We now have two tools to use as mechanisms for awareness and change – dreams and self-hypnosis. Next, let’s look at the range of emotions that make up our expressive palette. We all know about anger, sadness, joy, excitement, and fear. We intuitively understand that we come pre-loaded with the ability to experience these emotions, and in a perfect world where adults had perfect knowledge, and children were raised perfectly, there would be very few emotional problems.
Unfortunately, this is not what many of us experience. Instead, we are taught distortions of these natural states. We grow up with a long list of “shoulds” about most of our emotions. Male children should act a certain way and female children another. Crying is weak. Anger is bad. Expressing joy openly is often seen as silly.
Think of some of the rules about emotions that you grew up with. How many of them do you still believe? Did you understand that these weren’t universal truths, but rather artifacts of a particular culture? It might have been the “culture” of your family, of your neighborhood, or even of your school or religious association.
When natural emotions are cut off or deflected into unnatural paths, the result is often dysfunction. In the perfect world that we hypothesized above, children would learn to deal with all their feelings in a healthy way. If this happened we would be able to “grow up” our feelings along with our intellect and our bodies.
Due to a lack of this natural evolution, we often find ourselves dealing with our emotions on the level of a very young child. (Of course, this one is easier to notice in other people!)
How often have you rolled your eyes watching or listening to someone and thinking that they were “acting like a baby?” We watch supposedly mature friends throwing fits of anger, reacting with jealousy or selfishness out of proportion to a given situation. “Growing up” our emotional identity allows us to move through feelings gracefully and without causing harm to others.
Our potential emotional spectrum goes from the most intense to the most subtle. For instance, anger flows from rage at one end of the scale to minor annoyance at the other end, and sadness might range from intense grief to slight regret.
We need to learn to process the “energy” – the expressive charge or intensity - that comes with emotions, in a high-quality way. We need to discharge or “work” with this energy, to give it a positive, constructive pathway. It needs a healthy, useful release.
How do we use and channel our emotions constructively? The formula goes something like this:
- The first step is awareness. Ask yourself: “What am I feeling right now?”
- The second step is permission to experience the feeling. You might say to yourself: “It’s okay for me to feel _______. This is a natural response to what is happening."
- The third step is to check whether negative reactions – either internally or from the outside world are blocking your feelings. If this is the case, tell the internalized voices or the external ones to “Bug off.”
- Fourth, work with your feeling. This means finding a positive, safe, non-destructive and perhaps creative way to express yourself.
Remember: It’s your life. You are in control of your own feelings. Empower yourself!
Please share with us experiences you have getting in touch with emotions and allowing yourself to experience them in positive ways.
It is normal and healthy to cycle through emotional states. There is a great story attributed to Solomon. According to this tale, King David was having a tough time and he went to Solomon for advice. David supposedly asked how he could handle all the emotional ups and downs of life. When he was down it felt like it would last forever and when he was up, he wanted it to last forever. So, the story goes, Solomon made him a ring to wear as a constant reminder. Inscribed into the gold was the expression, “This too shall change!”
This story alludes to one of the problems that we can have with our emotions: getting stuck in a groove and allowing one emotion to become our "default" position
How does this happen? We began by talking about learning to deal with our feelings from the people who raise us. Did you have an adult model who was not able to move in a healthy way through their own emotions? Were they always angry or down in the dumps or feeling sorry for themselves? Do you want to emulate that persons’ way of coping?
Another area that gets us trapped into distortions of our feelings is "unfinished business". This refers to situations that are left hanging, incomplete or unresolved. This might be feelings or situations from as long ago as your childhood, or something that happened last week that you are still “obsessing” about.
Remember a clue to being stuck is that you are in an emotional rut.
How do we get unstuck?
Ask yourself:
What is unresolved here?
Can I resolve it and how?
There are many options to clean up unfinished business. These might include:
- Direct action:
Talk to the person.
Change the situation.
Leave the situation. - Indirect resolution:
Use your imagination to create a “make believe” better ending.
Use self-hypnosis to change the story. (See Talk 4).
Ask your dreams for help in creating resolution. (See Talk 2).
Use self-talk to imagine a conversation that you would like to have. You might even allow the other person to also have an imaginary voice and continue this imaginary conversation until you feel satisfied.
Some signs that your emotional temperature has shifted are: laughing, taking a deep breath, sighing, or feeling your muscles relax. Sometimes, you might even experience tears.
The most important step in creating a healthy relationship with your own feelings and an equally important step in respecting the feelings of others is acceptance. Denial is a surefire way to get stuck. Once you have taken this step you open up a richness of expression for yourself and others.
Please share your thoughts, experiences and questions with us. To post a comment or to read the comments written by others, click on the “Comments” link at the bottom of each “Talk”. You can continue to comment on any “Talk” even after new “Talks” are posted.
As a new parent, I am especially interested in learning how to raise my son so that he can experience and express his emotions in a healthy way. Any books out there that are particularly helpful in this regard? I'm striving to be mindful of the ways in which I don't always allow myself to express certain emotions (such as anger) so that I don't inadvertently hand down this tendency to my child. My own mother often expresses anger in an extreme way (with child-like tantrums), and I'm pretty sure it's because of this that I sometimes suppress my own angry emotions. I may be afraid of anger as an emotion because of how I've seen my mother handle it, but I don't want to suppress my son's need to express anger as a result.
ReplyDeleteI like the metaphor of emotions as an "expressive palette." The idea that people actively influence, or at least have the ability to conscientiously express their own emotions seems novel in America's consumer culture. Actually, I think it's become a global norm that people are targets of advertising and propaganda from a variety of sources with increasingly sophisticated and subtle means of emotional manipulation. Politics, religious institutions, business, fashion, health and beauty - all these aspects of daily life consistently push people to "feel" a certain way that may or may not benefit them. I like your advice in this posting because it encourages everyone to reclaim their emotions. Sometimes I feel as though I'm resisting a whole slew of emotions; looking at it in the way you suggest, I can separate them and deal with them one at a time. I look forward to more postings on this topic.
ReplyDeleteAs a parent, I've learned to embrace the gamut of emotions in my children as they've grown. I don't know if that's clear, but when they know, by our acceptance, that every emotion in the range that they (and we) express is valid, I think it helps them to be honest about their emotions . Silliness, anger, sadness--all deserve our acceptance. And when they see by our reactions that it's ok to feel these things, they can talk about it when they need to. Not that we shouldn't be honest--if they do something shocking, it's ok to be shocked! I've been lucky in that my kids have been pretty even-tempered (with a few memorable exceptions), but I've always stuck by the calm acceptance of emotions thing.
ReplyDeleteDue to the lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of alternative therapy, several physicians rather to call it non-evidence based medicine; or some decline to recognize these alternative forms of medicine or therapy, as medical therapies at all.
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