Not so fast! Before you scrap your “lower emotions” and just “choose to be happy,” take a moment to listen to what your emotions are trying to tell you. They may be the difference between just how long that happiness lasts, before you hit another low and get in yet another funk. In this post, you’ll learn how to deal with emotions in a healthy way:
how to deal with emotions in a healthy way
Why Honor and Receive Your Lower Emotions
I used to be a huge proponent of “happiness is a choice.” I still believe that you certainly must be open to feeling good, in order to experience deep joy and contentment, but I don’t think that a good, well, and abundant life is characterized by just how “happy” you are all the time, especially when that happiness is really forced and not founded upon true joy and presence.
Being in allowance of happiness and all “higher emotions” requires an allowance of all emotions, period. That includes your “lower emotions,” as well. Think of your emotions like a great body of water. You can put a dam up to try to block what you perceive as “negative” emotions (i.e. anger, grief, anxiety, etc.), creating a small, manageable channel for the emotions you actually desire to come in (i.e. happiness, love, exuberance, etc.).
However, any kind of numbing out and blocking of your emotions, decreases the amount of happiness and positive emotions you can feel overall. If you only let so many lower emotions in, then you’ll only be letting in so many higher emotions as well.
Numbing out reduces your sensitivity to all emotions, including the positive ones.
Plus, what you resist persists. ALL emotions hold important information. They are keys to your health, growth, and transformation. When you begin to honor your lower emotions, acknowledging and processing them, you’ll be able to experience longer moments of sustained happiness and peace.
The Effects of Unprocessed Emotions
AKA Why You Get into a Funk
When you block unwanted emotions and shut them down before they’ve said their piece, they burrow deep under the surface and go looking for other ways to get your attention.
Your buried, unprocessed emotions may reveal themselves in ailments, diseases, excess weight, and other manifestations in the physical body. They inform and sustain limiting beliefs and prevent you from manifesting and creating what you desire in life. They cause you to act in ways you don’t understand and won’t understand until you identify your emotional triggers, process, and release them.
An emotional trigger is an emotional reaction to a person, comment, situation, event, or any other content/occurrence.
Emotional Triggers and Your Path to Emotional Freedom
Emotional triggers are often sourced in childhood. Since we didn’t have the tools to understand pain, suffering, and complex emotions as children, they go unprocessed and often times unacknowledged. As a result, when something happens in adulthood that triggers that emotional pain, which we may not even be aware of, we get emotionally triggered. Getting triggered can put you in a funk, completely offset your day, and easily wreak havoc on your life, if you let your triggers go unchecked.
In the Mastering Lower Emotion series, we’ll be exploring various lower emotions to better understand, release, and learn from them.
Check out the full series here, complete with informative articles and weekly challenges. Get started with the first challenge today: Body Journaling for Health & Emotional Freedom
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