Ride Your Emotional Rollercoaster by Choosing to Own Your Feelings



The past few days I’ve been on a real emotional rollercoaster. Since 1998, I had been taking 200 milligrams of Zoloft everyday for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Last year I talked with my doctor and decided to start weaning myself off of the Zoloft, which I had started taking as a means of increasing my natural serotonin production. It helped with my OCD, but later I learned that it also was emotionally numbing-me-out.

Deciding that I wanted to start feeling the full rainbow of my feelings again, I began working my way down to 100 milligrams of Zoloft a day; then down to 50 milligrams a day. Last week, I took the last Zoloft I had. Since that time, emotions have started gushing out like crazy.

Last Sunday evening I was watching an old Ginger Rogers movie called Romance in Manhattan. Rogers plays a New York showgirl who chance-meets a newly-arrived Yugoslavian immigrant (played by Francis Lederer). They go up to the top of her apartment building one evening; and as Lederer is looking out over the skyline, he is bursting with excitement to be in America.

I’ve watched this movie several times before and every other time my reaction to Lederer’s joy has matched Ginger Rogers’ reaction to it in the movie: “OK. Whatever.” In other words, I was emotionally flat-lining to his euphoria. But this time I could feel all of his joy and excitement. I could feel the thrill of being somewhere you really want to be, and I could feel the exhilaration of experiencing a dream come true. I was bursting with joy myself. His joy became infectious to me.

Bursting with joy is great. But I’ve also felt myself much more alive with other feelings that I don’t love so much, like indignation, anxiety, sadness, loneliness and loss. In some cases I’ve found myself being an emotional-bitch, but the good news is that I’ve been able to be present to all of my feelings, good and bad. Over time I will learn to balance them better.

I’ve sensed my built-in reaction of wanting to run from the negative feelings kick-in, and I’ve acknowledge it. But I’ve also chosen not to run. I’ve allowed these feelings, as difficult as they are, to simply be. I know I need to feel them and I choose to walk with them rather than running from them, or trying to medicate them out of existence.

Today, I choose to treasure all of my feelings, even the ones I don’t like. I am not required to like them, but I am required to honor them if I want to be emotionally healthy. By embracing them and being with them, I am maintaining my power over them. They don’t “own” me, I “own” them. And all is exactly as it should be.

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