Skimming through this article: Emotions - How To Understand, Identify, Release Your Emotions
Some excerpts:
Dr. Maurice Elias says, “Emotions are human beings’ warning systems as
to what is really going on around them.
Emotions are our most reliable indicators of how things are going on in
our lives. Emotions help keep us on the
right track by making sure that we are led by more than the mental/
intellectual faculties of thought, perception, reason, memory.”
There are only two basic emotions that we all experience, love and
fear. All other emotions are variations
of these two emotions.
When we have an experience that we find painful or difficult, and are
either unable to cope with the pain, or just afraid of it, we often dismiss
this emotion and either get busy, exercise more, drink or eat a bit more, or
just pretend it has not happened. When
we do this we do not feel the emotion and this results in what is called
repressed, suppressed or buried emotions.
The following are a few examples of the methods people use to avoid
feeling their emotions.
- Ignoring your feelings
- Pretending something hasn’t happened
- Overeating
- Eating foods loaded with sugar and fat
- Excessive drinking of alcohol
- Excessive use of recreational drugs
- Using prescription drugs such as tranquilizers or Prozac
- Exercising compulsively
- Any type of compulsive behavior
- Excessive sex with or without a partner
- Always keeping busy so you can’t feel
- Constant intellectualizing and analyzing
- Excessive reading or TV
- Working Excessively
- Keeping conversations superficial
- Burying angry emotions under the mask of peace and love
The following are some major symptoms of buried and repressed emotions.
- Fatigue
- Depression without an apparent cause
- Speaking of issues/interests rather than personal matters and feelings
- Pretending something doesn’t matter when inside it does matter
- Rarely talking about your feelings
- Blowing up over minor incidents
- Walking around with a knot in your stomach or tightness in your throat
- Feeling your anger not at the time something happens but a few days
later
- In relationships, focusing discussions on children/ money rather than
talking about yourselves
- Difficulty talking about yourself
- Troubled personal relationships with family, friends, acquaintances
- A lack of ambition or motivation
- Lethargic – who cares - attitude
- Difficulty accepting yourself and others
- Laughing on the outside while crying on the inside
When you have repressed emotions, your behavior and reactions to events
in the present moment are really reactions to past events as well as the
present. This has a negative effect on
all relationships in your life. You
cannot be fully present with those you love in today until you have released
your emotions from the past. You buried
emotions because they were too painful and difficult to deal with when they
occurred and your reactions to today’s events are affected by this pain and
hurt that remains buried in your body.
Record What Makes You Feel Strongly For Two Months: Keep an ongoing record of strong emotions for
8 weeks. Regardless of the cause, if
it’s the weather, the traffic, your husband, wife, children, politicians, the
stock market, your fellow church members, whatever and whoever, add it to your
list. Try to identify what really made
you angry. Sadness is a mask for anger,
and anger is a mask for fear. If you can
identify yoTu real fears, what you are afraid of losing or not having, you are
well on your way to emotional health. Again, writing this down will help you
see things much more clearly, increase your awareness, and help you to know
your emotional self at a much deeper level.
If you have had a very painful experience, write one sentence and sit
with this sentence and cry. Then write
another sentence and sit and cry. In
time this process will relieve some of the sensitive pain around your
experience and eventually make it endurable.
With time, the pain around the situation will lesson, as long as you
allow yourself to feel it.
We can play all sorts of games with our minds, denying reality is
something we all do. However, it’s much
harder to do that when we write things down.
You might want to consider seeking the assistance of a counselor,
therapist, or minister. They can help
you to see things in a more balanced fashion, and help you understand more
fully what you are observing in yourself.
It can be difficult at times to be objective about yourself.
We need loving friends in our lives.
Many people pay for a therapist to listen to them because they cannot
tell their friends about their experiences.
One of the most important things about releasing an emotion is to
concentrate on the emotion rather than what caused the emotion. Forget who did what that caused the emotion,
forget about the person who did something to you, concentrate on the “I hate”
or “I am angry” or “I am so hurt”. It’s
the emotion you need to release.
Secrets are shame-based and incidents kept secret or feelings hidden
from others will make these feelings deeper and longer lasting. Emotional secrets lead to emotional and
mental illness.
Detach Yourself: When your emotions are running high and you
are having difficult reducing the intensity, try to detach yourself from the
situation and the emotion. Try to
imagine the same situation happening to someone else. Try to see if the
behavior would be the same if someone else were in your situation. If the answer is yes then you can begin to
see that the experience is not necessarily being focused at you. The other person is probably acting
unconsciously, and you just happen to be the individual “in their way”.
Detaching yourself in this manner can help you move through very difficult
situations without taking the abuse personally.
You might need to terminate the situation causing the emotions, but your detachment
allows you to look at things more rationally and quietly.
What are the fears underlying your emotions? You will need to know and understand your
fears. To do this you will have to swallow
some pride and admit and accept that you have many fears that are affecting
what you do each day. These fears are
often not at the conscious level.
Mary Kurus
