Success in sports, business or love is largely about the ability to manage emotions. Athletes, coaches and business people often loathe to admit this because feelings usually are associated with weakness. Yet in every area of life one must manage a host of feelings in order to get ahead. Your kids may challenge your patience to the breaking point, an opponent may scare you to death or a new project at work may overwhelm you. If you can’t manage these emotions you will have serious problems in dealing with them successfully.
There are many examples of this that I see every day in my practice. For years I have worked with a world famous figure skater whose main problem is her inability to express anger. The result is that she suffers with constant migraine headaches and skin rashes. All her anger gets internalized or put in the body so she appears to be sweet and kind to others but is suffering terribly on the inside. Another case is of a man who is flooded with anxiety on a daily basis when faced with any threat or setback. This problem is so bad that he has become addicted to many types of medications in an effort to remove or to cope with his anxiety.
So what is the cause of this inability to manage common place feelings? It will come as no surprise that it derives from certain troubles in childhood. The basic mechanisms in dealing with emotions are learned from the parents. And in the case above of the figure skater, her mother was unable to tolerate the girl’s anger at a young age and so she learned early on to suppress her anger and pretend that everything was just fine. She never learned that anger is a natural emotion and that it can be expressed easily and with no harm being done. In the case of the man with anxiety, he had a mother who was not able to tolerate his anxiety upon separating from her so she taught him to rely on her and never learn self-reliance. This led him to become a dependent personality and he uses drugs to cope with any feelings.
When faced with patients suffering with an inability to cope with feelings, we might label them as having anxiety disorders. Our job is to do what the parents failed to do, which is to give them solace. With this they slowly learn how to face various emotion laden situations and to process the emotions more maturely. They are given some insight as to the source of their disability. Typically in their past, the parents could not manage the same emotion. It is obvious that suppressing feelings until you become sick or dealing with them with drugs is not the way to go. The love that a therapist gives is sometimes expressed by guidance, sometimes by silence, sometimes by praise and sometimes by solace. The goal is invariably that the patient or the athlete learns how to cope with emotions in a more direct, courageous and more mature way. Life is only worth living when you can feel, so the ability to face emotions is one of the most important skills an adult can learn.
Dr. Tom Ferraro is a sport and business psychologist located in Mid-Nassau County. He can be reached at drtferraro@aol.com.
