Why I stopped "Keeping Calm and Carrying On"
Hey Friends, Rose here.
‘‘Keep Calm and Carry On” was a slogan created by Britain’s wartime propaganda department. It has travelled through the decades and is still displayed across the globe on posters and merchandise.
The message is clear and effective. In crisis situations where survival is threatened, staying calm can mean the difference between life and death.
However, my issue with this seemingly innocent phrase is in its every day application. I didn’t just drink from the iconic mug growing up, I also drank in the message.
Keeping ‘calm, cool, and collected’ was a behaviour that earned me popularity and praise throughout my teens. I regularly received compliments regarding how ‘emotionally mature’ I was for my age, especially in regard to how I concealed myself when I was angry.
Is this emotional maturity? Pretending to be unruffled when actually I felt disappointed, upset, and afraid? Actively withholding my true feelings? Is this what it means to be an adult? It seemed so to me.
“To pretend to not be pretending, when you are.” - Brad Blanton
The cost of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’
When traumatic events came around in my life, as they inevitably do, I did what I saw others around me do, the only thing I knew how to.
Keep calm and carry on.
There is a cost to perpetually withholding reactions and emotions. In my case, my skin, the very forefront of my appearance, betrayed my outward show of calm, and flared up regularly with rashes all over my body. Not only my skin, but my mouth and body language oozed passive aggression and sarcasm.
My body was expressing what I was trying so hard to repress.
The final cost of my emotional repression was the distance I had created between myself and my loved ones. I was beginning to be calm, cool, and cold.
Enter Brad Blanton and The Radical Honesty Community.
During my first Radical Honesty workshop, I was touched and shocked at the intensity of emotion I saw expressed by my fellow group members. I had never seen a grown man cry or adults express themselves like children before. It was incredible and inspiring to witness and I spent most of that workshop crying and shaking.
My body was having such a visceral response from the years of repressed emotion and withheld secrets that I was overwhelmed somatically with sensation. I barely spoke at all during that first workshop. My body did all the sharing.
When it came my turn to share at other workshops, I was supported through the process of expressing my anger and encouraged to be unreasonable and petty. I had a lot of fun and reconnected to a sense of aliveness that had been numbed inside of me.
When my anger was finally expressed, I experienced something far scarier than being angry. I experienced love. And my heart opened. I fell in love with all the people in the room, willing to be vulnerable and share themselves, warts and all, and for them witnessing me doing the same thing.
And for the first time in my life I truly experienced calm. I wasn’t putting all this energy into hiding. I was just being.
As for my body, my skin disorders cleaned up pretty quickly after I started expressing my emotions more. I’m no dermatologist, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that the two are unrelated.
I Learned How to Regulate - Not Repress
By reconnecting with my anger I have reconnected with my capacity to love. After getting an education on the importance of expressing emotions, and practising with the tools used in the workshops, I learned how to regulate my emotions instead of repressing them.
My household now, with my daughter, partner, friends and animals, is a welcome space to all emotions. We celebrate expressions of anger, discomfort, joy (especially the bodily noises - farts and burps are like music to my ears).
In writing this, I want to inspire you as the reader, and to remind myself to stop trying so hard to keep calm, and instead carrying on being me.
If you’d like to take a break from pretending and come be yourself with us, warts and all, I invite you to join me for a Weekend Workshop in Aberdeen, October 7-9th.
We have extended our early bird discount to Monday, August 15th just for this newsletter to be posted! And there is a further 10% discount for locals living in Scotland.
Rose Owen is a fellow pretender and recovering advanced liar, and Radical Honesty Trainer Candidate who lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. She leads the Honesty Aberdeen Meetup group.
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