A while back, my ex-husband sent me what I perceived as a nasty text message . To be fair, we’d had a pretty tense exchange earlier that day when I dropped off our kids to him, and I’d left his house knowing emotions were running a bit high. When I opened his message a few hours later, I felt my chest tighten like a vice.
Now, I could sit here and write about all of the context – all of the ways in which his words at the time felt so unjustified and unfair and infuriating to me – which would require you knowing so much of the story.
And while I love knowing all the dirty laundry as much as the next gal, I’m not going to do that here. It’s not just to avoid sharing too much, but instead because what I want to talk about is not really about him at all, but about what I noticed in me. It’s because sometimes the story is exactly what keeps us stuck – and suffering.
So back to sitting in bed, reading this not particularly pleasant text. I’ll admit to you, dear readers,I started to go down. Some of us might call it spiraling, and I trust you know exactly what I’m talking about, though I’m not sure it’s very often defined.
What going down looked like for me was something like this: I started in a feeling of shock. As I said earlier, it started with chest clenching, and then my feet and hands went cold. I let out a guttural wail that ricocheted in my empty room. I think this was the moment of feeling deeply hurt. But before I could really recognize that as such, my body moved into anger. And boy was my anger big. It felt like it scooped me up out of my body and replaced me with itself. I started shaking from the raw ragey energy coursing through me. Tears were falling from my eyes.
I was on the fast-moving slide and picking up steam on my way down. And then I did the thing that I know a lot of us would do, but I’m here writing this piece to tell you not to do – at least not like this.
I wrote him back..
That raw rage felt combustible inside of me and like I had to give it a release valve. And as someone whose default release is through words, I started typing. And kept typing. And sent. (Here’s where I would put that little “eek” face emoji).
So what I’m telling you is that what happened when I started to go down is that I put a little grease under me to go down faster.
After shooting off my response, rather than feel any better, my mind just kept accelerating. I spent the next few hours not just playing over the exchange, but ping ponging between the pains of the past and the fears of the future. My mind was arbitrating dozens of past conflicts, spinning itself up hurt and anger. Then it would switch into panic mode, fearing what would happen for our family if the tension of this night continued. And then it would descend into shame, chastising myself for my part in the past and my not-even-yet defined role in the future.
I was in it, as one might say. Going down, down, down... Meanwhile, my ex might have been sleeping soundly in his bed while I seethed and paced. And to be clear, that’s not a critique of him. That would have been the sane and sound thing to be doing.
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I share this experience – as vulnerable and borderline embarrassing as it feels to do so – because I think it demonstrates what happens for a lot of us when we start going down.
Now, you might have a very different pattern of where you go when activated. We each have one, and the Drama Triangle is an excellent tool for starting to recognize what your unique pattern looks like. But whether you go toward anger, hurt, or people pleasing first, we can recognize the commonalities in the going down process.
Maybe the most important thing to notice is the way that going down pulls us to the past and to the future. We find ourselves spiraling around thoughts like, “It’s always been this (terrible) way,” or “It was never this bad (and it’s horrible now!),” or “It will never get better,” or “Awful things are going to happen.”
When we are in it, our minds almost have to go get caught up in the past and future, because staying in the present doesn’t give it enough fuel. If I was staying only oriented to the present that night I was telling you about, I would have felt the painful sting of the text message, but that would have only lasted – in its acute form – maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour. That’s not to minimize how painful the present can feel. It can be excruciating. But the reality is that if we let ourselves fully feel into that excruciating feeling, it doesn’t last all that long.
There’s some fascinating research in this area, actually, as scientists try to pin down the actual duration of different emotions. While you might have heard the popular claim that any emotion only lasts 90-seconds, that’s likely untrue. The reality is, though, that most aversive feelings – including irritation, disgust, shame, and fear – last about 30 minutes. Sadness is somewhat longer.
What keeps emotions active and alive is the process of playing them over and over in our minds. Saskia Lavrijsen is a researcher who co-authored a study on how long emotions last. She explained that rumination “is the central determinant of why some emotions last longer than others. Emotions associated with high levels of rumination will last longest.”
What this suggests is that we can’t bypass the sting of difficult feelings, but maybe there’s something that we can do to avoid keeping them alive or keeping ourselves from going down faster. I call this, very scientifically, stopping making things worse.
I think it’s fair to say that most of us don’t want to make things worse on ourselves. There may be some exceptions where there is some personality dynamic or hidden gain from going and staying down – but most of us are not in the business of spiraling for fun. Still, we let ourselves go down all the time, unsure how to stop the slide.
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There is an idea and a practice that helps us in these exact moments – the ones where we feel strong emotion and can be particularly vulnerable to sliding down, down, down. It comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and it’s called lungta, which translates literally to “wind horse.” You don’t have to use the idea of the wind-horse itself to use the tenets I’m going to describe, but I often think a visual can be helpful.
In Tibetan tradition, the lungta was a mythical creature that symbolized the “inner air” or propelling life force inside of us. I imagine lungta as a strong energy that exists within us, a horsepower we can call upon when needed. And when we are sliding quickly down, spiraling in our negative emotions. we often need a burst of lungta to turn things around.
Practicing lungta looks something like this:
- Recognize: We find ourselves in strong, difficult emotion, and on our way down. Close your eyes here. We recognize this is happening, and – as best as we can – we stay with it and name it. There is something incredibly powerful about becoming consciously aware of an emotional experience. It helps shift things from being fully immersed in it to feeling it, but also being an observer of it. We can continue our observation of it but noting what the embodied feeling of that emotion is. “I’m feeling intense hurt and my body is contracting,” or “I’m feeling so much anger and like my chest is on fire.”
- Soften: The next step is to soften into the experience, which is another way of saying we keep ourselves open to it. Softening sounds airy, but this act is neither soft in the sense of weak, nor easy. It is choosing to stay with what’s happening rather than fending it off or tightening around it. The best way I know how to do this is through the body, which means closing my eyes, pulling my shoulders back to allow more openness, and seeing if I can relax my muscles, even just by 20%. Breath is also a helpful tool here – fully exhaling to release, which also physiologically tells your nervous system it’s safe and you can tolerate what’s happening.
- Wake Up: This is the lungta part. This is where we find that horsepower to interrupt our inclination to let being with the feeling take us too far down into the past or present or into rumination. If eyes are still closed, we open them rapidly and really look around. We orient back to the present. What do we see? What do we smell? What do we hear? What’s happening not back in the story of this situation or in our future fears of what’s to come – but right now? We arrive back in the sensory experience of where we are in this moment. We notice what’s real and true right now – they sent us a text that hurt, our kid had a really hard day, they didn’t unload the dishwasher, we were overlooked for the opportunity. We stay with the present situation – not pleasant, but present – and we resist the past or future stories about it that try to grip us.
This, I believe, is how we avoid making things worse. It’s not a solve for the pain, but it helps us get free from the ruminative or reactive impulses that just make things go down further.
And to be clear, this is a process and a practice that will need to be done over and over and over. Recognizing, softening, and waking up to the present are like taking a shower. We don’t stay clean on yesterday’s, so we’ll have to keep doing it. But I do think it becomes more intuitive. We get to the point where the we notice what’s happening more quickly, we relax into the experience more readily, and we can call on our wind-horse to bring us back to the present more easily.
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As a quick final note, I think this moment in our collective history is particularly calling for us to not make things worse. We are being bombarded with so much intensity and cultural pain that practicing staying with it and not adding to it is a task for all of us.
Questions for Reflection:
- What does “going down” look like for me — in my body, my thoughts, or my behaviors?
- If I didn’t try to make this moment better — only not worse — what might shift?
- Next time I’m going down, what’s one small way I might orient myself back to the present?
