Emotional Fitness in a Culture of the Emotionally Unwell

A mantra to deal with your emotions in a healthy manner amidst a culture that sucks at emotional fitness

I have been doing a lot of exploring and thinking over the past year about how my recovery journey has played out and why things seemed to “work” for me despite some seriously trying situations over the course of my time in recovery.

For those new to the newsletter, I have my pillars and practices of recovery that I think about and check in with on a daily basis. The pillars (Physical, Emotional and Spiritual) are those items that I feel are measurable in many ways, and also play a foundational role in my mission as a human being.

There has been a lot of unexpected growth and opportunities afforded to me as the podcast has grown and continued on long after I originally intended. I have had a small number of individuals approach me about wanting to share their own journey, and I have mostly taken up everyone’s request to open up about their past struggles and demons.

As a part of those conversations, I have found myself asking many questions about raising children in today’s world. I feel it’s fairly common for a parent to look out into the world and wonder what it’s going to be like for their child. But given the journey that our family has traveled, I feel that my role as a parent is to understand how to raise a child that can embrace unexpected suffering, have resilience, be honest, seek help and stay morally grounded.

What I see, and what I have personally experienced, is a culture that has lost its ability to be emotionally fit, stable and resilient. Just ask Jonathan Haidt (Substack).

Much of my questioning and these conversations center around the emotional pillar. I was horrendous in this space when I was struggling with alcohol. I wanted to understand why, and I want to do anything that I can to pass these learnings on to Grant.

From all these conversations, questions and reflecting on my own personal learnings, I feel like I have discovered a mantra that is simple, yet effective, and allows me to assess how I am handling certain situations of emotional unrest.

As a man I genuinely believed that I was not supposed to feel emotions. And if I did, I labeled them as “good” or “bad” emotions. And if those emotions hung around longer than I thought they were supposed to, I beat myself up for it (sometimes literally).

But I was wrong.

Being a man is a sub-component of something much larger, which is being a human-being. And humans have emotions. There is no arguing or changing this fact of life. Therefore, the problem is not, how do I rid myself of these emotions? But rather, how do I react to these emotions?

We should all have a vision for being the best versions of ourselves that we can possibly become. Neglecting, ignoring or beating ourselves up for not “moving on” from emotional disruption does not afford us the opportunity to integrate and learn from our emotional experiences.

Given that, one of the most imperative learnings that I have had recently pertaining to Emotional Fitness can be summarized in this mantra:

Address, don’t suppress.

I am coming to the belief that the most important activity that we partake in as human-beings is to integrate our life experience into ourselves. If we are present and aware, we can either do so constructively or we can deny or push back on our life experiences and refuse to integrate them into who we are. I have done both. I nearly lost my life because I defaulted towards the latter.

When it comes to addressing your emotions, I have seen some people put together a process, playbook or even a formula for how to progress through addressing a strong emotion. They feel a need to understand why am I feeling this way?

Listen, I get it. I’m an engineer who tried to solve the problem of my drinking alone. I asked myself why a LOT. If you are working to address a specific emotional upswell that you’re feeling, and you get to a why, that’s awesome.

But here’s the thing. It’s not a must have.

Just start small. Recognize when you’re feeling something and acknowledge it. Then, say the Serenity Prayer. Genuinely ask yourself if the emotion or the specific situation is something that you can control. If not (and with feeling the emotion, probably not), let it run its course. Many times I find that letting the big wave of emotion hit first and then reflect on why everything happened the way it did in the aftermath is much more helpful to me trying to figure things out while the wave is happening.

There are some days that I get hit with sadness when I think about Lucy. I have found myself laying down on the floor, and playing a few songs that make me feel connected with her. These days I can be sad for a few minutes and not cry. It didn’t used to be like that.

There are other days where I’m filled with love and pride for being Lucy and Grant’s father. I’ll put those exact same songs on and feel the love and connection with them.

Emotions are essential to being human. They are difficult and our culture sucks at teaching us how to incorporate them into our lives. No one wants to be crippled or clinging to a single event in their life that keeps them in emotional despair. We all have to learn how to face, acknowledge and integrate our experiences and emotions into our lives.

For those of us who have lost or suffered greatly in life, you know the message and push from our culture is to “move on”. It feels heartless and inappropriate. It distances us from others who project that message.

Instead, see that as a poorly worded part of the whole. We must first address the emotion, work to integrate it into our lives and then move forward. This isn’t a perfectly linear or clean progression, but it’s the healthiest way that I have learned through experience and in conversations with others how to be the greatest version of a human as you can possibly be.

Onward and upward.

Kyle