I’ve written before about anger. Today I want to talk about love. I know – engineering and academic citations to love, in the space of one blog post. Well, ye should be used to me by now.
But Love, Orlagh?
Love was a word that didn’t really mean much to me for a long time. I mean, sure – my parents loved me. My brother probably did too. I loved them back. But it was a word I said the way you’d say “grand” when someone asks how you are. Automatic. Not really felt.
Emotions in general were difficult for me long before that, mind. As a woman in engineering, any emotion I showed in my early career got diagnosed as hysteria by the people around me. Plenty of managers 24yrs ago were very happy banging the table, raising their voices, all that carry-on, but let me release the slightest hint of emotion and suddenly I was a hysterical woman with no technical ability whatsoever. Yeah. Double standards.
There’s research on this, actually – Henzler (2017) found that the more an organisation claims to be based 100% on meritocracy, the more likely there is bias in its actual decision-making processes. And trust me, engineers are vocal about only caring who’s good at the job, not what gender they are. That’s not accurate at all.
Where It Actually Started
All that led to me hiding my emotions, and eventually hiding from them entirely. Though honestly, it probably started well before engineering. I mean how many Irish kids grew up hearing “c’mere and I’ll give you something to cry about” the second they got upset? Add in the complete lack of healthy emotional expression anywhere in Ireland in the 80s and 90s… Possibly before that too, and you end up with a lot of us who genuinely don’t know what we’re feeling half the time.
So yeah. Emotions are tough for me. Love especially, cos it asks you to actually feel something and say so out loud.
What Actually Changed It
It took a crisis with my husband’s mental health, and potentially facing life without him, to get me to properly pay attention to it. And it changed how I spoke to people. I started telling those I love that I actually love them – out loud, not just assumed. I started recognising my own emotions more readily too, which is really just the tuning in exercise applied to feelings rather than physical sensation – you have to be able to identify what you’re feeling before you can say anything true about it.
It changed how people spoke to me back, as well.
Here’s the thing underneath all of it: you need to know the difference between you feeling something and someone trying to impose a feeling on you from the outside. And you need to know how to deal with what comes up as it arises, because trust me when I tell you, emotion really bloody rises in deep ritual work. That part I’m working on properly at the moment, as part of what I’m building for Imbolc this year – more on that soon.
Henzler, Eliora (2017). Measuring Meritocracy: A framework for investigation.
