Blog post by Lucy Collins
“Instead of resisting any emotion, the best way to dispel it is to enter it fully, embrace it and see through your resistance.” – Deepak Chopra
Our emotions are literally ‘energy in motion’. When we supress or try to bypass (avoid) our emotions we block the energy from moving through our body, and end up storing emotions in our cells.
Every traumatic experience we have is stored deep within our cells. If you're struggling with ailments such as chronic pain, anxiety, fatigue or other physical symptoms, it might be your body's way of crying out for help; after years of a dysregulated nervous system, your body can feel as if it’s ‘fighting back’.
Chronic stress is also something that can come from storing emotions rather than releasing them. When we are in a fear response i.e. in a state of constant or frequent fight or flight, our bodies get stuck in a hyperarousal state (an abnormal state of increased responsiveness to stimuli that is marked by various physiological and psychological symptoms) which over time culminates in chronic stress and various other sometimes seemingly ‘mysterious’ physical health problems.
Bessel Van Der Kolk, psychiatrist and the author of ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ says:
“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”
There is so much power in learning to feel and validate our emotions and to move them through the body, and the more that we bring awareness to and seek understanding in our feelings, the more aligned and trusting in our own intuition we become.
Culture and society can play a huge role on the expression of emotion, and we know that there are many negative and outdated narratives in the West surrounding the expression and suppression of certain emotions and what they ‘mean’ so embarking on your own self-empowerment journey of exploring and understanding your emotions allows you to become more autonomous and learn to trust yourself.
Emotions are also the gateway to what we desire, and can support us in understanding boundaries within ourselves and in relationship to others.
What Are Emotions?
Emotions, simply put are different physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, associated with thoughts, feelings and behavioural responses. As human beings we have a whole spectrum of emotional responses to our life experiences and the people and places around us.
Our emotions can provide us with a feedback system for how we are interpreting the world, and can give us valuable insight into our needs and desires.
Where Do Emotions Come From?
Physiologically, emotions come from the brain, triggered by the limbic system (the group of structures in your brain that regulate your emotions, behaviour, motivation, and memory). If we consider that they are responses to our external environment, we get a great picture of our emotional patterns and automatic reactions.
What Affects Our Emotions?
How our bodies react to the release of hormones and how those hormones are processed by neurotransmitters (feel-good chemicals) affects our emotions.
Events that are outside of our control also influence our emotions, as well as how others and the world respond to us.
Past-negative experiences also affect our emotions. Negative past experiences and core beliefs formed from these are often associated with increased traits or anxiety, depression, impulsivity, low self-esteem, and difficulty in decision making.
All of us, unconsciously have programmes of behaviour attached to particular emotional states due to our conditioning, which can sometimes be unhealthy, problematic, and based more on how other people around us express or see emotions, rather than our own authentic expression.
Due to the wondrous power of neuroplasticity, we have the capability of changing negative patterns of behaviour associated with different emotional states, freeing us from negative loops from the past.
What Helps Our Emotions?
We cannot change the past; however, we can bring awareness to and navigate our somatic responses (the way the body reacts to triggers) differently.
Our brain creates our emotions, and it does so by drawing on our past experiences to predict what will happen to us.
A great way that we can ‘change’ our emotional reactions is to have new experiences, this way your emotional feedback system is relative to this experience rather than replaying and predicting old patterns from the past. Doing things that bring us joy is also a way to stay more regulated and rewrite emotional patterns.
For more ‘complex’ or uncomfortable emotions, self-regulation tools can be hugely beneficial to support you in bringing awareness to and releasing emotions, allowing your nervous system to come back into equilibrium and support you once again.
If you are interested in finding out more about how Hypnotherapy and working together could support you, feel free to contact me today to find out more: lucy.collins@groundedchoicehypnotherapy.com
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