Turn your emotional reactions into responses
Emotional Health
Good emotional health is about turning your emotional reactions into responses. It also involves processing your raw emotions and your life experiences into wisdom. Like an alchemist turns raw base metals into gold.
The emotional body can be a turbulent sea to navigate especially if you have had a significant trauma experience/s. When too many emotions are unprocessed, people tend to present with ‘difficult’ or ‘complex’ personalities and perhaps a mental illness. I’ve never met a person with a mental illness that has had a life of smooth sailing. However, I have met plenty of people that have processed their emotions and their mental illnesses have disappeared, including my own.
Processing emotions is not difficult, but one does need to be prepared to face themselves, to face their pain and to give their pain some space to breathe and release. It takes time. The pain is worth the gain.
My life now is incredible. I’m not telling you that to rub it in, but to show you how far doing this work can take you. 15 years ago, I was homeless, jobless, destitute, I had abandoned my children, I was a practicing alcoholic, I was in a lot of debt and I hated myself. That was the result of suppressing my emotions. Mostly grief, anger and abandonment and the effects of emotional neglect growing up. I used alcohol to suppress all of that. It took a lot of alcohol!
I was lucky enough to decide that I wanted to change my life more than I wanted my next breath and found amazing people that could help me. It took several years and often felt like one step forward and three steps back, but always moving. Now I am working part-time in mental health, I have beside me the man of my dreams, a gorgeous home and lots of wonderful holidays and doing what I love to do every day! It wasn’t until I was on the phone with my mentor that I realized how far I’d come. We were talking about manifesting and she asked me if what I have today seemed possible when I was homeless. No way! My point is…. That is the gold. Turning those experiences and those feelings into wisdom and growth. It allows the good stuff in.
It was a long ride, but worth every step of the journey….I shudder to think where I’d be if I hadn’t done the inner work. I’m eternally grateful that I did. That I chose life, I chose to conquer this life, I chose to transform.
The strategies and questions to process your emotions.
Questions to ask yourself:
What am I learning from this feeling/experience?
What is it teaching me?
Are you expressing your emotions or repressing them? To know the difference; if you keep having the same feeling come up repeatedly; you’re probably repressing that emotion.
How can I respond rather than react to this situation that is triggering me?
Where does this emotional trigger come from and what do I need to do to address it?
Forgiveness. With whom do I need to make peace with…? Imagine you are lying on your deathbed and want to ‘tie up loose ends’… what do you need to do? What do you need to say? What do you need to ‘put to rest?’
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