Submitted by Look Inward on
Image by Alexey Pavlov from http://Pixabay.com
To acquire emotional mastery requires first that you become aware of your emotions and the level of activation or intensity they have. You might say well isn’t everyone aware of their emotions, after all they are experiencing them….The answer is no and also a matter of degree.
There is a high degree of variance in how people choose to experience emotions. It is possible to experience emotions almost exclusively in the head and completely disconnected from the body. However, the goal in being able to shape our emotions to our choosing is to feel them viscerally in the body as physical sensations for that is the gateway for releasing the emotions and rewiring our brain.
Trauma of whatever type are emotions that were to intense to deal with and the mind copes with this by dissociating from the body. When people have that blanked out stuck deep in the head look that is a sign of dissociation from the body and emotions felt in the body. The goal is to slowly and progressively reconnect the mind to the body so it can process emotions the way they were intended through physical sensations. Animals do this naturally however humans have an ego that sometimes gets in the way of this process.
Somatic Psychotherapy models have a basic process in common for how to properly work through emotions.
- Use your imagination to bring about a scenario in your mind that left you feeling emotionally uneasy
- Feel the negative emotion viscerally in the body and notice and temperature like sensations, tingling, tightness, contractions, pains, aches, stinging, creepiness, etc.
- Imagine a creative positive outcome to the negative scenario
- Feel how negative emotions transition to positive emotions based on a positive rather than negative outcome
- Take some time sense into and relax into the body and the positive emotions. Mentally notice how those emotions feel sensory wise.
Initially this process will go very slow. If a scenario brings up negative emotions that you feel are too powerful to deal with, try something easier for practice. With time the process becomes easier and can be applied to every single one of your emotions. This is how you gain emotional mastery. It is by working with your emotions rather than against them in a controlling manner. Emotions are fluid like water. The more intense an emotion the slower it needs to be worked through.
Mal-adapted ways of dealing with emotions
Most people deal with uncomfortable, creepy, disgusting, fearful, anxious and other negative emotions by actively trying to negate them. They usually try to do this by repressing them, usually by thinking about something else or becoming preoccupied with a non-correlated task. Most people run away from their negative emotions or try to work around them. These are extremely dysfunctional methods and while they work on the surface the act of repressing emotions drives them deeper causing them to fester often outside of conscious awareness. Then when circumstances bring about triggers, they resurface with a vengeance The more successful a person is at repressing an emotion the greater likelihood also for serious health issues down the road.
Fake it till you make it, is a common way people use the above process. Again this works, however it causes further disconnection of the mind from the body and ultimately does not resolve the root anxiety or fear. The more someone does this the more difficult it becomes for them to work through emotions and this applies to any emotion for the default method/go-to response will then be to repress. Most people are masters of repression, and this is why very few people are present in their bodies often lost in thought and disconnected socially.
The other most common method people use to deal with negative emotions is by ruminating about them. Ruminating is the tendency for people to repetitively focus on the causes and consequences of their problems without engaging in active problem solving. People often try to figure out ways they can logically fix an emotional problem when, when the problem is often best addressed by emotionally working through it.
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