Imagine yourself as a blue whale. You’re the largest animal in the world. You were born to live in the depths of the ocean.
Wikipedia says the greatest dive depth reported from a tagged blue whale was 315 meters (1,033 feet). A thousand feet down! Other types of whale can go much farther down, but you’re a blue whale, so a thousand feet is as far as you can go.
It feels great when you get to 500 feet and below. It’s extraordinary. But it takes some effort, and most days you don’t feel like it. Most days you stick to the shallower water, because it’s easier.
You also have to surface, of course. You need to get the oxygen in your lungs to make the next dive possible.
(I’m going to spell out this part of the metaphor, because I can’t think of a way to imply it. Surfacing = going to bed. Every time you go to bed, that’s your blue whale self going up to the surface to breathe. Breathe, recharge, get ready for the next day, the next dive.)
How deep will you go on your next dive?
Maybe you spend an entire day watching TV and doing stupid crap on the internet. You don’t cook any food or even get up the gumption to go out to eat, just microwave a burrito and snarf down some ice cream and chips. You stay in the shallows all day long. Maybe you feel dumb at the end of the day, but on the other hand maybe that’s all you could do that day. Maybe you knew, when you got up, that was all the breath you had. Your maximum depth that day … call it 25 feet.
The next day is Monday and you have to go to work or school. That’s a little deeper of a dive, and you need to prepare. Maybe you have an important meeting, a big client, the boss is mad at you: some work stress incoming: deeper yet. And that night you’re feeling good about yourself and you decide to dive into a new book, maybe a classic novel that you’ve always wanted to read and know will challenge you. That day, you got quite a bit deeper, right? Let’s call that day a 200 foot dive.
The next day you scheduled dinner with some old friends who you haven’t seen in a while. You actually reached out to them and made a time! They can do it tonight, so you just did it! A really nice night, you were a bit out of your comfort zone but it went really well. Good for you! It was amazing and at the end of the night you ask yourself why you don’t do that more often. 300 feet, maybe?
The next weekend you are feeling really good and you go to a show or a concert, maybe a club, a big party with friends. If you’re 20 years old you can do all that in a heartbeat and love every moment of it. But if you’re old like me, that was a pretty deep dive, maybe 400 feet.
Then there are things that you rarely do because they’re hard or unpleasant. Most days you wake up and say nope, not even going to think about that one today. But then one day, for whatever reason, you take a deep breath and go for it. Scheduling a doctor or dentist visit might be on the list. Especially if it’s more than a routine checkup, say a mammogram or a colonoscopy. Let alone if there’s reason to believe you might have cancer. Anything about confronting your mortality. Shopping for life insurance. Looking for a lawyer to write a will. Ugh. 600 feet.
Hunting for a new job! That’s a tough one. You don’t want to do that unless you absolutely have to. 700 feet.
Thinking about whether what you’re doing with your life has any meaning or importance to you! What changes might you want to make? Maybe you’d like to do some volunteer work? You really care about animals, maybe it’s time to volunteer at the shelter? Oh, the sadness when you think about the animals, how much they’re suffering. But maybe you could help them? But maybe you couldn’t! Maybe you would see one who was sick and needed to be euthanized, and you know you would start crying and have to leave. Or maybe you should volunteer at an old folks home. Those lonely people would love to meet your dog and talk with you. But that’s really confronting your own mortality, and it scares you. The day you actually decide to take the plunge and start volunteering for something like that? That’s a brave day. 800 feet.
The day you not only decide to write a book, but actually start writing. Or the day you start therapy. The day you decide to tell your current therapist it’s not working and you need a new one. Or the day you decide to change careers. The day you decide to retire, or move to a new country, and actually put the plans into motion. These are the days you dig down deep with everything you have. Maybe 900 or even 1,000 feet.
Maybe my examples feel stupid to you. Maybe my numbers are all wrong. I’m sure I haven’t even considered the really hard things that one can accomplish, the things that truly qualify as 1,000 foot dives. So substitute your own!
But there’s something kind of right about the metaphor (I hope). All the hard things in life, but also the things in life that we find truly worth doing: they have a depth to them. They take energy, determination, a deep breath, a plunge. A day spent doing only easy things is a day spent in the shallows.
As a young whale, you have amazing lung capacity, the ability to dive deep into life. But time passes and you get older, and now you’re not doing so well. You’ve suffered a trauma. Maybe multiple traumas. Maybe life is just grinding you down. You’re depressed, you’re worried, you’re anxious, you’re obsessive, you’re angry all the time.
Here’s the next part of the metaphor. Your unhappiness, your trauma, your symptoms of mental illness — sadness, anxiety, depression, whatever is bothering you — think of all that as balloons in your lungs.
Balloons don’t belong in your lungs! Also, they hurt! Now, mostly these are tiny little balloons. And you’re a blue whale, so your lungs are enormous! When the first few balloons show up, you barely even notice. But over time, they keep accumulating. And some of them start to grow, to fill with air. Over time, they take up more and more of the room in your lungs.
These days you just don’t have the breath you used to have. Doing the hard stuff is harder than it used to be. Diving deep takes more and more of your energy. Days that used to be easy are becoming harder. You find yourself spending more days skimming the shallows. Reading a novel is too hard, I’ll just watch TV. No, not a documentary; just find me a few episodes of Seinfeld. On your worst days (or maybe every day) you start to spend most of the day on the surface, desperately seeking air. (Non-metaphorically: you can’t make yourself get out of bed.)
If you’re not aware of the typical progress of mental health problems, this can all feel mysterious. Why do I hurt so much all the time? Why is it so hard to breathe freely? Why can’t I do the things I used to do?
The answer to these questions is straighforward. Your mental health challenges are real. It’s not “all in your head.” And no, of course, it’s not literal balloons in your lungs. But it is literal pain in your body! It probably hurts in your chest, and your belly. The pain may sometimes take your breath away. It definitely shrinks your ability to do the hard things in life, the things that are worth doing.
Even if you are aware of how mental health problems can grow, it probably feels like there’s nothing you can do to reverse the process. How do you actually get better?
Well, you know what my answer to that is going to be. Feel your feelings. Feeling your feelings is how you drain the air out of the balloons.
What does the process of feeling your feelings … feel like? Well, if you’re recovering from mental illness, it hurts. A lot. It hurts enough that it makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong. You’re not. The more it hurts, the more you know that you’re doing it right.
The balloons in your lungs have air in them. That air needs to come out, so the balloons can shrink down and eventually be expelled entirely. But the process of letting the air out … hurts. Imagine balloons embedded in your lungs. The air is under pressure and each balloon has only a tiny little exit hole. When the air comes out, it sounds like this.
Feeling your feelings takes time. The air takes time to come out. It makes its noise and it takes time and it hurts. You can’t just think about the process, or imagine it, or hope it will happen somehow without you: you have to actually do it. The process of recovery from mental illness is a real process, a physical process. Mental illness is a physical reality in your body. Feeling your feelings is physical, and it’s not pleasant. But you have to take the time to do it. Lie in bed and feel it, and don’t do anything else for a while.
This is not popular advice! People will tell you to get out of bed and get on with your life. If you can’t be happy, pretend to be happy: that’s the way forward. Fake it ‘til you make it.
Coincidentally, this article was posted to New York Magazine just today.
In case you can’t get past the paywall, the title is “All the TV I watched when I was clinically depressed.” It contains the following passage:
I submitted a request for medical leave, then lay there for a few days, sleeping when I could and wondering what would happen next. If you can’t do anything, and I mean really can’t do anything, if going outside feels impossible and lying in bed is the only option, what are you going to do? I stared at the wall. The color of the wall changed gradually. This was it, some part of my brain that still had critical faculties thought. You are in it now. All those memoirs described this — this state of simply not being able to do anything anymore. I lay there, and the light changed, and my whole being hurt. But the next day my husband handed me a laptop. “At least try to watch TV,” he said.
The rest of the article is about the TV she watched! I want to say to her: OK, great, you watched some TV (and eventually you got an article out of it). But your body wanted to be in bed! Your “whole being hurt.” That’s important information. Let it hurt! Feel your feelings! Pay attention! Your pain is trying to tell you something important.
Her husband’s reaction is so common. He wants her to get out of bed, because he thinks it would be better for her to watch TV. That’s our society. We think it’s better to watch TV than to confront our emotions. It’s better to do anything rather than simply be in our bodies.
You’re feeling awful? The only thing you want to do is lie in bed? I say: that’s fine. Go to bed. Settle in.
Now that you’re there, find one sensation in your body and take your time and feel everything the sensation is telling you. If it hurts, all the better. That pain, right now, is the pain you’re supposed to be feeling. Feel it. Feel your other sensations. Breathe. Feel them again. Pay attention to them. Let them come, let them go. Be in them.
If distracting thoughts come up, tell them not now, I’m doing something more important. Go back to your feelings.
You may want to talk to your feelings. Tell them they are welcome! Tell them that you want to know everything they have to say to you. Tell them you’re listening. Then lie back and listen.
What is your body saying? It doesn’t speak in words. There are no words. I can’t type it. You can’t translate it. Your body speaks in pain, in fear, in sadness. The sensations are the message. Feeling the sensations is listening to the message.
Please do not tell the feelings you hate them. Don’t tell yourself you’re an idiot for feeling them. Don’t pretend that everything’s OK. If a thought comes up that all of this is in your head, that none of this is real, reject that thought. This is real. It is really happening. The pain is real. The disinclination to get out of bed is real. When you are no longer suffering, you will want to get out of bed! But you’re not there right now.
The path to healing is right here, in and through the pain and the self-hatred and the anger and the sadness and the worry and the fear. This is the path. Be with and in the sensations. These sensations are the only things that truly matter to you right now. Please don’t ignore them or push them away. Don’t pretend to care about TV, or anything else.
The lung-balloons metaphor may seem weird as you read about it. But it’s correct on several levels, and it may feel correct as you do it.
Trauma and mental pain really does limit your ability to accomplish hard things, important things.
When you can’t do those things, it really does feel like you’re just skimming the surface of life. Your life feels small, shallow.
The feelings in your body that accompany emotional pain: most of them are located in your chest and belly.
Very often, when you take the time to feel your feelings, the worst pains will make it seem like you literally can’t breathe.
Lying in your painful feelings is not quiet or peaceful. There’s a rhythm and a sound to the pain. The rhythm and the sound of your own pain may not precisely remind you of air escaping a balloon … but maybe sometimes you will see the resemblance.
It’s a slow process. It’s a physical process. It’s not very pleasant.
Other whales will think you’re a weirdo for spending all your time on the surface playing with balloons. Ignore them. They don’t have as many balloons as you do. If they did, they would understand.
You start to feel better a little bit at a time. After a while, you may feel like one tiny balloon is gone, and now you can breathe just a tiny bit better. And that feels great! But if you work at it, you can drain another one, and you’ll feel that much better. And again, and again.
Balloon-draining is something you can do as often as you like. Some days you will feel so awful that you have no choice. Some days you will feel so good that there’s no way you want to spend any time in bed! On the in-between days, where you feel kind of OK, you just might decide to drain some more balloons for an hour or two.
As you get better, you may realize that every hour spent with your balloons helps you feel better, physically and emotionally, just a tiny bit. A few weeks, a few months in, and you may start to feel better all over. Your lung capacity is increasing. You find yourself diving deeper than you have in a while. You’ve forgotten how good it can feel.