Catharsis is the Tip of the Ice Berg
Releasing Stress and Pent up Emotions is Great... but It's Not the End Game
After I’d recovered from burnout during the pandemic, there was a huge welling up of energy that wanted to be released. It said: Run!
Where to? Nowhere in particular. It was non-specific. It wasn’t actually about getting away from someone or something, or achieving any goal. Rather, it was a natural physiological response to being stuck. Steam that needed to be released.
This energy, for me, took the form of dancing, running, crying, singing and occasionally screaming into a pillow or while driving. A natural process of catharsis to let go of that energy and associated emotions.
Catharsis is defined as the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. In psychology, it refers to the emotional release that comes from expressing deeply held feelings, often leading to a sense of renewal or emotional purification. The term originates from the Greek word "katharsis," meaning "cleansing" or "purification."
The body is smart. It’s evolved over millions of years to respond to threats. Even the smallest amoeba will move away from danger as a reflex. When you are stuck and have no choice (like being in lockdown), of course that creates suffering.
But we’re often feeling stuck in so many ways — relationships, jobs, the system. In order to be effective, and feel a sense of inner freedom, we have to learn to let go of our stuck-ness in these day-to-day situations.
The problem is, we are chronically disconnected from our bodies, living inside storylines fabricated in our heads. We tend to override our natural, instinctual responses for the logical. This is often to our detriment, making release harder than it has to be.
The spectrum of stress
There is a spectrum of stress. At one end, stress is small and easy. It comes and goes pretty quickly and you forget about it. On the other end of the spectrum, we experience a big trauma in our lives. That trauma stays stuck in our bodies and minds, increasing our allostatic load, thereby reducing our resilience to everyday stressors in life.
About 90% of people will go through a traumatic event in their life, but only 6-8% will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Those numbers are definitely higher after the pandemic given the 20% reported increases in anxiety around the world, and overall bump in mental disorders.
When stress builds up without being released, or trauma that isn’t worked through, it affects our nervous system. The nervous system goes between states of being relaxed and alert (social engagement), activated and relaxed. When there is too much pressure on the nervous system, you can find yourself overly anxious and wired, or tired and depressed. The more pressure that’s built up, the more you need to do to release the valve.
Your Window of Tolerance
The window of tolerance is defined as the range of optimal arousal levels within which an individual can function most effectively. Within this range, a person can manage stress, process information, and respond to situations in a calm and rational manner.
This is one of the most useful concepts I’ve learned in the last few years. We all have an optimal zone, or a Window of Tolerance, where we function the best. Usually we fall relaxed and alert, able to process information without getting overwhelmed, and staying engaged. There can be stress, but it’s not too much to overwhelm you.
When you explode in anger, run around in a circle between two decisions, or withdraw when you need help the most, you are probably outside of your Window of Tolerance. You’ve likely moved to hyperarousal (anxious, frazzled) or hypoaroused (tired, disconnected). When I am in the hyper-zone, my mind is producing lots of thoughts and I’m like Woody Allen after three espressos. When I’m in hypo-zone, I might feel inadequate, shut down and retreat into my cave.
Knowing where you are at any given time is an extremely powerful method of self-awareness. When you are noticing you are outside the window (or approaching the danger zones), you can pause and find a resource to connect with. That could be as simple as going for a walk, listening to music or talking to a friend. Generally, it’s a bad idea to make important decisions when you are outside of your window.
You might ask yourself right now, from a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being hypo and 5 being hyper, and 3 being optimal, where are you right now? Check in with yourself throughout the day, before and after meetings, and when you talk to certain people or do certain activities. This will give you a new superpower and allow you to make smarter decisions.
When you’re outside of your window of tolerance for too long
In his seminal book Waking the Tiger, trauma researcher Dr. Peter Levine talks about treating an extremely anxious and neurotic patient that had felt this way most of her life. At one point, she remembers a flashback of being at the dentist as a young child, feeling petrified as the doctors strapped her down for surgery.
In that moment in the therapy session, Dr. Levine screamed, “run, run as fast as you can! There’s a tiger chasing you!” On the couch, she started moving her legs back and forth as fast as she could. After the session, she felt some of her symptoms go away, and it marked the beginning of her path to healing.
What happened here was that the patient has ‘stuck’ traumatic energy inside her body that she couldn’t release when she was a kid. By recalling the memory, both mental and somatic, she was able to release some of that traumatic stress. The body keeps the score.
(Going to the dentist, by the way, and in particular surgeries are a rather common source of trauma. This type of trauma happens when someone feels totally helpless and unable to do something about their situation. Like being a young child strapped down by masked doctors as you scream for your parents who are nowhere to be found. )
The deeper the trauma, the further we need to run
It’s not always the case, but obsessive hard work and extreme athleticism can come from replaying or attempting to purge past trauma. It’s probably not a stretch to say that a lot of our role models, entrepreneurs and politicians are operating from traumatic patterns. The desire to run away or push harder can be a response to trauma.
One extreme example is David Goggins, famous for the almost unbelievable autobiographical book Can’t Hurt Me. I loved the audiobook and found myself inspired (and out of any excuses for being lazy) when I read about his superhuman, albeit masochistic, feats during Navy Seals training.
Also, it became clear that his past was troubled, with a very physically and verbally abusive childhood. The reason for ultramarathons, masochist training and never-give-up attitude became painfully clear. He was releasing the pent up energy of years of punishment, abuse and nervous system dysregulation through an explosive show of strength, courage, and running…a lot. (Another notable example is Cheryl Strayed in her book Wild, who walked 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail)
These people achieve incredible and inspiring things, so it’s not in any way to downplay that. One's deep-seated trauma, paradoxically, can create the seeds of great healing for many others.
But what applies to pretty much all of us at some point: Being stuck
When we think of these big traumas that cause a lot of stress and turmoil in life, we feel like it only applies to the extreme cases of abuse, natural disasters, violence and so forth. Fortunately, you probably didn’t have David Goggins' childhood (and if you did, I am really sorry). However, when you’re stuck for too long in any situation, you can start to develop post traumatic stress.
That could be from months of being locked in during a pandemic, feeling trapped at your work, feeling shamed in your relationship, or living through years or decades of systemic racism. The emotional stressors in life are often the biggest ones that we have to deal with.
If there is something that you “put up with” or something you haven’t expressed, it is likely building up your stress load/allostatic load. This in turn is causing your nervous system to be more dysregulated, which impacts both your physical and mental health – higher blood pressure, less patience, and overall less joy in life, to name a few side effects.
Running and dancing etc. is the start of release
Fight or flight mode – the sympathetic nervous system response – doesn’t mean you need to fight someone, or to run away completely from a situation. If you are feeling stuck in your job because you don’t like a colleague, running for an hour or two can be enough to discharge pent up energy that we are holding.
It’s not just healthy to run because its running, but because you are actually re-setting the stress cycle and re-regulating your nervous system. When we do not do this, the stuckness that we feel in our body’s creates a cascade of negative thinking and more emotional stuckness. A lot of mental and emotional distress can simply be solved through physical activities.
For many people, this idea is simple but revolutionary. Before making drastic big decisions in your life, can you go out and find a source of cathartic release? Rather than acting on the emotion (confronting someone or leaving your job), it can make sense to release the emotion, which allows you to likely come to a place of greater peace.
The problem with catharsis
But despite its power to heal, there is a problem with this approach. We can learn how to release anger, but that doesn’t necessarily address the root cause of our anger.
It’s possible to release emotion through running, in turn re-regulating our nervous system and allowing us to return to place within our Window of Tolerance. For some time we have anguish or anger or fear or dread, then we run/dance/scream and feel better. As a result, we feel like the emotion has passed through us. And it has! Great!
However catharsis isn’t the end game. You can go throughout your entire life just repeating the same patterns – feeling stuck, releasing the emotion – and then doing it again. This often gives you a false sense of resolution. You’ve temporarily alleviated the emotional pressure and now have the illusion that you’ve dealt with the problem.
For example, you might feel hurt at something your boss did. You are afraid to say or do anything, so you just put up with it. To release the stress you go off and run 20 kilometers and scream on the peak of some mountain. You feel better and go back to work rejuvenated.
But you haven’t really solved the problem. You complain to a friend, reinforcing the story, and find yourself getting upset again. When your boss says something similarly frustrating, you repeat the same pattern. You can go your entire life like this, getting an emotion out but never actually working on yourself.
In fact, you might even be reinforcing neural pathways of feeling that same emotion. If you know that you can just release your anger through a physical activity like running, you might be more prone to hold on to anger, knowing that you can always “blow off some steam” later.
What comes after catharsis?
Two words: pattern recognition.
Thus begins the journey to really understand what’s going on. To make the unconscious conscious, as Jung says. When your mind is less clouded by the emotion, and there is greater acceptance of the situation, you can start to reflect on what is important. Most important, to me, is asking: what is the pattern here?
A nasty pattern that I had, which resulted in two lost friendships, was my tendency to shy away from difficult conversations in person. When I was angry or frustrated, I would find it too easy to pick up my phone and do the whole exchange by text message. This might seem odd to some, but for many this is the norm.
As a result, I would say things over text that I would never say in person. When you see someone face to face, you are in touch with their humanity. When you hide behind a screen, it’s easier to “other” (verb) people and you lose an incredible amount of nuance that we evolved to notice as social creatures. The act of sharing my opinion or belief by message (I termed it “feedback”) was in itself an emotional catharsis, but one that had dire consequences for my relationships.
The real healing came when I had enough suffering through these experiences to realize that there was a pretty big pattern here. As a simple rule, I now never express any negative emotion by text, and at minimum do a call or meet in person. This doesn’t mean that there is no longer conflict, but often conflict is diffused or contextualized much sooner so it does not escalate.
Recognizing patterns leads you then to do the hard work of changing your beliefs.
In sum: Stress is inherent to life. Trauma is part of many of our lives. People and situations will always rub against you and collide with you. Such is life. The window of tolerance is key to know and regulate ourselves to make sure we don’t go outside of our zone. Our emotional release is the starting point, but not the end game. Find your patterns and question your beliefs!
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