Tending to Feelings is Key to Happiness

           This past weekend we took our youngest daughter to college.  We now have two kids in college and no kids living at home.  It would be easy to wax nostalgic about this life transition and how wonderful it has been to be the father to beautiful, intelligent, and humorous young women, but something else struck me about the past couple of weeks.  

            As the time approached for this monumental weekend, there were a number of significant stressors in my life.  I wanted to focus on my daughters’ leaving and enjoy my time with them.  I did not want to get overly emotional, but just appreciate every moment we had as a family.  What I now realize is that the more I tried to deny the stressors going on in other parts of my life and the more I tried to deny my feelings about what was happening, the more irritable and stressed I felt.  I found myself more frustrated in traffic and easily annoyed by others.  I knew I felt overwhelmed, so I tried to isolate at work to avoid additional stressors.  Engaging with others was difficult.  Instead of finding a way to enjoy my last couple of weeks with kids at home, I more survived it; not what I really wanted.  

            There are times in life when the stress of life gets to be too much and we find ourselves more surviving than thriving.  However, there are times when I think we do a disservice to ourselves by trying to avoid our feelings – by trying NOT to feel what we obviously feel – through a variety of means.  I know some people just isolate or become mesmerized by T.V. program or such while others try to avoid feelings by numbing with substances.  Still others try to avoid their feelings by staying so busy that they don’t think about the underlying stressors or feelings.  At different times in my life, I have been guilty of all of these.  Though I lost sight of it temporarily (again), I know that it is better to acknowledge the feelings and allow myself the opportunity to express them.  It takes more courage and it is more difficult, but I think it ultimately leads to more happiness.  When some people take time to be still and look inward, they do not like the things they find.  Guilt, shame, embarrassment, anger, disappointment, etc. can be hard to acknowledge and difficult to know how to manage. 

            I am grateful for various friends and therapist I have had through the years.  Friends can be a great source of support and help if they listen well.  My therapists have always listened well and have been beneficial in helping me identify underlying feelings and processing them until the power of those feelings is gone.  During the past few weeks, I cut down on my own counseling because I thought I was too busy.  In fact, I should have made more time for it and perhaps even gone more often.  I did not practice the very self-care that I would encourage in others.  This is my note of confession, but also an encouragement to others to tend to your inner world of feelings.  It definitely helps make living in the moment easier and more enjoyable.