Feelings

A large part of getting sober for me was getting used to feeling my feelings. Or, in fact, getting to know what "feelings" really were. For most of my life, and certainly while I was an active alcoholic, I was so out of touch with myself and my feelings that I was almost unaware that I had any. My days were lost in a blur of profound anxiety. I also had to manage the daily discomfort of my hangovers, and the lurking anticipation of how and with what (wine? beer? vodka? drugs? All of the above?) I would check out from that anxiety at the end of the day. In those two states I was never fully present. I was running from the hangover during the day and towards relief at the end of it. I had never learned how to recognize and handle whatever feelings I might be having. This was probably a reaction to the old school upbringing I endured in which children were meant to be seen and not heard. As a child growing up in a booze-soaked environment I learned that if I did have any feelings I certainly should not express them. That was just poor form and bad manners. Feelings, I learned early on, are not to be acknowledged.

Then, in my early thirties, while slowly drowning myself in a sea of alcohol, I entered the rooms of A.A. and met a group of like minded fellows. At ages ranging from eighteen to eighty, we were all encouraged (for the very first time mind you) to get in touch with our feelings. To explore and to understand the nature of our emotions without having them destroy us.

“Who cares about feelings?” I protested loudly. “Feelings can't hurt me. I just want to stop drinking and I can't,” I whined to anyone who could suffer my company.

“If you think that ‘feelings’ can't hurt you I suggest you check out the most recent suicide data,” a young man from my meeting told me. I've never forgotten his words. In America alone there were 49,500 reported suicides in 2025, the highest rate of suicide we have seen in the U.S. since 1941. And many thousands more are not reported as suicides because of the stigma surrounding the act.

Part of my inability to feel feelings was based on my fear of them. Feelings, I was once told, are not facts. But they certainly can feel like them. And running from them during my childhood and my actively alcoholic years was my self-appointed full time job. I didn't necessarily enjoy this job and the pay was non-existent but I had to run. What choice did I have? My feelings felt like a tornado churning away inside of me, shifty, powerful, unpredictable, dangerous. I felt that if I allowed myself to really feel the anxiety that swirled inside of me (for as long as I could remember) it might very well kill me. It was the same for rage. If I willingly allowed the full force of my anger to escape from its tightly sealed tomb I could very well kill someone...or maybe even myself. 

So I ran from those feelings. For decades. Until, almost twenty years after I started drinking to escape from them, they started to come back. To break through the lovely numbing fog of drugs and alcohol that I was poisoning myself with. I simply couldn't believe it. They were still there, peeking out from under the welcome distraction of addiction. Those damn intrusive and obnoxious feelings were still there! The anxiety was still there. The fear and rage and self-pity were still there. No matter how furiously I tried to drink and drug those feelings away...they were All. Still. There. Simmering. Festering. Waiting for me in the shadows. Gaining traction every day.

Recently I was having coffee with a friend of mine from A.A. Christy has been sober now for five years. Getting sober took her two decades and six rehabs but now she's firmly planted where she belongs, in a 12-step program. She was recounting to me how her inability to understand her feelings kept her trapped in addiction for decades. She could not grasp how invisible and intangible feelings were causing her to slowly destroy her mind, body, and spirit with drugs and alcohol. "You know when you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom but don't turn on the light?" she asked me "And then you walk through the room in the pitch dark with your eyes wide open and your arms outstretched hoping to find the bathroom door, but more often than not banging into things and stubbing your toes? That's how I felt about feelings. I just wandered blindly through life, crashing into things, and then when I did run into a feeling it would usually hurt." Christy told me about a chart that she was shown at several rehabs. It was called the How Are You Feeling? chart and she said it caused more confusion for the inpatients at her various rehabs than any other thing they encountered there. 

The chart looks like it was made for three-year-olds but for Christy (who was 28 the first time she encountered it) it was almost undecipherable. “Like Egyptian hieroglyphics” she told me. There are usually about twelve to fifteen “feelings” represented on the chart, from happy to sad and everything in between (calm, angry, hurt, nervous are some of the others) but to my friend they all looked the same. That is how out of touch she was with her feelings. She had pushed them down and numbed them out and run pell-mell away from them for so long and for so many years that they were totally abstract to her. “Foreign and terrifying,” she told me, shuddering at the memory of examining her feelings for the first time and seeing how they controlled her. “I had never faced my feelings and never planned on having to.”

Christy’s rehab therapists would ask her how she was feeling each day and instead of using words, she was meant to point at one of the images on the chart representing how she was feeling right then. She couldn’t do it. “Get that stupid chart out of my face already,” she would snap at her remarkably patient doctors. “I don't have feelings anyway so you can put that thing away,” she would inform them dramatically. 

But, just like I experienced when trying to get sober, Christy soon realized that she had to learn how to handle her feelings if she wanted to get clean. In recovery, if we are lucky, we do learn how to manage our emotions. How to coexist in peace with our internal world that seethes and cries and protests. At first, getting a grip on my feelings was like being at a rodeo. And I was one of those crazy men and women who enter the bucking bronco contests. The point of that contest is to stay astride a furiously protesting and enraged 1,800-pound beast for a whopping eight seconds. Few riders make it past five. 

That’s what it felt like when I got clean. I was the rider and my mind and its feelings and moods was the bucking bronco. It still feels that way sometimes. But thanks to my A.A. "toolbox" I have all the equipment I need to manage and sooth my turbulent and sometimes defiant internal world. Yoga helps. As do meditation, exercise and A.A. meetings. Being of service to others is a great way to get out of myself. Spending time in nature, alone or with my family and friends, is a fantastically soothing balms as well. And if all else fails I have these wonderful words given to me by a friend in my earliest days of recovery. “Remember,” she told me as she handed me a folded piece of paper on which was printed her favorite poem, “feelings can't kill you. Unless you let them. It's your choice.”

Now when I sense my inner bucking bronco rearing up and snorting aggressively in my direction with some “feeling” that I think will surely derail me, I go back again and again to this poem, secure in the knowledge that these uncomfortable feelings - like all other things in life - are impermanent and will, in time, surely pass. 

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Rumi