The power of rotting emotions, and how they help us feel something new 🦨

Matt Hussey

Aug 10, 2023 • 3 min read

Your emotions rot. That’s a phrase you don’t often hear. But using this slightly macabre description of how we feel is a powerful way of understanding how we change.

Let me explain.

When we think of ourselves, what makes up that idea will be a mix of memories, ideas and feelings. Well done, Matt for explaining the bleeding obvious. Bear with me.

Those feelings, those impressions of memories and ideas are not fixed. They come and go. Some dig in, take root and become a core part of how we think of ourselves. What some therapists call a “core belief”.

For those other emotions meanwhile, they wither and disappear. They effectively, rot. Have you ever wondered what happens to those old emotions? Well, a useful analogy is that they rot, breakdown, and are freed up to become something new. Let’s turn to biology briefly (I promise).

You Rotter 🥗

When something decomposes, it means, literally that is broken down. You’ll see it in your food waste bin. On Monday it’s vegetable peel and bits of other organic matter. By Friday, it’s a brown mush stinking up your kitchen.

While for us, the goal is to get rid of that mush, for billions of bacteria, worms and other insects, however, it’s an opportunity to create something new. Our emotions are doing the same thing. When a feeling breaks down, the raw material of that feeling is recycled. It can help deepen existing ideas or memories, or it can be used to form new ones. But that process of change can become tricky. Let’s take grief for example.

The feeling of loss can be extremely painful for us. Those emotions hang around, make us feel blue, or a bit directionless. What do you do with these feelings? Some of us feel trapped in them, and come to believe that they’re are inescapable, and we will feel like it forever. This is where the rotting analogy can become a powerful way of looking at them differently.

Those emotions, while raw in the beginning, begin to decay with time. They break down, they become less intense, we think about them less. They, in effect, decompose, rot, turn to smaller and smaller bits.

SIDE NOTE: Some people can and do get stuck in this first phase, let’s call it pre–rot. But with a bit of help and time, pretty much everyone can start this composting process.

Nature does this all the time. Take a tree. It gives all this energy to the leaves, but after time, they die, and the tree turns its metaphorical back on them and lets them wither and die and fall to the ground. But in the process, those leaves, rot and enrich the soil around the tree that gave up on them. It’s Elton John’s Circle of Life, in full effect.

In essence: to decompose is to become different. We recycle old versions of ourselves, integrating new experiences and then using those memories to transform into something new. Old emotions crumple, rot, and transform. They rise and fall; we lose and receive. We become, and we break down, and we become again.

Who we are and how we feel, changes like the seasons. If we accept this idea, that in our heads there is an eternal compost bin full of old memories being turned into fresh new soil, dealing with those big, horrible, inescaple feelings can feel a lot less terrifying.

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