Confession: I feel things deeply. Grand-Canyon deep.
As a novelist, this is extremely helpful. My primary job is to create and leverage empathy, so having deep feelings lets me get inside a character and convince you to feel it too. This is essential. If my reader is not experiencing that emotion—sadness, joy, excitement, panic—then I have failed.
Empathy is also helpful in my full-time job: teaching 8th grade social studies. I have to daily read the emotional landscape of my students—many of which feel deeply as well—and respond as needed. Mark displays easy-going confidence, so I can joke with him; Sarah is oddly quiet today, so I ask her what’s up; Aryan looks tired (doesn’t he just always), so I tell him to go get a drink in hopes the 30-second walk and water will wake him up. Sometimes he goes to the bathroom and texts his mom.
The point: feeling deeply can be a huge asset. Gigantic. Grand-Canyon big.
But deep feelings can be a serious problem. Imagine descending to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, running out of water, and then losing your mule (you’re supposed to take a mule, I’ve read). That’s a terrifying scenario; the climb out is insurmountable. You are stuck forever. Wolves will get you (I’ve heard there are wolves there). Death is certain.
This stuck-at-the-bottom-of-some-huge-place feeling is dangerous because real life situations—and the real mental reactions that elicit real feelings—are not actually the bottom of the Grand Canyon. They just feel like they are—not that us deep feelers can differentiate.
Our big emotions, whether learned from parents or passed by DNA (probably both), have cut deep grooves that are now the default mode of our minds and hearts. Worry, anxiety, and depression are the unhelpful extremes of this emotional depth.
Okay: So how do we fall into them? The fancy therapy word for such crevasses is “cognitive distortion”, which I like to translate as “jacked-up thinking.” My students and I usually step into the big ones like “catastrophizing” (fortune-telling a situation to its worst possible outcome), “mental filtering” (only seeing the negative) and my personal favorite, “magnification” (blowing things way out of proportion). 1
Many deep feelers run the risk of letting these mental distortions run their lives. I certainly used to—and often still do. But none of us have to…
Let’s change the metaphor to, say, a river. And let’s say that life is that river, which we’re floating down in a sturdy canoe. Like all rivers, there are rocks—dangerous, potentially life-altering events that can swallow us up. There are also calm waters and plenty of river folk to keep us company. But it’s that rock, or that black swirling tide pool, that we fear—or perhaps do actually drift into. My students often find themselves in such trouble: cruelty from peers, academic stress, body image obsession. Or the more rare but very real events: sudden poverty, divorce, or parental sickness/death. How are kids supposed to deal with this stuff (or impending stuff) without getting lost in their emotions?
The river analogy is key: navigation. You can’t turn around and paddle away from Class 3 rapids, something my wife and I experienced first-hand on the New River in West Virginia. Nor should you blindly plunge into it. Instead, you need to prepare—practice, daily—so when you encounter choppy waters you can deal with it. In this metaphor, paddling, steering, and holding on tight translate to mental preparation—knowing the pitfalls of your own mind so that when you encounter a situation, you can think clearly instead of drowning in emotion.
Here’s an example from my classroom: Layla has to give a presentation on the “Causes of the Civil War” and is freaking out (isn’t she just always?). She hates public speaking, because she is terrified of looking stupid in front of her friends (see “magnification”). But she also is terrified of getting a B, because to her that’s basically an F (see “discounting the positive”). Or at least that’s what she thinks her parents think (see “mind reading”). 2 To Layla, this presentation is the bottom of the Grand Canyon. She is lost and donkeyless. The wolves are circling.
But if Layla were instead on a river, heading for some big scary rapids (the presentation), then suddenly she’s not doomed—she’s in control. She can guide the canoe relying on practiced maneuvers (her many rehearsals), adjust to the unforeseen whirlpool (ad lib when PowerPoint freezes), and rebound off a rock or two (adjust her volume when Mr. Landis, annoyingly, asks her to speak louder).
“That’s all fine and well,” you say, “but none of that stops Layal from drowning in anxiety before she actually presents.” Quite so. Which is why practicing this is so critical. Layla needs to talk directly to her distorted thoughts every single time they come up—no matter how trivial, or how often. In this example, she ought to start the day the project is introduced. It might go like this:
Distorted thought: “If I mess up, people will think I’m stupid.”
Truth: “People in this class know me better than that. And even if they do, I know that I’m not stupid.”
Distorted thought: “If I forget my lines, I’ll fail the presentation.”
Truth: “The rubric has content weighted at 80%. Forgetting a line, even a few, won’t mean I’ll fail.”
Distorted thought: “If I get less than an A, my parents will be mad.”
Truth: “My parents have seen how hard I’ve practiced, and even helped me. They won’t be disappointed since I’ve done my best.” 2
This tactic is simple but strenuous; routine has made distorted thinking “automatic” for many deep feelers, so persistence is largely the antidote. Just anyone who’s stopped taking their antibiotics early because they “felt better.” I didn’t encounter these helpful approaches until I turned thirty, which means I had decades of distorted thinking habits to correct. Many days this exhausts me. But the thing is, it really does work.
To recap: emotions are good. Drowning in them is bad. The solution for students (and adults—all humans) is to think about what you’re thinking about. Identify the distortion and correct it. Repeat. All day, every day. For life.
There is no magic word to “stop” yourself from collapsing into an emotional Grand Canyon. It takes work—like getting in shape to hike the thing. You drink water and eat right and go on walks with a backpack so that you have enough stamina to descend and climb out. This is how the brain works too. It’s how I, a very insecure person once terrified of public speaking, now routinely talk to packed auditoriums and have the time of my life. It’s how I got over the fear of what people would think of my writing. It’s how I learned to understand and control my temper. To avoid getting lost in our emotions, we must navigate them. Not avoid, nor surrender to.
Godspeed on your journey down river.
– Matthew Landis, NEW BOOK JOY Guest Writer
1 Dr. David Burns’s enormously popular Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (based largely on the work of Dr. Aaron Beck) dropped in 1980 and brought Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) into the mainstream. It’s still used by therapists today—and tons of people who don’t ever get therapy. It ought to be mandatory reading in middle and high school. Actually all humans should have to read it.
2 For a complete list of Burns’s cognitive distortions, check out this article – https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/
About the Author
Matthew Landis
teaches 8th grade social studies outside of Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, four kids, twenty-nine chickens, and one elderly boxer.
He writes books for kids, such as The Not-So-Boring Letters of Private Nobody, winner of the Magnolia Book Award (Mississippi Children’s Book Award) and the ILA Teachers’s Choices Reading List.
His latest novel, It’s The End of the World as I Know It, is about an 8th grade kid building a bomb shelter in his backyard, and has been shortlisted for Oklahoma’s Sequoyah Book Award.
You can read more about him, his books, and find tons of free writing resources on his website www.matthew-landis.com.
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