The first time I entered into a therapist office, racked with fear. Having panic attacks which were crippling my day to day living. I went in and said to her, please help me. I do not want to feel. She looked at me and replied, you have to feel my dear. Emotions are not good or bad. These words started a long journey for me. I learnt a lot about emotional health, about brain science, about challenging emotions and trauma and how it manifests in our body. How all this affects our day to day lives and interactions.
I hope to share some of those insights with you, with the hope that it will help you on your journey to more wholesome living. Lets start with the basics, our brain is pretty complex but if we were to draw a very basic model for the brain we can divide it into three distinct parts. The brain stem, the limbic brain and the neocortex. The brain stem and limbic brain are the more ancient brain structures and they sit under the realm of conscious. They comprise of the subconscious, each brain system evolved to regulate the lower brain system so there is a top down and a bottom up regulation going on in our body.
Mostly the brain stem functions involve all the body functions that are not under our conscious control like breathing, heart beat etc. One of the main functions of the brain stem is to signal the higher brain and body that it is safe. They way it does this is by constantly scanning the environment for anything that reminds the body of threat and safety. The only input the brain is getting from the brain stem is am I safe or am I not safe.
Next up is the limbic brain, this part of the brain is responsible for the emotional response in our body. It produces these emotional responses in the form of physical sensations in our body. This part of the brain is also not under conscious control and its main purpose is help make sense of a safe or threat response. Our subconscious brains respond faster than our conscious analytical brain almost 5 times faster, especially when it perceives a threat in the environment, this may be a real threat like a bear in the forest or a perceived threat such as a past experience which brings out a similar body response of elevated heart beat or other physical manifestation. Think of this as what happens when one is near a hot object, your body recoils before you even have time to process that you are in danger.
We have all heard comments like, oh so and so is so emotional... well I have news for you folks. We all are emotional because emotions are biological responses of our body. Its like the response we have in our body to hunger or thirst. The only one who is not emotional is a dead person or a robot and as more and more robots get advanced I think it wont be long before even robots become emotional.
Biologically an emotional response is this, we receive a stimulus from the environment this produces a electric response in our brain, this electric response produces a chemical response in our body in the shape of hormones and chemicals these in turn produce an energetic response in our body. This energetic response can be felt in a myriad of physical sensations. In the case of challenging emotions like anger, sadness and anxiety these get manifested in our body with sensations such as butterfly like feelings in stomach, tightening of the chest, tightening of facial muscles, numbness in legs and other sensations. Emotions are the body signals to help us understand if we are safe or in threat and they have a biological purpose.
We do not control emotions, our emotions are our own and no one can read our emotional state unless we talk about it with them. People tend to numb or distance them selves from challenging emotions and this has dire consequences. When we do not acknowledge our emotional states they tend to fester and cause us undue grief. Sometimes when we are facing a difficult emotion we tend to project it onto another in the hope that it will make us feel less powerless and less uncomfortable, or we use other methods to numb and distance ourselves from the challenging emotions. Different people use different methods but denial is a very common strategy, pretend it is not there and it will disappear. Numbing using electronics, food, drugs or codependence on another are other common strategy to coping with challenging emotions.
How do we break this cycle? The most important thing to learn is cultivating presence and having the capacity to sit with our emotional states without attaching any judgment or value to them. Think of this like soothing a child when they are upset, just listen to your body sensations and allow your self to go through the cycle of activation to calm. Allow your self to feel and do not attach any meaning to how and what you are feeling. This takes practice just like we learn to eat, cloth our selves, ride a bike or a car. We can learn to be present with our emotional states and nurture them without judgement. This is the first step to developing self awareness so that we are better able to recognize our triggered emotional states.
The second step is to verbalize how we are feeling or write what we are feeling, this allows our thinking brain to start processing the emotions and making sense of them. This also helps us to be in a better position to ask for the support we may need because remember no one can read your mind or your emotional state.
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