The right to (emotionally) flood
Nurturing ecosystems of support that give us space to feel
I grew up thinking that floods were only ever bad thing. When I was little our home was separated from the river Thames by just a pavement and a wall. We were safe, but flooding would have been scary, destructive and dangerous. In many ways, in many places, flooding is a huge risk to humans. But flooding isn’t always a problem. Recently I attended a Land Justice Oxford event, a speaker read a list of the ‘rights of rivers’. This included ‘the right to flood’. Oh, I thought, flooding is to be encouraged? Flooding is part of a process of ongoing change that both destroys and creates habitats. Man-made defences such as flood walls, embankments and damns can only temporarily contain the force of water. Rivers that are controlled like this flood in part because of the way they’ve been twisted out of their organic shape, and taken out of the context in which they had the potential be a part of growth.
When I heard that rivers ought to have the right to flood, I felt something shift in me. I’d recently come across the term ‘emotional flooding’. This is when a person is totally overwhelmed by their emotions or distress. Big versions of the fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses. An emotionally flooded person may want to escape a room, push everyone away, have seemingly sudden outbursts of anger, shutdown and go quiet, may sob, have a panic attack etc. Some of that is because of the intensity of the feelings themselves, and some of that is the shame and fear about what might happen when we feel strong feelings.
Often we deem certain feelings and the expression of those feelings as ‘negative’ rather than being specific about what each feeling tells us and how it can serve us. It’s easy to think when you’re flooded by sadness, anger or grief, ‘this is bad, people don’t like seeing me like this, they can’t handle it, it’s too much for them, I must contain this, let’s put up barriers to keep this all inside.’
We live in a society where the overflow of feelings (particularly those deemed negative) is deemed ‘too much’ and destructive. And don’t get me wrong, there are ways in which we can hurt those around us when we are emotionally flooded, that we can try to unlearn. But that it isn’t inevitable that being emotional flooded is harmful to oneself or others. There are ways in which we can be flooded because we have been harmed. Sometimes we need to be in an emotionally flooded state to prevent harm. Sometimes an emotionally flooded state tells us what’s wrong, or what needs to change.
Learning rivers ought to have the right to flood made me think: What if you had the right to flood when you needed to? What if you understood that there was something transformative in the emotional flooding?
Some of what capitalistic humans do to try to feel safer, by controlling and dominating nature, actually increases the risk of floods. Things that mitigate the harm of a (water) flood get designed out: soil that absorbs rainfall is eroded or tarmacked over, trees are cut down, there is nowhere for the water to go but in the river, and eventually out again as a flood. How we treat our environments, with a fear of things that might spill over, we extend to how we treat ourselves. Emotional flooding is often pathologised (treated as abnormal and the sign of sickness) with the intention to correct and contain it. Those who get emotionally flooded can be told that their responses are disproportionate, irrational, hysterical overreactions.
Some therapeutic methods like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy encourage ‘negative feelings’ to be reframed, challenged, rationalised, contained and channelled in a different direction. In some circumstances, this is helpful, rerouting the overloading flow of emotion into more manageable streams, or putting up a damn so that someone can deal with the emotions at a later (perhaps safer) time.
This can be both helpful and harmful. For me, these tools have often felt like forcing a coursing river into a narrow shape, making it likely to burst its banks at a later point. Instead, what I have found more helpful, is when I can (this is very dependent on how safe a certain setting is), letting the flood happen when it happens. I used to be scared that if I let the flooding happen, I would be totally swept away or even drown. But when I let it happen (for example, crying when I felt sad, when tears came to my eyes), it passed much faster.
Often what these tools of rationalising and seeking to contain emotions often neglect is that flooding is an embodied response at a nervous system level. That feeling that you want to bolt out of a room, that you are frozen or that you’re so restless from being overwhelmed, those are all happening in the body. Emotions create physical energy in the body, literally, which has to be stored or released, it cannot just disappear because you think it should. We have to complete the stress cycle, and that’s what I was doing when I allowed myself to cry.
Emotional flooding isn’t an abnormal thing for humans. Like environments that have ways of being resilient to floods, we have inbuilt mechanisms in our nervous systems to deal with it. Some of us find it easier to access these than others, be that because of our attachment styles, our life experiences, how safe our environments are, and the way our bodyminds work: disability, neurodiversity or sickness. Whilst the stories we tell ourselves matter immensely, our bodies need to be tended to just as much as our thoughts.
What if being flooded is helpful information about what we need around us? The prospect of a flood is terrifying in a manmade city that doesn’t include all the ways nature deals with flooding already. In a similar way, if we design care out of our human interactions and society, no wonder if feels terrifying to be emotionally flooded. The good thing is, we have human practices that can support those who are being emotionally flooded, such as coregulation, care, gentleness, tenderness, expansiveness. People tend to one another instinctively, we ask someone who is upset if they want hugs, we make cups of tea when we have big talks, we cook food for those who are grieving. But we need to design this into our society, relationship models and care work. We need to give these efforts the time and resources they require.
What if we saw how spilling our emotions might help us and those around us grow? We may think that we are protecting other people when forcefully contain ourselves, being contained isn’t good in the long run. And whilst it is important we can do the level of self care which is accessible to us, it is also vital and very human that other people witness and hold us in our pain. Not just for the person suffering, but for actually for the benefit of everyone involved- being vulnerable gives other people the permission they may need to do the same.
Often seeking to solely contain emotions, just isn’t curious and creative enough. It isn’t asking what the conditions were that created the flood, and whether those conditions could be changed to prevent a flood in the future.
What if we let floods tell us about how we can transform the world?
If you want to think about some of this some more, here are some reflective creative writing or thinking prompts:
Back in January, I co-designed a creative session: Bodies of Water: Trauma and Healing in Health and Care where we invited people to delve into real life narratives to explore resistances and more multi-layered stories of health, sickness and challenging institutional trauma both as experts by experience (service users) and as practitioners. We dreamed about the rivers of care that collectively flow into the oceans of abundance.
These are a few of the creative prompts from the session, undertake these gently, there are no right or wrong answers:
Where have the dams been in your river of health (or emotional wellbeing)? In other words, what has blocked or changed the course of your health and how might that be designed differently? What has allowed for smooth movement or flow, how have you overcome barriers?
What would collecting our droplets (of care) look like? Can you think of where you have received droplets of care and how they may become more abundant?
And some new prompts, off the back of this blog:
In what ways are you forcing your emotions down particular paths?
Where does it serve you to reroute the rivers of your emotions? Where does this rerouting hinder you?
Where does it serve you to mindfully observe the flow of your emotions?
Where can you flood (express or feel through your emotions) safely? How might you create or find conditions where it was safe(r) to flood?
Thank you to everyone who has been reading my work so far, I love hearing your feedback so please do share!
With care,
Rachel x