Happy? Sad? Angry? All of the above? The art of emotional release can help.
If you are like most people (or at least like me) you probably struggle with certain emotions more than others.
For instance, with practice, I have gotten used to – habituated to, even – emotions like sadness and anxiety. But I still arm wrestle feelings of anger daily.
For me, anger is the no-no emotion.
For you, it might be grief. Or fear. Or even joy.
I have also noticed that I am actually kind of afraid of happiness feelings.
Happiness, identified and expressed, feels like a very concentrated emotional pill as compared with more familiar feelings of sadness and anxiety left over from more than 20 years of eating disorder recovery.
In other words, I am still getting used to happiness, whereas depression and fear have become old friends of sorts.
In this, my life coach and I have been working on what I like to call the art of emotional release. This technique is quite different from emotional clinging, emotional distancing, or simple disavowal of having emotions.
Emotional release is also different from emotional drama, emotional codependency (where you feel someone else’s emotions instead of your own), or emotional gridlock (often called simply “depression”).
With emotional release, there is a four step procedure my coach has taught me that I find quite useful:
It is awfully hard to choose which step is the most important – they are all very important. But if I had to choose, I would say steps #3 and #4 are the most important, because they are the most difficult steps for me.
They are the most difficult for me because they join forces to propel me from one emotional moment to the next, and my past tendency has been to do just the opposite. In the past, I frequently got stuck in steps #1 and #2. I actually became quite good at noticing and naming, but so much so that instead of feeling and releasing, I was intellectualizing and rationalizing.
So for instance, I would feel a strong feeling, and instead of granting it safe passage up, through, and out of me, I would push back against it and try to shove it down again. I didn’t want to feel it….I was sure that feeling it would last forever, would be more powerful than I could handle, would harm those around me, would expose all the horrors within me to the world outside of me.
In reality, my experiencing of feeling and releasing has been remarkably calm. I have learned that my emotions are reliable guides, and that they arise because they have a message to convey to me. Most of the time the message is short and quick, and then they are gone.
Sometimes the message takes longer to deliver, or has to be delivered in installments, but those days are the exception now that I have gotten better at noticing, naming, feeling and releasing my emotions.
In this, I have learned that the duration and intensity of my emotional release work on any given day centers around how emotionally aware, strong, and resilient I am becoming – and that my own effort to develop these qualities will determine how helpful my emotions can be on my own behalf.
Today’s Takeaway: If you had to rate yourself on a scale from 1 (not skilled) to 10 (highly skilled) at practicing steps 1-4 above, what rating would you give yourself? What can you do to begin to make better friends with, partner with even, your emotions, so that you can receive and use the helpful messages they are bringing to you?
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Last reviewed: 27 Dec 2011
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