What To Do With All Those Feelings?
How do we stay with what is? All people in this world have something in common, guess what? Emotions! Studies and research show that from an early age we all express the emotions listed below In psychology, these become our Core or Base emotions and form the ground basis of all other emotions.
The Base (Core) Emotions:
- Fear/Anxiety
- Disgust/Hostility
- Contempt/Shame
- Guilt
- Anger
- Sadness/Sorrow
- Interest/Curiosity
- Surprise
- Joy
- Love
Most of us have learned to value certain emotions as positive and some as negative. Feeling contempt, sadness, shame and fear is often associated with bad. And bad is often associated with something we do not want to be, right?
We may have been told from an early age: Do not be angry; Do not be sad; Do not be afraid. So now when we feel these feelings in adulthood, the odds are high that we also feel resistance to these feelings. This resistance triggers new emotions, emotions that have been named: anxiety, panic and stress. Kind of common, right?
We are also by socialization, trained to value opinions, behaviors and emotions as right or wrong. Good or bad. or perhaps with Reward or punishment.
Maybe some of us have been punished by our parents, teachers, or other authorities when we have, for example, been angry. Maybe we were ignored by the same authorities when we were scared or sad. We have simply learned how to act in order to be liked. To be cute, happy, good is a short cut to being loved, right? And if you are liked and popular, the reward system in the brain starts and produces dopamine and dopamine, simply explained, make us feel happy and satisfied. So If we stay on this path we will be good, safe and loved… right? In many cases, we seek out more situations where there is a high rate of that dopamine scoring to stay in a “feeling good” mode. Things such as social media –but that is a topic for another time.
We have learned that emotions are valued according to how they feel. If it feels good, then the emotions are good and of high value and we then we work at becoming good so we can be loved. If it feels bad, then we don’t see the value of the emotion as bad, we see ourselves as bad people (the chance that we will be rejected increases) So, over time, we try to protect ourselves from “bad feelings / emotions” because we think it makes us unlovable. And being unlovable leads to loneliness. We then deny the bad feelings or we reject or escape them. We basically disown a part of us and try to escape from it. Through a process of dissociation, we dis-associate from the part of us that threatens our ability to be attractive enough to be loved. This in time turns into self-hatred. This is why practising self-love is crucial for us because self-hatred forces us to withhold well-being from ourselves. When we hate ourselves, we start denying ourselves anything that will make us feel good and attract anything that justifies us in punishing ourselves or sabotaging any attempts to improve ourselves. By just going through socialization, we have been damaged and wounded and have lack of self-love. We have also become experts at punishing ourselves.
Practising self-love means staying in your emotions, accepting them, honoring them and in time, appreciating them. Relearning that you are not bad because you feel anger. You are not bad because you feel bad. We have simply learned to value our own and others’ feelings and the result often stands in the way of our well-being and self-love,
Why should one care? and why should one love oneself? Self-love is vital if we are to truly succeed in every area of life. Self-love is developed through self-acknowledgement and self-care. Self-care is a muscle and it stands for caring about oneself enough to stop escaping your emotions and integrating all parts of the self. In other words, stop escaping aspects of you that just want to be held and loved.
Join The EQ GYM this Sunday for a complimentary session with April Wickström. In this session, April will dig deeper into this topic and take you through a guided meditation for you to start building up your Self-Care Muscle. Sign up for free here!
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See you Sunday!