Summary
Joe lays out the hidden cost of the deal most of us made with ourselves after being swept away by an emotion: either we vow never to be taken over again, or we resign ourselves to being helplessly controlled. Both, he argues, leave us controlled by the emotion—what he calls the “rebel dilemma,” like the person who won’t tie their shoe precisely because they were told to. And the suppression option isn’t free: holding an emotion down is muscular work. He invites you to try stopping all your emotions right now and notice that the effort itself is stress, pain, and constriction—chronic holding that eventually shows up in the face, the voice, and the body as depression and a lackluster life.
Joe tells the story of his own thirteen years without tears. His parents couldn’t tolerate crying, so they shamed and mocked it out of him. Finding an old photo of himself crying jolted him awake, but it still took eighteen months and repeated trips deep into the LA back country to “fake cry” before the floodgates finally opened and he cried for days—coming out of it with a changed body, more energy, and a different way of relating to people. From there he develops the third option beyond expressing and suppressing: letting the emotion move. Drawing on Tibetan philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine, he describes emotion as energy running through a tube—kink it one way and you get suppression, kink it another and you get a tantrum, but let it flow fully felt and welcomed and anger becomes clarity, boundaries, and determination; fear becomes excitement and activation.
The payoff is fluidity. When emotions can move, they stop controlling you and start informing you: anger signals a boundary, fear signals an unmet need. You get the wisdom of the emotion without being run by it. Joe ties this to connection—citing Patty Wipfler’s Listen—noting that a disconnected child usually has a big unfelt emotion, and that across thousands of people in his work, fully feeling and expressing emotion reliably restores connection. He closes by pointing out that suppressing the hard emotions also flattens the good ones, so opening the channels lets excitement and joy return too.
Key Concepts
- Managing your emotions is the rebel dilemma — either way the emotion controls you
- Suppressing emotions has a physical price the body pays
- You can’t think or shortcut your way past an emotion — you have to let it move
- Fully felt and unresisted, every emotion becomes a virtue
- Feeling and expressing emotion restores connection
- When emotions become fluid they give you signals instead of controlling you
Key Quotes
“In either case, we are being controlled by the emotion. It’s either controlling us by taking us away or it’s controlling us by forcing us to manage it. It’s what I call the rebel dilemma.”
“Managing your emotion actually requires you to constrict your muscles, to be in pain, to be in discomfort.”
“That’s why I haven’t cried in 13 years.”
“But uncinked, fully felt, fully loved, fully welcomed, it looks like Gandhi or it looks like Martin Luther King or it looks like Mother Teresa. It is a clear boundary.”
“That anger becomes clarity and determination. That fear becomes excitement.”
“If we’ve stopped ourselves from feeling one thing, in some way we’re stopping ourselves from feeling everything.”
“They only feel disconnected when there was too much gunk in the system and they didn’t get it all out.”
Transcript
At some point in all of our lives, we have been taken away by an emotional experience. We’ve gotten angry when we didn’t want to. We’ve had a temper tantrum when we didn’t want to. We got really sad when we didn’t want to. And we make a pact with ourselves. We say, “Hey, we’re not going to be swept away by these emotions anymore.” Or for the very worst, we’re like, “Oh, I’m going to get swept away by my emotions, but I can’t stop it. It’s just what’s going to happen, and there’s nothing I can do.” So, we’re doing one of those two things. In either case, we are being controlled by the emotion. It’s either controlling us by taking us away or it’s controlling us by forcing us to manage it. It’s what I call the rebel dilemma. Right? If somebody tells you, “Hey, tie your shoe.” If you’re compliant, you just tie your shoe. If you are a rebel, you’re definitely not going to tie your shoe. Either way, controlled by the person saying, “Tie your shoe.”
Not only that, it really, really hurts. So, just think of it this way. If I ask you to stop all of your emotions right now, go ahead and do it. Just stop all of the emotions. You’ll notice that’s not really comfortable. As a matter of fact, another way to say what that is is stress. It is really really hard and it’s a lot of energy to maintain. So managing your emotion actually requires you to constrict your muscles, to be in pain, to be in discomfort. So the question is like how do we not be controlled by the emotion? How do we not allow the emotion to sweep us away in the moment or control us by telling us I have to be managing it and therefore controlling us that way, or by holding it down over the long term and then getting the long-term effects like depression and lackluster life and no vibe.
So, my story through this was hopefully one that you didn’t have to personally experience, but my story was that my parents absolutely would not let me cry. It made them very uncomfortable. I think it made them feel like they were bad parents if I was crying, but most importantly, they weren’t allowed to cry. So, to see somebody else crying made them very upset. And I later realized that you could just tell when somebody wasn’t allowed to cry, because if you were in an airplane and a kid was crying, you could stand up, turn around, look at everybody’s faces, and whoever was bothered was a kid that wasn’t allowed to cry. And so my parents were bothered by crying, so they made fun of me. They threw pity parties. The world’s smallest violin. They even took pictures of me to make fun of me while I was crying.
13 years later, I was going through the photo album and there was one of the pictures of me crying. And it was a face that was amazing because I was at once disgusted and surprised that somebody would take a picture of me while I was crying. But I looked at it, I’m like, that’s why I haven’t cried in 13 years. Cuz I hadn’t cried in 13 years. And I was like, I know that’s not healthy. Something in me knew, just like there’s something in you right now that knows it’s not healthy to not feel your emotions. So I took the picture. I put it on my desk and I kept it there to remind me to cry. Unfortunately, it was so scary for me to cry because I was going to get shamed, because I was going to be made fun of, that I just couldn’t get myself to cry. And so, after like a year and a half of this, I decided I had to take more extreme measures. And so I was living in LA at the time and I went up to the top of a hill at 10,000 ft and then I went into back country and then I hiked off trail way out of the way so that I could fake cry because I was so ashamed of my tears. And I fake cried and still no real tears came. And I fake cried, and for three months I just went out there and fake cried, and then finally the floodgates opened and I cried, I think for like, it was maybe four or five days straight. It was a long time. I could stop if I wanted to. It wasn’t like I was taken over by it, but I was getting years of tears out of my system. Years of them. I just cried and cried. I felt so good. And I remember after the first hour, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to get lost in this.” And I stopped and I was like, “Oh no, I feel better than I did an hour ago. I’m going to keep doing this.” And so I just kept crying. And every couple hours I’d check in, I’m like, “Yep, I’m still feeling better.” And so I just cried for days. I was brushing my teeth crying. I was going to sleep crying. I was just crying. Felt so good.
And my whole world changed after that. How I held my body changed, how I related to people changed, because I was allowing myself to feel an emotion instead of holding it back. I had so much more energy. So oftentimes when people start to feel these emotions for the first time or express these emotions for the first time, they’re just like, “Wow, my hands feel different. My arms feel different. My head feels different,” because they’re not holding anymore. Chronically holding. If you are angry all the time and you’re not expressing it, this starts happening to your face. This starts happening to your voice. This starts happening to your mouth, right? Because we muscularly have to hold the thing that happens in our mind.
And let’s take anger because this is a great example. You take anger and somebody says, “Hey, you’re angry.” Or you say, “Wow, I’m really angry.” And you somehow think there’s actually only two options. The first option is I’m going to go yell at the person. The second option is I’m not going to yell at the person. But there’s another option, which is I’m just going to go get angry, but not at that other person. I’m going to move this anger. And if you haven’t moved your anger in a long time, once you start moving it, it shows up a lot more for a while. And then over an extended period of time you become a lot less angry. But in the short term you might get a lot more angry for a while. But it’s actually opening up that experience of letting the anger move.
And the weird thing is, as you let it move, as you accept it, it changes. So this is talked about both in Tibetan philosophy and in traditional Chinese medicine, that an emotional experience is like a tube, right? So you have this tube and this emotional energy is running through it, right? This emotion is running through the tube and you kink it this way and it reacts one way. You kink it another way, it reacts another way. If you kink it another way, something else happens. But if you let it flow, something completely different happens. And usually when you let it flow, you get the best result.
So let’s take anger as an example again. You kink it this way and it’s “I’m not angry.” You kink it this way and it’s “Why’d I do that? Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why did I do that?” You kink it this way and it’s nice — passive. You kink it this way and it’s “you son of a blah blah blah blah blah.” But uncinked, fully felt, fully loved, fully welcomed, it looks like Gandhi or it looks like Martin Luther King or it looks like Mother Teresa. It is a clear boundary. It is going forward knowing the thing that you want. It’s that clarity. It’s that determination and it’s a clear boundary. “Yeah, I am not accepting this. I am going here.” That’s what anger unresisted feels like.
And each of the emotions has that. If it’s tweaked one way, not fully accepted, tweaked another way, it changes. But when it’s completely unresisted, it also allows it to be this very pure thing. It allows it to be a virtue. No matter how negative you think it is, once you fully love and welcome it, that emotional fluidity becomes a virtue. That anger becomes clarity and determination. That fear becomes excitement. It becomes activation, because what we want is to actually have the full experience of being alive. And once we do, once we open up these channels, then the positive emotions start popping up. Because if we’ve stopped ourselves from feeling one thing, in some way we’re stopping ourselves from feeling everything. And so you get a lot more emotions showing up when those negative emotions are allowed to move.
And the funny thing is those can be just as scary and those can be just as hard to express. So think about it this way. You’re in a cafe and you’re really sad. You’re going to feel self-conscious crying. Probably most people are. But let’s say you’re really angry and now you get really angry alone in a cafe. Well, that’s going to be really self-conscious. And if you’re sitting across from somebody who’s sad, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, maybe.” Or maybe you’re like, “Oh, man. Go to your room.” Whatever. Depends on whether you were allowed to cry or not as a kid. But if you see their anger, then maybe, oh, you’re a little frightened. But now imagine they’re just laughing hysterically. Then you just think they’re crazy. Then it really makes you upset, because we also don’t allow ourselves to actually feel and express the positive emotions. Like if you look at how little kids get excited, that’s what kids do. They actually feel excitement. And if you look at adults, there’s very few adults that actually allow themselves to feel that excitement.
There’s this great book called Listen by Patty Wipfler. I highly recommend it for any parent. And she talks about — and we raise our kids this way — she talks about if your kid feels disconnected, they have a big emotion that they’re not feeling. And if you let them feel that emotion all the way, you’ll notice that they come back into connection. So with us and our kids, you know, say four or five years old, they would just be in that ornery mood and everything was wrong and they’d say no all the time, and we’d see they had a big emotion. We’d make space for that emotion. We let them feel safe enough to have that emotion. They’d have this big expression. Kids need a lot of expression. They got a big expression, and as soon as it was over, they’re like, “Bump, hey, mom. Hey, dad.” And they were just back to being connected. And I see that all the time in my work. We’ve now had thousands of people come through and feel their emotions and express their emotions. And every single time, okay, 99.9% of the time, they feel more connected at the end of it. They only feel disconnected when there was too much gunk in the system and they didn’t get it all out.
So expression is one part and that’s really great, and I really recommend just trying really gentle exercises to express emotions. Know that when you start expressing them, you might be inviting them to be a little more intense for a while. But then there’s also just the being aware, just the feeling of them. And that’s something that we call emotional inquiry. It’s a really cool tool that uses a lot of wonder. It uses a lot of investigation and experimentation to really grok what emotions are, how you feel them, what’s going on in your body. Then you start to learn to, oh, I can just be open to feeling an emotion at any time. And once you’ve started to do this for a while — and it takes, you know, a while, it could take even a year to start being open to the emotions — what you’ll notice is the emotions become really fluid. There’s no resistance, so they don’t control you. And you get to experience them. And you even get to understand the wisdom of them. Oh, look at that. I’m angry. Hm. Probably have a boundary. Probably something’s not working for me. Probably something has to change. Oh, look. I’m scared. Huh. Probably not getting a need met. Probably there’s something that I’m not admitting to myself. And once they become fluid, they give you the signal and then you get to decide, hey, I don’t have to react to it. Not taken by it. I don’t need to manage it. I can just be with it. I can just hang out with this thing. It doesn’t control me. It just moves. And I can decide, oh, is that signal something I want to pay attention to right now?
When that energy frees up, there’s so much more availability for the person to be who they want to be and live the life that they want to live, because they’re not constantly clamping down and saying, “This aspect of me isn’t okay.” And the way to experience that right now is once again see what it’s like to clamp down on that emotional experience. Don’t feel — whatever you do, you don’t feel. Do you want to live that way? Or do you want to relax? Allow yourself to feel everything you can feel in this moment. Or do you want to live this way?