Emotions and Feelings

So, yesterday, I spent a day with two friends, Rachel and Victoria.  Victoria has a developmental delay.  One thing that I realized when I was talking to them was that they have a problem with accepting their feelings.  Victoria rides the bus to get to her job, and the bus driver had a stroke the other day and she is scared to go back on the bus.  I told her outright, "It is okay to be scared." 

She asked one of the most disturbing questions I have ever been asked, "It is?"

Humans in general should be allowed to feel the way they feel.  I asked her, "Why do you think it isn't okay to be scared?" 

She replied, "My mom told me to just get over it because she can't drive me to work."

Throughout the conversation, I noticed that she was scared even though she wasn't on a bus.  I think too often, with people with disabilities, they are told to not feel the way they feel.  A few months ago, Victoria said, "My life sucks" while we were riding in a car.

Two of my friends replied, "Your life doesn't suck, don't ever say a thing like that again."  You might think that that was an insensitive thing to say, and I agree.  But we all do it, to one extent or another.  When we tell people "Don't think things like that," we are beheading their feelings.  We are helping one more person reject their feelings and thereby creating a huge personality problem.  A problem where they reject their emotions or what they are feeling.

To reject a person's emotions or feelings, no matter what they are, is the most insensitive and inhumane things that we, as humans can do.  Our brains feel things and think things that we don't like, but if we reject them and act like we never thought them, we reject a huge elephant in the room.  And soon, that elephant is going to grow so big that we begin to be crushed.

I think that all too often, we do this to students, and they end up being diagnosed with emotional behavioral disorders (EBD).  Not all students that we do this to will end up being diagnosed, but I think that rejection of emotions or feelings is a huge part of the diagnosis of EBD.

We are an emotionally crippled society, we don't like hearing people's negative thoughts.  We think that they should just stop thinking those kinds of thoughts and they will be just fine.  No, that is not the case, we need to accept what they are feeling and then we go from there.

I have a question: Do you, as a parent, as a teacher, as a social worker, as a human, do you want to feed into our society's belief that nobody should express their negative thoughts, that way, we don't have to worry about it.  And by not expressing their thoughts, their thoughts become stronger.  Do you want to feed into this?