There is a line from the movie, Thanks for Sharing.

“Feelings are like kids. You don’t want them driving the car, but you don’t want to stuff them in the trunk either.”

I mostly write about beliefs, but the only reason to do so is because how they affect your happiness, and unhappiness. I always try to tie it to your emotions. In the end, the really important part is about your emotions. However, emotions are what most people are ignoring in their life. There are no classes on them in school. We aren’t just uncomfortable feeling them, we are uncomfortable talking about them. My clients often talk to me about what they are feeling with me, but are scared to death when I ask them about sharing it with their partner.

We all feel emotions. It’s the common denominator in the human experience. No matter your race, gender, or socioeconomic class, by the time you are an adult, you will have experienced fear, heartbreak, betrayal, guilt, shame, anger, sadness.  You will also have experienced joy, laughter, gratitude, happiness, love and many more. Whether you are aware or not, you are experiencing emotions all day. Your skin is sensing tactile experiences and temperature all day, you just might not notice because you are busy with your attention elsewhere. The same goes for your feelings.

Joy, sadness, stress, anger, or gratitude might be going on emotionally within you, but you are too busy on your phone and emails to notice. That may be part of the unconscious belief system plan; Stay busy so you don’t feel those emotions. It’s what we often learned to do because we felt some bad ones sometimes. When we try to block out or avoid the bad ones, we are actually turning our attention away from all feelings. How are you going to feel excited, passionate, inspired, or sustain love in a relationship if you have trained yourself to turn down your emotional state?

What did you learn to do with your emotions when you were a kid? Whatever it was it is likely you are still doing that today, just unconsciously, and automatically. If uncomfortable emotions came up, we often ignored them. Or we learned to what our parents and people around us did. Some would get to blame others, or get angry until they got what they wanted from others. Maybe you would over eat, over exercise, or shop. Food and spending money has a way to make some people feel better, but as a distraction from the original feeling, not a solution. Others use dieting, getting attention from others, or sex to give us a positive self esteem, or chemical rush. If you don’t consciously develop a healthy method to work through your emotions, and release them, you are going to exaggerate the unconscious patterns you learned in childhood.

Sometimes in college it was exercise, maybe a game of racquetball with my friend Frank. I burned off the frustration, anger at an instructor, or myself in two hours on a Friday afternoon. You can’t be very emotional if you are physically exhausted. I got good exercise, but that didn’t mean I dealt with my negative thoughts or emotions in an emotionally healthy way.  If exercise didn’t work, there was alcohol to turn to.

The “patterns” can be found in your behavior, and your beliefs.  “I hate feeling this way, lets go..……”  What do you fill in the blank with?  Are you addressing the source of your emotions, or just distracting yourself?  You pay a price when you shop, drink, or vent at others. You feel better by avoiding your emotions, but you pay a price elsewhere, and it can get expensive over time. Not addressing your emotions can cost you money, friendships, or your marriage.

“They didn’t do everything right either. If they hadn’t done X, Y, and Z, then this wouldn’t have happened.”  Blaming someone, or something else works well to shift things, but you pay a price in your relationships over time when you don’t take responsibility for your half.  Turning things around so you feel right by making someone else at fault only works until others are tired of it.

What price are you paying, or going to pay in your life if you don’t work through your negative thoughts and emotions in a healthy way?  Do you want to keep paying that price?

Helpful methods to work through your emotions and beliefs in the Self Mastery Course, Releasing Emotions, and Recapitulation Series.