Responding to My Emotions with Nonjudgmental

An emotion that I tend to invalidate in myself, or struggle to express, or even accept is fear. Fear is not the same as anxiety, yet anxiety can invoke fear. Whenever fear arises I try to write it off as “just part of my anxiety” or as “irrational” rather than look at it and respond to it. I was teased a lot as I was growing up, particularly in high school. Then I was attacked by people I thought were my friends in a homophobic attack on myself, my husband, and my home. Whenever fear arises I am transported to one of the moments I was being teased, or to the more recent homophobic attack. I never really just experience fear for whatever first invoked it, it becomes a cluster of past events that traumatized and whatever is happening at the moment. I also spent several years in an Independent Baptist school that was a safe place for me to grow and be me. Nobody made fun of me. However, I was told I was going to hell for being gay and that invoked fear as well. So, when fear arises I deal with all of this past trauma in combination with the current issue at hand that invoked fear.

In The Balanced Mind -A Mental Health Journal- Exploratory Prompts and Effective Practices, written by Carolyn Mehlomakulu, LMFT-S, ATR-BC, page 24–25 focuses on the helpfulness of exploring our emotions. My emotion is, as I said above, fear that is coated in traumas of the past. I am supposed to come up with “a new, validating statement that you will tell yourself the next time this emotion comes up” (p.24). For me, to start, I want to say “There is no such thing as an invalid emotion.” That is an area that I struggle to remember. It does not matter if the concept is irrational, the fear is real and should be acknowledged and resolved.