Discovering your ‘emotional home”
Happy Sunday, friends, and thanks for all of your lovely notes about your own relationship to time from last week’s Soother. Writing about my fraught relationship to time and the stress levels I’m experiencing in relation to doing, striving, productivity gave me some settling space this week. In particular I was able to connect my looming burnout with a concept I heard about recently (I can’t remember where, unfortunately) called the “emotional home.”
From what I understand, the emotional home is the place you feel most comfortable and often retreat to. And it’s not always necessarily good for you. But it’s habitual. For example, somebody who was raised in chaos or dysfunction might find themselves in workplaces of chaos and toxicity over and over again, simply because at some core level, that sort of insanity feels like home. Or a person who ends up in romantic relationships repeatedly with an emotionally unavailable person might be re-enacting a relationship with an emotionally unavailable caregiver. Or somebody who reverts to stressful situations over and over again, and trying to create structure out of the chaos, or ‘over functioning,’ as I do, feels good in that place at some level. Somebody who was raised in anger might resort to yelling, again and again. I know somebody who, immediately as soon as something good or promising happens to her, starts harping on all that’s going…
