Mary Schiller argues that Western culture wrongly treats prolonged sadness and grief as medical problems. She describes emotions as transient waves, not fixed conditions, and shares how she stopped treating her anxiety as a problem after recognizing it was a label imposed by others, which led to a calmer life.
Hello, hello, it's Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com. I am happy to be talking with you today from my apartment here in Paris, France. It's about to start pouring outside, so I thought I would stay in and talk with you from here today. This morning, while I was doing some work around the apartment, I was watching a movie on Amazon called Equals starring Kristen Stewart and also Guy Pearce and an actor who I didn't recognize and I can't remember his name. But the premise of the movie is it's set in the future and the premise is that humans no longer have feelings. And if humans have feelings, they are considered sick. And they have to be treated. And of course, I couldn't help but think about Western culture and the whole conversation that you and I are engaged in as I was watching this movie, because it seems in Western culture, for example, that there are certain feelings that if we have them or if we have them for a certain length of time, they are then considered problems. That if we, for instance, feel sad for what someone else deems as too long, then we are suddenly seen as having a problem. Well, in the movie, when people have these feelings and they're considered sick, they get treated for them. Well, of course, that's what we do in Western culture now. We have these judgments about feelings, certain feelings, as being problematic. We look at people as having these specific time limits that they must adhere to. So if they are quote unquote sad for too long, or if they feel grief for too long, then suddenly that is a full-fledged problem that needs to be medicated or it needs to be psychoanalyzed or something. It has— something has to be done about it. And I would really love if I could do one thing before I am not on this earth anymore, I would love to completely blow this up into a million zillion pieces. Because it's absolutely ridiculous. As I was watching the movie, I was so struck by the fact that the two main characters are doing everything they can to not feel certain things, and certain things being love to the point of sometimes it being painful and the incredible rush you get when somebody comes to see you who you care about and you haven't seen them for a long time, or this sort of delicious pain that exists when someone you love goes away, or all of these beautiful range of feelings. And then after I watched the movie, again, doing some work around the apartment, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces of music in the world, which is Symphony No. 3 by Beethoven, and I was listening to the incredible range of emotion that comes through that music. And all I could say to myself was, why, oh why, do we continue to look at feelings as problems? That if we have a feeling of sadness, that that becomes a problem if it lasts quote unquote too long. What if we simply saw that feelings are natural, that human beings are designed to have A to Z, full range, full spectrum of feelings, and that they are coming from momentary thought They're not coming from any situation or person or anything out there. They're coming from momentary, transient thinking, and they are not designed to be problems. They're designed as gifts. Feelings are the most amazing gift we could ever hope to have. Now you might say, well, Mary, you know, what if somebody is sad and they have depressed type thinking for a long time, isn't that a problem? Well, the only reason it's a problem is because they've been told it's a problem. The only reason why my post-traumatic stress disorder type symptoms looked like a problem to me was because somebody told me they were. As soon as I kind of woke up in 2014 to the fact that they weren't a problem at all, that they were simply thoughts I was listening to and kind of buying into, Guess what happened? I stopped feeling stressed and anxious all the time. And there's no miracle here. There's no miracle here. It's seeing that feelings are normal. They're coming from thinking. We can have any feelings that come through. We can't control them or do anything about them. We can simply feel them until they're not there anymore and a new feeling comes in. And here's the piece that is so crucial to this, so I want to make sure and mention it, is feelings are like the waves on the ocean, okay? They are the surface of our experience. They are what give us this feeling of being human. It was the piece in the film Equals that I was just talking about that was missing for all of these characters was they were missing this essential element of being human was this range of feelings. So their lives were quite flat. But underneath, underneath these waves of feelings of sadness and happiness and grief and love and all these things is something that never changes, never ever changes. And that is your core self. Your core of peace, of calm, of composure, the depth that is who you are, that has nothing whatsoever to do with any emotional ups and downs as we might call them. And so when I saw those two things for myself, when I saw that through all of those years of dealing with PTSD symptoms, that I was fine, that I was calm and composed and peaceful and joyful because that was what I was made of. When I saw that, plus the fact that I didn't have to worry about any direction my daily feelings were going in, suddenly my whole life changed. It became much more exciting. It became much more what's the word I'm looking for, just a passion came through me that I had never experienced before. And it was because I realized I could embrace the entire experience of being human without ever labeling any aspect of it as a problem. So I really hope that this video has been helpful to you today. Please feel free to leave a comment wherever you're watching it, and thank you so very much for joining me. If you'd ever like to get in touch, please go to my website at maryschiller.com or email me mary@maryschiller.com. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.
