In the BrightStar programme, Mod 2, the first theme: ‘Managing your Emotions’, one of the steps is to ‘Name’ or identify the emotion that you are experiencing. We use the phrase:
‘If you can name it, you can tame it’. Coined by Dr. Dan Siegel.
Today I want to share another potential life altering phrase regarding emotions that I learned from a webinar presented by Alex Howard – He is the creator of ‘Therapeutic Coaching’ and the Founder of ‘The Optimum Health Clinic’ and ‘Conscious Life’.
He says “You can’t heal what you don’t feel”
When we avoid feeling our emotions, to avoid discomfort or pain, it stays inside. Edith Eager says: What comes out of you doesn’t make you sick, whats stays in there does.
He shares 6 different/ unhealty ways how people tend to deal with their emotions:
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- Avoidance and distraction
We stay so busy that we have no time to feel, or we can distract ourselves by focusing on other’s needs and feelings
- State changing
We can use external tools such as drugs and alcohol and even eating, to try to change the state of how we feel emotionally
- Analysis
We over analyse and intellectualise our feelings rather than feeling them.
- Blaming others
We blame the outside world for our feelings -using a phrase like:
“They make me mad”
- Empathy
We take on other people’s feelings and feel them as own.
- Somatising
Because we are out of touch with our feelings, we unconsciously express our emotions as physical symptoms – they have to go somewhere!
Think for a moment, are you an
- Avoider,
- State changer,
- Analyzer,
- Blamer,
- Empath or
- Somotiser, on the long term will harm your life and health.
What does a healthy relationship with our emotions look like?
* We feel them, but we don’t get stuck in them
* Emotions are like waves in the ocean, we must let them flow through us – A great example that I can share with you is that it benefits our health when we feel thankfulness and not only say or think it…
* All emotions are welcome, but we need appropriate boundaries of what we express where and when.
* In BrightStar we say we need to STOP… Stop and think to decide how you are going to act. Don’t stop experiencing the emotion, you need to understand where it comes from and how intense it is.
My challenge to you: Let’s try our best to really feel the next emotion that we will experience today. Give it a name and then let it flow through you like a wave, maybe you can discover or learn something from the emotion and then decide how to react.
Amanda Swanepoel
CO-CEO BrightStar Lifestyle