to be human is to feel all the feelings

you can't numb yourself selectively

Florence Pugh, A Good Person

I watched A Good Person the other night—a film written and directed by Zach Braff, starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman—and I have never cried from joy, pain, empathy, grief, heartbreak, and reconciliation so much in one film. I am generally hesitant to watch very “involved” films like this one, because I find myself getting so deeply entranced by the characters that I feel like I, myself, am them. It feels like it’s me going through the emotions, feeling the characters’ feelings with a level of intimacy that can really only be compared to personal experience. I now realize that this is the point of films like this—ones full of heartbreak, humour and everything in between. They are meant to activate the emotions that we are hesitant to face ourselves. They are meant to let us feel.

catharsis through film

Sam Harris has this bit about how watching movies creates this unique experience where we can observe a deeply human experience in front of us while not feeling implicated in it. Unlike in real life, you have permission to separate yourself from the experience you’re observing. Or in other words: you have the opportunity to collapse your ego and simply let your consciousness flood into the movie, letting the feelings that arise while watching it pass through you with no tension, resistance or attachment to them. Because there is nothing we can do, nothing we need to do. The characters in the film are moving through their experience regardless of how much attention you pay to them, or how deeply you opt in to feeling how they are feeling. So you might as well sit back, relax, and genuinely observe.

This is why film can be so cathartic. It lets us feel what we don’t want to feel in our personal lives through the lens of someone else’s. It prompts us to feel what feels too painful to feel on our own. Film lets us be alone together, amongst the millions of others watching the same story asynchronously. It lets us connect through these deeply human, intense yet fleeting emotions that don’t belong to us, but still seem to strike a deep, personal chord within each of us. We somehow all feel as though the film is telling a part of our own story on screen, even if we have never been through an experience quite like the one the characters are having.

This is because great films portray universal truths. They tap into the deepest emotions we come up against in the human condition, and show a part of our lives to us on screen. Feelings we haven’t fully faced get dislodged from our psyche and pulled into the forefront of our consciousness. We feel the rush of our own pain flood through the cracks of ambiguity left in the film for us to project ourselves into. Films filled with rich pockets of the human condition let us face our own feelings in an approachable, healing, cathartic way.

catharsis is medium-agnostic

Films are not the only way to let feeling flow through us, though. Catharsis is a medium-agnostic process. There are many ways for us to channel the deep feelings we resist. Movement. Writing. Conversation. Dance. Art. Play. The path is not as important as the process of letting the feelings through us. Because when we resist our deep feelings, they catch up to us. Repression, avoidance, escapism are not viable ways to work through our feelings. They simply shove these feelings more deeply into our inner fabric, letting them control us without our consent.

to heal fully, feel fully

After watching A Good Person, “to heal fully, feel fully” really felt like the fundamental message of the film. Let your feelings in. Face them, even if it’s painful. Lean on those around you. Don’t avoid. Don’t try to escape. Don’t resist. Feel your feelings. Interestingly, this also felt like the fundamental message of Zach Braff’s first film that he wrote and starred in: Garden State. Both films toy with similar themes of numbness and escapism. In both of these films, we see the main characters face deep, painful, traumatic realities that they are, in part, responsible for causing. We see the messiness of guilt, bad luck, and a resistance to facing trauma collide to cause turmoil and dissonance in their lives (much like what happens in real life!). In both films, we see the characters avoiding the deep, painful feelings through numbness l—though the voluntariness of the choice varies between the films. And by watching the stories unfold, we see a clear theme emerge: you cannot numb yourself selectively.

the human condition includes the painful parts

The big corollary to escapism that everyone loves to gloss over is that through numbing yourself, you take away the good emotions, too. You take yourself away from the love, the joy, the awe, the transcendent moments that come with being alive. When you choose not to feel your pain, you’re signing off on not feeling the rest of the emotional spectrum as well.

But this is not intuitive, because feeling all of the emotions that rise up deeply does not always feel inviting. We resist letting emotion rush over us. We don’t want to let grief in when we face loss, we don’t want to let pain in when we feel betrayed, we don’t want to let fear in when we feel unsafe. We think that we are above it, or that we don’t have time for it, or most often: we’re just plain scared of feeling our feelings. Emotion can be intense. It can hurt. It can rock us. And because we can choose not to feel, sometimes we do. We numb ourselves. Through avoidance, or repression, or substances, or whatever mechanism we find to get as far away from our feelings as possible. This is textbook escapism: use this, and you don’t have to look at your problems. Sounds pretty good, right? An opt-out button on pain and negativity. Take [this] and you don’t have to feel the pain that’s bubbling up. But there’s something no one tells you about escapism—it comes with a price. And that price is losing access to all of the good feelings you think it is going to bring you.

the cost of numbness

What is so elegantly highlighted in A Good Person through its exploration of addiction, escapism, and the resistance we feel to facing pain is that you cannot opt out of some feelings while holding onto others. Numbness is a holistic choice. When we are faced with something we don’t want to feel, numbing it has consequences that go beyond that feeling alone. Another way I’ve been thinking about this is through the lens of Newton’s Third Law of physics (sorry if a physics analogy in the middle of a stream of consciousness on art is annoying, but it works). Newton’s law says: for every force, there is an equal-but-opposite force. This feels true for emotions, too: for every feeling we let in, we get access to an equal-but-opposite feeling. This is why people say “the lower the lows, the higher the highs”. There is something very real about the symmetry across the center-point of our emotional spectrum. If you protect yourself from feeling deep negative emotion, you may also be unconsciously protecting yourself from feeling the deeply good stuff: the equal-but-opposite love on the other side of the grief. The pleasure on the other side of the pain. The safety on the other side of the fear. And by shrinking our emotional spectrum to exclude the feelings we don’t want to feel, we somewhat unintentionally cancel out the other, beautiful, enriching feelings that we do want to feel. No one tells us that by numbing the “tough to swallow” feelings, we also numb the delicious, nutrient-dense feelings we need to enjoy life. By facing the painful stuff, we open ourselves up to the joyful stuff. But when we run away from pain and loss, we collapse our ability to feel love and joy. Or in other words: you can’t numb your emotions locally. Feeling is a bit of an all-or-nothing endeavour. You’re either opting in or out of the human experience, and by opting out, you limit the beautiful parts of it in equal proportion to the painful parts of it.

to numb is to avoid treating the feeling

I had the opportunity to speak with Zach Braff about this film—about why he created it, what it meant to him, where it came from. I brought up this idea of duality in the film—about how we see some characters resist the darkness and as a result, suffer from a lack of light in their lives. And in contrast: we see other characters who embrace all the shades of the emotional spectrum have a more embodied, fluid experience between light and dark. They feel their feelings and move through them. They can reach for light and love through the darkness. By opening themselves up to feeling their feelings fully, they don’t get gripped by any one of them too deeply. They don’t hold the feelings down, or avoid them. And as a result, these feelings don’t stick with them. Whereas the characters trying to escape the bad feelings are being controlled by their fear of their feelings in the background. The weight of not looking at their pain feels so heavy that it prevents them from operating smoothly in life, from ever letting go, from ever letting themselves be free of their emotional burden.

feelings are teachers

In our discussion about the importance of embracing duality, Zach pointed out that not only does avoidance close themselves off to the positive emotions on the other side of the pectrum, but they also miss the opportunity to treat the root cause of the painful feeling. They don’t get to learn what the feeling is trying to teach them. Because when we face our feelings fully, we understand them more deeply. We spend time with them. We open ourselves up to them. We see what they are trying to communicate. When we surrender, we can integrate these feelings. Because ultimately, most feelings (even the scary ones!) are just trying to protect us in some way. They are trying to do some job that they think is important inside us. And by acknowledging them fully, we can soothe those feelings. We can remind ourselves we are safe, even if it feels like we are not. But when we close ourselves off to the unpleasant feelings, we miss the lessons we can learn from them, and we miss the opportunity to soothe and let go of them. And by avoiding some of our feelings, we may unintentionally avoid many more that we cannot even see coming up. Because numbness blinds us to the good stuff, too.

avoidance goes beyond the moment in which we choose it

There are times when we don’t want things that are good for us. Because for whatever reason, they feel like a burden in the moment. Maybe this is our feelings, maybe it’s social time, or friends, or family, or hard work, or being creative. Sometimes what’s good for us doesn’t feel good in the moment. And so we start to think: I don’t want this thing in my life anymore. I have no need for it. And if we’re not in a place of full clarity, perhaps we trust this voice that tells us to contract, to lean away from our humanity. It tells us that we can get by without these essential nutrients: support, love, community, belonging, self-care, self-expression. But eventually, that feeling of resistance (or delusional invincibility) wears off, and these things we chose to avoid when they felt inconvenient in the moment (deep feelings, close relationships, family) are also gone when we suddenly need them again.

The human condition is more precious and delicate than we think—its core ingredients are there for a reason. Discarding of any of its elements is not “free”—it has a cost, a trade off. So, when something painful happens to us and we suddenly feel the desire to avoid or abandon some of the core components of being human in an effort to avoid the feelings that are coming up, we only end up feeling alone, isolated, and small. We no longer feel supported and held by the things we abandoned when we felt compelled to avoid them. Through avoidance, we learn that letting go of what is important when it feels momentarily unimportant affects us in the long term. Because avoidance is just another version of numbing ourselves. Doing so leaves you alone to deal with your problems, your pain.

But we’re not designed for isolation—just as we’re not designed to avoid, or be numb, or to escape forever. We are designed to feel the feelings of loss, because the depth of a loss only reflects the potency of love we had for what was lost. We are designed to handle grief and pain and struggle, together. We are capable of facing what scares us, capable of working through it all, of feeling it all. But when we don’t give ourselves the chance to feel pain, we cut ourselves off from the chance to feel just about everything else. Because as much as pain hurts, it is just as important any other part of the human experience. It is a teacher. A signal. We can learn from every feeling that rises up in us. And the only way we don’t learn is by looking away—by keeping ourselves numb.

to be human is to feel it all

Humanity, in all its shades, colours, textures, is a holistic experience full of light and darkness. By rejecting some parts of our humanity, we make it harder to deal with others. By rejecting grief, it becomes harder to let in love. By rejecting community, getting through dark times becomes more challenging. And by avoiding our feelings, we don’t get to fully understand what it means to be human. So, my take away from the film (among many others) is this prompt: the next time you want to reach for something to take yourself away from what you’re feeling, first ask yourself—is avoiding this feeling worth all of the good feelings I want to feel in the future? Can I tolerate this pain to learn the lesson it’s trying to teach me? Can I accept that being human means feeling all the feelings? Or said even more simply: is this trade really worth it?

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Do you resonate with what I write about? Maybe we should work together: If you resonate with the ideas I write about and want to cultivate a life you genuinely enjoy living, where you align your actions with your values, move towards the changes you know you want to make, and consciously harvest the self-knowledge that emerges through that process, send an email to isabel@mindmine.school or to isabel@mindmine.school or DM me on Twitter to explore what working together 1-1 would look like.

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PS—If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like one of my previous essays: feel your feelings, or my daily stream of consciousness that spills onto Twitter. Thank you for reading :).