Look back in your life. You would certainly have some memories when you had very strong emotions. Try to figure out 3 or 4 most prominent ones. Include the ones that you have disciplined yourself to never think about. The ones you do not want to think about.
In your past have you been subjected to any of the following –
1. In childhood did you get too embarrassed by some action of yours which was innocent mistake but you had to face lot of overreaction from parents or teachers?
2. Were you ridiculed by friends, colleagues or family members for something you didn't do right?
3. Did you think that your parents loved your sibling more than they loved you?
4. Did you feel that your parents did not love you enough(as much as you wanted them to)?
5. Did someone ditch you?
6. Did you ditch someone?
7. Were you made to feel that you were not ‘OK’ in some dimension and if you didn't behave in a certain way, you may loose out in life?
8. Did your partner overreact to certain behaviour of yours?
9. Did you stop expressing yourself to avoid yourself getting into a conflict?
10. Do you think that you are guilty of not being a good son/daughter and that you haven’t fulfilled your obligations to your parents?
11. Do you think that you do not spend enough time with your children?
12. Do you feel that you are not as good a parent as your parents were?
13. Do you think that you aren’t smart enough to have capitalized on the opportunities that came in your life?
14. Do you think that to be successful in life you have to be on guard always when you are in your office?
15. Do you think that you do not show your real self to people otherwise they may get offended?
Experiences like these really screw up our lives. The society in which we grow up along with the education systems always try to teach us that we are not ‘OK’ and to be ‘OK’, we need to behave in a ‘certain way’. All of us are subjected to this trauma for at least first two decades of our lives, leading us to become distant from our own inner beauty and we start wearing so many masks that we finally get disconnected with our emotions and rather than living through or using our emotions in a positive way, we start ignoring and avoiding our emotions. We feel that certain emotions are ‘bad emotions’ that we should not have. This compounds the problem. One, we do not do justice to our emotions, two we start feeling that something is wrong with us since we are having such emotions.
What can be done about this?
I find that there are four steps that you can take to get out of this unhealthy situation.
Step 01 : Take out ‘quiet time’ for yourself everyday of your life. Anywhere between 15 mins to 30 mins would be absolutely fine. This can be anytime during the day. In that quite time, think about the situations in your life which created strong emotions. Understand that the context in which those things happened also had a huge role to play in the way things turned out. May be you blamed yourself too much unnecessarily and changed yourself wrongly. If you started behaving in a ‘certain way’ to avoid making some mistake again in your life, may be you made a mistake. If you stopped doing the things that you enjoyed doing because of any of such events, just start doing them again. Just start enjoying your natural self. Re discover yourself. Express yourself. Reconnect with your childhood friends.
Today onwards, start ‘feeling’ your emotions as you go through them. You probably get 50,000 thoughts a day and each of these trigger as many emotions. Let those emotions come and go. It is a matter of few seconds every time.
To understand this, you need to understand the way thoughts travel in our brains. Everything we experience passes first through the emotional part of our brains, called the limbic system. A trigger event, such as a new deadline to meet, is “felt” by the limbic system before we have any rational reaction to the circumstance. So, we fully experience the anxiety, exuberance, or irritation of a moment before the rational part of the brain gets a crack at choosing the direction to head in response to the situation.
They ‘Key’ is to hold yourself for a couple of seconds when your emotions are overpowering you. After a few seconds, the rational part of our brain starts working. And naturally the clarity which rational thinking brings settles the emotion. This happens ‘naturally’. You just need to stop interfering with this natural process.
Have a nice weekend.
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