What makes us human?

We dance all around it.  We talk about it but then try to hide it whenever possible.  The defining trait of humanity - as I have come to see it - isn't so much our intelligence, our social structure, or our accomplishments (including how much money we make or even that we have the concept of money!)  Rather, it is the capacity to both experience emotion and KNOW we are experiencing it, to have thoughts and know we are having them.  

Psychologists call this capacity "meta-cognition."  We have no problem with the thinking part.  We think and we know we're thinking, and we can even express in words, either verbal or written (another defining human trait), the ideas and thoughts that we think.

However, we have a harder time with the other part.

Emotions.  We are taught (especially in Western culture) that emotions are bad, especially negative ones, even the positive ones - if they are intense - are suspect.  For this reason many try to clamp down on their negative emotions.  I did it for years, even prided myself on nothing being able to affect me.  The problem with that, of course, is that nothing affected me.  In cutting myself off from my negative emotions, I also cut myself off from the pleasant ones.  I lost my self, and not in a good way.  I lost touch with who I was - and at the age of 48, I had no idea who Judy was or if I would even like her if I got to know her.  If there was a feeling there at all, it was of bewilderment... of sadness so profound I could not even begin to get to its roots - by myself.  

Suppressed (shall I put it another way - denied and unexpressed) anger, fear, or disappointment, mixed with a sense of being trapped, are the seeds of depression, clinical (that is, lasting more than 3 months) or not.  

Only now, now that I have been in a recovery process for over 2 years, am I starting to allow myself the luxury of having fun.  In order to get there, I had to express some pretty strong feelings (in a safe way of course and with people I had come to trust).  All that pent-up anger and feelings of betrayal, sadness, and self-pity had to come out, to be brought to the surface and ... FELT.

Yes, it was hard.  It was incredibly hard.  I am not a big fan of pain at all!!  But I had someone who was wiling to walk through the process with me and let me know that it was necessary in order to be free, to come to a place of forgiveness, dare I say acceptance ... and compassion.  Before, I could not get to forgiveness because I could not allow myself to express those feelings that - truth be told - I was forbidden to express growing up.  

Being assured that my emerging feelings were normal for what I went through was extremely liberating.  Just the validation of that carried me through many painful months of having those "normal" feelings... I put it in quotation marks because it felt anything but normal - they came out in a flood because they had been pent-up for so very long and I had only allowed overflows (like a pressure cooker letting off steam enough to keep from blowing up).  The flood was overwhelming at times. And most of the stuff I felt was negative.  A lot of negative stuff happened to me in my life.  My emotional recovery was like a storm in a lake - all the silt and mud gets stirred up and the waters look so dirty.  That's how I felt - soiled somehow - until these things started to be brought to the surface, dealt with, and forgiven.  

Gradually, though, the waters cleared ... and I could begin to see clearly.  I began to experience something I had not known for many years - if at all.  Happiness.

I would not trade that sense of everything being as it should be - for anything.