Love Your Negative Emotions
Emotions are the most present, pressing and sometimes painful force in our lives. It dictates our thoughts, intentions and actions with superior authority to our rational minds. They can grow like weeds, slowly conditioning our minds to function on the detrimental feelings we have and dominating our daily life. Our ability to regulate emotions affects how we are perceived by the people around us.
When emotions failed to be under proper control, sudden responses that triggered may be disruptive or inappropriate, causing outbursts where rapid changes in expression such as strong or exaggerated feelings occur.
If you've had tendencies toward denial, withdrawal, and self-isolation, chances are there are some deeply buried emotions inside that are holding you back in your life.
Emotions help us survive, thrive and avoid danger. They serve as an adaptive role in our lives by motivating us to act quickly and take action. As it is true that our feelings can shield us, they can hurt us too. We need to identify healthy ways to manage them.
Sure, nobody likes negative emotions. They can dampen our enthusiasm for life, depending on how long we are willing to cling onto and allow them to affect us. They stop us from thinking and behaving rationally and seeing situations in their true perspective. We find it hard to cope when we experience them, so naturally, we would do everything in our power to avoid having to deal with them. But what if avoiding these feelings altogether could hasten a costly outcome?
Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
– Roger Ebert
When you intentionally push distressing thoughts away in an attempt to ignore it, the emotions that are linked to those thoughts are suppressed and hidden away. While we can use the label negative, with what we know about those emotions, it’s important to acknowledge that all emotions are completely normal to experience. They are a normal part of the human experience. Understanding when and why negative emotions arise enable us to honestly look for and develop behaviors that may positively address them.
Emotions are energy. Understanding this implies that they are fluid, moving resources meant to be felt and released vs. suppressed and ignored. They exist everywhere inside our bodies. The nature of chronic stress often results in a buildup of energy that gets suppressed in the body. The unprocessed emotional energy is stored in our organs, muscles and tissues. It leads to inflammation and chronic health problems, and it undermines our overall well-being.
So many people carry trapped emotions within multiple areas of the body, without even knowing it. It is possible to go for years, even decades and be completely oblivious to the blocked energy our muscles are holding on to. The unresolved emotions get trapped inside our body where they build and fester, draining our energy, leading to burnout, emotional imbalance, and eventually disease. When we chronically repress emotions, we create toxicity in our body, mind, and heart.
In order to experience healing, these trapped emotional distresses need to be processed and move through and out of our bodies in a healthy way. The drive to move your emotional energy is present every moment because your body is in constant pursuit of wholeness. In order to successfully express the emotion, you have to move your emotional energy by identifying the sensations and releasing states of contraction. As you move from contraction to expansion you will typically feel lighter, calmer or relieved while opening the door to lasting happiness.
Suppressing emotions, or attempting to push uncomfortable thoughts and feelings down, is an emotion regulation strategy that many people use to prevent from being over-driven by their behavior. Repression however, means those uncomfortable emotions have been hidden deep down into the unconscious to the point that you are no longer aware of it. These are often connected to difficult experiences that are undealt with in the past. In such cases, a sound or a smell can trigger those negative feelings. If these thought patterns are not dealt with properly, they continue to exist within and will resurface at the next trigger.
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are burried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
– Sigmund Freud