Quote from Marin Hann

In The Body is Bad: When Disability and Complex Dissociative Disorders Meet, Marin Hann, LPC, states, “Our emotions are there to give us a very important wordless message and the problem is that we do not always interpret that message accurately. The longer we have to slow down and pay attention to the emotion and share that feeling with others…the more we will be able to grasp the picture being painted.”

I love this quote because it speaks to the importance of our emotions, something that gets dismissed, downplayed, ignored and scorned in our society.

There is such a disdain our culture has for emotions, emotional sensitivity and emotional expression. There is definitely a dissociative element to this denial, both societally and individually, the flavor of which is influenced by your intersecting identities.

In addition, our culture’s focus on hyper-producivity and urgency, reinforce this tendency to ignore our feelings. Because feelings take time, they need space to move through us, to ebb and flow, to change.

So there is a great deal of wisdom in the messages that BIPOC communities and organizers have been supporting around the need for rest as an active part of social change.

You and your body deserve to become acquainted with each other and understand each other. A primary way things are communicated is through the feelings.

But when we have a history of trauma, there may be a pull to deny feelings all together or to filter them through past traumatic experiences. The first leaves us in a state of not knowing ourselves, and the other in a state of possible misunderstanding ourselves.

The more we can slow down and learn to listen and tune into our bodies, the more likely we are to start understanding our emotions and thus ourselves, better.