NAMING OUR EMOTIONS: can you describe how you felt about Ashling's death?

THE initial intention of this article was to review a book for our readers, the most recent publication by Brene Brown called 'Atlas of the Heart'. Brene Brown is a New York Times best-selling author and research professor at the University of Houston, Texas.

In her book she explores 87 emotions and experiences that have been organized into groups by herself and a team of researchers in an extensive study spanning three years analysing approximately 1,500 academic publications.

Why is it important to be aware of and to label our emotions? A large body of research shows that the process of labelling emotional experience is related to greater emotional regulation and psychosocial well-being. Our nervous system is soothed when we tell it what we are dealing with, our frontal lobe is activated (the part of the brain that looks after abilities such as reasoning and problem solving) and the activity of the amygdala (the smoke alarm or threat detector) is inhibited.

According to Brown in order to recognise emotions and experiences, we need to become familiar with how emotions feel in the body, be curious about our beliefs and habitual behaviours and we need to recognise the context of what we are feeling and thinking.

If we can establish a common understanding of the language of emotion and human experience then we can connect better with ourselves and with others.

Here we explore some of these emotions and how Brown and her colleagues have described them. However, while the article started out as a book review we decided to link it to the impact of a specific event. That event took place in our community on January 12 last when Ashling Murphy, while out for her run after an ordinary, busy working day, was attacked and killed.

It is probably fair to say that everyone who knew Ashling – from her family, partner, friends, colleagues, pupils, fellow musicians and teammates, to those of us who have only come to know of her because of her death – experienced a rollercoaster of emotions over the past month.

Reading Brown’s book (pictured below), there are a number of those 87 emotions that have been truly heartfelt by people far and wide in recent weeks. We have selected some that have particularly resonated with both of us and also with the clients we both saw in the second half of January.

Anguish

Even if you had never heard the word before, there is something about the way it sounds and feels as you say it that even feels painful. Brown defines it “as an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief and powerlessness”. In addition, anguish is so brutal that it can bring us to our knees and the powerlessness of the emotion deepens the trauma.

In the days after the tragedy, people’s shock could be seen on their faces, in their expressions and even the way they walked and held themselves. The incredulity also that such a thing could happen in our quiet, safe country town at any time of the day or night never mind in broad daylight.

Grief

Three fundamental elements of grief emerged from Brown’s research, loss, longing and feeling lost.

Longing is related to the loss of a loved one. Brown describes this as “an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or simply touch what we’ve lost”.

Any one of us who has ever lost a loved one will recognize the yearning. When someone dies unexpectedly and tragically there can be no meaning. All of those people who were part of Ashling’s life will no doubt be feeling lost.

Reaching out to others and feeling connected to other people is probably one of the most helpful things we can do to navigate loss. One of the striking things about the weeks following Ashling's death was the sense of community and connectedness that we shared as we attended the many, many vigils and watched or attended Ashling’s funeral Mass. In this regard our community was not confined by geographical boundaries as we witnessed an outpouring of grief that was worldwide.

Fear and Anxiety

People often use these two emotions together or interchangeably. Brown describes some of the differences between them. For example, she describes fear as a short-lasting intense immediate feeling in response to threat, which triggers the activation of the sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight/freeze).

Fear is designed to protect us from physical threats. We are hardwired to experience fear. From an evolutionary point of view, we experienced fear when we saw a wild animal coming towards us as it activated this threat system. Brown describes anxiety as pertaining to the future and it can be part of our personality makeup as well as an emotion.

Undoubtedly, women in particular will feel more fearful and more anxious as a consequence of what happened to one of us. As one of our clients said, it could have been any of us. Our greenway is a beautiful amenity and another client described it as “a lifeline” for her (and many more of us) over the past two years. But we now associate its beauty with the loss of another young woman’s life.

Locals know that the nearest access point to the canal walkway from Tullamore town is called Fiona’s Way (named after Fiona Pender whose family home was just metres away).

Anger

Brown and her colleagues describe anger as an activating emotion that arouses our fight/flight system and makes us want to take action. Brown feels that while anger can be just anger on its own, it can also be a secondary emotion which can mask a myriad of other emotions and experiences, for example, fear, helplessness, grief, depression. Either way she says we have “the right and need to feel and own our anger”.

However, maintaining that anger over a long period of time is not sustainable. Brown also describes anger as a “catalyst” and says it's an emotion “we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice”. This last sentence in particular, really struck a chord with us.

When we think about Ashling, even those of us who did not know her personally, we think of a talented, gifted, beautiful woman full of life and at the beginning of her adult journey. With time and support and connectedness, hopefully we will be able to transform the anger we feel at her death into changes in our society and our culture. Courage, compassion and justice may be part of Ashling’s legacy to us all.

Julie O’Flaherty and Imelda Ferguson are chartered clinical psychologists, both based in private practice in Tullamore. They write a fortnightly column for the Tullamore Tribune and the Midland Tribune.  Through Mind Your Self Midlands, they run courses on Positive Psychology and Mindfulness through the year. They can be contacted through the Psychological Society of Ireland www.psychologicalsociety.ie (Find a Psychologist section) or on their Facebook page, Mind Your Self Midlands.