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Key points
- Avoiding or suppressing negative emotions only causes them to eventually intensify and become more painful.
- The artist, Jewel, has come to embrace her anxiety and panic as allies rather than an indication that she's "broken."
- Mindfulness techniques such as meditation and writing have helped Jewel connect with her authentic self.
Intense, negative emotions such as panic, depression, and rage can feel terrifying. These feelings hurt—so much so, that when we experience them, we are convinced that there must be something very wrong with us; that we are somehow “broken.” And often, we ignore, suppress, minimize or otherwise avoid our negative feelings in an effort to avoid feeling this pain.
While seeking relief from pain is an understandable goal, the way we do so matters to our overall mental health and well-being. Emotional avoidance and suppression may feel like good short-term solutions, but studies suggest that these strategies actually result in intensifying our negative emotions over time.
A more effective alternative is to try to understand and cope with our feelings in a way that both gives us relief and addresses the underlying issues that cause our negative feelings in the first place.
One of the ways that many of us explore our intense negative feelings is through the music. We seek out artists whose music resonates with us on a deeper emotional level and helps us to confront the very feelings that we may otherwise try to avoid. Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Jewel’s 1995 debut studio album Pieces of You was certified platinum 12 times over, and included hit songs such as “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “Foolish Games.” Part of the appeal of Jewel’s music has always been its emotional resonance and her willingness to tackle difficult emotions, as is evident in her new 2022 album Freewheelin’ Woman—her first album in 7 years.
Spin magazine declared that the album focuses on her “commitment to happiness” and is “an unmistakable decree: Jewel is back.” And during our discussion, Jewel explained that the key to her approach to mental health harkens back to her 1998 song “Hands” when she wrote, “I am never broken.” Because to Jewel, experiencing emotional pain is something to be embraced and explored—a sign of being whole rather than being “broken.”
Jewel has publicly shared that after her parents were divorced when she was a child, her father struggled with alcohol abuse and was physically abusive towards her. She explained that she recognized that she was in emotional pain, but initially faced this pain alone and in isolation. Yet, when she began singing in bars, she realized that emotional pain was not unique to her, but rather a more universal human experience.
“I was able to recognize that I was in pain and I could recognize people in the bar-room were in pain,” Jewel told me. “And it dawned on me that we're not taught what to do with pain … I saw this image of a piece of sand, like with an oyster. But people weren't making pearls; they were piling on drinking, or drugs or relationships. And it created a mountain.”
Jewel concluded, however, that the best way to manage this type of pain was to address it directly. And she was inspired by the way buffalo deal with a storm. “The buffalo is the only animal that goes into the heart of the storm. It'll go directly to it,” Jewel explained. “And it really taught me that the quickest way is to move toward the pain ... And so, I began to turn to writing as my way of handling the pain. And it became a career, oddly.”
Accordingly, Jewel began to reconceptualize her panic and anxiety not as something to be ignored or avoided, but rather as a warning system to alert her to issues that need to be resolved.
“I stopped looking at my anxiety as an enemy. And I stopped looking at my anxiety as something that was a sign saying, ‘I'm broken. Something's wrong with me.’ But instead, changed that narrative to saying, ‘Wait a minute, what if my anxiety means something's right with me?’ Maybe it means everything's working,” she said. “And so I started to see it like a car alarm: a car alarm goes off when somebody's trying to break in. You wouldn't get mad at the car alarm. It's doing its job. My anxiety is my body's way of giving me an alarm, saying something I am consuming does not agree with me.”
Jewel began to approach coping with her anxiety not only as a method of relieving emotional pain, but also as a method for becoming connected with her authentic self.
“I was given an emotional inheritance. And it gave me a predisposition to addiction, to abuse, to be in an abusive relationship. Because I was able to see that in every generation in my family,” Jewel said. “So I realized … if my nurture was this bad, could I ever get to know my nature? And I tried to figure out my life's mission at 15 became how do I re-nurture myself ... how do I get underneath how trauma has altered me to get back to my authentic expression of myself?”
In her book, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story, Jewel shares how she suffered intense emotional pain when she discovered that her mother, who was her manager at the time, had stolen money from her. During our conversation, she talked about how she began exploring her pain as a way of connecting with herself in a more authentic way.
“Basically at 34 or something like that, I woke up and realized I was $3 million in debt. And that my mom, who was my manager, was not the person I thought that she was, and that much of what I had been told was the narrative of my life by my mother wasn’t actually even true. It was made up. You talk about a psychologically crushing thing to come to terms with,” Jewel recalled. “I cancelled my tour. And I just focused on my mental health. And the recovery process taught me a lot about myself ... I was peeling an orange … And I looked at that like nature versus nurture—my nurture was the peel and the fruit was me … And so how do you get to know the fruit, as it were? How do you get to know what's inside of you, versus the psychological wrapping that you've acquired and accumulated over a lifetime?”
Jewel found that meditating and being present are essential for getting under this “psychological wrapping.” She has become a powerful mental health advocate through her Never Broken Program in connection with The Inspiring Children Foundation. This program teaches children mindfulness and how to observe their experience so that they can understand their authentic selves more clearly.
“The very first thing you have to do if you're going to try to get under the skin of nurture is be present. Because that lifts the orange peel off the fruit presence creates a gap, where you start to notice, you have a thought. You notice you’re having a thought. You stop and you pause. That gap is that little tiny pocket between the peel and the orange.”
Jewel explained how she utilized mindfulness techniques when coping with a panic attack. And she saw coping with her anxiety as a pathway to both reducing her pain and making important change in her life.
“I remember I was in a theater, I was almost about to have a panic attack. This is after this whole thing happened with my mom. Something really triggered me but I wasn't present enough to see what was triggering me. I left the theater. I sat in my car. I had a pen and a paper and I realized it had triggered a cycle of thought that was really nurtured into me by my mom. And it was only because of my anxiety that I was able to see it, it was like this little neon sign,” Jewel explained. “And I have come to be so profoundly grateful for my anxiety, because it was my healer. It was that little voice in me saying … anxiety is an ally, it's your friend saying, ‘If I'm thinking this, and it's making me anxious, a good chance, it's not authentically me’ … And then are you willing to do something about it … It gives you a shot to change it.”
Listen to the conversation with Jewel here.
