My Emotional Overflow About This Country
- anthropologylady36
- Jan 12
- 12 min read
I am one of those people who feel very strong emotions with tears in my eyes, I feel choked up and some other physical things occur sometimes, when I am proud of something or I feel moved by an experience. There is actually a name for this, it is called Dimorphous Expression. Dimorphous Expression of Positive Emotion: Displays of Both Care and Aggression in Response to Cute Stimuli is a peer reviewed journal article by Oriana R. Aragón, Margaret S. Clark, Rebecca L. Dyer, and John A. Bargh from Yale University and are some of the individuals that researched this phenomenon. Basically, what happens to me (for instance) if I am extremely proud of something or feel moved by something going on in the world or around me, I feel it in an almost overwhelming way. These feelings usually include tears, or feelings of speechlessness, because I feel overcome by emotion. There is also something called “Emotional Overflow” which is similar. In the case of Dimorphous Expression, I have not ever felt aggressive. Yes, I am actually going someplace with this, so bear with me. The case I am trying to make is that I have a great deal of empathy, I am an emotionally charged person a lot of the time and I am very sensitive. There are several times in my life when I have had “Emotional Overflow” and felt like this. I think this is why I am able to empathize with my mental health clients is that I have the ability to put myself into their shoes due to this sensitivity.
Just to give a definition here to understand further:
“Dimorphous expression and emotional overflow are concepts in psychology that describe why people sometimes exhibit seemingly contradictory physical responses (like crying) to extremely powerful emotions, even positive ones such as intense joy, pride, or the feeling of seeing something incredibly beautiful.”
“Emotional Overflow: This describes the phenomenon where an emotion is so potent that it exceeds the body's normal capacity for expression, resulting in tears as a physical mechanism to release the powerful feeling. In essence, the tears serve a regulatory function, acting as an emotional safety valve for the brain and body.”
Above were AI definitions, however I did read the resources where the information came from, and I was trying to remember the word for what this was as I have studied it. Part of the information came from that peer reviewed article I mentioned. This overflow can also be a negative thing sometimes when you have negative emotional overflow. Even the positive feelings are overwhelming, this I have experienced. The way you get choked up, and the uncontrollable tears. The term emotional flooding (often referred to as "emotional overflow") was coined by psychologist Dr. John Gottman. He defined it as the experience of being overwhelmed by a partner's negative emotions during conflict to the point where one feels a strong desire to withdraw from the interaction.
So, I felt this a lot when I was in the United States Military in the Navy. My motivation to go into the military was due to lack of other opportunities and the fact my mom drove me to the Navy recruiter’s office because she didn’t want me to live in her basement anymore. I get it, I wasn’t really doing anything. I will be honest in saying I didn’t do well in high school, for one I moved around a lot and my grades fluctuated from A’s to D’s. I don’t believe I ever got an F, but my memory is foggy. I was always smart enough to kind of “wing it” and graduate. My whole last year of high school, my books aside from library books stayed in my locker every night and all weekend and I never did homework and that last year, I would skip school at times. I only read or studied things I liked sometimes, but that was usually reading which I enjoyed, or French class and I did take anthropology out of interest in high school.
So my big goal was to go to cosmetology school, which I probably could have done well, but I had living situation issues come up with my father who I never lived with until I was 18 when I moved out to live with him in the Bay Area and go to beauty school out there, I had only visited him previously and had no idea how it would really be and I had to move back to my mother’s house when I left.
My mother lived in Salt Lake City and my father Marin County. So I packed up my car I bought for the journey back to Salt Lake and I was not a good driver and I don’t know how I made the drive home alive but I did, and moved home with my mother, her husband and my younger siblings again. I tried to go to cosmetology school in Salt Lake, and I did for a while, but there were problems with my student loans, and I was stuck not knowing what to do. So, by the time I was 19, I opted on trying to make the military a career course and my mother thought it was a great idea. I had done nothing to prepare for college and hadn’t had interest in college. On hindsight, I should not have waited so long in my life to go to college, but then I wouldn’t have had some of the experiences I had, which would have changed me altogether.
Pride started to come after I joined the Navy. I was looking to get some free travel, learn some skills, I have to admit that when I joined I was not as patriotic, basically I didn’t care a lot about the world or what was going on, to be honest and I was 19 after all. But when I took my oath when I joined (a time I had overflowing emotion), and after all the hard work of boot camp after that, when I had to travel to Florida and go through one of the most challenging times in my life, that was one of those moments with overflowing emotions, as I was so proud to have gone through all I did and I made it and I was officially in the Navy, by that time I felt a sense of pride and belonging to something larger than myself, and I felt so patriotic.
A short time later, I went to firefighting school at Treasure Island in San Francisco, I walked through burning buildings, I climbed up on 50 foot ladders, learned how to carry full grown men, and I learned how to be heroic. I ended up being a crash and rescue airfield firefighter of all things in Adak, Alaska which was isolated duty. I drove one of those large firefighting trucks you see at the airport, and I had to have a lot of upper body strength which I had developed, to actually be able to do a lot of the tasks we had to do. I learned about different aircraft and how to save people when they crashed or had emergency issues, I even taught other people classes about it I worked with.
Below, the whole Island was a base, but it was considered a Naval Air Station. These were pretty much the conditions we live in. We had base housing or the barracks. The population was less than 10,000 people including some civilians, and the tour there, was approximately a year and a half, I was there for that long, and it was isolated duty.
In my work in the Navy, I came to realize with where I was and what we were doing that we were the “good guys” in the world. I was so damn proud of this. It mattered what I did, and I felt at different times that swelling of pride. If it was launching arresting gear(I was one of the only women to have the strength to crank it to start it), which was a chain that would go across the runway as jets caught it with their tail hook for F-14 Jets that happened to come around sometimes, or watching the launch and feeling the thunder standing on the side of the runway, I was so moved and I was so damn proud to be there. I would be totally overwhelmed with that emotion, and I would be so proud of my country and what I was doing.
Other times in my life where there was that much emotion were the times that I had my son and daughter and other moments with my partners at the time in regard to this.
But what matters here is I grew up in the Navy. I became an adult and most of all, I became a patriot. It wasn’t all perfect, but my time in the Navy was special. We were all so confident about who we were and what we were doing. It was pretty evident with the world situation what was going on, and that is when I started to care and be more informed by my own choice to notice that there were people in the world that were positive and people in the world that did bad things and we were the good guys. We all knew it and we all were together in that and I never lost that feeling, even with the Bush administration and all going on with Iraq and 9/11, and eventually Afghanistan, because we lived in a system I trusted and I thought we would get out of that scenario and it was a temporary thing. We had a constitution and we all still honored it. Some liberties were taken, but the structure was still strong, and I never doubted who the U.S. was as a whole. I would still get choked up and feel tears when I heard the Star Spangled Banner, or when I recited the Pledge of Allegiance with children learning it, when I was a substitute teacher while I was working on my MS degree and did that part time. I loved America. I had Overflowing Emotions about it.
So I guess in all sincerity and from the bottom of my heart and those emotions that are so strong within me, I think that is what is killing me so much now, literally killing my soul and my identity, is what I am seeing now. From my fellow Americans to my government, I always had so much faith in, watching as all of the checks and balances crumble, I am watching the Supreme Court not do anything to protect us. The Congress works against us. The president who is supposed to work for us, give for us, could care less about us and our whole world as we know it fall to ruin.
When I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with grad school, I was interested for a little while in the Social Work Program at the University of Utah. I was trying to get pre-requisites done while I was an undergrad, for the graduate program as it was required for the program to get in. I mainly wanted to be a therapist, and there were different paths to that. When I realized that it was highly competitive for that program, and the PhD program for Psych was even more so as it went straight from a BS to PhD (I took pre-requisites for that and even volunteered to do work for professors doing studies for letters of recommendation), I went with a private college I had been exploring and other people I knew had been through, that worked a little differently and I have now been a mental health therapist for ten years because I did so.
The thing about the pre-requisite classes to be a social worker was that you had to take civics classes, government and ethics classes to know just how in an advanced level the government works. It was like someone taking the blinders off and I just ate it up and learned so very much. That is why I get so alarmed and that is why I feel so helpless, is that all of the things that were designed to help us stay safe and fair as a nation, (as well as it could be anyway), is what is being attacked now, systematically. I also learned in these classes about social inequality, as social workers see that regularly and how unfair the system is. But that gave me enough knowledge to know that the things that are happening now are methodical, it was planned and I don’t think it was just the president, it was those behind him in the shadow, and most of his administration. But it was designed to destroy the country we knew as we knew it. We were a thriving nation, based on high ideals. Was it perfect? No. But it was one of the best around, nothing in this world is perfect. Also, it was based on supporting your fellow man, your fellow citizen and being able to have a voice, which is being taken away from us and signs are this is going to be getting worse.
I don’t mean to be a “downer” to people in my life. I don’t like these overwhelming hopeless feelings I am having. I have to find a reason to get up every day. If I didn’t have my partner who I love more than life itself, if I didn’t have my two cats, I may feel too hopeless to get out of bed at all. When things happen like the fact we even have ICE which is an exact duplicate of the Gestapo, a time I never thought I would ever see in this country in the first place or that they murdered a citizen and the leaders in the government are saying it was the citizen’s fault, when we starved to death hundreds of thousands of people around the world by denying them aid (many of those were children), and no one seems to care, when it becomes “woke” by half of the citizens in the country to care about others, like our country has been known to do, WHAT HAS HAPPENED! When those same leaders look at us with not a bit of conscience with a smirk and we are told, “Enjoy this Christmas, it will be your last” by our president in social media, well I feel hopeless. This is not the country where I would work together with others in times of trouble, where we worked as a team and we were proud of who we were and what we were doing. Where I was, we were protecting our world as we knew it. The literal last frontier and we made jokes about being in such a location, but we all were the most patriotic people I have ever met, I would have taken a bullet for, or helped any of my peers at any time. I just wonder what happened to all of that.
I feel like I have lost my own identity.
I feel those overwhelming feelings of dread and anxiety. Of sadness and pain.
I am 60 now and I have a shelf life. I don’t worry so much for me, it is about the younger people, my children’s kids. In another bit of heartache, my adult children in their thirties, my son is nearing 40, my daughter 35, they do not have an idea what it was like to grow up in the time period I did. Again, this was not perfect, but I grew up in the late 60s through the 80s, and life was different, the system was more fair and we had been through the Civil Rights movement for people of color and even women, there was more of a middle class. Even those with less money could own a home, automobiles, they could go to college and actually afford it when they worked during the Summer. Neither of my maternal grandparents graduated high school. My grandfather had been a professional musician and still worked occasionally but became a window washer and painter to support his family of four children. He worked as the church janitor part time to get them into the parochial school for a better education. When the kids were old enough, my grandmother got a job and eventually became the manager of our local Sear’s Department store cafeteria. They owned a home and two cars. The house was old and run down, but it was theirs, their cars weren’t fancy. But they still took care of and helped out their grandchildren with toys, clothing and brought over groceries when times were tough. We also were able to enjoy going to amusement parks and trips Back East from Los Angeles where we lived, to visit extended family in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. They managed to do all of that. My children are struggling and trying to make it. They have had some help from the in-laws. But their ideals are those of this administration and they believe this is a good thing, these kinds of beliefs about others. They wanted all of this to happen, and they have shown that they are prejudiced against other races. I won’t get into too much detail. But this is also heartbreaking and we are estranged. So that even makes it worse. Sometimes it is even harder to get out of bed. There is more to that situation, but I won’t get into that as that is more about relationships themselves.
But I have to say that every day I wake up, I dread knowing what is going on in the world as especially since 2026 started, it has been something bad every single day in our country. It is like waking up to a nightmare that we are living in that we can’t get out of. I love my country and I was proud to be an American. I can no longer say that. And I wish I had those overwhelming feelings I had of pride where I had tears in my eyes, I miss those so much now.
