Habitual negative emotions can feel like old friends.
Negative emotions often feel like old friends in the sense that they can be familiar and recognizable, even if we don't always want them around. Just like old friends, negative emotions can show up unexpectedly or at predictable times, and they can linger for a while or disappear quickly. Sometimes they come back after a long absence, and other times they seem to be ever-present. If we have a long history living life primarily through negative emotions, positive emotions feel threatening to our familiar primary relationship. This is exacerbated if our culture tends towards negative emotions. People closest to us may not know what to do with us if we are not being negative by feeling bad, complaining, despairing, blaming, and feeling powerless. People sometimes feel that negative emotions signal depth and authenticity. This is especially true for people who grew up in cultures that emphasize positive emotions and cast judgment on negative emotions. Individuals emerge as “scapegoats” in these cultures and take on the burden of embodying the negative emotions the culture eschews. One comes to believe, often rightly, that everyone around them actually feels the negative things one feels but they are pretending not to feel difficult emotions. People in this situation can become distrusting of positive emotion on the whole, casting it as always false and superficial. One can take it as far as to feel they are betraying themselves or an ideal if they start moving towards positive emotion. Negative emotions are not “bad.” Negative emotions can also feel like old friends because, even though they might not always be pleasant, they can serve as reminders of our humanity and the complexities of life. Just as old friends can teach us valuable lessons and provide insight into ourselves and our experiences, negative emotions can offer opportunities for growth, self-reflection, and understanding. Like positive emotions, negative emotions are messengers. It is not so important that emotions are positive or negative, rather the messages they carry contain important and useful information for us. Problems arise when we categorize emotions as negative and positive in the first place and then form loyalty to one type of emotion over the other. Just as we might outgrow certain friendships or choose to distance ourselves from unhealthy relationships, it's important to recognize when loyalty to one type of emotion is no longer serving us and to actively work towards managing or releasing them in healthy ways. Positive emotion can feel threatening for many reasons.
In many ways we can take this entire article and flip positive for negative. I discuss our cultural tendency to engage in emotional fixing and its consequences in the article PARTS DRAMA: EMOTIONAL PAIN AND THE URGENCY TO GET PAST IT. If you ever have the privilege of being able to embrace your full emotional range without avoiding whole categories of emotions, you will find that “positive” and “negative” emotions do not necessarily exist. Emotions are merely messengers. Anger and sadness can feel pleasurable if they are in alignment with your present moment situation and are aiding you in taking the best course of action. There is a felt sense of reward when this happens. Positive and negative stop being assigned to emotions and instead get assigned to how aligned someone is. Being in alignment feels strong and solid even if negative emotions are present and being out of alignment feels “off” even if positive emotions are present. Furthermore, being out of alignment is not “bad.” It is, rather, more information for us. So much can be learned being out of alignment and moving back into alignment. Ultimately, escaping the “good feeling/bad feeling” trap leads to emotional freedom. We can feel emotions as “just sensation in the body” upon which I am not obligated to act, yet use as information to guide my actions. Emotions do not have to be overwhelming or drive the bus when we become competent in allowing them to emerge in the body and pass away in the body without resistance. After learning how to dance with emotion in this way, one is able to handle resistance when it arises as well, knowing whatever combination of actions one needs to take to clear that resistance and flow into right action.
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AuthorProsopon Therapy Archives
April 2024
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