Are You Afraid Of Negative Emotions?

Posted by LeeAnn on September 8th, 2009 at 09:25am

I know that I grew up with the nice disease. Girls were supposed to put their nice face on. I remember watching my mother’s friends talking. Their energy and body language said one thing and their words said something totally different. Their incongruence was difficult to be around. Over the years I watched as that deep incongruence surfaced in “body talk.” Their bodies expressed what they had suppressed and repressed in the forms of illness, accidents and dis-ease.

I remember wondering if that was how you had to “be” in life. I wondered why boys could express negative emotions – get it out and get it over with. Although I also noticed that some boys tended to take their negative emotion out on something living. Of course not all, but some.

After a very traumatic experience, I actually had to learn to express rage, anger, sadness, fear and other seldom acknowledged feelings. First I had to learn to identify what I was feeling. Suppressing and denying what I was feeling lead to panic attacks. I had to discover my emotions were neither good nor bad, but simply a way my body talked to me and tried to get my attention.

What was funny was that I could accurately tune into what other people were feeling and yet my own emotions were a complete mystery. I had spent my entire youth and young adult years trying to control my emotions like the adult women had modeled for me.

Horses helped me learn to be congruent with my inner truth. They pick up incongruence immediately and react to that incongruence by reacting to the human as if they were untrustworthy. Horses cue off what is sometimes deeply hidden from yourself, which is why they make such great learning partners. They mirror the truth to us if we are willing to stop and inquire what is really happening in the moment, rather than blame the horse for its reaction.

The first step on the journey of dealing with negative emotions is to stop trying to control the emotion and make friends with it. The second step is to:

• Breathe into the emotion
• Honor it
• Allow it
• Recognize that this emotion is evidence of something I need to pay attention to.

The third step is to ask: What is trying to be revealed here? What is trying to emerge that I have been ignoring or unaware of?

The forth step is to be grateful for the message.

We never lose when we are truthful first with ourselves and with others. Things may change when we tell our truth, and in aligning with our truth everybody ultimately wins.

Often we suppress what we think is negative because we are afraid of the change that might come. Cowgirls are never dissuaded by fear; they know that when they follow the path of their heart, and connect to their inner truth, growth and learning happens for all concerned. On the other hand when we deny and suppress what our feelings are trying to tell us, it is the body that takes the brunt.

Self-love begins with truth telling. The nice disease was taught by our mothers and their mothers because of fear. Our world needs us to heal our fear of possible loss and courageously step into our truth as quickly as possible.

Are you willing to heal your distaste of negative emotions?

Are you wiling to see your negative emotions as a spiritual gift?

Drop me a note and tell me what you have learned about your feelings in general or your journey of making peace with your difficult emotions.

Happy Trails,

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Tags: body language, confidence, interior landscape, introspection, listening, Self-love

Under Inward Journey+ Relationship+ Uncategorized+ With others+ With our bodies+ With ourselves