Emotional Matters: Strategies For Unpacking Emotions
I’ve come to learn that many of us are not taught how to feel our emotions. We were taught that emotions, rather showing our emotions, is a weakness.
Emotions Are Part of The Human Experience
Emotions are part of the physical experience and come with the territory of being human. And emotions, if not allowed, can manifest themselves in the body as symptoms, illness, dis-ease. It took me years to understand this.
That all the times I would watch a movie and hide my tears for fear of being called a crybaby, was a suppression of real emotions.
That all those times I bit my tongue so as not to make anyone mad at me, was a suppression of emotions.
All the times I felt anger pulse through me and I actively worked to push it down, was an unallowing and unaccepting of who I was AND what I was feeling in that moment.
That being unable to process my emotions would eventually lead to my body forcing me to deal with all the pent-up emotional turmoil I had been hiding, in fear of being perceived as “too much”.
My nephew loves the movie Elemental. In it, the main character Ember, a fire element, is such a lovely depiction of what happens when we suppress or repress our emotions. As an element who has been told that she doesn’t mix well with other elements, who is meant to take over her father’s store, a store her family built so hard to build, Ember finds herself unable to control her fire. She bursts out in flames when a customer angers her.
Unable to recognize the reason behind her outburst, along comes Wade, a water element. Wade is the complete opposite of Ember. In fact, hardly a moment goes by where Wade is not in touch with his feelings and emotions. His family even introduces Ember to a game they play where they try and make the other NOT cry.
Through the development of Wade and Ember’s relationship, Wade recognizes something Ember could not - her anger was there to tell her something. Ember realized she did not want to run her father’s shop, and each outburst was a physical manifestation of the words she couldn’t say. To run the shop was not her dream - it was her father’s. And as the child of an immigrant family, she feels an immense guild over not wanting what her parents worked so hard for. A guilt, too, that she was unable to express.
Is there any validation to the way emotions are presented in the movie? 1000% YES.
Ancient systems of medicine such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda have known for thousands of years that emotions are stored in the body. Grief in the lungs, anger in the liver, fear in the stomach, sadness in the heart.
How Do We Feel Our Emotions?
By allowing them to happen. By surrendering to the feeling and allowing them to move past the body. By knowing that we are not the emotion, we are simply the conduit for the emotion. Thereby recognizing that I am not sad, rather, that I feel sadness, and allowing yourself to feel the feelings and emotions of sadness, or anger, or grief.
Suppressed versus Repressed Emotions
Suppressing your emotions is a pushing down of the feelings, usually until you give yourself a more convenient time to process the emotions.
Repressed emotions, on the other hand, are emotions that don’t get processed.
How to Know if You’ve Repressed Emotions?
Repressed emotions often go back to childhood experiences. If you heard comments such as:
“Calm down.”
“Don’t cry.”
“You should be grateful.”
“You have no reason to be sad.”
These, along with any other comments that minimized the way your felt, or had the potential to make you feel bad for feeling certain emotions, could be an indicator of repressed emotions.
Signs of Repressed Emotions
Nervousness
Anxiety
Feeling stressed for no apparent reason
Feeling uneasy when others share their feelings
Numbing behaviors such as too much t.v., social media, alcohol, drugs
Tips To Release Repressed Emotions
Seek Professional Help As Needed
Seek professional help if you feel you need to speak to someone about uncovering some of the reason why you behave the way you do. Talk therapy can be great if you feel unsafe to speak with anyone close to you
Maintain Awareness of Your Emotions
A great question we can learn to ask ourselves is “What is the cause of the ____ that I am feeling?”
What is the cause of the anger/sadness/etc I’m feeling?
Follow that question with “How would I like to feel instead?”
In this way, you start to use your emotions to your advantage because our emotions are powerful energies that we can use to our benefit.
Use Movement When You Feel The Need To
Do you ever notice how when you are angry you want to get up and go? For me, I have to get out and go for a walk or get on my yoga mat.
This is the energy of emotions moving through our body.
And if we simply allow that energy to store in the body, without allowing it, then it’s at that point that small aches and pains turn into chronic symptoms, and chronic symptoms turn into dis-ease of the body.
In his book Healing Back Pain, John Sarno M.D., discussed how many of his patients who presented with chronic pain had no physical signs of injury that could attribute to the very real and true pain they were in. Often times the pain they felt was a calling of an emotional issue that had not been dealt with.
In our body’s innate intelligence knows that we can’t point to our emotional pain, but we can point to physical pain, thus giving us a place to look.
Give Yourself A Break
We can all agree that no one really wants to be in pain. But in our attempts to protect ourselves at all costs, we invariably cause pain to ourselves by not dealing with emotions as they arise.
I used to hate crying. Especially in front of others. To me, it showed my inability to deal with the situations that life had thrown at me.
But we all cry. And eventually, I couldn’t keep it in any longer any more than my body could hold it in either.
Now, I’ll be hard-pressed to find myself not crying each day, whether happy tears or sad tears, I allow for the full expression of my natural responses to being human.
Don’t be afraid of feeling the emotions that come with living life. It’s what makes us, us.