Embedded Files
Updated 7/14/25
Click the document to the right or below for a PDF version that you can read or print.
SUPPRESSED EMOTIONS.pdf
Suppressed Emotions
Suppressed Emotions
We have already covered that our emotions are just programs your body has learned to use to help you in different situations. You have different programs for different situations and outcomes. We have discussed that there are not really good or bad emotions, just emotions. It is the meaning we attach to the program that determines how we react to it. Many of this happens subconsciously.
As humans, we do not like things that make us uncomfortable. A lot of these feelings are uncomfortable for us, so we have learned different strategies for handling them. Some good and some not so good. Some people are also better at it than others.
One of the most common ways to handle uncomfortable feelings is to suppress or repress them. Suppression is when we consciously ignore or push down feelings.b,g We can do this for many reasons and is not always wrong. Sometimes when your boss or teacher is making you mad, you have to bite your tongue and stop yourself from doing something you would later regret. Repression on the other hand, is an “unconscious process where disturbing or painful thoughts, memories, or emotions are pushed away from conscious awareness as a defense mechanism.”g,b This usually occurs with stronger emotions or more traumatic events. It is often because the emotion is too scary or there is a lot of guilt and shame associated with it.b Often the individual is not even aware of these repressed thoughts or feelings. Some people talk about escape as a third way of handling emotions.b
This can be seen by those with addictions. Addictions are not just alcohol and drugs but we can be addicted to work, exercise, talking negatively to ourselves, screentime, pulling your hair, biting your nails etc. We often talk about these actions or objects like they are what is controlling us. However, people just use these things to fill a need or as a distraction to avoid facing the real problem and feeling. By avoiding the feelings they are actually just suppressing or repressing the emotion. Interestingly, Marisa Peer points out “when you crave something, it’s often not the thing itself that you’re craving, but the feeling that it represents.”e
As Kate Murphy points out, “when we learn to avoid feelings, our brains learn that these emotions are unsafe —not safe for us to feel. As long as these repressed emotions remain buried in the unconscious mind, they trigger the fight-or-flight nervous system, and the brain will do just about anything to keep you safe from feeling them—even giving you a nice dose of pain or some other problem to solve.”g Or as she more simply put it, “the body expresses what the mind suppresses.”g I have heard some doctors say that 80-90% of what they see in the clinic (no matter what symptoms they are dealing with) ultimately ties back to this problem with the mind. However, it is important to understand what one doctor pointed out. “It is absolutely true that your symptoms are real, they are not imagined or just in your head. The symptoms are in your mind and your body and are caused by a set of learned neural circuits.”j
This phenomenon has been called different things like psychosomatic distress,b nervous system dysregulationg or mind body syndrome.j It makes sense that trapped emotions are related to depression, anxiety, and the other mental health conditions. It has also been found to be a large portion of many people’s autoimmune conditions, fibromyalgia, stomach/digestive issues, fatigue, hormone imbalances, blood pressure problems, and pretty much anything else that is chronic. I also think it is a large portion of relationship and other social problems. I was told once that chronic pain is just when your body couldn’t compensate any more. Our bodies are made to heal and it also does a really good job compensating. The problem is, it can only compensate for so long before something wears down.
This is also why drugs (legal and illegal), massage, chiropractors, physical therapy, acupuncture, massage, and all the other techniques out there do not work for many people. They are doing their best and they do have some benefits; but for these people they are only addressing the symptoms. As a result, the symptoms don’t completely resolve, they return, or they just move to another area of the body.
When someone does not allow an emotion to process, now their energy becomes focused on suppressing the chaos inside.d It takes a lot of energy to hold these emotions down.b I have heard it’s like holding a ball under the water – it takes a lot of effort and eventually it is going to pop up. Unfortunately, we don’t just suppress one emotion. These emotions accumulate over time and the pressure builds. Sometimes we will snap or do something else to release some of the pressure, but usually just enough to make it manageable enough for us to push the rest of it back down.b
Many experts like to use the analogy of a bucket. Our body and mind can actually do a lot and compensate for awhile. When our bucket is full, it starts overflowing and that is when the symptoms show up. There is a story of a man walking on the beach and comes upon a fisherman carrying a bucket of crabs with no lid. The man kindly tells the fisherman, “You’d better put a cover on that pail or the crabs will get out.” The wise old fisherman just smiles and says, “There is no need for that. You see, as one crab crawls up the side of the pail to get out, the other crabs reach up and grab him and pull him back down. So there’s no need for a cover.”
As Kate Murphy points out, “But here’s what most people don’t realize: This isn’t a mental problem. It’s a physiological state. Chronic stress puts your body in survival mode. And when your body is stuck in survival, your brain will be too. The mind can only calm down when the nervous system feels safe.”g
When we are in fight or flight mode, our body’s resources are diverted to only those systems that are useful to help you fight or get out of there. The blood slows down to the organs so it can be transferred to the major muscles that move your body. This means that as long as you are in this state, your digestive system is not going to be able to digest and process food as well. Some of the processing power leaves the thinking part of the brain to help increase the functioning power of those parts of your brain that will help you be more alert to potential danger. This is the emotional brain which is why people tend to act more like toddlers or animals. It has been said when we are functioning at the lower levels we only have two emotions – fear and desire.l This is also why many people in this state can only see a limited number of options. We also get an increase in hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to help our body have the necessary resources to fight or flee. Once the situation is over, the body is supposed to return to normal with the blood flowing back to the organs, the muscles relaxing, restoring the processing power of the rest of your brain. What happens if this system never gets shut off or the alarm keeps going off every couple of hours day after day?
M. Scott Peck pointed out, “I have come to conclude that mental illness is not a product of the unconscious; it is instead a phenomenon of consciousness or a disordered relationship between the conscious and the unconscious…..But why were these desires and feelings located in the unconscious in the first place? Why were they repressed? The answer is that the conscious mind did not want them. … but rather that human beings have a conscious mind that is so often unwilling to face these feelings and tolerate the pain of dealing with them, and that is so willing to sweep them under the rug.”h
We are afraid of these feelings because we don’t like the way they make us feel and/or we don’t believe we can handle them.b Because we are afraid, our body perceives danger. When our body perceives danger, it activates the fight-or-flight response.g Many people are living in this constant state of stress and their body is constantly responding as if they were being chased by a lion.j The brain keeps sending signals to the body to escape a threat that no longer exists.d Suppressing these feelings does not make them disappear. On the contrary, they will re-emerge as negative thoughts or symptoms in the body.b Emotions can be likened to a toddler. When they are ignored they just get louder until they are heard. When someone suppresses an emotion, eventually it will show up but may just show up as migraines, asthma attacks, or some other symptom.d I sometimes think of emotions as one of those old fashioned records or part of a symphony. When one of these emotions becomes trapped, the rest of the body may be playing good music but the area where the emotion is stuck is like a record that is stuck or an instrument that is out of tune.
When the clouds are removed, the sun shines through. – David Hawkins
Some people have pointed out that a lot of these trapped emotions are tied to the “fundamental human needs for love, safety, and belonging.”m Sometimes the need has not been met and sometimes we are just afraid of having it not met or losing it.b For example, when a woman keeps asking her special someone if she is beautiful, “she's not just fishing for compliments — she's trying to quiet the voice inside that tells her she's not enough.”m Maybe you feel that all your needs are met and that is not why your emotions are being suppressed. This is an extremely common lie we tell ourselves — “our minds try to protect us from the disappointment of wanting something we can't have (or have come to believe we can never have). And so we convince ourselves that what we secretly desire is overrated, unnecessary, or that we're better off without it anyway.”
A lot of times we get stuck in a thought cycle where we have certain beliefs and then we go look for proof of those beliefs.e This is called confirmation bias. Remember, very often what we look for we will find. We have a certain thought or belief, so we consciously or subconsciously act a certain way. Because of the way we act, we get a response which confirms that belief. For example, if you don’t feel worthy of love, then you can’t accept your husband’s compliments. Because you don’t accept the compliments, he gradually starts giving them less which just confirms in your mind that you are not worthy of love.
A lot of these beliefs start with us when we are children. Many children experience some really terrible things in life. Even if you had great parents and a good life we can still learn some incorrect beliefs about ourselves. When a child believes their parents don’t love them, “they don’t stop loving their parents. They immediately and often permanently stop loving themselves.”e A dad may be a great dad and play with his children and take care of them, but what if he works a lot? A child can’t logically understand that dad has to work to pay for the house and other things. What they assume is that dad must love work more than them because they are not good enough. What if the mom has to take care of a fussy baby a lot? Big brother or sister doesn’t understand that babies need a lot of attention. All they realize is that mom must love the baby more than them, so the baby must be more important.
Many of us may relate to this experience of someone who survived a traumatic experience. She said, “I instinctively blame myself for everything bad that happens to the people around me. I know that isn’t rational, and I feel really dumb for feeling this way, but I do. When you try to talk me into being more reasonable, I only feel even more lonely and isolated – and it confirms the feeling that nobody in the whole world will ever understand what it feels like to be me.”d
TRAUMA
TRAUMA
Although the world is full of suffering. It is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
Stress is not an emotion but is our body’s response to a perceived threat whether it is real or imaginary.b These threats can be big or small. What is a big threat to me, might be a small threat to someone else. What wasn’t a threat yesterday, might be a threat today. When someone experiences a stressor that “overwhelms their capacity to cope,” we call it a trauma.o It doesn’t have to be something major. It could have been something that was just too much, too little, too soon, too fast, too slow, etc. Many people use the analogy of a bucket. They mention that life is constantly putting things into our bucket and if we aren’t able to empty any of it, it just keeps getting more full until it overflows. It might be one big thing that overflows your bucket or a bunch of little things.
Many people have experienced some really traumatic things in their life. For example, “one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence.”d Dr. Gabor Mate points out, “Trauma is not what happens to you, trauma is what happens inside of you, as a result of what happened to you.”
Trauma actually changes the brain. The brain’s alarm system is altered so many of these people become hypervigilant to possible threats.d It also messes up their perception and imagination. This is why many of them see danger when there is none, or why they are always on edge. Many of these people “chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies.”d As part of their survival mechanism, many of them have mentally separated from their body so they feel like somebody else or no body at all.d All of this significantly impacts their ability to have a close relationship with others.
Those who have experienced trauma have trouble processing the situation and affects how their brain processes memories. Researchers have found that people who have experienced severe trauma were unable to make their past into a story that happened long ago and their memories are disorganized.d Instead of being a story that happened a long time ago, many of these people experience these same emotions and physical sensations like it is happening in the present.d That is why in the book, The Body Keeps the Score they say that “trauma comes back as a response not a memory.”d These people often do not know what is going to trigger this flashback, when it will occur, or how long it will last. Because of this many of these people develop a fear of the fear.d All of this can be exhausting and many of these sufferers “don’t spend a great deal of time or effort on dealing with the past – their problem is simply making it through the day.” On top of all that, “deep down many traumatized people are even more haunted by the shame they feel about what they themselves did or did not do under the circumstances.”d
PEOPLE AVOID PROBLEMS
PEOPLE AVOID PROBLEMS
Kate Murphy taught, “Our brains are wired to keep us safe, and it’s often easier to think than to feel because we learn from a young age that intense emotions are overwhelming and uncomfortable. Instead of facing the anxiety or alarm in our bodies, we escape into the mind, trying to think our way out of danger and cope with these big feelings. This tendency to intellectualize our experiences rather than truly feel them reinforces our disconnect from our emotions and prolongs our suffering.”g
As we have mentioned multiple times, this tendency to avoid problems, the truth, and emotional discomfort is the root cause of most if not all human mental and physical problems.h When we avoid the problem, it does not go away. The farther we get from the problem, the farther we also get away from the solution. It is amazing how far some people go to avoid facing their emotions and demons.d Ironically the things we do to avoid the problem or manage it are usually more painful and difficult in the long run than what we are trying to avoid.h Kind of like my kids when they don’t want to do their chores or homework. It may not be fun, but they would be done in five minutes if they would just do their chore or homework. They could then go play or do whatever they want. Instead they spend two hours whining, wasting time, getting in trouble, or having to do more work.
This is where it is good to realize that we always have a choice and we get to choose our hard. “Difficult choices are still choices.”i You can choose to do the hard thing and exercise consistently. Or you can choose to deal with the low self esteem, difficulty with tasks, being unable to do things you want to, and health problems that come later with being out of shape. You can choose to practice the piano even when you don’t want to so you can play what you want when you want or need to. Or you can choose having regrets that you aren’t as good as you want to be or miss out on an opportunity you could have had. You can choose to face a tough emotion or situation and be uncomfortable for a little while. Or you can deal with the physical symptoms that develop later from suppressing it and/or constantly having to fight the negative emotion that is still trying to express itself.
Another common human tendency is to give our power away. We often say that we will do something when the other person does _____ first or when _____ happens.i Or we may say, I can’t do _____ because ______. This is giving the power over the situation to the other person or thing. What if that person or thing never does that action? What if I were to give you a million dollars to find a solution, would you be able to do it then? Like Arnold Swartzenegger said, “You can have excuses or results, but not both.” We are good at giving some reasonable sounding excuses because it eases our conscious, but once we quit believing them we can work on getting results. M. Scott Peck reminds us, “I can solve a problem only when I say ‘This is my problem and it’s up to me to solve it.’”h
PROBLEMS WHEN EMOTIONS ARE IN CONTROL
PROBLEMS WHEN EMOTIONS ARE IN CONTROL
Your brain and emotions could be compared to a house of the future. Let’s say you have a house of the future that can be programmed. Maybe you decide to program it so every Saturday morning you push a button and the carpets gets vacuumed, the floors mopped, the toilets cleaned, and the windows washed. When you are ready for date night you push a button and the kitchen is cleaned, the lights dim, some candles are lit, a bath is ready, and a romantic movie is on t.v. waiting for you to push play. There is even a security setting where if a threat is detected metal coverings drop over the windows, all the doors automatically lock, and the police are notified. (Sounds nice, huh).
That is not all, this is a smart house that can learn and become more efficient. After a few weeks, the house notices that when you put on your work clothes Saturday morning that is when you push the cleaning program. Pretty soon the house starts cleaning as soon as it notices you request those clothes from the closet. Maybe it starts to notice that you have date night on Friday nights. Soon it starts getting everything ready even before you get home from work on Friday night. It even starts to match some food to the movie of the night. This could really make life more convenient.
As with all technology, it is great when it works how it is supposed to. When it doesn’t, it can be a real problem. What if your friend comes over wearing a t-shirt that looks similar to your cleaning shirt. It would be hard to have a fun conversation, and they might be really confused when the vacuum starts going and the windows are getting washed. What if you have a late night on Friday and didn’t want to clean until Saturday afternoon so you could sleep in. It would be pretty annoying to have the vacuum going off Saturday morning because that is when you usually clean. What about the house getting locked down even when there is no threat or even worse if it is keeping your friends out when you want them to come over?
When we are in control of our emotions, things work well. When our emotions are in control of us, things do not work well. Controlling our feelings does not mean squashing them out completely.h Unfortunately many people can’t seem to control their negative feelings so they learn to shut out all feelings. This leaves them emotionally numb to all the good feelings as well. A good analogy to training our emotions is the training of a wild horse. If you let the wild horse run free and do whatever it wants; it gets into trouble, damages things, and can’t be used for fun or when you need something done. Other people whip and beat a horse into submission; and while it may work at times for a short time, the horse will rebel at times, runaway, and will never be able to do all the things a good horse can do. When a horse is trained with love and patience, over time it learns to trust its master. It progressively becomes more able to handle harder and scarier situations and will often even end up saving its master’s life. It is loyal and loving and healthy and strong.
We have all experienced it ourselves and seen it in others when someone is living too much in their head. Here is a funny example, “You might be familiar with the story of a man who got a flat tire while traveling and needed to borrow a jack. He saw a light on in a nearby farmhouse and walked toward the house. As he got closer, he began to rehearse what he might say and imagined the response of the person living in the farmhouse. Pretty soon his mind had gone from an expected response of ‘Sure, help yourself’ to one of the farmer demanding payment and questioning why he was so rudely awakened. By the time the man reached the farmhouse, he knocked on the door angrily and said, ‘I don’t want your stupid jack anyway!’”
Here is another example that shows many of these principles in action. The person related the following experience, “The other night about 2:00 a.m. I awoke to hear the baby crying. At that moment I had a fleeting feeling, a feeling that if I got up quickly I might be able to see what was wrong before Carolyn would be awakened. It was a feeling that this was something I really ought to do. But I didn’t get up to check on the baby.” He then had to find some way to rationalize his self-betrayal. He continued, “It bugged me that Carolyn wasn’t waking up. I kept thinking it was her job to take care of the baby. She has her work and I have mine, and mine is hard. It starts early in the morning. She can sleep in. On top of that, I never know how to handle the baby anyway. I wonder if Carolyn was lying there waiting for me to get up. Why did I have to feel so guilty that I couldn’t sleep? The only thing I wanted was to get to work fresh enough to do a good job. What was so selfish about that?” C. Terry Warner then points out, “That’s what made the lie so convincing – because his angry feelings were real, he was sure the person toward whom they were directed was causing them. For self-justification, we are willing to pay almost any price – and very often the higher the price, the more justified we feel. Often we will do almost anything to hang on to our victimhood, even if it means destroying something we treasure.”n
DISCARD THE DIAGNOSIS
DISCARD THE DIAGNOSIS
This may sound counterintuitive, but one of the best things you can often do is forget what your doctor or Google has told you. (Read this section carefully as you still need to listen to and follow your doctor’s advice about many things.)
Many people get a sense of relief when they go to a doctor and finally get a diagnosis for their symptoms. They often feel like they at least know what is going on now and can start to do something about it. A correct diagnosis leads to good treatment; however, an incorrect diagnosis can lead to the incorrect treatment.d
I work with patients all the time who come to me and say the doctor did an x-ray of their back or shoulder or knee and found arthritis that is causing their pain. Here is where life gets tricky. The arthritis may be causing all of their pain, it may be causing some of their pain, and it may be causing none of their pain. That arthritis may have been there for 20 years and is not causing any of their pain, it just happens to be in the area and so it gets blamed because it is the only thing that shows up on x-rays. I just get a little sad or frustrated when I hear this because many of these people act like they now have a life sentence to be doomed with pain. I mean “there’s nothing you can do about arthritis” and “it’s part of getting older.” Right?
There are many studies that have taken individuals with full ROM, full strength, and no pain and given them x-rays or MRI’s. They found that many of these people have severe arthritis, bulging discs, stenosis, etc. One surgeon looked at 30 professional baseball pitchers who had no pain and were doing well physically and found on the MRI that 27 of the 30 had shoulders bad enough that the insurance would have approved surgery. (I am not against x-rays and MRI’s as they can sometimes provide very good information. I just know many times it causes more trouble than it helps.) I have heard of more than one person that didn’t have any neck or back pain. For some reason they ended up getting some imaging for something else which just happened to show some degeneration of the spine or stenosis or a bulging disc. Not too long later their back or neck started hurting and after some failed shots they ended up having surgery. You could argue that the condition had just progressed to the point where they started to have pain. It does make one wonder if they would have developed the pain if they had not heard those imaging results.
Here are some good quotes from doctors about this, “Stop giving a physical disorder a name, do not label it. A label is a whole program. Surrender what is actually felt, which are the sensations themselves. We cannot feel a disease. It is helpful to ask ‘What am I actually feeling?’ We cannot feel ulcers. We feel a burning or piercing sensation. The word ulcer is a label and a program and as soon as we use that word to label our experience, we identify ourselves with the whole ulcer program. In reality, we are feeling a specific body sensation.”b From the book, The Body Keeps the Score we read, “A psychiatric diagnosis has serious consequences: diagonosis informs treatment, and getting the wrong treatment can have disastrous effects. Also, a diagnostic label is likely to attach to people for the rest of their lives and have a profound influence on how they define themselves.”d He was also really hopeful and had good results when some of the psychiatric medications came out, but looking back he said, “The drug revolution that started out with so much promise may in the end have done as much harm as good…. The brain disease model takes control over people’s fate out of their own hands and puts doctors and insurance companies in charge of fixing their problems.”d The more I learn about Big Pharma, the less I believe they care about our health as much as their pocketbook.
“We can hope to solve the problems of these children only if we correctly define what is going on with them and do more than developing new drugs to control them or trying to find “the” gene that is responsible for their “disease” “d
When all is said and done, it is always the body that heals.l If you do surgery, give a supplement, or do any other modality none of those actually heal the body. They just do something to help the body heal. I think most doctors are honestly trying to help people and they are doing the best they know how. However, medicines are not designed to heal you. It is designed to manage some of the symptoms and usually causes other side effects. Ask your doctor if any of the medications you are taking are designed to cure your problem and see what they say. They are designed to manage symptoms and maybe keep you from developing other problems but they rarely are designed to actually cure the problem. As long as you are taking your blood pressure medication, your blood pressure is supposed to be under control but what caused the blood pressure to be high in the first place? The cortisone shot in your knee or back may help with the pain for a few months or years, but is it actually doing anything for what caused the pain and inflammation in the first place? Are the depression and anxiety pills really helping you learn how to manage and control your sadness or anxiety or does it just take the edge off the symptoms? How many of your symptoms are a side effect from some medication you are taking?
I know this is a little tricky and it is hard to explain this without knowing your specific details. However, there is always a reason that the arthritis develops, or the kidneys stop working, or the thyroid hormones aren’t being made like they should. Your symptoms are very real and not a lot of fun. The medication may help keep the symptoms under control, but if it doesn’t fix the cause of the problem then your problem will just keep getting worse. This is why you often have to keep increasing the dosage of the medication or you get new symptoms or the disease progresses until it gets bad enough for some kind of surgery. Some things are not fixed easily and some things have progressed enough that you do need surgery. I just know there are many people suffering more than they need to be because no one ever helped them figure out how to solve the root problem. I know there are a few doctors (like Dr. Livingood) who have left traditional medicine and have helped many people reverse some of these supposedly incurable conditions and gotten them off all of their medications. (Keep taking your medication until the problem is resolved or work with your doctor on getting off the medications.)
There is not one thing causing your problem. There is not one thing that is going to fix your problem. There is no magic bullet. The symptoms of these conditions are not fun, so medicine in the short term to manage the symptoms is a great benefit of modern medicine. Just don’t forget to work on finding and fixing the root causes. Many of the things that are going to fix your problem require effort and/or consistency on your part. Hopefully from reading these sections you are realizing that a big part of the cause of many of your symptoms actually starts with emotions and beliefs.
DIFFERENT EMOTIONS
DIFFERENT EMOTIONS
As we mentioned earlier, emotions have different vibrational levels. This is based on quantum physics. These have been measured at the following levels.b
· PEACE (600)
· JOY (540) This is a love that is unconditional and unchanging despite the circumstances or actions of others.
· LOVE (500)
· REASON (400)
· ACCEPTANCE (350)
· WILLINGNESS (310)
· NEUTRALITY (250)
· COURAGE (200) This is the energy that says “I can do it.” This is the point that some mark as the differentiator between positive and negative energy.
· PRIDE (175) Focuses on achievement. Based on a desire for recognition, specialness, perfectionism. Based on comparison.
o “Once we see pride for what it is, it is one of the easier emotions to surrender. To begin with, we can ask ourselves: ‘What is the purpose of pride? What is its payoff? Why do I seek it? For what does it compensate? What do I have to realize about my true nature in order to let pride go without a feeling of loss?’.... The smaller we feel within, the more we have to compensate for an inner sense of inadequacy, unimportance, and valuelessness by the substitution of the emotion of pride. … Gratitude is an opposite to pride. …. Pride goes with a sense of ownership…if we view one of our thoughts as ‘an opinion’ instead of ‘my opinion’ the feeling tone changes.”b
o “Perfectionists seem more obsessed with convincing themselves, rather than other people, of their worth.”n
· ANGER (150) This energy tends to overcome sources of fear by force, threats, or attack.
o “We typically feel so much guilt about anger that we find it necessary to make the object of our anger ‘wrong’ so that we can say our anger is ‘justified’. It is common for people to repress anger. The anger disappears when we let go of the fear or pride.”b
· DESIRE (125) Is always seeking gain, acquisition, pleasure, and “getting” something outside oneself. It is insatiable, never satisfied, and craving.
o “When we are at the effect of desire, we are no longer free. We are controlled by it, run by it, enslaved and led about by the nose by it. The main illusion is seen in the statement “The only way that I’ll get what I want is by desiring it; if I let go of my desire, then I won’t get what I want. – Actually the opposite is true. Identify the goal and then let go of wanting them.”b
· FEAR (100) This energy sees “danger” which is “everywhere”. It is avoidant, defensive, preoccupied with security, possessive of others, jealous, restless, anxious, and vigilant.
o Holding on to fear often leads to depression, fatigue, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and panic disorders.j The more we have fear trapped inside, the more it changes our perception of the world so that everything appears scary and we are always on guard.b
o Many people are afraid of fear itself. When you stop being afraid of fear, you can realize that it is just a feeling.b The mind is always trying to accomplish what it thinks we want. It doesn’t differentiate between good or bad things. This means that what we focus on has an increased chance of coming to pass. When we are afraid, we tend to think about that thing more which means we are helping to bring this to pass.b
· GRIEF (75) This energy is full of is helplessness, despair, depression, loss, regret, and the feeling “If only I had.”
o With significant loss, such as death, it is natural to have feelings of sadness. These feelings need to be experienced and processed for them to move on and heal. Someone pointed out that “we only have to tolerate an overwhelming grief for 10-20 minutes and then all of a sudden it will disappear. If we resist the grief, then it will go on and on. Suppressed grief can go on for years.”b
· APATHY (50) This energy is characterized by hopelessness, playing dead, being a “drain” to others.
· GUILT (30) – One wants to punish and be punished.
o There are two forms of guilt: deserved guilt and undeserved guilt.j
o “Deserved guilt” is the result of recognizing that one has made actual mistakes. This is sometimes also referred to as conscious guilt. Many people tend to feel guilty for many things they have done or not done. They have a difficult time letting go of that guilt or forgiving themselves for mistakes, even though they would easily forgive others for similar actions.
o Undeserved guilt is a little more complicated. Many women carry undeserved guilt for having been sexually assaulted, as if this event was their fault, and many children assume undeserved guilt for their parents’ divorce. This is often guilt one feels for the resentment and anger he/she holds towards others, even though this resentment and anger is completely justified. Many times this guilt is at a subconscious level.
o Only by addressing this guilt can one fully heal. (See my handout on Forgiveness)
o Ironically someone estimated that “Ninety-nine percent of guilt has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.” They also point out that guilt is really self-condemnation and self-invalidation of our worth and value as a human being. We feel guilty no matter what we are doing as a part of our mind says that we really ought to be doing something else or we could have done better or we should have done something different.
o We don’t like feeling guilty which is why we tend to find an enemy – someone or something that we can place the blame on so we don’t have to admit the truth.b,n
· SHAME (20) This energy is characterized by humiliation.
o Shame is a powerful blocker of healing. “At its core, shame is the belief that one isn’t a good person, isn’t worthy of being loved, or doesn’t deserve to be happy.” j..
o “Guilt and shame are both forms of anger being turned inward upon oneself.”j
o Deep down many people who experienced a traumatic experience suffer from the shame they feel about what they did or not do in the situation. One person expressed their feeling as, “You will find out how rotten and disgusting I am and dump me as soon as you really get to know me.”j
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better."
- Maya Angelou
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse