Emotions
What’s So Good About Feeling Bad?
In the last few days I’ve had a couple of people close to me tell me that they didn’t want to talk about painful experiences that they have had. They said things like “I don’t want to dwell on it” or “I really want a cigarette”, rather than talking about something that made them feel bad.
We’re not always in an appropriate social context to heal emotional pain and it’s wise to be discerning about when and with whom we choose to share vulnerable feelings. Nobody really wants to feel bad; we all naturally want to feel happy and generally speaking we tend to get more of whatever we focus on in life.
However we live in a society which tends to glorify intellect over feelings. Many of us have been taught to suppress emotions while growing up; especially those that our family and friends were uncomfortable with. Few people really understand what emotional trauma is, how it operates or how to heal it.
The one thing I didn’t mention explicitly was what exactly emotional trauma is: the emotional residue left in our brains and nervous system attached to memories of any emotionally overwhelming past event that we weren’t able to fully express and release at the time.