Could Deep Feeling Serve an Important Purpose?
Our emotional lives are especially vibrant, textured and powerful in the postpartum time. We generally understand why: major hormonal, neurological and lifestyle shifts are all happening at the same time. We find ourselves caring around the clock for a new person whose well being we’re deeply invested in.
Many of us also experience more stillness and simplicity through early parenthood, which offers an opportunity to feel more. When busy-ness drops out, there is space and time for feeling our lives more, for more awareness of what it’s like to be in our life.
It is becoming more widely understood that the postpartum hormonal and neurological metamorphosis is as potent as adolescence.
It is uncomfortable to change as much and as quickly as we do in the biological transition to parenthood that birth parents face! (Parents who don’t birth a child also undergo neurological and hormonal change, but the change is often stronger and more immediate in the birth parent and so my motivation for writing this is the biological post-birth experience.)
What if instead of dreading the intense emotionality of postpartum we tried to imagine its purpose?
Elephants sense vibration through their feet. Migrating birds and sea turtles feel the Earth’s magnetic field. Rattlesnakes essentially see their prey’s body heat.
Postpartum birth parents feel emotions intensely. It is a time of heightened sensitivity because of what emotions are and because of what the postpartum time means.
Our emotions make meaning out of our experience of our environment and organize our response pattern. We feel in order to be motivated to create or seek safety.
Following the birth of a baby we have an incredible responsibility to the species and need to keep ourselves and our offspring in maximum safety.
Martha Nussbaum teaches us that emotions are also "intelligent responses to the perception of value.”
Beyond survival it’s in the interest of our children and ourselves to be acutely in touch with what we value. We (and therefore our offspring) naturally turn toward what we value and away from what we don’t.
Deep feeling is our personal and collective compass and map, showing us what we value and need.