There's Strength in Showing Emotions
A Life-Changing Lesson from Sleepawake Camp about how embracing emotions can lead to healing and empowerment.
Growing up I learned that showing emotions is a sign of weakness, and that bottling up emotions makes us appear stronger.
But what if showing emotions is actually a sign of strength?
What if it expands our capacity to fully live?
What if our welcoming our emotions could be a rapid path for personal transformation?
As I approach a new role this summer as a facilitator at Camp Sleepawake (a month-long immersive camp for 18-27 year olds), mindsets like this are exactly what I’m excited to teach.
So, I interviewed an attendee from last year’s camp in a desire to learn more about how the camp equipped him with the mental health curriculum that was missing from high school and college.
Johnny Wei is a young adult, and part of the LGBTQIA+ community, who shared his powerful experience of attending Sleepawake:
“I sat in front of everyone, in an exercise called “The Group Can't Handle My ____.” And I told them, ‘the group can't handle my shame because I can't handle my shame.’ Then I burst into tears. I hadn't cried for a year prior to that.
My whole point in going to Sleepawake was that I didn't want to be numb anymore. The numbness was me holding down all the emotions that I was trying to avoid.”
There's only been once in my life where I felt like, 'I want to kill myself,' and that was five or six years before Sleepawake.
As time went on, I got so good at pushing down my emotions. I kept telling myself, 'I'm okay. Everything's fine.' But pretending had taken a really large toll on me.
Your emotions are as important as your thoughts, if not more important. I think that was essential for me to feel a sense of lightness.
Throughout the weeks of integration calls (the year after camp), I dealt with the source of my shame head-on and made amends with my family. There was a decade's worth of pain and avoidance with my mom, and it just suddenly vanished. I didn’t have this awkward wall anymore.”
Johnny’s choice to dive into the shame he’d been avoiding, led to a life-changing repair with his family. And feeling it fully created space he needed for that repair in the months following Sleepawake.
The compounding effect on mental health of resisting emotions
Society teaches us that emotions like shame, anger, and grief are “too intense” for other people to see, which often leads to the deeper pain of loneliness.
And when we avoid feeling those intense emotions, it has compounding effects on mental health too. Research shows that avoiding or suppressing emotions can have negative impacts. Some of the key findings show that:
Avoiding emotions requires constant management of thoughts and behaviors, which is a chronic stressor and can lead to anxiety and depression.
Emotional suppression impairs memory and cognitive functioning. It takes mental resources to constantly monitor and avoid emotions. This can negatively impact memory, problem-solving, and decision making.
Emotional suppression leads to activation in the sympathetic nervous system, causing increased blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormone levels.
In Johnny’s case, he’d been avoiding feeling shame because some part of his psyche feared that he wouldn’t survive if he felt it. And years of avoidance led to dark thoughts and an overall numbness in life.
At Sleepawake, Johnny’s opportunity to feel the shame amidst a group of people where there was established care, created the resource for healing to happen. And when we have that additional resource, there’s more capacity to bravely process the emotion that felt too heavy for us to navigate on our own.
Society may trick us into believing that showing emotions is a sign of weakness, and it’s our choice to reframe that into a new type of truth.
That when we welcome feeling every emotion that life brings, we strengthen our permission to fully live.
*Special thanks to Jeff Lieberman, Edmond Lau, and Claude+ AI for perspective and editing.