Emotion Sick

Written by Michelle Shelton

February 26, 2023

My family went to Disney World a few months ago. Disney is a lot to take in for my highly sensitive little crew. We warm up to things slowly and play if safe on the milder rides. My middle child especially does not like loud or fast rides. 

On our third day, we ventured to Epcot. My husband was excited to try the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride and woke up early to jump through all the hoops to get a reservation for this high demand attraction. As we stood in line, none of us knew exactly what we were getting into. We quickly found out it was a roller coaster…honestly, one of the most fun roller coasters we had ever been on. And also the very first roller coaster for my two younger boys. 

As my middle child realized what he was in for, he began crying immediately. I gave him my arm to squeeze as hard as he needed to squeeze to help with the fear. For those three or four minutes that the ride lasted, this sweet little boy cried and squeezed my arm as hard as he could. Several minutes after it was all over, after the flood of feelings passed, he realized he had actually loved the ride after all. “I was just emotion sick,” he declared. 

I smiled, knowing he was actually thinking of “motion sick.” And I couldn’t help but reflect on the irony of this term “emotion sick.” The ability to feel your emotions in the moment, to express them, to seek support and connection as you experience them, is not emotion sick. I’d say, in that moment, he was actually emotion healthy. 

Without intending to, I do think he captured well in that phrase the state of our world and the reality for many of us. For many, it isn’t safe to feel the reality of their feelings and in fact, it drives disconnection and isolation rather than connection. This drives us to avoidance and numbing techniques, including food, to escape the pain and intensity of these emotions. 

We don’t tolerate difficult emotions well in our culture. Maybe we grew up with adults who couldn’t regulate their own big emotions, which meant they could not tolerate ours. We learned that anger, fear, or sadness led to chastisement or isolation. I can’t tell you how many church lessons I have sat through hearing that we need to be cheerful or that if you feel fear it means you don’t have enough faith. In other words, some feelings are ok and some are not ok. The feelings that are not ok get pushed down, hidden, controlled, or numbed. We learned a pattern of emotion sickness rather than emotion health. 

To heal this sickness, we need a new pattern. We need a pattern of emotion health. We need to allow all feelings to be. We need to meet them with compassion, care, and curiosity. Hopefully we have safe people in our lives we can reach out to for connection in these hard times. Over time, as we cultivate more self energy, we can be that for ourselves, too. That is the goal of healing through IFS. It is unleashing the natural self energy inside of you to love and even heal the source of the hard feelings and to care for them as they arise. You can start this journey today by cultivating self compassion and curiosity for all emotions as they arise instead of self chastisement, criticism, or avoidance.