Sadness, fear, anger, and joy are roughly the four basic emotions that humans possess. And we don't have them for no reason. We have emotions to navigate life. Emotions provide us with crucial information about ourselves and offer us the immediate opportunity to process situations in our lives.
Do we experience unpleasant emotions?
It's unfortunate that sadness, fear, and anger are often suppressed because they are labeled as negative emotions. With this perspective, these emotions are seen as something to get rid of as quickly as possible. And that's where it goes wrong. Emotions that arise within you need to be felt. By allowing yourself to fully experience the sadness, you can process the event. This releases the emotional charge from the memory, allowing us to move on with our lives cleansed.
The function of emotions
We need emotions to cope with life. We feel sadness when something affects us deeply. By unabashedly feeling the sadness, we can process that event. The emotional charge diminishes, and we can move forward with our lives.
Fear is necessary as a warning signal and to react alertly and appropriately in dangerous situations. Anger serves as a warning to ourselves that a boundary is being crossed and empowers us to stand up for ourselves.
Joy provides us with the happiness and energy to continue and thrive in life.
Suppressing emotions
If you don't want to feel emotions, you keep them within yourself. Because the natural course of emotions is that they want to be felt, you find yourself constantly trying to control these emotions. You might be doing this without even realizing it.
If you experience unexplained fatigue, restlessness in your body, irritability, impatience, and find yourself increasingly overwhelmed by strong emotions, you likely have a buildup of unprocessed emotions.
Suppressing emotions leads to exhaustion and is the number one cause of burnout.
Processing emotions
You can only process emotions like sadness, fear, and anger by allowing yourself to feel them without restraint. Feeling involves directing your attention to the emotions that you can only sense in your body. Sometimes, the sensation is so suppressed that you feel nothing in your body. In that case, something else is needed: bringing you back into your feelings. I can assist you with that.
Once you start feeling something again, the next step is to allow that feeling without judgment. Embrace what you feel in your body, and accept it completely without any judgment.
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