Emotions are energy. Actual physical energy that is manifested in our
bodies. Emotions are not thoughts - they do not exist in our mind. Our mental
attitudes, definitions, and expectations can create emotional reactions, can
cause
us to get stuck in emotional states - but thoughts are not emotions. The
intellectual and emotional are two distinctly separate though intimately
interconnected parts of our being. In order to find some balance, peace, and
sanity
in recovery it is vitally important to start separating the emotional from the
intellectual and to start setting boundaries with, and between, the emotional
and mental parts of our self.

Many of us learned to live in our heads. To analyze, intellectualize, and
rationalize as a defense against feeling our feelings. Some of us went to the
other extreme and lived life based on our emotional reactions without any
intellectual balance. Some of us would swing from one extreme to the other.
Living life in the extremes or swinging between the extremes is dysfunctional -
it
does not work to create a balanced, healthy, happy life.

If you learned to live life in your head it is vitally necessary to start
becoming more aware of your body and what is happening in your body emotionally.
Where is there tension, tightness? Where is the energy manifesting in my
body? I learned that when there is energy congregating in my upper chest it was
sadness. If it was around my heart chakra it was hurt. Anger and fear
manifest in my stomach. Until I started to become aware of, and identify, the
emotional energy in my body it was impossible for me to be emotionally honest
with
myself. It was impossible for me to start owning, honoring, and releasing the
emotional energy in a healthy way until I became aware that it was there.

I had to become aware that there were such things as emotions that lived in
my body and then I had to start learning how to recognize and sort them out. I
had to become aware of all the ways that I was trained to distance myself
from my feelings. I am going to mention a few of them here to help any of you
reading this in your process of becoming emotionally honest.

Speaking in the third person. One of the defenses many of us have against
feeling our feelings is to speak of ourselves in the third person. "You just
kind of feel hurt when that happens" is not a personal statement and does not
carry the power of speaking in the first person. "I felt hurt when that
happened" is personal, is owning the feeling. Listen to yourself and to others
and
become aware of how often you hear others and yourself refer to self in the
third person.

Avoiding using primary feeling words. There are only a handful of primary
feelings that all humans feel. There is some dispute about just how many there
are primary but for our purpose here I am going to use seven. Those are:
angry, sad, hurt, afraid, lonely, ashamed, and happy. It is important to start
using the primary names of these feelings in order to own them and to stop
distancing ourselves from the feelings. To say "I am anxious" or "concerned" or
"apprehensive" is not the same as saying "I am afraid." Fear is at the root of
all those other expressions but we don't have to be so aware of our fear if
we use a word that distances us from fear. Expressions like "confused,"
"irritated," "upset," "tense," "disturbed," "melancholy," "blue," "good," or
"bad"
are not primary feeling words.

Emotions are energy that is meant to flow: E - motion = energy in motion.
Until we own it, feel it and release it, it cannot flow. By blocking and
repressing our emotions we are damming up our internal energy and that will
eventually result in some physical or mental manifestation such as cancer or
alzheimers disease or whatever.

Until we can start being emotionally honest with ourselves it is impossible
to be truly honest on any level with anybody. Until we start becoming
emotionally honest with ourselves it is impossible to know who we Truly are.
Our
emotions tell us who we are and without emotional honesty it is impossible to be
True to our self because we don't know ourselves.

Of course there is a very good reason we have had to be emotionally
dishonest. It is because we are carrying around unresolved grief - suppressed
pain,
terror, shame, and rage energy from our childhoods. Until we deal with our
unresolved grief and start releasing the suppressed, pressurized emotional
energy
from our past it is impossible to be comfortable in our own skins, in the
moment, in an emotionally honest, age-appropriate way. Until we become willing
to
take the journey to the emotional frontier within us we cannot Truly know who
we are, we cannot Truly start to forgive and Love ourselves.


Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
by Robert Burney, therapist


HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
~Scottish Saying


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