Emotionality, Embodiment, and the Triangle of Experience

I have been reading Hillary L. McBride’s Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing. It has been life-changing for me. It is not light work to bring these parts of my life into consciousness, but it feels like necessary work, and I know I am ready. The journey of my life this far has helped me get to a place where I have enough internal safety now to take a look back into my childhood development, shaped largely by the influence of Catholicism, colonialism, and patriarchy. I am reading it slowly, taking deep breaths between pages, taking time between chapters. 

Bringing truths into our awareness, out of our unconscious storage spaces within ourselves, is a process that can cause a kind of internal reorientation that might feel like turning the snow globe around to see what’s happening behind the scene, or lifting the curtain on a performance to see what else is happening backstage. It can make you feel like you are spinning. It can also be very validating of things you may have sensed, but had minimized, gaslit within yourself or hesitated to believe, in service of survival or keeping the peace. It requires patience, presence, self-trust and a body-mind connection that can help you stay resourced through the process. It’s okay to go slow.

One of the most harmful things about growing up in a highly controlling patriarchal religious environment is that you learn to trust other people before yourself, to trust male authority figures (who have not actually earned your trust) over your own body, which contains the signals and the tools that allow you to be the authority over yourself.

Within your body lies the information you need about what feels right and wrong to you: your core emotions. Our core emotions are physiological processes we are born with to help us learn and understand what matters, help us solve problems, help us communicate ourselves to the people around us. They are critical to selfhood, critical to healthy human development. 

As Hillary McBride writes in Holy Hurt, every single one of our core emotions serves a function for our existence. Fear lets us know that there could be danger or harm. Anger helps us know we value and where we need boundaries. Sadness lets us know we have lost something that matters and that we may need comfort. Disgust tells us to distance ourselves from something. Joy communicates connection, pleasure, and a sense of gratitude. Excitement indicates motivation and tells us what we’d like to move towards. Desire lets us know we want something. Emotions have purpose.

Our lived experience determines if and/or how we learn to be in relationship to these core emotions, these physiological (embodied) processes. An emotion is just fundamentally energy in motion, but most of us do not have that understanding or relationship with our emotions. Most of us can be quite scared of our emotions. Why? It could be because we are unfamiliar with them, we don’t trust them, we don’t understand them, we fear they will last forever, we fear they will define us, and/or we fear that we will be alone in them. We can also carry false narratives about what emotions are and what they mean about us. Why? Because in our lived experience we have quite likely come into contact with systems and models that have discouraged embodiment and emotionality, and planted inhibitory emotions and defences into our systems in place of co-regulation and the development of self-regulation, and so we never learned how to feel.

Take a look above at my sketch of the Triangle of Experience, which comes from a therapeutic framework called AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy). Dr. McBride uses this image in her book to facilitate reflection on what a person’s relationship with their spirituality and religion may have meant for their relationship with their core emotions. The morning I flipped the page in Holy Hurt and saw the image of the Triangle of Experience, I paused to let it in within the context of understanding the impact of my religious experience on my selfhood, and it felt like so many things fell into place for me. I could see how early indoctrination rooted in the devaluation of the earth, my earthly body, femininity, and my selfhood led to disembodiment and emotional disconnection in service of acceptance, obedience, belonging, and perceived goodness and safety. Because embodiment was discouraged, core emotions were not accessible, and so I learned inhibitory emotions and defenses before I learned how to process my core emotions. The Triangle of Experience helps me understand where I am in my emotional experience, and find my way back to my core.

How might this image impact you when you take a look at it? What does it mean for your life and your healing? What is your relationship like with your core emotions? And what are the factors in your life that have shaped those relationships? These questions are worthy of reflection. Your emotional health and well-being is worthy of reflection.

Reflection requires courage. It takes energy. It can feel heavy at times. You might feel discouraged. I find great encouragement in one of the most amazing things about being human: our neuroplasticity. We are learners by nature! Our brains and nervous systems can change! We have embodied systems that are built for learning and for healing. Just as we may have learned to avoid certain or all emotions for our social safety in our early lives, we can also learn to turn towards them now with tenderness and curiosity, and we can build the capacity over time to allow their waves to move through us so that we can receive all of the important information they carry about who we are are what we need to experience the fullness of our being.