Tag: feelings

Emotional Survival

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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.