Miscellaneous
Too many people are waging war on their emotions are trying to avoid them out of existence. Emotions have a bad rep I think mostly because people don’t understand them and don’t have a very good grasp on what to do with them. Emotions are a vital part of the human experience. Without emotions, the world would be bland. But what have we been taught? Don’t show your emotions because you will be seen as weak, over the top, crazy and a whole slew of other things. Society has classified that emotions should be something to shy away from and as a result, people don’t know how to read their emotions, how to control them or generally what to do with them so we end up avoiding them. Your emotions are linked to your thoughts. Those thoughts you can either be aware or unaware of. Yur thoughts create your emotions and you end up playing a game on ping-pong back and forth between the two. So going back to neuroplasticity and how neurons that fire together wire together you end up with emotional pathways. So depending on what you are continuously thinking about you will have certain emotions expressing themselves over and over. We have mistakenly been taught to believe that you should spend the major not feeling anything. This is absolute garbage. You should always be feeling something. Numbness is a coping mechanism of shutting yourself off from your emotions. People who have good emotional management don't need to numb because they know that emotion cannot harm them. It comes and if you acknowledge it and give it the space to exist it will dissipate on its own. Each emotion has a way that it feels physically in your body. What that means is that you will feel different sensations in your body depending on what emotion you are feeling. For everyone, this will feel different. Your body has a reaction. But we are not well versed in sensing and understanding what emotions we are feeling and because we have been told that emotions are bad we feel a certain way and we automatically think that this bad. So people are always feeling anxious because they have a physical sensation that they have associated with fear and anxiety and that’s automatically where they go to. And because this cascade happens so quickly you can get into the pattern of perceiving that physical sensation as negative instead of positive. I’ll give you an example. I took my daughter to the park one time. She was maybe 18 months old. Now she’s started talking very early so her vocab was pretty good. I put her on the swing and push her. She looked at me terrified “Mama I’m scared!!” I didn’t stop pushing all I said was “baby you’re not scared you’re excited” the second I said it you could see the switch flip she had this huge smile on her face and she wouldn’t get off that swing. Still loves it to this day. At that moment I basically reclassified her emotions. I had to give her a bigger context. How many of you who have kids would have stopped that swing and fed into the fear? This is how anxiety is passed on from one generation to the next. You have an adult who is not in control of their own emotional experiences who give the child “evidence” to support their lack of control. I want you to think about how many times you have done that? If you just have a moment don’t beat yourself up. Don’t expect to be able to coach your child through their emotions if you can’t say with confidence that you have a good handle of your own. When we don’t know any better and have never had someone who is emotionally rich teach us about what emotions are and how to deal we are at the mercy of being run by those natural automatic ways of the brain. Now your brain may develop a preference or familiarity with certain emotions. The brain does what is easy and what it has practised. Therefore ee can get stuck in a couple of emotions. Think about what emotions you are familiar with, what emotions do you typically function in? what comes up a lot for you?