Emotions: An Introduction
Definition – Emotions = Energy in motion!
Think of a really happy time in your life, picture the people, the sounds, the feelings. What emotions is this memory stirring in your body? Where are you feeling those emotions? Now pick a sad memory. Again feel the feelings, immerse yourself in it, don’t be afraid. Their just feelings and they will pass. Where are you feeling the emotions in your body? What is the after affect? How long does it take for the feeling to pass?
How/why do we store emotions in our bodies?
We are all made up of energy and our emotions are triggered if something happens to us, good or bad, we have a thought about it, we judge it and that’s when the emotion comes.
Anger for example, it’s one you really feel in your body, you feel it all over! It’s one of the most uncontrollable emotions, you need to get it out in some way, any way!
Bear in mind that when you’re feeling an emotion in your body, it has to run its course. That energy has to be let loose or expressed in some way or else you store it.
Our bodies are the greatest vessels they can store so much emotion. And they will store and store until we cannot feel, we are numb and we don’t know how to express our emotions.
If somebody gets to that point, their lives can’t be that good and it’s going to make them sick. This is why I find counselling so beneficial. It gives you a safe space, to talk about traumatic events where we pushed away our feelings that are now stored in our bodies. Those feelings have to go somewhere, if they are not expressed and we keep pushing more and more unexpressed feelings into our bodies, this is guaranteed to manifest as illness or disease.
Why we are the way we are now
From my own point of view, I had been storing unexpressed emotions in my body for 27 years up until last year. The turning point for me luckily wasn’t illness or disease. It was a mixture of things that finally pushed me to try counselling. The first was that I would get very angry for no reason and take it out on the people closest to me, which I would feel extremely guilty for afterwards because they did not deserve that. The other thing that worried me was that I was beginning to feel numb. Numb of any feelings at all. I would be watching a really sad movie or having an experience that should be making me exceptionally happy and thinking why am I not feeling anything? We get so used to pushing away our feelings and we really don’t realise the consequences of this, and I am one of the lucky ones.
As children, and this is nobody’s fault, it’s because of a lack of education or awareness in previous generations, we were deprived of the tools of how to cope with our emotions. We weren’t given the space to feel our emotions and we also weren’t told that it’s natural to feel these emotions. Instead we were made to feel that our feelings were insignificant because we were “only” children and this made us push our feelings away.
Tips and tricks on how to manage your emotions
- When an emotion is rushing through your body, give yourself space and time to really feel the feeling, take a deep breath and let it be in your body, don’t push it away or supress it!
- Talk yourself through it, give the feeling a label or I like to give it a colour.
- Focus on your body and identify where you are feeling the emotion, again breathe into that feeling.
- Accept the emotion/feeling as it is, give it a minute or two and it will pass. It’s called energy in motion that means the energy is moving through you and will not get stuck.
- If you have children, this information and these tools for expressing emotions are the greatest gifts you can give them. It will give them the best start in life, something that most of us didn’t get.
- If you’re in a situation where you are feeling an emotion (anger for example) that it really isn’t appropriate to express fully right then and there, then it is fine to supress it until such a time where you are able to feel it and express it. Make sure though to come back to it!
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