trauma
Minimizing Your Troubles Can Be Harmful to Your Health
It’s easy to minimize what is troubling you. Just look at the news and you see the current disaster(s) that has happened. You see and hear about people who have lost their homes, lost members of their families, or are recovering from injuries from serious accidents.
You can always find someone worse off than you.
Let’s say that you and a friend are in a car accident and you are both injured. Your friend has two broken arms and two broken legs. You have a dislocated index finger. She is much worse off than you are. Of course, your friend will get treatment for her injuries. But that does not mean you are not in pain. That does not mean you do not get treatment. If you do not get treatment your index finger will continue to bother you, causing you pain and discomfort. It will not heal properly and will hamper your ability to use your hand for a lifetime.
People often dismiss what is bothering them. They tell themselves that they should not let such small troubles bother them because other people are worse off. This is effective when people truly let go. Then their vulnerable feelings dissipate. However, it is more common for people to ignore their feelings, pushing them to the back of their minds. The feelings do not dissipate; they are parked somewhere in the brain.
As life goes on and more of these times happen, more vulnerable feelings build up in the brain like a stack of coins piling up. Each situation by itself is not a big deal. But when circumstances do not change and feelings accumulate, little things grow into bigger things. One day, a small event happens, and the reaction to it is over the top. Others do not see the stacking up of the smaller events; they only see the overreaction to the one small event. They judge. They criticize. They blame.
Example:
Randy and Paula had planned a getaway weekend. Randy had been looking forward to getting away. He needed the break from the project he was working on at work. Paula became sick and they had to cancel. He brushed off his disappointment because, after all, it wasn’t anyone’s fault. There was nothing that could be done about it. He looked after Paula throughout the weekend.
On Monday, when he got back to work, he still could not get the project to go the way he wanted. By Tuesday he was frustrated and disappointed. He blew up at one of his co-workers. The co-worker felt blindsided by the intensity of Randy’s anger and refused to work with him.
People fear that if they allow themselves to feel their feelings, they will get worse. The opposite is true. When people allow themselves to feel what they feel, they recover quickly—much more quickly than if they suppress their feelings. Then no backlog of feelings can cause problems later, perhaps when you least expect it.
You are entitled to feel what you feel. It is healthy to feel what you feel. What is is. If you are sad, feel sad. If you are hurt, feel hurt. If you are lonely, feel lonely. Breathe through your feelings.
Allowing yourself to feel what you feel often leads to appropriate action.
With care and concern,
Dr. Bea Mackay
Stop Managing Your Emotions and Start Processing Them
Most people have the mistaken idea that emotions are to be managed. When you process your emotions, they do not need to be managed, they naturally shift and change in healthy ways.
To make this shift, you need to understand the physiology of emotion. The brain and the body are complicated. The following is a simplification of the mind/body connection regarding emotion.
The right brain, limbic system, and the body create the emotions we experience. The left brain analyzes emotions, but it does not create them. We express emotions from our right brain; we talk about emotions from our left brain.
Emotions come in waves. When emotions are pleasant, such as experiences of contentment, satisfaction, happiness, and joy, people tend to breathe normally, rarely noticing the waves. Feelings do not stay the same—they come and they go.
What goes wrong?
When emotions are uncomfortable; such as experiences of high excitement, fear, grief, and loss, people change how they breathe, often without realizing it. As the emotion wells up, people tend to hold their breath and then shallow breathe. They shift into their left brain and start to question what is happening (What if? What’s wrong? OMG, etc.) Holding the breath blocks the processing of the emotion so the wave cannot crest, it cannot recede, and therefore, it cannot dissipate. Now the emotion has to be managed. Unprocessed emotions tend to build over time, like a stack of coins, as other situations create similar feelings. There is more and more emotion to manage. There is less and less energy to manage or wall off the emotions.
When emotions are distressing, such as intense love, fear, grief, and rejection, people get into the habit of trying to avoid them. What they are trying to avoid are the sensations of the feelings. The actual situation that created the distressing sensations usually gets lost. Now life becomes about avoiding the awful sensations. This complicates life because people become so focused on trying to avoid, they cannot live freely. Also, by trying to avoid feelings, people often behave in ways that create the very feelings that they are trying to avoid.
The breath is the key to processing emotions.
As an emotion wells up, breathing through the emotion allows it to crest and recede. At first, the waves may be intense. By breathing through the waves they dissipate and get smaller and smaller until, like waves on a beach, they are gone. There is nothing left to manage or avoid.
By facing a feeling and breathing through the sensations of an emotion you will learn that you can handle it. Knowing you can tolerate and handle difficult sensations, will free you up to make the decisions that you want to make. You are less likely to experience difficult feelings and, because life can be difficult, when you do, they won’t last as long.
Embrace all the moments of life. The capacity to experience the full range of emotions, from the depths of despair to the heights of ecstasy, creates a sense of being fully alive.
With care & concern,
Dr. Bea
