadness.

And so in that sense, I do think that my ideal is reasonable and it is healthy, because that is not the answer to dealing with feeling numb, to dealing with loneliness. It's not to invite in something that is destructive for you. And while there are times that sadness has been a good companion for me and somebody that I genuinely needed around, and it has been mutually beneficial, that does not mean that I should feel obligated to sadness when it is something that is destructive and toxic to me. It does not mean that it's a good idea for me to invite it in because I feel lonely, and it's not a good idea for me to invite it in just because I'm desperate to feel something at all.

So it's a little bit of both yes and no. In some ways, it's healthy for me to set this ideal of being able to say no and kick it to the curb. But at the same time, it would not be good to completely sever that relationship either, because there are times when sadness does serve a purpose, and there are times when sadness can be a good friend. As unhealthy as sadness can sometimes be, there are times when sadness can still be a good friend. And I don't think it would be entirely beneficial for me to completely sever those ties. I just need to have stronger boundaries, both for my sake and for the sake of sadness, too.

AUTUMN

And that is some definite advanced level emotional tangling there is. Once you are able to more identify your emotions and you're learning how to express them and you're processing through them, it's starting to identify when is it appropriate to set those boundaries and when is it appropriate to sit within and allow it to crescendo. And that's something that's very specific to each person and is definitely some advanced level journey stuff.

All right, so the next question on our checklist how do I effectively or healthily express this emotion? For me, effective and healthy goes hand in hand luckily anymore. Like I said, I dive into it. I cry, I seek out sad music. I allow myself to lay around and stare off. I allow myself to seek out hugs and reassurance and be kind of sappy. Essentially, I embrace sadness with a hug, but I don't hold on. And so we do a nice hug. There's the bro pat. That means, hey, the hug is over. And then we kind of part ways. So that's how I effectively and healthily express it. Now I do the sad things. I let myself be sad.

IVY

Just as I did with happiness, I'm going to highlight how I used to effectively express that emotion, and it's all the things that I listed before. It was like having that codependent relationship with sadness. How do I deal with this emotion? How do I express this emotion? Let me dive into it deeper than I need to. Let me dredge everything up, rehash everything, make myself cry. Let me make myself miserable when I was otherwise at least like baseline, okayish. Let me do unnecessary levels of damage to myself because I need this. That is how I used to express the emotion. It was effective. It was not healthy.

Now, how I deal with and express this emotion? In a much more healthy and equally effective way. First and foremost, I be reasonable and gentle with myself. I know what my limitations are. I know where I'm at in terms of setting my boundaries. I know where I'm at in terms of what I can handle and what I can't.

When sadness rolls in, I know I will be operating at limited capacity so I don't overload my schedule with things. I do what needs to be done, but I don't extend myself further than I have to because I know I'm going to be exhausted. I know I'm going to be down. I know I'm going to have negative perspectives, and I'm not going to want to drag other people into that. So I do let myself sleep more because at least when I'm asleep, I'm not conscious of it. I don't sleep all the time. I still make myself get up. I go to the gym. I go to work. I still do the things that need to be done for myself and for maintaining the relationships that I have that are super important to me and for maintaining my work. I still do those things, but I don't overextend myself. I let myself cry if I need to.

I let myself have moments where I'm catatonic, and I don't let myself panic about it, because I used to panic when I would start feeling catatonic, when I would shut down completely. Part of me deep inside would panic and think that once I went into that catatonic state, I was never coming out. I have gone to this rodeo many a times with sadness. I know how it works, and I know that I will not always be catatonic. And it's fine for me to indulge in that because it's a way for my brain to rest and repair and reset, and I let myself do that.

And the other thing that I do is that when sadness starts sharing its sob stories again that I've heard a million times and I've rehashed with them a million times, I don't deep dive. I say, man, that sucks. I'm sorry. And then I move on. I don't hold on to it. I let those things pass through me. I don't try to elaborate on it. I don't take the sad thing that I'm thinking about or the sad memory of a trauma or abuse that I experienced and build on it. I don't try to remember every single moment and second of it. I don't try to feel again what I felt in that moment. I don't do any of those things. I acknowledge it. I accept that it happened. I am gentle with myself. I commiserate. But then I move on because I'm not going to be dragged down by this any more than I absolutely have to be.

AUTUMN

I feel like your way of effectively expressing and kind of handling and dealing with this emotion of sadness also is just part of how you keep it from impairing your functioning as well. Are there other things you do on top of that to help keep sadness from impairing your functioning?

IVY

A lot of it is preventative care at this point. In some ways similar to the analogy that you used earlier of not making as comfortable the space for sadness. It's pretty much the same thing that I do now.

I don't often feel sadness as intensely as I did a few years ago. Over time, I have gotten better at handling it, better at pulling back from it instead of diving into it unnecessarily. I have changed a lot of things about my lifestyle. I maintain a regular sleep schedule for the most part. I am very careful with what I eat and how it affects my mental health. I take supplements. I go to the gym. I make sure that I do have social interaction. I make sure that I go outside and I enjoy nature. I do the things that I need to to ground me. I'm in therapy. I do anything and everything that I can to prevent sadness from coming and staying for very long or from dragging me into its bullshit.

Because even when it shows up now, I maintain a certain amount of distance from it. I try to remain more objective. I'm not going to be sadness’s ride or die. I'm not doing that shit anymore. So I do everything that I can to keep it at bay and to keep myself healthy, to keep my environment healthy. I'm not going to sit down with sadness and eat pizza every night because I know that's going to negatively impact my mental health. I don't let my apartment become a huge mess because I know that the bigger the mess becomes, the more overwhelming it's going to be, the harder it is for me to pull myself out of that sadness. I do what I need to do to keep myself functional and moving and healthy.

I take care of myself now, which is not something that I did before, because before I was willing to go along with whatever sadness says, and now I recognize how unhealthy sadness is [for me]. I still have compassion for sadness. I don't merge with sadness the way that I did before. We are not one in the same. Sadness is not my entire identity. We are not twins. We are separate beings. I can have a relationship with sadness and have positive moments with it and some positive connotations with it without letting it completely consume my life and be all that there is.

AUTUMN

Sounds like a lot of preventive care. And then also you always hear that thing like, you are not your thoughts, but I think that goes hand in hand - you are not your emotions, and it sounds like you're really taking that to heart as well.

I think I've done that a lot to help keep sadness from impairing my functioning. Like I said, making my environment uncomfortable for it, which means improving my overall mental health and allowing myself to understand that me and sadness are separate entities, that sadness is an emotion. Or a chemical imbalance if it decides to be depression. It is not necessarily me and my personality.

I will say, though, that as far as impairing my functioning, sadness specifically, because I tangled with sadness and depression for so long, for the most part, sadness honestly doesn't impair my functioning. Not just because I'm preventing it and it doesn't stay as long and I'm allowing myself to process and work through it, but also because I learned how to function when depressed. If I had stopped functioning when I was sad, I just would have not functioned for like 30 some years. So I just learned to function. So even when sadness is sitting on my shoulders pretty hard, or even when it does start to turn into depression, yes, I do have fewer resources and yes, I get less done, but I'm still functioning because I learned how I had to do that.

All right, so let's do this one more time with one of the other big three emotions that we hear about very, very frequently and that a lot of us probably experience very frequently, and that is anger. So first off, starting with that definition of anger. So we're going to go over to that dictionary, and the dictionary says it is a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility. Yes, to all of that, but especially the strong feeling.

I feel like that is the big piece of anger. Because if it's not strong, it's probably not anger. It's probably like frustration or annoyance. Anger really comes in and rears up like a dragon. Anger is very, very strong. I would agree with that. I would also say for me, there's a lot more agitation and restlessness. There's definitely a lot of frustration and irritation there. And for whatever reason, there's a lot of judgmentalness. It gets mixed in with my anger. Like, I get fucking pissed at other people. I get fucking pissed at myself for things. And where I would normally allow more grace, when I am anger, there is no grace. There is just, you fucking do it right or get the fuck out of the way. And that applies to myself as well. And as you can tell, there's probably a lot more swearing in anger.

IVY

We're going to diverge on this one too, in quite a few ways, I think, because you described anger as being so much bigger, rearing up like a dragon. And that is not how I define anger. To me, it is frustration and just being irritable. And there is restlessness there. There's also a lot of irrationality and a lot of righteous indignation.

And honestly, anger feels very entitled to me. And I think the reason why anger feels entitled to me is because I remember watching how our parents acted and I remember how our parents would treat us and other people and their emotions were so much bigger. And they acted like they were the only fucking people whose feelings mattered at all. And they would be explosive with their anger, even over tiny little things, and they wouldn't give a fuck about how it affected anybody else but themselves.

And so anger to me, I see as being very entitled. And I'm not saying that that is the truth of anger. I am saying that that is how I developed my definition of anger is largely from watching other people express it. Because anger is something that is difficult for me to wrap my head around. It's not something I feel very often. It's something that I am still struggling with no matter how long I've been in therapy now, trying to grapple with the concept of anger, it does not seem to be a huge part of my emotional repertoire.

Honestly, it's a little shit. That's how I see it. It just irritates me more than anything else.

AUTUMN

I could definitely see how you see anger as entitled. And I feel like all of these emotions have their place. I mean, if you want to go down to genetically speaking, to help us continue to survive and thrive. And I think one of the pieces that anger does is it forces us to step up. It forces us to step up and it forces us to go head to head with what we're angry with. And in doing that, that often means that we are putting our desires first. Even if we're angry on the account of somebody else. Like somebody has insulted my sister or my boyfriend and I decide to get angry about that. My emotions and feelings regarding them are now taking the forefront. And I kind of think, I mean, this is just my personal opinion that is the purpose of anger is to allow us the fuel to put ourselves first, which is entitled, but sometimes necessary.

I think it's more entitled when we don't learn to manage and control and effectively express our anger. Because then we are constantly putting our issues and our self and our needs and our desires and our frustrations before everybody else. But I feel like when anger is part of a larger palette of expression, it does have its place.

Now, when it comes to media, that really embodies anger for me - when I was looking through these songs because that's what I was focusing on, I realized that most of my angry songs were about other people and the shit that they had done to me. And the one I ended up settling on because I guess just Blue October is my emotional expression go to band is another Blue October song, and it's called Razor Blade. And this is very much about people fucking you up in your youth.

And the part that really, really resonates with me is the chorus of this too, which is: “a brief bout with a razor blade cut me. I freaked out thinking people didn't love me. I watched closely as the you I knew forgot me. In letting go I am so proud of what I've done.”

And so, yes, for me, a lot of my anger does come from the fact that people I expected to and should have believed in and trusted to love me and hold me and protect me did not. They failed me. They actively interfered and fucked up my life. And by so doing, they fucked up My Life. Not just my childhood in that moment but my entire existence and pathway has deviated because of the harm that people caused me. And hand in hand with that though, with my anger is the idea that now when I get angry and I lose it, there is this little piece of me that is a little proud of thi,s that is a little bit able to say, yeah, look at this. Yeah, sure, I cut myself. I hurt myself. And I am a little bit proud of having done that. And part of that comes from the fact that I did have to repress my emotions for so long that when I'm finally able to express it, I am honestly a little proud of myself as long as I'm not hurting other people, because that I am not proud of when that happens.

IVY

I can understand that. Like I said before, I do not look at my perception of anger and consider it to be truth. Because I know my perception of anger is warped by the experiences with our parents. And also by the fact that I never learned how to properly express it or properly feel it or process it. And so I have a really contentious relationship with anger. I am open to the fact that other people will feel very differently about it and they'll express it differently and they'll have different attitudes about it.

I recognize that my way of seeing anger and feeling it stunted in some ways. Part of that being stunted is because of the shame that I have around the concept of anger. Watching our parents was deeply embarrassing to me. The way that they would act in public, the way they would lash out at people. I felt vicarious humiliation because they didn't have the decency to be embarrassed about the way that they were acting or to consider it all, how it was affecting other people. And so that has largely shaped my view on anger, even with my own expression of it. And I do have a very contentious relationship with it.

I will say that when I do feel anger, which of course I do, because everybody does, a lot of the anger that I feel comes down to the theme of don't put your shit on me. I think that does also go back to the experiences with our parents, because they made their problems, everybody else's problems. And that is pretty much the only fucking thing that sends me over the deep end and makes me angry.

And that ties into my song for anger, which is Alanis Morrisette’s Not the Doctor. And just a little piece here from that: “I don't want to be the filler if the void is solely yours. I don't want to be your glass of single malt whiskey hidden in the bottom drawer. I don't want to be a bandage if the wound is not mine. Lend me some fresh air. I don't want to be adored for what I merely represent to you. I don't want to be your babysitter. You're a very big boy now. I don't want to be your mother I didn't carry you in my womb for nine months. Show me the back door.”

And that is how I feel a lot of times with anger. Whatever you're fucking dealing with, don't bring that on me. Don't make this my problem. This is not me. You need to deal with your shit. If you feel like you got to lash out and drag other people into it and make it everybody else's problem, that's fucked up.

That's the spot where I get angry because I try very hard not to make my anger other people's problems. And to a certain degree I probably go a little bit too far where again, I withdraw completely and I shut myself down from other people. But that is because it's so deeply triggering me when somebody is trying to put their issues on you and make it your problem and drag you into their drama and their mess and blame you for the things that they're choosing not to work on in themselves. That is the one area where anger really gets me. I don't want to be your fucking mother and I don't want to fix your problems for you or deal with your bullshit because you are choosing not to deal with it in a healthy way.

AUTUMN

I definitely agree with that as well because that is triggering for me. And so I have a very diverse relationship with anger. So when we're talking about a relationship with emotions logically, I can look at this and I can see its genetic survivability and how it could be helpful. I see its point in expressing it. But also at the same point, I feel the same way. Like, I hate it when people put their issues on me. And I don't like that. My entire life got shoved aside and completely derailed because other people's issues were bigger than their ability to care for a child that they chose to have. And so I also feel ashamed of being angry, and I dislike the feeling of anger.

And in all honesty, I find anger uncomfortable and find anger very dangerous for me. And I am not sure if this is just the way we were raised and the way I saw it expressed. I'm not sure if some of this is the autism, because a lot of time when I get angry, it ties in somehow to my autistic meltdown process, which can get violent - usually towards myself or objects. I don't get violent towards other people.

So for me, my relationship with anger is a very it's a very careful one. I have to be careful to not get angry, because when I get angry, I lose control. And that's why I say it's a dragon, because if you wake this dragon, it does not turn out well. Now, I can do a lot to keep that dragon asleep, and if it starts to wake, I can soothe it back. But once the dragon is awake, I do not have the capability to control the dragon. And that's kind of my relationship to anger. This is one where it does feel like something that almost possesses me or overtakes me. It turns me into a different person. So this is one that I do more personify, but not as being separate from me, but as something that overtake my being. I'm very trepidacious with anger.

IVY

Very different for me. I don't see anger as being like this big dragon or demon or monstrous things or big wave that takes me over. If anything, my relationship with anger is like a parent dealing with a rebellious teenager that you don't understand. Yes, there are times when you might still feel in danger because if that kid's violent, that's a whole thing. But most of the time I'm just like, I don't get it. Why can’t you use your words? Can you mellow out? Can we have a discussion? I don't understand why you are communicating by throwing things and breaking shit and calling names and screaming at me. I don't know what you want. I don't know what we're trying to accomplish here. I don't know what you're getting at.

And honestly, this is part of the reason why I lost interest in becoming a parent. Because you have no way of knowing how your kid is going to be and if they're going to be defiant. And there's so many mental health problems in our family. And I was and still am an incredibly stubborn fucking person. And I'm certain any kid that I have is probably going to be hell on wheels as a teenager. And honestly, I do not think I would be a good parent that were to happen, because I don't have a whole lot of compassion for anger.

I'm trying to develop compassion. I'm trying to develop more understanding. I'm trying not to just be a pull yourself up by your bootstrap, shut that shit down, deal with it yourself. I'm trying not to be an asshole when it comes to anger, but I am not there. And honestly, I would feel so bad for any kid that had me as a parent if they had any sort of behavioral issues or if they lashed out when they were in pain, because I would not know what to do with that as far as how to support them properly.

And I know this because I don't support myself properly when it comes to anger. I certainly would not trust myself to be responsible for another person when it comes to responding to their anger in a healthy way and helping them work through it and process it. I don't get it. Because even when I feel it, I don't make that shit other people's problems. I don't lash out. I internalize. I internalize and I rigidly control and I restrict.

So to me, anger is not this big, monstrous thing. Anger is just this relationship with somebody that I view as being immature and not having good coping skills, not being willing to learn them. Rebellious as hell. Lashing out. Like I see it as that this is annoying, this is frustrating. It's confusing. I don't fucking get it. I want you to go away. That's how I am with anger. That's the relationship that I have. And I'm working on it, but this one's really fucking hard for me to deal with.

AUTUMN

Even though we're very divergent in anger, it's apparently a big piece that led to the same decision for us, which is not having kids. Because my lack of control did make me honestly afraid that I would abuse or potentially accidentally kill a child. And I know that sounds horrible, but again, that's why I'm not a parent. I recognized the possibility and I was like, Fuck no, not doing that.

So now how do we know we're feeling anger? So if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that as we talk about each of these emotions, we actually are getting into those emotions. So when we were talking about happiness, we were calmer and quieter and there was more gentle leaking. And when we were talking about sadness, there did get that heaviness in both of us.

And if you're listening now, one of the things I'm noticing, both with Ivy and I, we're getting louder, we're talking faster. I'm seeing myself gesture a lot more, bigger. These are all things that happen when I'm angry. I also find that I have a lot less tolerance for anything. I become extremely irritable. I get a lot of tension in my shoulders. It's almost like my adrenal response has kicked in and it's chose to fight. And my whole body is like, prepping. So I end up having a lot more almost ticks with my shoulders. They start coming up a lot more.

I also become more, I guess, hyperbolic. I exaggerate a lot more because I'm really trying to convert or force my opinion on people. Not sure what that's about, but that's a big piece of it. And then my autism, again, I'm not sure how this is mixed in, but when anger gets triggered, the more troublesome autistic pieces get triggered as well. And so I become extremely hypersensitive and have no tolerance for the hypersensitivity. So normally, like hearing my dogs lick themselves, it's annoying. When I'm angry and my dogs are licking themselves, I become irate. And I have to be very strict to control that [in myself] so I don't yell or be rude or mean with my dogs. The hypersensitivity almost gets like my skin doesn't fit. Like I'm uncomfortable, like I need to do something. Like I need to explode.

And then another piece of that is the rigidness that comes with autism. That piece comes out as well. When I get angry, I have a real hard time compromising on anything or seeing a different viewpoint. Even just seeing anything not black or white. Everything becomes black or white for me.

IVY

We actually do have some crossover there in how we know we're feeling it, because, yes, I do get more animated and I get louder. I also get much more clipped, and impatient, irritable. I get a lot of pressure and tightness in my chest and I withdraw from other people. The withdrawing from other people - some of it is I'm not going to drag other people into my shit just because I'm in a bad mood. But the other part of it is that when I get angry, I'm angry at everything now. I'm angry at life. Life is fucking stupid. And fuck all y'all. I don't want to be around anybody ever again. That's what happens when I get angry. It is a full cut off from everything and everyone. I just want to be completely within myself.

But at the same time, I am feeling so physically overloaded that I refer to it as going supernova. I feel like I am about to implode in on myself because it just feels it feels intense, it feels frantic, it feels frenetic, it feels fucking terrible. And I don't want anything to do with it. It's really hard for me to have compassion with it. I want to rigidly control that shit and not be around anybody. I mostly just want to rigidly control everybody else. I should not be around anybody.

AUTUMN

Good point. All right, so then how do we differentiate between this and other emotions? And so some of the things I have, like when I get louder and I start talking faster and moving around a lot, this also happens when I'm socially anxious. Those are almost mirror behaviors. You'll see that. You'll also see me get more hyperbolic and exaggerating. That's just a feeling of insecurity. And it's not anger towards anybody. When I also get overwhelmed with my autism and the hypersensitivity, you see a lot of the same things because like I said, there's some crossover there that the anger triggers that, but sometimes I just experience those things without it. So my differentiation for anger is typically a feeling of violence.

When I feel violent towards myself or others, that's how I know when I'm angry. Most everything before that is usually something else. It's anxiety, it is hypersensitive. It's sometimes even sadness that I'm trying to push through. But violence is what differentiates anger from other emotions for me.

IVY

The main thing that differentiates anger from other emotions for me is that anger is the only emotion I have active resentment towards. I resent it in other people. I resent it in myself even more because it is something that I consider to be shameful. It is something that I consider to be on the verge of losing control. So I really resent anger, and it is the only emotion that I actively resent. As soon as it starts to show up, all I feel is flooded with resentment and shame. And that was the only emotion that I have that reaction to.

The only other thing that differentiates anger from any other emotion for me is that anger is the only thing that makes me likely to lash out, not at other people. I never do it in front of other people. There's only been a couple of times in my life where I've lost my shit in front of another person, and I have so much shame and disgust around that. Anger for me, is something that I do by myself when nobody else is around. And it is the only emotion that I have that causes me to lash out at my surroundings.

AUTUMN

Which brings us to the next piece on our checklist, which is how do we act when we feel angry? And Ivy spoke to that a little bit. For me, I tend to get very short with people. I don't have tolerance or patience for anything. I tend to be more rude. I'm not actively trying to be rude, but just because I'm short and I have fewer resources to mask and play the socializing game, I come across as rude. I do tend to get more aggressive.

And then if it escalates to a certain point, I will become physically violent. I have worked very hard, and that was the very first piece I did on my healing journey, was Autumn will not hurt other things ever. And so that was the very first piece I worked on. And I do not anymore in my adulthood get physically violent with other people. I only hurt myself.

And part of the reason I think there is a lot of crossover with the autism is because anger is very overwhelming. And so I start to feel overwhelmed and start to feel like I'm losing control. And that's what you start to see. I don't know for sure - From the inside what it looks like to me is I am spiraling. I'm getting louder, and I'm getting bigger, and I'm losing control over a lot of things: my tone of voice and my gesturing and my balance and my reasoning. I don't know what it looks like from the outside, but internally, I feel like I act like I am losing more and more control over for myself.

IVY

How I act when I'm feeling angry really depends. It depends on whether or not there's other people around and whether or not I'm in public, if there are other people around. I have gotten so good at internalizing my anger, I shut down. I may be a little bit more clipped. I may try to put on the facial expression, the body language of don't come talk to me right now, but that's about it. I don't lash out.

If somebody comes up to talk to me, I am able to have a conversation with them and act relatively normal. But in the back of my mind, I've got kind of this visual of this pressure gauge, and I kind of watch where that needle is at. As long as that needle stays below the halfway point, like, okay, I can be around people. I may not like it, but I am able to control myself. As soon as it goes past that halfway point, I find some way to get by myself. Because again, I do not express anger in front of other people.

And when I am by myself, even then I do not really completely ever release and let go. I pace a lot back and forth trying to get some of that energy out. If that doesn't work, I will scream or cuss out in my head and out loud whoever it is that I may be mad at. I mean, I'm not going to say it to them, but I will get it out of my system verbally while I'm by myself if I need to.

If that doesn't work, then the only thing that I have left that really does get the anger out is throwing things. But even in that, I am very rigidly controlled because I will only throw things that are unlikely to damage anything or cause any harm. And I am only going to throw those things in directions that, again, are unlikely to cause any damage or harm. I will throw a pillow at the wall. I will throw a tennis shoe at the wall. I do not throw anything that will break like glass or clay. I don't throw anything that will make a huge mess that I'll have to clean up later. Everything for me with anger is so rigidly controlled that even when I express it and release it, it never fully releases. I just release enough of the pressure that I can go back to burying it.

AUTUMN

I feel like this is possibly the most divergent one we have, because when it comes to anger, I'm pretty sure I'm losing all of my control. And when it comes to anger, you keep gaining all of the control. You're just like more control.

When it comes to how want to act with anger: like a fucking adult. That's how I want to act with anger. I want to act like a fucking adult, not like a toddler. I don't want to be selfish. I want to have moderation. I want to have control. That's what I want. I have no idea if that's possible. But that's what I would like.

IVY

I could probably teach you how to control it. That's the one thing I'm really good at is controlling that shit.

What I would really like, I would like to get to a point, honestly, where I could have some compassion for anger. A little bit more patience, a little bit more understanding. I would like to understand what the fuck it is that anger wants. Because every time anger comes up, I always feel like this is really inefficient. This could be dealt with in better way. This is poor communication. This is not helpful. This isn't going to fix anything. I shut it down and I put it down. And again, this is why I don't feel like I would be a good parent with a child that has behavioral issues, because my response would just be irritation and stop acting so childish.

And that's not helpful. As much as I feel like anger is largely inefficient and unhelpful, I also feel like the response that I have towards anger is largely inefficient and unhelpful. Yes, I am able to release a certain amount of anger so that I can get to a space where it's manageable. And yes, for the most part, I can control my behavior. So I don't take it out on other people or lash out in front of people. But ultimately, I don't help it. And that's what I would like to work on.

I would like to get to a space where I could have more understanding for anger and see what it's getting at and what it needs and what it's seeking from me. I wish that I could diffuse it with humor. I wish that I could offer it reassurance. I wish that I could love it until it doesn't feel the need to act out. Because often when we act out, there is some need that's not being fulfilled. There's this frustration or pain that comes with anger. There's always things that are underlying anger. That are so much bigger and so much deeper and so much more painful than the expression that you see. And I would like to get to a space where I not only understand that logically, but I can act on that with compassion and humor and love and reassurance and validation.

I would like to be able to parent myself better in that way because, like I said, all of my internal parts, they do represent different emotions. And the parts of myself that I have struggled with the most are the parts that represent anger and that feel it often and express it often. I would like to be able to parent those parts of myself better. I still don't have any interest in having kids of my own, but I would like to get to a space where I can offer those parts of myself that feel anger, some love and reassurance and validation and help them cope with it and process it and heal from it, whatever it is that they actually need. I would like to be able to do that. I would like to be able to offer that. I would like to be able to communicate better with those parts of me that feel anger so that it's not a contentious relationship, so it's not just continuing to do harm, so it's not just ignoring the problem and burying it deeper.

AUTUMN

That sounds like an amazingly excellent and well thought out goal for anger. I can tell you've been working a lot on this in therapy for sure.

Now, the next piece on this checklist are our ideals for anger reasonable or healthy ones? Would being a fucking adult and showing some control with anger be healthy? Yes, I'm sure it would be healthy. Is it a reasonable expectation? At this time? I'm going to have to say no. No, it's not.

Anger is something I have been working with. Because of how I do react when I'm angry, anger is something I have had to work with for most of my life and I have not yet found a way to not lose control once I hit a certain point. So my anger management is always on preventing myself from getting to that point and if I get to that point, channeling that violence into something that only hurts me.

I am hoping that as I go along on this journey, I can find a better way to do that, to actually get to the point that I'm angry and lose control and then find a way to gain it back. But 30 years I would say I've been working on this and I have not yet found it. So I don't know if it's honestly a reasonable expectation for the way I am wired to be able to get extremely angry and still be in control of myself

IVY

In some ways, kind of like you on this one, I don't know that my ideal is reasonable or possible for me. I would like to believe it is because I do think that my ideal is actually pretty healthy. I think that would be a good, healthy way to deal with anger is be able to offer it in compassion and diffuse it with humor and give it love and validation and communicate. I do think that that is very healthy and I would like to believe that that is reasonable and achievable for me. I don't know. I'm going to keep working at it. I'm going to keep chipping away at it, even if I have to chip away at it my entire life. Hopefully I will get to that point. I'm not going to give up.

But I've been this way for as long as I can remember. A lot of my trauma is wrapped up in other people's expression of anger, not just our parents. The way a lot of people express anger, honestly, it triggers me, it pisses me off. I really struggle having patience with it because of those early traumas that's really, really wired into me.

Now to have this resentment towards anger and this disgust with it and shame that's around it, I know that's not healthy and I know that there are plenty of ways to express anger in a healthy way. Anger is not a bad, horrible, evil emotion. All emotions that we feel exist for a reason. That spectrum is there for a reason and I do believe that they serve a valuable purpose. All of them serve a valuable purpose, including anger.

My relationship with anger is shit. I'm going to keep working at it because what I'm working towards is very healthy. I don't know how long it will take me to get there or if I will ever get there in my lifetime, but I know I'm not going to give up on it because I don't have it in me to give up on it. That is one area where that stubbornness that I mentioned earlier is probably going to come in handy. Because I will be damned if I stop working on this particular thing.

AUTUMN

And that in and of itself, is admirable. I mean, we don't always know whether or not we're going to reach these goals for psychological and mental and physical health that we set for ourselves, but we definitely will never reach them if we don't at least try to walk that path. It's just what we have to do. I'll keep walking mine, and Ivy will keep walking hers, and we'll see how far we get in this lifetime.

So given that complicated issues that both Ivy and I have with anger, here comes the next one. How do we effectively and healthily express this emotion? Okay, so I'm going to break this into two pieces. One is, how do I do this once I've lost control? And then, how do I do this so I don't lose control?

So the first of this is once I have actually lost control, I try to isolate myself and get away from other people, because the way I express anger once I've lost control is frightening, and I don't want to traumatize people further. And so what I do is I find a way to isolate myself from others. If I have to even run away from an interaction that I'm in so that I can do that. I will lock myself in a bathroom, run into the woods, go into my car. I will do something to isolate myself.

And then the second piece, which is the only thing I have ever found that can bring me back down, is I self-harm. And that usually means hitting something extremely hard to the point that I bruise my knuckles or my head or some part of me, whether I'm head banging or I'm punching things. So that's what I do if I lose control. Isolate, self harm in as controlled a manner as possible so I don't break anything and end up in the hospital, and then it dissipates. And then I can go back and do whatever repair I need to in that relationship.

To prevent this from escalating to that point. What I usually have to do is give in to my fear. And I say that because almost always my response of anger is a guard for intense, overwhelming fear. Fear that I will be abandoned, fear that I will lose control, fear that I am not safe, fear that life is never going to be fair, fear that I will never be okay. Whatever that fear is that drives that underlying anger, I'm running from it because it is such a horrifying, existential, all encompassing, ocean depth void for me. And so I'm using anger to protect myself.

But that anger is not actually a protection. It is damaging me further. And so what I have found is the absolute best thing I can do is give in to the fear, break down, have the panic attack, end up on the floor, sobbing to the point I cannot breathe, and writhing like I'm in some sort of slow motion seizure. But when I do that, the anger can go away because I'm no longer using it as a brittle shell to protect me against the fear. So it's not escalating anymore.

I discard the shell of anger, and I allow myself to be completely and utterly vulnerable and terrified. And that is overwhelmingly frightening to me. It really is. But when I can do that, I don't lose control and become violent, and I don't hate myself later for it. And I find that when I can do that, when I can allow myself to just fall into the fear that I don't even know if I can escape it once I let myself in, when I do that, I'm usually able to process and connect with some deep wound within myself that I can begin working with so that that same wound doesn't trigger me towards that fear again. So that's how I am effectively expressing my anger.

IVY

Now, I will admit that you are much further along than I am on this one, because how do I effectively express anger? I don't. I have to admit that I am where I'm at right now. I am stunted on this. As effective as it gets for me, is making sure that I don't take it out on other people and that I don't tear up a bunch of shit and destroy property or injure myself by letting it out. That's it. That's as effective as it gets for me.

It's not ideal. I don't feel like I have ever actually effectively expressed anger. I always only release just enough that it will calm down enough that I can bury it deep down again, that's it. It comes back to the surface from time to time, rarely. Because again, I have that rigid, strict control over it, which is not ultimately healthy. It has stunted me in my growth in other ways and stunted me in my healing. That's part of the reason why I'm trying so hard to address it in therapy is because I know this this inability to deal with my anger and shift my perspective on it is still holding me back in a lot of ways.

I am no longer content with the status quo of being like, well, at least I'm not taking it on other people. At least I'm not breaking things as I used to just be proud of myself for that. And to a certain degree, I still am. Because when you feel anger and it does overtake you and it wells up inside you, it is very hard to not just let it out.

I recognize that that is why Autumn expressed her anger the ways that she did that scared me. I recognize that is why my parents expressed their anger like that. They didn't have better coping skills for it and it was overwhelming and it did well up and they didn't know what to do with it. And it just came out in a big whoosh. And I tried so hard to restrict that and control that in myself, which I have. And to a certain degree, I am proud of that because I feel like I have been able to decrease the amount of damage to other people and to my property and to myself.

That being said, it is still not really effective the way that I deal with anger. Because the anger never really gets dealt with. It never really gets processed, it never really gets full expression. It just gets buried. I control it as tightly, as rigidly, as harshly and as strictly as I can. I am an authoritarian over my anger. And that does not help. That doesn't fix anything, that doesn't heal anything. That is not helping me move forward. So honestly, I don't effectively express my anger. I would like to say that I do, but I can't lie to you guys and I can't lie to myself. I don't effectively express my anger at all.

AUTUMN

Maybe it's just those of us with extreme emotions or I don't know, maybe Ivy and I are just on the extreme end of things, but I feel like that's sometimes what anger is, is that anger is going to cause pain and discomfort to somebody. It's sometimes just a matter of whether you internalize it and most of the pain and discomfort, it goes to you. Or you externalize it, and most of the pain and discomfort goes to somebody else. Anger, I don't believe, is a very fun emotion to dealing with. I think it is one of the, definitely one of the more uncomfortable ones.

And I do think part of that does go to the fact that we aren't given the skills and training necessary to handle this, especially for those of us that have extreme emotions. And so you have extreme emotions, you lack skills and training, and then you're in a society where it's not acceptable to be angry. It's a bomb waiting to explode is all that is.

So then the very last thing on our checklist here is how do we keep anger from impairing our functioning? And for me, it's a lot of preventive work. I make sure I don't get overwhelmed. Like I said, if I do get overwhelmed, then I find a safe place to lose it quickly, because as soon as I lose it, I'll start deescalating.

And in all honesty, the reality for me is that anger will impair my functioning, and I have to make room to allow for that to happen, because if I don't, it's going to be worse. Because I've tried repressing it and I've tried internalizing it and this is part of why I said, I don't know if I can be adult about it. Because when I've tried in the past to internalize and to compress it and to bury it, I just turn into a nuclear bomb and cause so much more damage than if I just let myself go off with a little firework explosion.

So I know that anger is going to impair my functioning. And so a lot of it is preventing myself from ever getting that angry, doing all the work I need to, to heal those core wounds so I don't have the fear that caused the anger. And then mitigating and allowing for it to impair my functioning so that I can run away and lose it and have those brief moments. Or even more importantly, so that I can allow myself to honestly lose all capability and functioning and fall into that panic and that fear so that I can work my way through that.

And so for me, I keep anger from impairing my function long term by truly allowing it to fully and wholly impair my functioning in the moment. Just giving into it and allowing it to overtake me so that I can do what I need with it to handle it in a healthy manner.

IVY

The way that I keep anger from impairing my function is twofold. One of those is the ways that I've been discussing. I tightly control it and I bury it because I don't have a better alternative. Right now, I'm trying, but right now I don't have a better alternative. So that's what I do to keep it from impairing my function.

The only other thing that I do and this is me trying to parent myself and trying to be there for the inner parts of me that are responsible for dealing with anger. There's one in particular that really is the bulk of it. She is the most wild, she is the most free spirited, she is the most aggressive. And I've had a very tumultuous relationship with this internal part of me and I view her as being kind of like a teenager, a rebellious teenager, like 18 or 19 years old, trying to find her way in the world after having been abused and traumatized for so long. And as much as I get frustrated by the anger itself, I can't wrap my head around the way she wants to express anger or the way it comes out sometimes. What I do though is I look at her and remember that while I may struggle with the part of her that is angry, I love her because she is not only anger, that is not her whole identity, just like it's not my whole identity. There is so much more to her. She is so much more multifaceted and she is one of my favorite parts of me, if not my favorite part of me because she is so strong and she is so resilient and creative and resourceful and she's a fighter and she is a big part of what has protected me all of these years.

So when I start to feel the anger well up, I may not like the anger. I may hate the anger. I may feel the need to rigidly control the anger. But I remember that this anger is part of someone that I love. And that someone is part of me and I still need to be able to love myself, even if I'm not at a space where I can really have much compassion for the anger.

I don't know how to communicate with that part. I don't know how to understand that part. I am still working on that. But I am learning to be more compassionate, at least with myself, and to remember the reasons why I do love myself. I also am trying to remember that the anger still serves a purpose because the anger has protected me at times. The anger is what's allowed me to set boundaries. The anger is what compelled me to cut my father out of my life, which is the best decision that I ever made. The anger is what compelled me to move away from my mom when I was 15, without counting the cost, because I knew staying with her was going to put me in a worse place than whatever was out there in the unknown. The anger is what gave me the courage to draw that line in the sand and to get the fuck out. So there are times that the anger has benefited me and I try to remember that.

I may hate the anger, it may be a real tumultuous relationship, I may argue with that internal part of myself, that angry teenager part of myself, but I still fucking love her and I still love myself. And I still recognize that anger has at times served me well, that internal part of me protected me from greater harm because she had the courage to be angry when I did not.

AUTUMN

That is a very difficult concept to tango with. And that is awesome that you're on that journey and that you're now able to have that grace for yourself and that love for yourself so that you can start building that bridge with anger and maybe hopefully someday be able to come to terms with it and meet that ideal that you laid out for it.

But as you said, anger does serve a purpose, as do all of the emotions we feel. And whether they serve a purpose or not, we all have these emotions, and they are something that we have got to learn to live with and that hopefully we can learn to live with in a loving and healthy manner that helps us grow, that ultimately does not impair our function, and that keeps us and those around us healthy. So we hope that by listening today that you have learned maybe some ways that you can start identifying your emotions and learning to express them and start on or continue on that journey towards healthy emotional expression.

If you are interested, we will just put this basic little checklist up on our Resources page for this episode. Ivy, if you want to go ahead and throw them our connecty bits so they can find said Resources page.

IVY

Indeed. You can find us at our website www.differentfunctional.com. You can also find us on Facebook as Different Functional and on Instagram and TikTok as different_ functional. You can email us if you'd like at differentfunctional@gmail.com. We are also on Patreon as Different Functional. And out of all of those ways you could contact us, we sure hope you do.

We would love to hear from you guys. Share with us your thoughts on your emotions, your relationship with your emotions, how you express them, what you're working on. If you feel like you're in a good space with your emotional expression overall, or if you don't, if you need support, reach out. We would love to hear from you guys.

And if you could do us a solid and leave us a rating, a review, anything to get our names out there. Tell your friends about us. Tell your enemies about us. Tell anybody about us. We don't care. Just tell people that we exist, that we do things, that we talk about. Cool stuff that would be helpful. It would be extremely helpful.

AUTUMN

And I don't know if you covered or not, but we do also have our Patreon out there, and we do put a lot of bonus content. Because Ivy and I talk a lot, and so oftentimes our two hour episodes are actually a four hour recording time. So you can imagine the amount of bonus content you get if you decide to support us on Patreon.

So for today, we will go ahead and wrap up. We definitely hope to hear from you. We hope to get a little interaction out there on our social media, and we definitely thank you for listening.

As always, remember, though, different does not mean defective.