How Buffy Helps Me Process Big Emotional Themes

One thing that I learned from the mentors of my past that seems to hold very true, is that you have to feel your stuff in order to heal it. The feelings have to be present. And you have to acknowledge them and feel them in order to heal the associated wounds. Otherwise they just stay under the radar and keep coming back to kick your butt. Avoidance is really not a strategy that was ever intended to last for very long.

I think that’s why sometimes having our old wounds triggered is actually a gift. While those feelings are activated and present – we connect to the things that created them. We connect to the root causes of our pain and we can affect them. They are no longer hiding in the dark, where it’s easy to ignore them. And that’s a good thing! It’s why Therapists take us back to our childhoods, our pain points. This activation of emotion can be used to serve us. Even though, much of the time, we don’t let it get further than our heads. But understanding is not healing.

The reason we have these emotional wounds in the first place is because something happened that was too big for us to process at the time. It wasn’t safe to feel those feelings all the way through, and so they got shoved down. That can become a habit which has an impact on our physical health, over time. These unprocessed feelings get stuck in our bodies, and are constantly referenced, over and over again by our nervous systems, and can anchor us even deeper into traumatic patterns. Because our nervous systems like familiarity. They can inadvertently start collecting data that feeds a narrative that we are not safe, that we are shameful, that we are not worthy. All kinds of not very helpful things that we then also don’t want to feel.

But if, when we are triggered, instead of running in the other direction from our big and uncomfortable feelings, we turn towards them, we discover something interesting. If we make space for our feelings to exist and be felt, then we can learn that they are not bigger than us. We can learn to feel them all of the way through. Which is often when they dissipate and leave us alone. And then we have an opportunity to experience some kind of completion. It takes some guts to face the big ones. But it’s always worth it. You get to dissolve a piece of the toxic wound. You get to reclaim a piece of you. You get to heal something. With practice, this practice can clear out the backlog and deliver you into a much clearer state of being. One where you can feel and process very big emotional states in a relatively small amount of time. But if you don’t have access to a handy Therapist to assist you and hold space through these moments while you develop this skill, what do you do?

One of my strategies during these times is to use a TV show or a movie (or a book or music) as a kind of intermediary or surrogate. I came across this intuitively - and I seem to have a knack for knowing what I need at any time. A heartbreaking love story I can wallow in. A battle between good and evil to reinstate my hope. Something to connect me to my grief, so that I can cry it out..

What I found was that it feels safer to allow myself to get invested in the stories on the screen - rather than to get pulled back completely into my own stories. (A little distance from our story is actually helpful). And it’s a lot easier to be compassionate for someone else. As long as it’s activating and taking me on a journey with the same kind of feelings or emotional themes - it doesn’t matter whether it’s my stories or theirs. They (the emotions) are activated and present. And they get to be felt to completion. And that seems to be the magic of it.

The stories on the screen take you on a journey that completes in the allotted timeframe. You get to feel closure. You get to feel involved and also removed. It feels safer, so you can let yourself dive in deeper - knowing that when the credits roll, you’ll be done. And because we are usually more open to understanding the suffering of others, we learn about ourselves on the way.

Today has been a Buffy binge. It was exactly the right episodes of the right season to sync exactly with some themes I’ve been feeling over recent weeks. And where as I might second guess myself, or think that I’m not allowed to feel those things (or need to minimise them to make allowances for other people) - I can be totally there for Buffy!

When I acknowledge that it’s totally justified for her to feel that way, then I allow it to be more OK for me to feel that way. It’s a little sneaky, but it’s something that works for me.

So anyway. Maybe give it a try. It could work for you?