As a child we may spend our life observing our emotions. It is a way of righting a wrong, a way for us to understand our life and for us to understand that we don't need to copy other people's emotional behaviour.
So how do the emotions work?
It is the psyche that is responsible for our emotions, thoughts and behaviour. It is the totality of the human mind, unconscious and conscious. It controls our response patterns to our environment and recreates our unconscious experiences, which reside below the level of conscious thinking, so that we look for and learn how to deal with some of those patterns.
Once we begin to analyse and recognise character trait patterns that reside below our level of conscious awareness, we can begin the healing process. Trauma stems from patterns that continually play out on a conscious level. Only when we change our unconscious thinking, will we change our conscious thinking.
It’s easy for us to see this when children engage in child's play. Have you ever noticed how children enact traumatic events they've seen over and over, without consciously being aware that's what they're doing, until they solve the problem and come to a different conclusion?
In adults, it’s our inner child that re-enacts our traumas from childhood until we too solve those and find different conclusions. The reality is that many of us will never go on to recognise trauma in this way and if we do, we’ll often choose to ignore those behaviour patterns, because they're too difficult to deal with.
Good blog. It's hard to believe or imagine that a lot of what we experience, particularly when it comes to bad experiences, lie below our consciousness, but still has the capacity to affect the way we conduct ourselves.
Perhaps if more of us understood how the emotions work, we would change some of our character traits, which clearly affect how other people see and interact with us.
Thanks, yes I think it needs to happen. Having been on the receiving end so many times, I know how it feels. If the shoe were on the other foot, they would soon have something to say.
Yes, I too spent most of my childhood watching my emotions, but never did quite understand a lot of them.
There were certain ones that were surfacing that I didn't know how to handle, so the only option I really had was to cut myself off from them. The problem with that is, it's an all or nothing proposition; so you end up feeling nothing, good or bad, which is a pretty horrible way to live.
It's more like just existing, which is great for survival, but not a very healthy way to actually live. The biggest issue with stuffing all those feelings is that eventually you will have a volcano that is going to explode. People wonder why somebody all of a sudden snaps, but I can understand how it happens!
So many people never want to deal with those demons; so they spend their whole live's suffering horribly! I have to say I don't blame them, because reliving those traumatic events can be excruciatingly painful.
People somehow think that you should be able to just get over it, when they usually haven't had to deal with anything more difficult than a broken fingernail! My emotions don't work very well and are something I wish I didn't have at times. but I am only human so I will have to get used to them.
I have felt powerless most of my life because of them, but I know I can do things differently than I always have. I just want to be able to have some small amount of enjoyment of the time I have left!
Yes, I can understand too why it happens. The mind is a very powerful too, which has the capabilities to reinforce negative experiences and change how we see those experiences, until we look at the bigger picture to understand why things happened in the way they did.
It's not that things didn't happen in the way we see them, but it's very easy for our minds to hone in on those feelings; which makes the way we see those experiences worse. The mind is sensitive, unique and very delicate.
Perhaps the problem is that we often don't realise we are in control and can lose sight of how we see things. I believe that us talking about and sharing experiences can help us feel better with a view to taking back some of that control, whilst allowing us to begin to think differently about our own experiences.