You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You

by Mike McHargue

You are here. You are alive. You have survived the challenges of life, and each part of you—even the parts you don’t like or appreciate—has played a role in your continued existence. There isn’t a piece of you that hasn’t been fearfully and wonderfully made, tested by the unforgiving process of natural selection.

This is why it’s far more effective to offer education, open conversation, and professional support when people are struggling with unregulated behavioral patterns.

But more often in our culture, our basic, healthy emotions are met with a social reinforcement to repress them. Instead of communicating our basic emotions, we learn to stop them by feeling anxious, worried, guilty, or ashamed.

For people dealing with the impacts of trauma, the work of learning to know and trust your feelings is an even more difficult endeavor. —

To understand how trauma shapes our every moment, we have to realize that our feelings aren’t just something that happens in our brains. The same neurotransmitters that make us feel down also impact the neurons in our guts and interfere with our digestive processes—which is why digestive issues often coincide with stress or depression.

The nerve that connects our guts and our brains is called the vagus nerve.

The polyvagal theory model offers a three-tiered view of our involuntary nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system still handles the “fight or flight” response when in high arousal. But, in this view, the parasympathetic system isn’t just the “chill” network. Because when the parasympathetic system is highly aroused, it can also invoke a trauma response: freeze, or faint. In safe situations, when neither the sympathetic nor parasympathetic systems are highly activated, a third system runs the show: the social engagement system. The social engagement system uses the ventral branch of the vagus nerve, running from your brain stem to your middle ear, to filter out background noise and help you focus on human voices. But the ventral branch also runs to your heart and lungs, which means your brain stem, middle ear, heart, and diaphragm can respond to the tone of someone’s voice several seconds faster than the structures in your neocortex can process the content of their actual words. A sharp word can literally take your breath away. How we say something matters as much as what we say, because our automatic nervous system is listening and responding to tone long before our thinking brains get the message.

Besides, when I tell stories, I care less about what I feel, or even felt at the time, and more about the emotions I’m stirring in the listener. But Ron kept interrupting me. “How did that make you feel, Mike?” It robbed me of my powerful defensive affects, like humor, intellectualization, deflecting, and denying.

Anxiety doesn’t tell us very much. It’s like the “check engine” light in your car, which tells you something’s wrong without telling you what it is. To escape anxiety, we can’t just focus on external factors. We have to look under the hood.

believe that when you learn to appreciate all your feelings, to accept them as a vital part of you, you’ll begin a journey that helps you escape the cycle of spinning around the triangle of core, inhibiting, and defensive affects, and instead acquaint yourself with the clarity and calm that come from riding an emotional wave all the way through.

If your devices are nearby, they offer immediate relief from boredom or anxiety. To combat that, I try to follow a “one device” rule. If I am on my computer, or watching TV, then I keep my iPhone on my nightstand and my iPad in my bag.

Attachment theory says that much of the way people approach relationships is shaped in the first year of life. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember anything before my third birthday, much less my first. But the research says I can know a lot about what life was like for me as a baby based on how I behave in relationships now.

The right brain thinks holistically, while the left is more reductionist. Your left brain looks at a book and notices the paper, binding, cover art, and type. The right brain sees a book, or maybe even an opportunity to learn or go on an adventure of the imagination.

In the late seventeenth century, the left brain launched an all-out war on its counterpart, starting in Europe and what would become the United States. Today, this war is known as the Enlightenment, a movement of philosophers and scientists who set the cultural expectation that analytical, left-brain thinking was best. I mean, could there be a better slogan for how our left brain views the world than Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”? Or Immanuel Kant’s statement “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

The Enlightenment wasn’t the beginning of the left brain’s uprising—indeed, reason had already been tipping the scales of human experience in its favor in ancient Greece and China. But the Enlightenment took this war on right hemispheres and launched it on a global scale. The Enlightenment led to rationalism, modern science, and an ever-increasing suspicion of cultural traditions and emotions.

In the West, our socioeconomic systems were codified around this value of favoring logic and reason over other ways of know...

The left brain is dominated by “top-down” processing, in which the neocortex takes the onus to coordinate—and dominate—activity. Thinking back to the burrito brain, the left hemisphere begins more processes in the tortilla, before working its way down to the meat in the middle.

The right brain, on the other hand, is more focused on a “bottom-up” approach, allowing the instinctual and emotional centers of the brain to integrate into all forms of processing. That approach means that our right brains excel at relating to other people and understanding how our actions impact our world.

As we discussed earlier in the book, white men are so lonely that they are killing themselves in record numbers. The individualistic framing of our culture, created and maintained by men of European ancestry, has created a box that simultaneously elevates us in society while slowly killing us.

We live in a capitalistic culture that values productivity and output. We treat our own creativity and emotions in the same careless manner that our species treats our forests. We cut what we need, as fast as we need it, paying no attention to how the forests shrink and the climate changes. Soon, we are shocked when we have a nervous breakdown, panic attacks, or anxiety. We, people of great material resources, clear-cut our hearts to look impressive at work, or advance causes we care about. The misery we so often feel is our bodies and minds trying to tell us something: that we’ve had enough. It’s time to slow down, to rest, to restock, and, yes, to grow some new leaves before we cut any more.