emotions.

Emotional Stripper by Jordan Springer

What Are Emotions – Feelings?

Different people define emotions in different ways. Some make a distinction between emotions and feelings saying that a feeling is the response part of the emotion and that an emotion includes the situation or experience, the interpretation, the perception, and the response or feeling related to the experience of a particular situation. 

John D. (Jack) Mayer says, “Emotions operate on many levels.  They have a physical aspect as well as a psychological aspect.  Emotions bridge thought, feeling, and action – they operate in every part of a person, they affect many aspects of a person, and the person affects many aspects of the emotions.”

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.”

Why Bother With Emotions? 

Emotions control your thinking, behavior and actions.  Emotions affect your physical bodies as much as your body affects your feelings and thinking.  People who ignore, dismiss, repress or just ventilate their emotions, are setting themselves up for physical illness.  Emotions that are not felt and released but buried within the body can cause serious illness, research says. 

Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, negativity, frustration and depression cause chemical reactions in your body that are very different from the chemicals released when you feel positive emotions such as happy, content, loved, accepted.

Other People, Places, and Things Cannot Change How You Feel

The only person who can change what you feel is you.  A new relationship, a new house, a new car, a new job, these things can momentarily distract you from your feelings, but no other person, no material possession, no activity can remove, release, or change how you feel.

How often do you hear people say things like “when I have enough money, I won’t be afraid anymore”, only to find there never seems to be enough money to stop being afraid.   Or “when I’m in a secure relationship I won’t feel lonely any more”, and finding they are still lonely regardless of their relationship.   We need to understand that we take our feelings with us wherever we go.  A new dress, a new house, a new job, none of these things change how we feel.  Our feelings remain within us until we release them.

Two Basic Emotions In Life – Love and Fear

There are only two basic emotions that we all experience, love and fear.  All other emotions are variations of these two emotions.  Thoughts and behavior come from either a place of love, or a place of fear.  Anxiety, anger, control, sadness, depression, inadequacy, confusion, hurt, lonely, guilt, shame, these are all fear-based emotions.  Emotions such as joy, happiness, caring, trust, compassion, truth, contentment, satisfaction, these are love-based emotions.

There are varying degrees of intensity of both types of emotions, some being mild, others moderate, and others strong in intensity.  For example, anger in a mild form can be felt as disgust or dismay, at a moderate level can be felt as offended or exasperated, and at an intense level can be felt as rage or hate. 

And the emotion that always underpins anger is fear.

You Cannot Control Your Emotions

You cannot change or control your emotions.  You can learn how to be with them, living peacefully with them, releasing them, and you can manage them, but you cannot control them.

Think of the people who go along day after day seeming to function normally and all of a sudden they will explode in anger at something that seems relatively trivial and harmless.  That is one sign of someone who is trying to control or repress their emotions but their repressed emotions are leaking out.

The more anyone tries to control their emotions the more they resist control, and the more frightened people eventually become at what is seen to be a “loss of emotional control”.  It is a vicious circle. 

Emotions and Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse is a form of violence in relationships.  Emotional abuse is just as violent and serious as physical abuse but is often ignored or minimized because physical violence is absent.  Emotional Abuse can include any or all of the following elements.  It can include rejection of the person or their value or worth.  Degrading an individual in any way is emotionally abusive, involving ridiculing, humiliating and insulting behavior.  Isolating a person is deeply abusive and happens to children, adults, and often the elderly.  Exploiting someone is abusive.  Denying emotional responses to another is deeply abusive. 

The “silent treatment” is a cruel way of controlling people and situations.  Where there is control there is no love, only fear.

If you are living in a situation that is emotionally abusive please seek help from either a professional or one of the many helpful organizations present in most communities, to help you sort out your issues.  

Emotions stemming from emotional abuse are deep, requiring ongoing help from those trained to deal with emotional abuse.

Feeling Your Feelings

People spend much time talking about how they feel.  They attend workshops, they visit therapists, and they tell others who did what to them and describe how they feel about it.  They talk and talk about their feelings but they don’t feel their feelings.  They intellectualize and analyze their feelings without feeling them.

People are afraid to really feel their feelings, afraid of losing control, afraid of the pain involved in feeling their emotions, of feeling the sense of loss or failure or whatever the emotion brings with it.  

People are afraid to cry.  So much of life is about what you feel rather than what you think.  Being strongly connected to your emotional life is essential to living a life with high energy and a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. 

How We Repress 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. These feelings stay in our muscles, ligaments, stomach, auras. 

These emotions remain buried within us until we bring that emotion up and feel the emotion, thus releasing it. 

The following are a few examples of the methods people use to avoid feeling their emotions. 

1. Ignoring your feelings
2. Pretending something has not happened
3. Over-eating
4. Excessive drinking of alcohol
5. Excessive use of recreational drugs
6. Using prescription drugs
7. Exercising compulsively
8. Excessive sex with or without a partner
9. Always keeping yourself busy
10. Excessive reading or watching TV
11. Working excessively
12. Keeping conversations superficial
13. Burying angry emotions under the mask of peace and love

Effects of Repressed or Buried Emotions

Repressed or buried emotions can cause major difficulties in the physical body and energetic systems.  They affect all your relationships, and they especially affect your ability to grow spiritually and shift your level of consciousness.

According to research, since repressed emotions can rest either in your body or auras, they can cause holes in your auras, through which your energy leaks out creating fatigue, a sense of vulnerability, and low self-confidence.

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.

It takes a lot of energy to bury emotions and to keep them buried.   There isn’t much energy left over for other activities when your energy is being used to keep stuffing these emotions back down. By nature, buried emotions want to come up so you can become aware of them, feel them and release them.  You work very hard to keep them stuffed down.

Our real purpose in being on Mother Earth is to keep increasing our level of consciousness and living a more spiritual or love-based life.  The higher the consciousness someone has, the higher degree of spirituality in his or her life.  The higher the spirituality the closer we are to being what we are meant to be, a fully integrated and loving human being.  You cannot shift to higher levels of consciousness as long as you have major negative emotions buried within you.

Commit To Emotional Health

People who make a deep commitment to themselves to become emotionally healthy are willing to go a long way to learn about their emotional selves and to do what is required to release buried emotions. This is often an uncomfortable and difficult journey when you begin.

But once you make this commitment your journey to identify your issues, releasing buried emotions will become much easier.

How To Release Emotions

Don’t be afraid of your emotions.  Don’t fight them, run away from them or  blocking them out.  Welcome them, be with them, regardless of what they are.  We were born with all emotions.  They are neither good or bad, they just are.  Emotions slowly disappear if you feel them, and are present with them.  

Just close your eyes and feel them as deeply as you can.

Physical Part of Releasing Your Emotions

There are a number of ways you can begin to release your emotions, especially those relating to anger and hurt. 

1. Go into an empty room, or go for a drive alone, and scream, scream as loudly as you can.  Scream the words “I hate” or whatever it is you are feeling.  So many people have never screamed out their hurt, their rage. Continue to do this as long as it feels right inside.  Cry, allow yourself to cry your feeling.
2. If you cannot scream aloud, imagine you are screaming your rage, hurt, and pain.  Imagine it and imagine it.  See it, and hear it, and especially, feel it as deeply as you can.
3. If you are a physical person, take a pillow and keep hitting a chair, your bed, something, feeling your hurt every time you hit that object with the pillow.  Every time you hit that pillow say the words “I hate” or “I am frustrated” or whatever it is that you are feeling.
4. Get yourself a punching bag and hang it in your basement.  Then take time to keep hitting that punching bag, releasing your rage.
5. Take your fists and keep pounding a table saying, “I hate” and just keep doing it.
6. If you like to write, write about your anger; write about your hate; write about how hurt you are; write about how afraid you really are.  Journal about what happened and how it is affecting you today.  Write about what you have lost, or what you have never had that has hurt you so deeply.  

Feel the feeling!  Don’t be afraid of it!

Under all the anger, rage, hate, and hurt is one emotion – FEAR!

It’s essential to whatever method you choose to realize that you are hating, that you are full of rage and anger, and that this is a safe way to begin to accept your anger, your hate, and to own your anger and hate as your own.  So often we are too afraid to lose control or just afraid of the intensity of our rage, that we run away from it and ignore it.  The more you ignore it, the bigger it gets.

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. 

Don’t be afraid to feel your feelings.  Feeling them means owning them.

Accept Responsibility For Your Emotions

Taking care of ourselves is the greatest way we can love ourselves in a wholesome and healthy manner.  And this means accepting responsibility for our emotions.  Remember, emotions are not good or bad.  They just are.  But be careful and don’t punish yourself or be too hard on yourself.  Balance is the key work.  Each human being is very human, and that means each one of us is born with a full range of emotions. 

Live In Peace

Once you have completed the looking, the understanding, the releasing of your buried emotions, you may find you have become accustomed to being in a more intense emotional state.  The exercises above will heighten your overall emotionality.  If you are relatively certain you have done what can be done, make a decision to live in peace, at peace with yourself, and at peace with others.  You can decide this. 

Avoid those situations that you know will create conflict and upsets.  You cannot change others, you can only change yourself.  There are times where it’s important to stand and fight.  It takes a lot of wisdom to “accept the things you cannot change, and change the things you can”.  Wisdom to know the difference brings peace of mind.

Harboring hurt feelings can be emotionally detrimental. This is especially true if we take offenses personally. We need to learn to deal with hurt feelings to be at peace with ourselves.

Instructions:

1. Stay calm when your feelings are hurt and allow time for yourself to completely cool off.
2. Think before you speak, or you may lash out with words that you can't retract and regret the consequences.
3. Prevent misjudging by not presuming the other person's intention. You may pass judgment incorrectly and make the situation worse. Ask yourself if the person's intent was deliberate or if it's unintentional.
4. Walk away from situations that may cause you to retaliate or seek revenge.
5. Try to put yourself in the other person's shoes and understand why he acted the way he did. It's a lot easier to forgive when you can understand the reason for someone's behavior.
6. Approach the person that offended you and express to her that she hurt your feelings by her behavior, actions or words. It's healthier to resolve the concern than to let it sit and debilitate you. However, be careful how you phrase what you say so that you do not appear to be antagonistic.
7. Choose to be not offended and avoid self-pity; you are only hurting yourself.
8. Forgive, overcome oversensitivity and seek to be at peace with yourself.
9. Pray for the ability to let go of hurt feelings.

Power of Prayer

When human effort fails to produce the desired change, then it’s time to hand this over to God, the Divine Spirit of the Universe. 

Whatever negative emotions you have this very moment, simply ask in prayer, that the emotion be lifted from you. And lastly, be ok, ok?