Emotions: Understanding can bring you peace
Suppressed emotion is probably at the root of the vast majority of chronic health issues.
How we process experiences in life and the associated emotions, and understand what the nervous system is doing with that emotion, will have an impact on our brain and on our physiology. Anxiety and turbulence in the stomach can present as butterflies. We can feel shock as a tightening in our heart. We can be moved by many things in life: watching a bird in a tree, children playing or a distressing shock event. If we are unable to process and to really experience those emotions – problems may occur.
A compassionate view of emotions: anger
Anger is a really important emotion and it is an inevitability. In childhood, healthy attachment requires healthy aggression, which is the ability to rage when a parent doesn’t respond immediately or leaves us too long when we are frightened. However, children are only able to rage if they feel safe to do so because they know that ‘rupture and repair’ takes place (rebuilding a relationship after disconnection) within the unconditional love of a parent/carer.
Therefore, it is very difficult to actually express that anger if we believe that anger is not permitted, for example, we may have been hit or told that we must not have that view, feeling or experience. Subsequently, this can develop into shame which is a very toxic emotion to have and it is very damaging for the physiology.
If somebody crosses our personal boundary, we need the ability to say no and in the famous words of Gabor Mate “if you can’t say no verbally, the body says no”. Therefore, we need to have healthy aggression to affirm boundaries; it is okay to say no. If we are unable to do that then a whole chain of negative reactions follow in our physiology in response to suppressing that emotion.
Of course, this does not mean we need to be acting out all our emotions but hopefully, with good parenting, we can process our feelings. Acting out an emotion is like a temper tantrum of a child, suppression is the other extreme and processing an emotion is the happy space in the middle.
We need to have the capacity to be accepting of all emotions and realise that they are within our tolerance. We can feel immense love, immense joy or immense sadness and feel it with a complete intensity, but still be contained. That is our ability to build a capacity for emotions and experiences in life that impacts our physiology positively and can bring about peace and harmony in our mind and body. Importantly, a lack of ability to have capacity for emotion can impact on the physiology bringing disharmony in mind and body.
You can watch my video on this on my YouTube channel. Just click on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ABaNofzknY