Starting more than a year ago, I started putting a lot of my feelings in a box. Not all of them, to be sure, but primarily the negative ones. And not consciously, but out of necessity.
For roughly three years before he died last February, my father had been falling into Parkinson’s-related dementia. The hardest part was not losing him gradually, nor even the distress he felt over his slipping mental faculties, but that my mother, now 81, was his primary caretaker. It was incredibly hard for her, both practically and emotionally, and I became one of her primary emotional supports.
This meant that I had to be able to put her first when she called me in hysterics over the latest thing my father had said or did. In order to do that I had to stop letting my usual feelings — primarily negative ones about myself and my life — get in the way. So how I handled it — as I said, unconsciously — was to put them in a box. Basically stop feeling them.
Click to continue reading “Putting feelings in a box can help”