Showing posts with label rejection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rejection. Show all posts
Friday, July 12, 2013
Rejection is Not an Emotion
So, I imagine the idea that rejection isn’t an emotion might
sound like old news. For others, they are blinking and going…wait! I’ve felt
rejected before! It’s terrible! It made me feel horrible!
Yup, well, horrible is sorta the same as saying I feel
rejection. Horror can be an emotion. But horrible? I’m not sure.
You see, I’m in couples’ counseling with the spouse and we
have a fabulous guy helping us restore lines of communication, etc. I mean,
things break down after 33 years. Just sorta slides into a rut of sameness.
We’re working on climbing out of the rut. It’s a good thing. (Don’t worry about
us.)
The language of communicating emotions is a treacherous one.
My poor husband is floundering like a fish out of water. He’s an engineer. Plus
he grew up with the message that there are bad emotions and good emotions and
that about summed it up. He feels good or he feels bad. That is about as deep
as he goes.
After a particularly difficult session, I told him about the
Emotional Thesaurus, and he asked me to get one for him. (He’s great about
wanting to figure it all out.) Most complex feelings are buried so deep, he
needs a backhoe to find them. If not something bigger.
While me? Oh, I pride myself on expressing what is going on.
I am a word person, right?
Uh, no. I went through an episode a few weeks back that
opened my eyes to how far away I was from actual experiencing my emotions.
The convo went something like this… (I’m also summarizing,
it took a lot longer than this.)
“How did that make you feel?”
“I felt rejected.”
“No, how did you feel?”
I tilt my head, narrow my eyes, my brows knit. “I…I felt
rejected…”
He changed his tactics… “What does rejection feel like?”
BIG LIGHTBULB MOMENT.
“OH. It…hurts.”
BINGO!
It took some digging but I found the base of my emotions
regarding rejection. There are a lot of emotions that can stem from
experiencing rejection, from hurt, to anger, to elation (you sick masochists
out there!)
You never know where a lesson in writing and deepening a character’s
reaction will come from. It might be in the middle of a counseling session! The
word rejection is a distancing method from the actual feeling. It gives it a
label and makes it easy to slot into a category of good or bad emotion. But! It
isn’t going deep enough. Think about that the next time your character knows
rejection. Choose the deeper path or the lighter path and make it feel right
for that character.
I know this now.
Can you think of any
other word we use to create distance from the actual emotion? What else should
I, and others, keep an eye out for?
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