First, The Vinegar

(Well, at least metaphorically...)

I’m reading this book called “Present Over Perfect” by Shauna Niequist, and have been thinking about her analogy of vinegar and oil. She asks her readers to picture a carafe of Italian vinegar and oil dressing—with the two liquids separated out, and the vinegar on top.

Damn it. I have been looking up pictures of vinegar and oil dressing to illustrate her point, and over and over again, I’m finding that the oil sits on top of the vinegar, NOT the other way around, because vinegar is more dense than oil, which totally ruins the entire basis of the chapter of her book, and the premise of what I was going to post about today.

Talk about needing a better editor, lol.

Ok, but for the sake of this post, let’s pretend that Niequist’s version of oil and vinegar is correct, and the vinegar sits on top of the oil. Her point is that to get to the oil, you have to pour out the vinegar first. She likens this to how sometimes WE need to pour out our “vinegary” feelings and parts of ourselves, to find the rich oil underneath.

Not gonna lie, this post would have more steam with an accurate analogy, but I’m going to keep trudging on.

Vinegar and oil aside, I think it’s true that acknowledging and feeling our “negative” emotions is really important, and too often we shove them down and ignore them instead.

I had therapy yesterday, in which we talked about how throughout my life I’ve learned how to “perform emotion” rather than FEEL emotion, and, though it served me well as a child to get my needs met, as an adult, it is more of a hinderance than a true help.

I sometimes find it incredibly hard to make decisions because I discount the way I feel about things as valid data points in my decision making process (or I simply am too dissociated from the way I feel to use my feelings as information.)

I often feel like an observer of my own life—more concerned about how I am performing for others rather than how I am experiencing things moment by moment.

Though I’ve “mastered” the art of not feeling angry or sad or disappointed, the flip side of that is that I also don’t feel happy or excited or safe—I can perform these emotions for people, but the actual FEELING of them is very difficult for me to access.

I saw a Tiktok the other day that really hit home for me. I’ll link to it here, because it’s worth a watch, but the part that really stuck out to me is when he says that thinking is a form of dissociating from BEING, and overthinking is often a result of trauma and nervous system dysregulation. When we experience negative emotions as unsafe (as they were for many of us growing up), then we dissociate from those emotions and retreat to our heads. If we want to learn to be PRESENT (which many believe is the path to enlightenment, peace, and joy), then we have to return to our bodies, and often that means sitting with the feelings and sensations that made us retreat to our heads in the first place.

This is what therapy is helping me do—return to my body, and feel my feelings; And let me tell you, sometimes emotional healing feels like quite the opposite. When it comes to therapy, emotional “vinegar” definitely sits on top, and even the promise of “oil” underneath doesn’t make swimming through the vinegar easy.

Sometimes I really hate feeling my feelings. My therapist, Carly, asked me to just notice my body sensations while holding the picture of a stressful memory in my head yesterday, and I felt a deep sense of revulsion—not toward the memory, but toward the feelings the memory caused. I told Carly that the exercise reminded me of what it feels like to clean up dog vomit—everything in me is repulsed by the idea, and if I have to do it, I want to close off as many sensory receptors as possible. But here she is asking me to pay attention to the texture, the smell, and the color of the vomit, and then stay with those sensations as long as I can without dissociating. I can feel my jaw clench up and my shoulders tense just writing about it.

There is no way I would volunteer to do this on a weekly basis except that, after reading a plethora of books on trauma and how it is stored in the body, I really do believe that you have to “feel it to heal it,” and boy, do I want to heal it.

So, here’s to vinegar. I’ll continue to sprinkle it throughout my writing along with the oil, because it’s flavorful, and valid, and important, and REAL.

Lucky for me, that old adage, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” is also in need of a good fact checker. So hopefully, fellow fly, you will stick along for the ride.