What Do You Do With Your Feelings?
What do you do with your feelings? Do you stifle them, vent them, or simply allow yourself to feel them? The three paths are different, and the outcome can be drastically different in terms of the effect on our relationships.
Stifling feelings is a protective move that we make when we are young because we don't know what to do with overwhelming feelings, if we are either not allowed to have them or it doesn't feel safe.
In later years, incidents with a similar emotional signature reawaken these feelings.
Eckhart Tolle calls these stored feelings "the pain body.
" They become a sort of alternative version of us that springs to life whenever someone evokes these feelings in us-when a person or situation presses our buttons.
Venting feelings has often been likened to releasing pressure from a volcano.
But studies of how the brain works now reveal that this analogy is flawed.
Feelings are more like a muscle-the more we vent them, the stronger they grow.
This is because we are laying down connections, patterns, in the brain.
Once the patterns are formed, we tend to follow them like a well-worn groove.
They become a rut.
We are stuck in repetitive behavior.
Feelings are to be felt.
It is possible to sit quietly, and simply allow our feelings to be.
We don't deny them, and we don't vent them.
We just let them be.
If a feeling is overwhelming, it can be helpful to use connected breathing.
Connecting our in-breath and out-breath allows us to feel the feeling in all of its immensity, until it gradually dissipates of its own accord because it has been allowed to be felt.
Many of us don't want to resolve our longstanding painful feelings.
We would rather nurse them by sulking, rehearse them to others over and over again in the form of our story of victimhood, or curse others with them by blasting them.
We get a certain "pleasure," of a sadistic and masochistic nature, from such nursing, rehearsing, or cursing.
It's possible to have a strong emotion, while deeper inside us we have the opposite feeling.
For instance, you want to reach out to your partner for a romantic evening, but he or she says something that hurts your feelings.
So on the surface, you are angry.
Your partner gets the cold shoulder, or your angry tongue.
The message is, "Keep your distance.
Don't touch me.
Don't even talk to me!" But beneath this, your heart really wishes you could both touch and talk.
Venting feelings damages relationships.
Stifling them damages health and personality.
Feeling them resolves them.
When is it safe to share a feeling with another? When there is no charge left to the feeling.
Once it has been freed of its charge, a feeling is something we may or may not choose to share, depending on whether it would be beneficial to the relationship to do so.
Because we are no longer driven by an emotional charge, we can make this choice responsibly.
We are now free to choose, instead of acting under compulsion, a very unfree state.
Feelings can enrich life when they are shared responsibly.
They can also trash the best of relationships when they are discharged irresponsibly.
It is up to each of us to discharge the emotional wallop of feelings by feeling them fully, in the privacy of our own heart, sitting in stillness and perhaps breathing-breathing to allow, not to block.
Stifling feelings is a protective move that we make when we are young because we don't know what to do with overwhelming feelings, if we are either not allowed to have them or it doesn't feel safe.
In later years, incidents with a similar emotional signature reawaken these feelings.
Eckhart Tolle calls these stored feelings "the pain body.
" They become a sort of alternative version of us that springs to life whenever someone evokes these feelings in us-when a person or situation presses our buttons.
Venting feelings has often been likened to releasing pressure from a volcano.
But studies of how the brain works now reveal that this analogy is flawed.
Feelings are more like a muscle-the more we vent them, the stronger they grow.
This is because we are laying down connections, patterns, in the brain.
Once the patterns are formed, we tend to follow them like a well-worn groove.
They become a rut.
We are stuck in repetitive behavior.
Feelings are to be felt.
It is possible to sit quietly, and simply allow our feelings to be.
We don't deny them, and we don't vent them.
We just let them be.
If a feeling is overwhelming, it can be helpful to use connected breathing.
Connecting our in-breath and out-breath allows us to feel the feeling in all of its immensity, until it gradually dissipates of its own accord because it has been allowed to be felt.
Many of us don't want to resolve our longstanding painful feelings.
We would rather nurse them by sulking, rehearse them to others over and over again in the form of our story of victimhood, or curse others with them by blasting them.
We get a certain "pleasure," of a sadistic and masochistic nature, from such nursing, rehearsing, or cursing.
It's possible to have a strong emotion, while deeper inside us we have the opposite feeling.
For instance, you want to reach out to your partner for a romantic evening, but he or she says something that hurts your feelings.
So on the surface, you are angry.
Your partner gets the cold shoulder, or your angry tongue.
The message is, "Keep your distance.
Don't touch me.
Don't even talk to me!" But beneath this, your heart really wishes you could both touch and talk.
Venting feelings damages relationships.
Stifling them damages health and personality.
Feeling them resolves them.
When is it safe to share a feeling with another? When there is no charge left to the feeling.
Once it has been freed of its charge, a feeling is something we may or may not choose to share, depending on whether it would be beneficial to the relationship to do so.
Because we are no longer driven by an emotional charge, we can make this choice responsibly.
We are now free to choose, instead of acting under compulsion, a very unfree state.
Feelings can enrich life when they are shared responsibly.
They can also trash the best of relationships when they are discharged irresponsibly.
It is up to each of us to discharge the emotional wallop of feelings by feeling them fully, in the privacy of our own heart, sitting in stillness and perhaps breathing-breathing to allow, not to block.