I write this to help you understand some of the inner landscape of emotional reactions that you might be navigating or perhaps to help you understand someone close to you.
Making Sense of the Inner Landscape of Emotional Reactions
Sometimes, figuring out your emotions and reactions can be a challenge. Emotions can be triggered so fast that they seem to show up at once. It usually takes some time and effort to determine what is really happening and then change it. I assure you, it is entirely possible to change. The keys to change are to show up and do the work.
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We Begin with Chaotic Emotions
Jane is 30, and most of these emotions showed up a few years ago for seemingly no reason. Jane has occasional headaches, anxiety, and sometimes a panic attack. Sometimes, she cries for no reason as she has bouts of sadness and loneliness.
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When her emotions come on strong, she is engulfed in thoughts that she will always feel this way and that change is hopeless. She doesn’t know why she feels these things or what to do about them.
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Jane showed up for herself and began doing the Self Mastery practices from my course and saw some changes. With the practices she would have moments of clarity, outside the drama. However, as she attempted to address some of the stronger emotions she was having difficulty staying in the observer perspective. As she wrote about these emotions and the voices that were projecting these thoughts into her mind, she would feel that the horrific things they said were true. Jane reached out to me for some help.
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Sometimes, we need some help.
?When someone is stuck, the first thing I evaluate is whether there were any traumatic events early in their life. Trauma affects our perceptions and changes how we process and handle emotions. Not surprisingly, there were. You can take your Trauma assessment here. ?
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In spite of being a high-functioning person in her corporate job, not surprisingly, there were a few traumatic events in her life. We began processing those emotions and events. Jane learned how to relax her body and focus her attention better. When we explored the pain in her head, other emotions would show up. Sometimes, they would come in a bundle and jump around, so it took a couple of sessions to get a clearer picture of what was happening.
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The bundle of feelings in her body and try to pull her attention would be:
- Pain in her head.
- Anger
- The feeling of wanting to cry.
- Powerlessness
- Hopelessness
- Freeze response
- Anxiety and tension in her belly and torso area
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?In the beginning, these different emotions and feelings would behave like ghosts trying to hide. We would pay attention to the anger, and it would disappear, and the pain would show up. We would then begin working with the pain, and a couple of minutes in, it would disappear, and a feeling of anxiety would appear, and so on with each one.
?Initially, Jane would think she wasn’t doing something right in processing these emotions. I assured her that, actually, this was completely normal. To me, this is just part of the process.
?We have been conditioned to avoid looking at our inner world and emotions. We have often developed mechanisms to repress emotions. Our attention is easily distracted and wants to avoid an uncomfortable process. When we turn inward, we have to build new skills with our attention and patience.
?In sessions, various flashes of memories would show up. Sometimes long enough to process the emotions. During the process, as we sat present with these various emotions, Jane became more capable of holding space for all these emotions at once. She could be calm while different parts of her mind and body were experiencing moments of anger, anxiety, wanting to cry, and hopelessness. It’s really quite surprising how calm and centered you can be while feeling multiple emotions that used to take you over.
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?The Core Memory
?Then came the day around session 10 when it became clear how these emotions were layered and what they were doing in this bundle. As Jane was present with the emotions, a memory emerged that she didn’t know existed. Jane was about 3 years old and on holiday with her parents at the beach. She got separated and doesn’t see her parents. In the recollection, all of the emotions are firing at once. As we slowed down the memory in a replay process, the emotions and stories had an order to them. There was a specific program of thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that her 3-year-old self created.
The sequence was part natural response and partly an attempted solution:
- I can’t find my parents – fear
- I’m alone.- Abandonment
- Powerlessness – looking for them isn’t working
- Hopelessness. – As a 3-year-old by herself, she will not survive.
- Her nervous system is now in an overwhelmed survival state.
- A feeling of doom overwhelms her and her nervous system shuts down into a freeze response.
- Another part of her brain is trying to find a solution. It calculates that if she sits there frozen, she is less likely to be seen. Her brain engages in a survival response to override the freeze response.
- She decides she has to create a dramatic scene so that people will see her and hear her.
- Jane creates pain within herself. She reacts to the pain and voices as much emotion of anger and sad crying as she can.
- Her parents find her, and she is okay.
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This is the beginning of later stories
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We would like to believe that this is the end of the story with a happy ending. Jane cried out and was found. However, this is actually the beginning of a programmed belief system that will repeat in her mind over the years.
While that day, the beach turned out fine, Jane also learned that by initiating strong crying and anger tantrums, she can make things happen. Large amounts of despair, anger, and ranting will get me attention, closeness, and relief.
?This is the beginning of a programmed pattern that little Jane will build on multiple times. She can turn it on if she feels lonely, unloved, or lacking attention. Imagine that she is in great pain and feels hopeless and stuck in this pain, add some fear and anger about what she is feeling, and then cry and or scream. It works to get attention from Mom and Dad. She is consoled, hugged, and comforted. File it away in the mind that this belief program works.
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More memories emerge when Jane recalls activating this program. Jane is five, and her dad has to go away on a trip, so she will be without his attention. This doesn’t feel good, so activate the program, pain, crying, and an angry tantrum.
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Anytime the little girl feels lonely, unloved, abandoned, or in need of attention, she knows which emotional buttons to push in herself to create those feelings and express those emotions for attention. In order not to be a complete fraud to herself and to justify the creation of those emotions, she creates the pain in her head that makes the emotions make sense.
?This isn’t a conscious choice of a young child. It is an automatic program that activates without her thinking or knowing about it. Her brain is still developing, so conscious choices that consider consequences other options aren’t yet part of the process.
?The feeling of powerlessness, which is part of the bundle, gets mistakenly attached to the story about not being able to change these feelings instead of being attributed to the original event.
?Being Present with Your Self
As Jane sat in calm presence and watched the memory of what the 3-year-old did to get found that day on the beach, it made perfect sense. She was really overwhelmed with survival level of incapacitating fear. She needed to do something, try anything. Painful crying and anger were good expressions to overcome the hopelessness underneath.
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Jane then marveled as she could remember other times she would use the same program of emotions and expressions for attention. The program of beliefs to generate feelings and expressions was initially a lifesaver but later just used for soothing.
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Jane marveled that she could see how the young version of herself created the pain to drive anger, screaming, and crying. More remarkable was that she then hid away what her panicked 3-year-old self was doing in her mind into the unconscious.
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As Jane got older, those behaviors were undoubtedly inappropriate. She would be scolded and shamed for overreacting. So, she learned to repress the feelings of the little girl inside, including hopelessness, survival-level anxiety, freeze response, pain, and anger. The trauma response doesn’t go away, we just build other layers of programs over the top to repress it.
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?Unconscious Memories and Beliefs
?Memories are peculiar things. Many times the brain washes them away as they are not important and not needed. However, when it is a traumatic event or strong emotional experience, the brain keeps them around.
?Here is a situation in which we almost died. We had to do something and adapt to survive. We might need this program of beliefs in the future, so let’s keep it alive in our memory.
How does the subconscious keep belief programs alive? It occasionally fires the neural pathways of that memory and the program of beliefs and emotions in a gentle manner during our days. It does so gently that we don’t consciously notice the emotions that much, and we go about our lives.
?The brain doesn’t want to fire those circuits so strongly that we go into full hopelessness, freeze, or outbursts of anger. Our denial system is busy repressing the memory that was too painful and emotional, and we are left with anxiety instead of panic survival. We have tension in our bodies, and maybe we are on edge, frustrated, instead of screaming anger. We have headaches instead of acute pain.
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Our denial system is keeping the really bad stuff in check, but the neural pathways keep firing since our belief system says we should keep around in case we need it to survive.
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The Wounded Child
?In our subconscious lives, we have a memory of the girl at the beach, experiencing all her emotions and nervous system survival programs. She is gently activating the call for help so she can be rescued.
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Then, some change, like a stressful event happens in our adult life, and the programmed belief circuits fire. Perhaps we are tired or stressed, and our denial system isn’t that strong that day, and we become overwhelmed with emotions over something minor. Or perhaps, we have worked our tails off, built up some financial security, in our lives settled down. We think it is time to relax and enjoy life, but we can’t. Our subconscious is still firing away with anxiety, anger, and pain because there is still a panicked little girl at the beach who feels she needs to be seen, heard, and rescued, or she will die.
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I think we all move into adulthood with some unresolved emotional wounds, or trauma responses. We all have some parts of our mind that has a hurt little boy, or girl. Something in our subconscious is calling to us through emotions and thoughts, asking us to pay attention, find the wound, and bring it love and comfort.
Only you have access to your inner landscape of the virtual world of the mind. Only you can do the essence of this work for yourself. You can be guided, helped, and supported, but others can not reach the wounded parts of your psyche unless you are present and loving with yourself.
?What parts of yourself are still active in your memory?
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What emotions do you have at the surface that don’t make any sense, but at some level in the subconscious, they make perfect sense?
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?It has been my experience that all of our emotions make perfect sense once we see why.
To our rational mind, they will appear as over-reactions, chaos, and jumbled messes.
However, when we examine the belief systems of the unconscious we bring it into consciousness, we find repressed memories, emotions, and childhood versions of ourselves seeking our attention, acceptance, and love. We find belief systems with intent to help childhood versions of ourselves.
?It is up to our present-day self to time-travel back and heal our own psyche.
?My experience working with myself and clients for over 25 years shows that this is entirely normal.
?You don’t have to do this inner work
Or you can work step by step on your own
Or, for faster results, get some help,
And
If you want to make leaps of progress, join us for the
?Intensive into Unconditional Love and Divine Consciousness?
?Teotihuacan Mexico
October 5th to 12th. ?
?Peace be with you,
Gary van Warmerdam