denial – This Emotional Life

Emotions Heal Us

The Conflict Within

Restoring the Peace Between Body and MInd

Hundreds of therapies exist to help us with our problems, but my personal and professional experiences have led me to one, very important conclusion: In order for any therapy to be effective, it must do one thing above all else, it must end the discord between the feeling body and the reasoning brain.

The reasoning brain and the feeling body are always interacting with one another, and their relationship, will in many ways determine the quality of our life. With each passing day, the degree to which there is peace in us. Peace between what we think and what we feel, will determine the degree to which we feel calm or stressed. It will determine our mental and physical health. The depth of our relationship to ourselves, others, and the world, will always be determined by the relationship between our thinking self and our feeling self.

“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace within ourselves.”

Dalai Lama

The Mind/Body Conflict Is Real

We all suffer from mind/body conflicts. Our Mind/Body conflicts begin in our formative years when the people whom we are closest to, fail to allow us to process our emotions. The processing of our emotions plays a key role in our mental and physical health because the emotions we feel in our bodies are the only means we have of providing our thinking selves with a true understanding of how we feel. If we donget to feel what happens then we don’t get to understand what happened.

Here is a clear example:

A child is running, he feels joy and excitement, he trips and hits the ground. This child is very young and so still has access to all of his emotions. In the throes of the fall, the excitement turns to fear. Fear is the first emotion he feels as he loses control over his body. After the fear, howling tears of anger and sadness come from the fear and the pain. If this child is attended to, held, hugged, and comforted, his sadness/hurt/pain will have been acknowledged and his emotions will have been validated and he will fully know the truth of what happened and that there is comfort and love in the world to remedy his pain. I am often amazed how physical pain/hurt for the body is not separate from emotional pain. We often separate them and in doing so deny the emotional aspect of pain. If this child is comforted, if his fear and pain are acknowledged he will have processed those emotions and the event, and within minutes his body will become calm. He will have resolved the trauma. The comfort offered will make him feel loved and deserving of care, and the world will be right again. If his emotions are ignored or rejected by the adults that are important to him, his mind will challenge what his body feels. He will deny to himself his body’s organic emotional response, and this will give birth to an inner conflict. The adults that I look to for survival have told me that I feel fine and I should simply continue with my day. But my body hurts and that was frightening and I feel unsettled. Who to believe? My body or them. He will convince himself they are right because after all they are the all powerful parents. But his body, his nervous system and his brain will never fully believe it and the consequences of this will be more situations where he feels bad and thinks he shouldn’t, and that if he does, then there is something wrong with him, which in turn can lead to at best a constant neediness and at worst frustrating feelings that can turn into aggression.

Until our mind/body conflicts are resolved, they will continue to cause problems in our lives. Based on my own healing process, as well as decades of helping others, I can tell you one thing for sure: The way to resolve our mind/body conflicts lies in going back in time and processing our emotions. If we can find the courage to truly feel our past, buried emotions, and equally importantly, imagine the scenario in which the people who caused us to feel fear, anger and hurt could connect to us vis a vis those emotions, we can bring back harmony to our minds and bodies and end the conflicts that show up and cause problems.

Our emotions are not a luxury, they are a vital partner in our mind’s day-to-day efforts to understand our lives. Because connecting to our emotions is how we connect to our truth, it is the only authentic way we have of understanding ourselves, others and the world around us. Neuroscience now tells us that our brains are wired to protect us from feeling uncomfortable emotions, but when the mind decides how we feel, the resulting inner conflict leaves tension in our bodies, and hinders our future decision-making abilities because the information we will base those decisions on, will be faulty. Although pure emotions, such as anger and sadness are not pleasant, the information they supply to our brains keeps us clear. As children, our emotions flowed freely, but with each new event, that hindered our emotional processing, a conflict was formed, an internal conflict that we will continue to suffer from until the emotions are released and all is put right again. By allowing our emotions to flow freely once again, we can end the internal conflicts that arise from being kept separate from our body’s truth and we can overcome our problems and evolve, but by denying our emotions, we stay stuck. As long as we are separate from our truth, we will stay separate from our own true selves, and this will inhibit our ability to be truly close to others. Until our mind/body conflicts are resolved, they will continue to create problems for our bodies, our minds, our communities and our world. Over the years, I have often thought of the biblical quote, “..and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. Nature intended us to keep feeling and processing our emotions so that we may live and love better. The Conflict Within will teach people how to restore the natural processing of pure emotion, because as we all move closer to our truth, so to, do we move closer to the freedom that comes when our minds and bodies are at peace.

Emotions vs Feelings

There is a difference between a ‘feeling’ and an ‘emotion’, and knowing the difference, is an important component of healing. Emotions are never the result of thinking, they are organic responses, felt in our bodies first, and then processed by our logical minds; a rapidfire sequencing that allows us to both understand and then accept the truth about the situations in which we find ourselves. Beliefs that come from information that is provided by our feeling bodies, by our emotions, will never be felt as a disturbance in the body. As we awaken to our unprocessed emotions, even and especially the uncomfortable ones, we will experience them as a natural and necessary process essential to our well-being. When we begin to realize the consequences for blocking real emotion, and we start to experience the benefits that come from releasing and processing them, we will embark upon a journey into healing that will bring into our lives positive changes that are instantly noticeable in both inside ourselves and in our world. The process of owning our emotional life, is the process by which we own our truth. We can never be well if we are denying our truth, we truly need to feel it, in order to feel better.

Emotional Survival

Saying our parents “did the best they could” in no way absolves us of having to do the emotional work in the areas where they fell short. In order to keep evolving as a species, we must look to our past so that we can move forward and become better people. It is only by working on what it means to be fully human, that we can move into more spiritual awakening. We must stop protecting our parents and ancestors, we must hold them accountable for their and our shortcomings. It’s not about blame, it’s about truth. Psychologically, Emotionally and Spiritually, the truth really does set us free.

What would the world look like if we had the sensitivity required to pay attention to our children’s emotional injuries? What kind of a world would we be helping to create, if we could be as proficient at attending to our children’s emotional needs as we are to their physical needs? The dream of restoring full sensitivity to our children, can only come to be, if we are willing to look at and heal our own emotional wounds. If we truly want to make the world a more caring place, we need to become more sensitive to the emotional needs of our children, and in order to do that, we need to find out how to heal our emotional injuries. We need to go back and confront the places in our past where our emotional needs were neither acknowledged not attended to. We need to move beyond the emotional limitations of our parents.

Our emotional and physical lives are forever intertwined. When a child falls, the pain is both emotional and physical, and both require equal attention. We know from studies that serious physical injuries cause, psychological distress, but we are only beginning to understand how our psychological distress jeopardizes our physical health. We all suffer from emotional injuries that our parents inflicted upon us. They had no choice. If they endured any emotional injuries and hadn’t ever had the opportunity to work through them, then the emotional injury inevitably got passed down to us.

Love is the emotion that creates connection, and as far as our babies and children are concerned, all they long for emotionally and physically, is that loving connection to us. It’s important to realize that the emotions, we as adults would prefer not to feel; anger, fear, sadness and need, are the only tools our babies and children have for letting us know when connection is at risk.

When we are responding to our needs. When we are willing to receive comfort, when we are living well, it is a result of having known comfort and having had our needs met. From the place of security, that these emotions offer us, we are able to care for others. If we truly know these emotions, and have access to them, then our mere presence can at times provide relief and love to others. However, wherever we are lacking in our capacity to feel the emotions of comfort and love, we are challenged to care for ourselves or anyone else. It is only by reawakening our deeply buried, emotional needs for our parents’ comfort and love, a need most of us at some level were forced to forget, that we can find compassion for ourselves and others. When we honor that vulnerability which unites us in our humanity we can finally know peace.

Feelings vs Emotions

There is a difference between a ‘feeling’ and an ‘emotion, and distinguishing one from the other is an important factor when it comes to our health. It’s true that we experience both emotions and feelings in our bodies. However, feelings cause tension that blocks the natural processes we rely on to understand and resolve our problems, whereas emotions, enable our bodily systems to do their job of keeping our bodies and minds healthy. Panic is not fear, frustration is not anger, pity is not sadness and fawning is not love. Only pure emotions can help us heal. Our emotions operate through a perfectly beautiful system based in and orchestrated by nature. One could indeed consider our emotional processing to ba a natural science.

We are primarily, emotional beings, our thinking is a byproduct of our feeling bodies. The emotions comes first, then the thoughts. Research by Antonio Damasio indicates that Descartes was mistaken when he claimed , “I think therefore I am.” Damasio has decreed from his research, that it would have been far more accurate had Descartes concluded, “I feel therefore I am”. Damasio’s work has proven that our emotions provide our brains with the information we use to understand ourselves and everything around us.

Damasio discovered through his research, that once the creative/emotional part of brain has been damaged, it hinders our ability to make decisions. The more damage, the more jeopardy to our decision making process. Damasio provides us with proof that our emotions are an integral part of the choices we make in our lives. Decision making that is based upon, our emotional self, is information based on our reality and is the process by which we develop into our unique selves. Personally, it has given me great joy to think that the derogatory accusation, “you’re so emotional” may soon be understood as a complement.

Damasio distinguishes a feeling from an emotion in his book “Self Comes To Mind”, when he notes, “…feelings of emotion are primarily perceptions of our body state during a state of emotion.” In other words, ‘feelings’ are perceived, whereas ‘emotions’ are experienced. Feelings are perceptions of what is happening in situations that have evoked emotion. If we are perceiving, we are using our logical brains to draw conclusions in order to decide how we feel. Damasio cites pertinent brain research, that proves the existence of a reactionary, time lapse, as we go from experiencing an emotion to having a feeling. He writes, “The time frame….from the moment stimuli were processed, (emotion) to the moment the subjects first reported their perceptions (feeling), was about half a second.” Quite a substantial amount of time when one considers that a brain neuron can fire in about five milliseconds. Neurons are the brain cells that transmit information. Emotions happen in our bodies within the exact instant that a situation is occurring. Feelings lead to, and require words. The moment we are using perceptions to relay information about the emotional experience, it no longer qualifies as an emotion. Feelings require the use of our intellectual brain. Emotions preclude explanation. If we take into account everything Damasio is saying, we can conclude that, once we explain an emotion, it no longer qualifies as an emotion.

Our Emotional Brain

Coming out of an emotionally dysfunctional family took its toll on me.

I struggled for years to find something meaningful to do with my life. And my relationships? Well they never seemed to turn out the way I had hoped. I went to therapy and had an excellent therapist for 12 years. I recounted, and cried about, hurtful past events and things did improve, but I never really felt done with the past, and my present was proof positive that I wasn’t.

A few years ago, I came across the work of a woman named Julie Motz, and it provided the missing link for me. Julie is a healer and author of the book Hands of Life and her work deals with emotional-energy. The philosophy of emotional-energy healing is based on the principle that emotions are the energies that run through our bodies and keep us healthy.

Julie believes that healing emotional wounds is incumbent upon one finding and removing the emotional blockages within oneself.

What was wonderful about the healing was that it allowed me to really resolve my past and be done with it once and for all. As Deepak Chopra says, “Once you have healed, there’s nothing to forgive.”

So how do emotions become blocked?

A child is running in the playground, falls, and severely scraps a knee; it is frightening and painful. If no one empathizes and validates the fear and sadness; no one offers the hug and the soothing words; or if, worse yet, the child is in any way berated or chastised for having fallen; then the fear, anger and sadness are buried. In fact, it’s commonplace for a child who has had an upsetting experience at school, to immediately play out the emotions once within the safer, more nurturing environment of home. I’m a mother, I know.

The consequence of unexpressed, invalidated emotions is that they cause all kinds of problems in the present. I have been on a healing journey long enough to know that any interpersonal, irresolvable conflict, occurring in my present, is a repeat of an unresolved, unprocessed trauma from my past. The problem with suppressed emotions is that they seriously limit our ability to be fully present.

The psychologist Frank Hannah, MS, gives weight to the theory when he writes, ”The feeling brain stores the memories, collected knowledge and beliefs acquired over a lifetime, holding them in readiness to influence, if not determine all of our thoughts, behaviors, feelings and emotions.”

Have you ever found yourself thinking about the past and saying to yourself, “Why did I overreact?” or “How could I not have seen how distrustful that person was?”

We seem to be declaring that our emotional brains over-rode our logical brains. A PBS special entitled “The Secret Life Of The Brain” is a wonderful source for anyone interested in learning more about the critical interplay between reason and emotion.

The research indicates that the thinking brain and the emotional brain are always working together and perhaps when important emotions get blocked in the past, it jeopardizes its ability to do so well. The emotional brain allows us to have the visceral experiences necessary for the thinking brain to fully comprehend the truth of our experiences.

When my emotions are overwhelming and my arguments turn messy and frustrating, it is an indication to me that some unresolved, hurtful situation from my past has been stirred up and that I am not fully in the present. The circumstances and people are new, but the feelings they stir up are old. It’s an interesting phenomenon.

Somehow, the old, unresolved conflict shows up again in my life as an opportunity to process and heal. Perhaps the theory of reoccurring issues is a well-known one in the world of psychotherapy, but it was not a technique being used by my psychotherapist.

I recently saw two people bump into each other. One person knocked into the other as they passed on the sidewalk. The person who was not paying attention immediately started to apologize profusely; but it was obvious the moment their bodies made contact, that the person who had been knocked into was transported back to another place and time. His face and body energy were in no way related to the actual moment because the bump was not that harsh but his face was full of fury and frustration. Poor perceptions, unresolved anger and pain are the cause of many, many misunderstandings and can be so potentially damaging.

So, when a messy conflict arises in the present what do I do to rectify?

First, I get quiet and ask myself, “When in the past did I feel similarly?”

Then I go back and replay that scene; only this time, I get to express everything I felt, no holes barred. The whole healing process gets done through visualization. No one gets hurt, and I get healed.

Once the suppressed fear, anger, and sadness have been expressed, it is very important for me to follow with comfort and relief. Just like the child who fell and needs comfort, I visualize one or more people who I know can offer empathy and comfort. I allow myself to be comforted, I immerse myself in that comfort, and I actually can sense the relief in my body. Imagining allows the body to feel whatever the mind creates.

The muscles, bones, cells and systems are all affected as if it all were actually happening. In fact there are studies showing that when you express your old unresolved emotions, your immune system gets an immediate boost. As a result of using this method, I am able to feel the healing in my body and somehow my life is flowing more and more smoothly.

In a recent radio interview, as a way of explaining the oneness of the mind/body, Ms. Langer spoke of a study done with actors. An actor playing a character, who is completely and utterly immersed in the role, becomes not only akin to the character in outward appearance but also altered on a physiological level (i.e., blood pressure, heart rate). The actor is not ‘watching himself’ be the character, but rather has merged completely with the role—the visualization technique works in the same, exact way.

The mind believes, and the body feels and responds.

Discovering where the emotional conflicts are in the past can be the key to resolving the present. The word resolve has its roots in the Latin verb resolvere, meaning to loosen. I find the definition particularly accurate when applied to healing the body. The repressed emotions make us tight and stressed, and by resolving the past, we literally loosen ourselves. It’s a shame to let stressful times from the past contaminate our present opportunities for connection.

Once we process blocked emotions from the past, the emotional and the thinking brain can once again be partners.

When we restore our ability to accurately perceive all situations, then all of our emotions are available to us, our breath flows freely and, we are once again returned to our senses. From this place our relationships can flourish and our life energy can flow.

The Cost Of Denial

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When I found a way to give the child I once was, all that I longed for from my parents. When I found a way to feel the sadness and the anger, and admit and feel the fear of potentially not ever having what I needed. As I continued to fully embrace the truth about both the small, and the devastating pains of my past. Each time I embraced the truth, I no longer needed to lie to my body, or pacify it with compulsions, or addictions, or the clinging to authority figures, or any intellectualizations. All of my embracing of my truth, continues to give me the energy, once used for denial and defense, to better love myself, to be better at allowing myself to be loved by those who are capable of loving me, to continue learning what it means to have true compassion for myself, so that I can be better at loving others. Denial comes at much too great a cost. I continue to become more free, every time I embrace the truth, feel the uncomfortable truthful emotions, and allow myself to imagine a better senario. By walking through the discomfort that I feared feeling, I can make space for a new reality. I can erase the old recorded messages, and the subconscious’ need for the repetition of the same painful experiences, only by truly feeling the pain and anger of having been subject to them in the first place. For it is necessary to not only admit the old reality, but to finally have the courage to fully feel the fear, anger, pain and need of that old reality, so that we can erase it’s hold on us by creating and recording, a new, more loving reality for ourselves. To feel the truth and replace it with the experiences of the love we deserved, is the only way to break the cycle. Denial keeps the pain alive.