Lee Suckling: The key to handling raw emotions

What is needed is actually a buffer between the raw and the processed states of your experience. Photo / Getty Images

Sometimes life leaves you feeling emotionally raw.

This is a difficult feeling to describe because it's often the absence of feeling. Raw emotions like anger, confusion, shock, desperation, and sadness can leave you depleted, even broken. As if the only thoughts you can muster up are, "I have nothing left right now".

"Raw", as a term, is used when the emotions are so fresh. They're new, ripe, and unprocessed. You haven't been able to understand anything or even figure out how you feel. They're like open wounds – you've just been cut, and the immediacy of the pain is all you know.

Raw emotions often come about when experiencing the worst that life can throw at you, e.g. the death of loved ones or some sort of betrayal by a partner, a medical prognosis or a catastrophic argument that changes your relationship with someone.

The last time I remember having really raw emotions was when someone close to me had a serious cancer diagnosis. I was left in a strange state of numbness for days. Not unlike when I've felt raw in the past upon going through a break-up or experiencing a death in the family. It's a combination of worry, confusion, and exhaustion.

What's impossible to realise in the moment is that processing only comes with time. You can't fast-track it. This is something many of us have a hard time with because we can't stand internal discomfort. We want a solution, we want to feel better, we want to accept and move on.

How to survive these seemingly impossible feelings

Surviving raw emotions seems impossible. Often, our reactions to them are extreme – we yell, slam doors, walk out, throw things... such responses seem appropriate and justified at the time, but never really are. They are just our human go-to reactions when we don't know how to feel.

What is needed is actually a buffer between the raw and the processed states of your experience. Short of becoming some sort of Buddhist enlightened spirit, how can you find this?

I like to sit down on the floor and breathe. It's not quite foetal in its position but it feels safe. I concentrate on my breath by counting: inhale for five seconds, exhale for five seconds. While it doesn't make any of the raw emotions go away, it often stops them from escalating. That, in itself, is a real feat.

I will then try and do what's called a "body scan". I observe my body from head to toe and notice where I feel discomfort. Does my forehead hurt? My shoulders? Is my stomach in knots? I don't do anything with the information I glean from this scan. I just take it in. I sit with it.

I then attempt the most difficult part of surviving raw emotions: I try to stop myself from making decisions.

My natural inclination is to solve a problem by whatever means necessary. I'm sure many of you know this feeling well. It's that "fight or flight" survival response that mental health professionals bang on about. What we are not told is that metaphorically fighting or flying away aren't the only two options. There is a third: just stop. Wait for time to pass.

When we're suffering, we can make unwise, expensive, long-lasting decisions all in the name of survival. This is often where we go very wrong in dealing with raw emotions.

I don't want to infer that time heals everything, but it's how I get from the state of rawness to a place where I can logically process things.

When you're calm and able to think more objectively, important decisions, changes, and actions are all in much safer hands. Paradoxically, I actually find this is the fastest way to move on from raw emotions overall.