This article is part 2
of a 3 part series on emotions
Emotions
1
Emotions
2
Emotions
3
Emotions Pt 2 - 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, midriff,
auras. These emotions remain buried within us until we bring
that emotion up and feel the emotion, thus releasing it. Emotions
that are buried on the long-term are the emotions that normally
cause physical illness.
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 tranquillisers or Prozac
Exercising compulsively
Any type of compulsive behaviour
Excessive sex with or without
a partner
Always keeping busy so you
can’t feel
Constant intellectualising
and analysing
Excessive reading or TV
Working Excessively
Keeping conversations superficial
Burying angry emotions under
the mask of peace and love
Symptoms of Repressed Emotions
It takes a lot of energy
to keep emotions repressed and buried. If you keep emotions
buried for a long period of time, you lower your overall vibrations,
and lower vibrations lead to illness and an accelerated ageing
process. Buried emotions create fatigue and depression.
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
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.
Emotions repressed for the
long-term can caused serious illness including cancer, arthritis,
chronic fatigue, and many other major health problems. Since
repressed emotions can rest either in your body or auras,
they can cause holes in your auras, through which your energy
leaks out and creating fatigue, a sense of vulnerability,
and low self-confidence.
When you have repressed emotions,
your behaviour 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.
Committing To Emotional Health
People who make a deep commitment
to themselves to become emotionally healthy are willing to
go to great lengths 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 I promise you great joy once you’ve gotten over
the first few hurdles. Once you make this commitment your
journey to identify your issues and release buried emotions
will become much easier.
Methods To Identify Your Emotions
Emotions are reliable indicators
of what is really going on inside of us. There are many ways
to identify emotions and you will have to choose the manner
that is most suitable to your personality. Some people need
to do this in solitude whereas others need to do this with
others. Some will want to write while others will use a much
more casual approach. Sometimes it’s best to combine
a number of approaches for a deeper identification of emotions.
The following are a few methods
you can use to identify what you are really feeling about
a person, place, situation or thing. Identifying your emotions
is the first step to a rich and healthy emotional life. Use
a number or all of these methods. Find the ones that suit
you and use them to help you in your journey towards emotional
health.
Awareness is the first step
of change!
(Find
Out More About This ....)
Listen To Your Thoughts and
Daydreams – We become so accustomed to thinking in certain
patterns that we are no longer aware or conscious about our
thoughts and daydreams. Catch those daydreams, hold the thoughts,
bring them up into your conscious mind. This will tell you
a great deal about yourself, what you love and hate, and about
your relationships. If you possibly can, keep a written diary
of these for a month or two. Writing down your thoughts and
daydreams will help you to organize, experience, and understand
your thought patterns and bring them into a higher level of
awareness within you. If you keep a written record for a period
of time you will begin to see important patterns in your feeling
and thinking.
Identify Your “Little
and Unimportant Hurts” – More people walk around
saying it’s not important or it doesn’t matter
when it is very important and a big piece of hurting emotion
is buried within them. They will describe this hurt and being
small and unimportant. Men tend to do this rather frequently.
Write down a detailed description of all the “little
and unimportant hurts” that somehow don’t go away.
Every little hurt that you keep remembering, that won’t
go away, regardless of when it happened, must go on this list.
Many people have many of these little hurts from childhood.
These emotions are buried within creating difficulties with
their health. Identifying these hurts will tell you a great
deal about your buried and unexpressed emotions.
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 you 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.
Memories That Won’t
Go Away: If you keep remembering situations, hurts that happened
some time ago, you are guaranteed to have repressed emotions
around this person or situation. You will need to pull this
situation out and re-feel the hurt around it. Try to document
these carefully since these are more than likely causing you
much physical distress. Forgiveness is something that occurs
as a result of owning and releasing your emotions. We often
reach for forgiveness without doing the work required to release
emotions of hurt and anger. Forgiveness is a result of an
emotional process. There are no short cuts.
Keep a Journal of the Emotions
in Your Dreams: Keep paper and pencil by your bedside and
jot down your dreams as soon as you begin to waken. Write
down the emotions you are experiencing in your dreams. The
activity in a dream can be secondary, the emotions being experienced
there are essential. The emotions in your dreams are the very
emotions that you are repressing and burying within. Dreams
can give you a deep insight into your emotional self.
Be Specific About The Emotions
You Are Experiencing: Confusion occurs when people are trying
to get to know their emotions because they speak in general
terms rather that than specific emotions. A good example of
this is depression. You may be experiencing loneliness for
people, loneliness for God (spiritual loneliness), boredom,
and a lack of creativity in your life. You may be feeling
abandoned because of a death or divorce. If you just say you
are depressed you will have great difficulty releasing the
emotion or finding a solution to the situation causing the
emotion.
A good example of this is
the difference between jealousy and envy. Jealousy relates
to being resentful of a person’s advantages be they
in social standing, education, profession, or it can relate
to resentment of a rival in love or affection. Envy is a discontentment
or resentment aroused by another’s good fortune or success.
Are You Using Sex To Release
Your Emotions? Sex is a normal and healthy part of life. However
today many people engage in sexual acts, with others, alone,
or using pornography on the Internet, to release emotions
buried within them that they have been unable to feel and
release. These individuals tend to have a very high sex drive
since this is their primary way of releasing emotions that
are pent up within. These are people who enjoy sex more than
once a day. They tend to be very cerebral or intellectual,
highly emotional, but very much out of touch with their emotions.
If you identify with this description, keep a record of the
thoughts/ experiences/ fears that you are having prior to
engaging in this types of sex. Sex can be used to stuff down
feelings so you won’t feel them and identifying these
feelings and releasing them will help you move into a much
healthier and enjoyable sexual life.
Eating, Drinking, Exercising,
or Any Type of Compulsive or Excessive Behavior: We often
go for weeks, even years acting in a manner that is normal
for us – and what is normal for you may not be normal
for another person. Then we will find ourselves overeating,
working excessively, drinking daily, engaging in compulsive
sex, working long hours, and many other types of compulsive
behaviour. We stuff down our feelings through excessive behaviour,
ensuring we do not feel them at that moment. We do this because
the feelings are too painful or we are just too afraid of
these feelings and where they might lead us in our thinking
and actions.
Try to identify the times
when your excessive behaviour was triggered and, as soon as
you can, identify the emotion that is causing this behaviour.
It can be stress or fear related to a new job, the death of
a friend or partner, difficulties with lovers or children.
Document these emotions as best as you can. We never do anything
without getting something from it. There is a reason why you
are engaged in excessive or compulsive behaviour.
When What You Say and Do Is
Not In Sync With What You Feel: Men and women go through many
situations telling themselves that “it doesn’t
really matter” or “it’s not important enough
to argue about”, basically buying peace by agreeing
to something that deep down they do not agree with. They find
themselves feeling unhappy, disgruntled, and angry with the
individual involved. This type of situation creates tensions
and unhappiness in relationships. Buying peace at any price
creates negative feelings within you.
Identify those situations
where you have created depressing feelings within yourself
by agreeing to something that makes you don’t really
agree with. Write them down. This will be difficult for people
who have difficulty saying no, or who are too anxious to please
others. But the feelings generated by these situations are
very important when dealing with your emotional life. Many
times we need to excuse things and just overlook them. That’s
normal in life. But we apply this to situations that affect
us deeply. It’s these situations we need to identify.
Positive Emotions: It is crucial
that you identify your positive emotions during these exercises.
You are probably very loving, caring, compassionate, trusting,
forgiving, generous, many times in each day. Be certain to
include the wonderful and good things about yourself as you
identify your emotional self. This provides a realistic picture.
If your record only negative emotions, your picture of yourself
will be quite distorted and lacking in reality. Each one of
us is born with all emotions and each emotion needs to be
seen in its full and loving energy.
The Gentle Whispers of Your
Soul: Find a quiet place and time and listen to that inner
voice of intuition within you. Each person has it. And listen
with your heart rather than your head. Your heart will hear
different things from your head.
There is a very special time
just as you are waking up in the morning but before you are
fully awake. This is the time zone when you can often hear
your sub-conscious speaking to you. Listen to your thoughts
at this time carefully and you will pick up important messages,
messages that can help you to identify your emotions, even
your core issues.
Using Your Guides/ Angels/
The Divine Universal Energy: Ask your guides, angels, or whoever
you call on from the Divine Universal Energy, to help you
to see not just your emotions, but to see the core issues
that you have come to deal with in this lifetime. Our Guides
and Angels need to be asked, they are so respectful. They
do not intervene unless asked. You will be amazed to see the
Divine assistance come into your healing journey once you
seek their assistance. Pray, meditate, ask them to help you
see, understand and release your buried emotions. Believe
in their help, it’s guaranteed to come.
Crying About Your Experience:
Crying is a normal releasing function for each human being.
We are born with this ability because through crying we release
pain, hurt, and associated stress. Please begin to cry about
whatever hurts you.
Crying or writing and crying
about what has happened to you can help you sort out your
experience and understand it. And understanding is crucial
for many people. 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.
Writing About Your Emotions:
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 don’t have to
show your list to anyone, but for complete emotional health
you have to fully accept your emotions. This acceptance will
be accelerated if you write your list and share this list
of emotions with one other human being. But be very careful
and choose someone who will guarantee you confidentiality.
I highly recommend a counsellor, minister, priest, and psychiatrist,
someone trained in this type of work and who guarantees confidentiality.
A professional can often help you put a healthy perspective
on these emotions. Writing this list is important.
Friends/ Counsellor/ Minister/
Therapist: You might want to consider seeking the assistance
of a counsellor, 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 friends who love us
and care about us, especially when we are hurting. And usually
this is not the time when you could say we are at our best.
Tell your friends about what hurts you. Feel their comfort
and love. Make sure they understand you may not want advice
on how to resolve your issues. What we all need is a loving
ear to listen to us with their heart. 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.
Take the risk and share these happenings and your feelings
with close friends whom you can trust.
This article is part 2 of a 3 part series on emotions
Emotions
1
Emotions
2
Emotions
3
More Information On Emotions
(Your Emotions)
(Enlightenment)
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