What Role Do Our Emotions Play?
“Emotion is not opposed to reason. Emotions guide and manage thought in fundamental ways and complement the deficiencies of thinking.”
Our emotions are simply signals that our rather complex nervous system gives to our brain to inform us about our experience. An emotion cannot be ‘wrong’. It just is. Now… in Western society we typically don’t do emotions well. We don’t understand them, we are uncomfortable with them, we judge them, etc. Because of this, most of us learn very early on how to ‘manage’ our emotions - as in learn how to control our responses to our emotions rather than feel them.
If we are managing our emotions then they simply cannot do their job. If we are unable to allow ourselves to actually feel our emotions fully then their message remains undelivered. As we go on in life we collect more and more of these unfelt emotions. This in turn makes our job of managing and controlling them more and more difficult. This dynamic increasingly interferes with our ability to live our lives in a healthy and fulfilling way.
It all gets so confusing… because as we go on in life and gather more and more unfelt emotions, our system begins to collapse them into one another. Therefore we can have an emotion about something relatively minor that is happening in the present and have an emotional response that feels over the top or even out of control. This is because our current response triggers into our backlog of unfelt similar past responses and we are left trying to manage the whole lot at once. This does not tend to go too well for us.
Fortunately, our bodies are so immensely wise and capable. We can feel and process our past unfelt emotions in the here and now. What does this mean? In the here and now, we can learn to be with our emotions. Then we can revisit past emotions, feel and be with them and let them move through us. Our present more resourced self, with support, can be with the emotion that we couldn’t be with in the past. Message finally delivered.
In this way, we can begin to unpack the backlog thereby freeing ourselves of the quagmire of unresolved emotions that have been getting in our way for far too long. It is incredibly liberating. It enables us to be more present in our lives and more accurately and fully able to feel what is happening NOW.