Welcome! Below you will find
Emotions Made Easy:
How Your Feelings Work
A Free Online E-booklet By
Linda Belliveau B.Ph. & Neil Friedman Ph.D.
We Help You
Learn How Your Feelings Work
"I know much more
about the way my emotions work now."
- Alison F.
To read your free online e-booklet please begin now:
Emotions Made Easy:
How Your Feelings Work
By Linda Belliveau B.Ph.and Neil Friedman Ph.D.
Peak Emotional Intelligence Associates
How Do Your Feelings Work?
How do your feelings work? Here is what we know. We feel many things. Happy. Sad. Mad. Bored. Scared. Joyful. And so on.
There is a saying in Germany - "the infant is all heart." When we were all babies and young children, we were really good at the free flow of emotion. Different moments brought up different feelings in us. We felt them and expressed them. Then we forgot about them and moved on.
Here is an example. When a baby is hungry it is unhappy. So it cries. If it's parent brings food then it eats and is happy again. When a toddler wants a piece of candy badly at the supermarket and is not allowed to have it, you will often see a full-blown tantrum complete with kicking and screaming. Once the child works this out of it's system, a new moment comes along and the child
usually forgets all about what happened before.
This is what happens when children's emotions flow.
What Happened As We Grew Up?
As we grew up, most of us stopped doing this. We stopped for a variety of reasons - and some of them were good. Our feelings are a force of nature. They are not often neat, tidy or convenient. They often bother other people. When we were young our feelings may have bothered our parents or other caregivers. The adults in our lives may have been overwhelmed, stressed out, too busy, or just plain afraid of the intensity of our feelings. They may very well have tried to stifle the honest expression of our emotions and taught us how to do this ourselves.
Some of this was a good thing. There is a time and a place for the expression of emotion in a healthy person's life. Our parents were also trying to teach us manners and how to get along with other people. The strong expression of emotions is often not a polite thing done in most social situations. Holding our feelings in check was a necessary skill we had to learn to get along in the world.
Some people have the tendency to get hysterical or be too aggressive. If this is true for you then
your task will not be to learn how to express your emotions. You already know how. Your task is to learn how to contain your emotions in your daily life and let them flow only in the right way, at the right time and in the right place. For this we think that you will do well with the support of a professional who specializes in this.
Some people learned all too well how to contain their emotions. If this is true for you then your task is to learn how to express them.
Life will always have it's ups and downs. It is a normal part of life that we will get hurt at some time or another. We will always need to know how and when to put our social training to the side and turn to our early instinctual skill at expressing our feelings in a healthy way as a first step in healing our emotional hurts.
Here is an analogy. We take in food. We digest it. We let out the waste regularly. What would happen if we did not digest our food? Or if we digested it and did not let out the waste? We would get sick.
In the area of emotions, we take in life experiences. Ideally, we digest them, then let them go and move on. What would happen if did not digest our experiences and then let go of the past? We would get sick-at-heart.
Emotions Are Meant To Flow
Emotion is like a river. It is meant to flow. As babies and young children, whenever it arose it flowed through us anytime and anyplace. That is one big reason our hearts used to be so open and unencumbered.
As emotionally responsible adults, we are meant to be in charge of the time and place we allow our feelings to flow. But we are not designed to dam up that flow by holding our feelings inside
ourselves indefinately.
When we dam up the flow of our emotion, it creates alot of pressure inside. This can have several different results. The first is that it can prevent you from feeling any of the positive emotions as well. Most notably, love. When we are not feeling anything, then it is easy to feel dead inside and like we are only "going through the motions" of living.
After awhile, the pressure may buildup so much that the dam finally breaks and floods a nearby town. An emotional explosion can cause alot of damage!
Clearly our emotions are very powerful. We said that sometimes people stop the flow because they are afraid of emotions. They do not understand them or know what to do about them. We will tell you what we know about this.
People Have A Wide Range Of Feelings
If we were to name a number of different feelings right now and ask you whether you had ever felt each of them, you would most likely answer yes.
Let us do a little experiment. Have you ever felt angry? Have you ever felt sad? Have you ever felt happy, afraid or disappointed? How about amused or flattered?
If we were to keep on, we might come to very intense emotions like these. Have you ever felt love? How about anguish? Have you ever felt depression or joy or even bliss?
All of these emotions and more are a part of the human experience.
When Emotions Are Fully Felt They Change
Some emotions are fun and pleasant to feel. Others scare us or hurt. Regardless, a clue as to how to handle your emotions in a healthy way is built into the word itself.
Imagine that the "E" at the beginning of the word "Emotion" stands for "Energy". Then the meaning of the word would be this: "Energy-in-motion".
An emotion is a piece of energy that comes from a life experience. That energy is meant to flow and be felt fully. Once it is then it will change.
Here is an example from Linda's life:
"A long time ago when I was a new group leader I had an experience which illustrated this.
"I was trying to lead something I really cared about during quiet time with a group of children. One little boy was very tense and disruptive. During this quiet time he began to express his tension by giggling. To make a long story short it was contagious and after a few minutes all the children and staff erupted in true belly-laughs and loud guffaws.
"All except me. I was actually feeling embarassed. I knew the laughter was good-natured. But I was in front of the group trying to lead, and it just felt like everyone was laughing at me.
"Even though I knew this was not what was happening I began to experience the feeling of humiliation. A burning sensation began at the bottom of my toes and traveled up to my cheeks and ears until my face felt like it was on fire.
"I had often run from my deepest feelings. But that day I heard a little voice inside which said to me, "Just stay with this feeling for a moment. Feel this so you can truly know it. That way if you decide to run from this feeling you will at least know what you are running from".
"So I gritted my teeth and opened to it instead of fighting it. I breathed deeply and felt the feeling of pure unadulterated humiliation.
"That feeling lasted one to two minutes at the very most. Since I allowed it to flow through me there was nothing for it to get stuck on. It passed right through me and out of me. When it left there was a shift. I began feeling a deep harmony with the moment and that group of children.
"As the laughter in the room naturally died down we finished what we had been doing and went on with our day."
An emotion is a piece of energy that is meant to be fully felt in a safe and respectful way. After it is felt it will change.
Stored Emotions Are Found In The Body
We have said that emotions need to be felt in the right way and at the right time and place. You may not know how to do this. Or you may know how to do it but your emotions are so painful or overwhelming that you feel you cannot. Instead you stop the flow of your emotion in an attempt to protect yourself from the pain. What happens to that unfelt emotion then?
We think that it gets stored inside the very tissues and muscles of the body and is held there by tension. This tension serves to hold the emotion in and stop it from flowing freely.
Here is an analogy. Imagine a logger who is standing on a heavy, wet log in the river. This half-submerged log is a metaphor for unfelt and undigested emotions. The logger has one foot on the dock and the other on the log. His footing is unsure and he is making an intense effort trying to keep the log under the water. But it is a very hard thing to do and basically just is not working. The log keeps popping back up put of the water no matter how hard he tries. It will be hard for him to ever get his balance. He may even fall.
Consider. Emotion is like a river that naturally wants to flow. To keep it from flowing you have to dam up the river. Physical tension helps us do this.
Therefore when we begin to learn how to find our emotions we quite naturally look first to the body. After we learn how to find them we can also engage the body to help us release those stored emotions in healthy, safe and responsible ways.
We Are Built To Let Our Emotions Flow
We just said that emotions are stored in the body. Look at a baby or young child's body. You can see that the basic types of painful emotions such as fear, anger and sadness all have their standard physical reaction which allows that emotion to be released.
When we are scared the natural physical reaction is to get weak in the knees and start to tremble. If a young child were terribly afraid she might start to shake violently or scream at the top of her lungs.
Anger makes people agitated. People start to talk in an animated way and raise their voices. Anger naturally tries to be released by moving the body vigorously. Young children will have a tantrum. An adult can get in trouble if they have an adult-size tantrum and express their anger in the wrong way. Yelling at others, destroying property, or going and punching another person are all examples of this.
Everyone knows that the natural physcial reaction associated with sadness is crying. In times of extreme grief wails of sorrow may be heard.
Each of us has probably witnessed or experienced these physical reactions to emotions many times in our lives. Done in the right way, at the right time and in the right place this physical release of emotion is very important. This is a major key to coping with the depth of human emotion.
Women are designed to not only bear the pain of childbirth but to come through it with a new baby in their arms. In the same way, we think that people are designed, with the help of these natural outlets for their emotions, to bear the pain of life. We think that people are not only designed to bear the pain of life but to come out the other side with a deeper wisdom and maturity than they had before.
This does not mean we think that you are a failure if you are weighed down by emotions that you are not feeling or releasing very well. We have both been there.
We both have some significant experience with a variety of emotions from childhood and as adults. Between us we have experienced both occasional and clinical depression, divorce, cancer, open heart surgery, culture shock, and the decline and death of various dear loved ones.
We know whereof we speak.
If You Are Not Open To All Your Emotions
You Will Not Feel Any
The river of emotion is either flowing or it is not. We do not get to choose the emotions that are fun like love and joy, and push away the ones we do not like. "Okay - I like happiness but not sorrow."
When you have emotions that you do not want to feel, and you close yourself off from them to protect yourself, what happens? It becomes very hard to feel all the good feelings that you might also have - like love and happiness.
Then you will feel very lonely and isolated and cut-off from life. This is an extremely painful place to be.
One cannot feel happiness and love through thinking. One can only think thoughts. To feel, the heart has to open. To open you will have to realize that you cannot control life and at some point you will get hurt.
However you can learn how to feel that pain and release it instead of carrying it. As you get better and better at this your courage to risk pain for the sake of love will grow. Risking love is a big part of what it means to be alive.
To Home Page
| | |
|
