Feeling emotions, good or bad, is an everyday aspect of being human. We constantly undertake activities that we believe will bring us a sense of happiness, joy, fulfilment, accomplishment, success, fun, or purpose. Experiencing these emotions helps us to feel fully human. And yet there are times in our lives when instead we feel anger, sad, fear, guilt, hurt, shame, or jealousy to name a few of our darker moods. These too are part of being human. The problem comes when negative emotions start to take over our lives. They can make us do things that we don’t want to do and stop us doing things that we do want to do. Memories, events or other people can trigger our emotional outbursts, or our collapse into depression and self-pity. The thing about negative emotions is not to deny them and attempt to banish them from your life, but instead to treat their appearance as messengers telling you something about your situation, attitude, or beliefs. As far as emotions are concerned, our goal in life should be resilience, bounce-back ability. So how do we achieve this? I will talk about a couple of things that you can do, but let’s be very clear, there are many ways to release, rationalise, rise above, or conquer our negative emotions, not just the ones that I mention here. The first step in any change process is self-awareness. Recognise that you do feel emotions and they are your emotions.
When it comes to change techniques to help with negative emotions, I do use a range of techniques from NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), Time Line Therapy™ (TLT), and Hypnosis. The one that I turn to the most to deal with the strongest emotions is TLT. This is a set of techniques that emerged out of NLP in the 1980s. It works by recognising that emotions with a similar content are stored together, like a string of pearls. Each time you felt, say anger, it adds another pearl to the string. Or to use another analogy, the collection of memories about a specific emotion is like an open wound on your hand. If you or someone else comes along and pokes it the collective pain of the whole wound is felt. One client once told me that her husband says to her that he is paying for all the things men had done to her in the past. When he does something to her, maybe not that major, he is poking her open wound and then she reacts accordingly. The TLT method of releasing emotions also works with the idea that we have a time line. This is how our unconscious minds stores and organises our memories with respect to time. It is how you know that memories of yesterday are in the past and ideas about tomorrow are in the future. The unconscious uses a spatial metaphor. For example, the past may commonly be thought of as behind you, or to your left, and your future may commonly be to your right or in front of you. Now the memories are all still in your head, this is just how your unconscious mind is making sense of the past and the future, because all of your life happens in the now. And this is the key point with TLT, whatever happened to you in the past is in the past, you cannot change it. But what you can do now is to change your perspective and learn something positive about yourself with respect to the emotion. And when you do, you release the emotion. Which is like healing the open wound and being left with a scar, which when poked again doesn’t flare up in the same way.
It is just as possible to heal mentally as it is to heal physically. Be free of your past so that your future becomes more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness.” James Thurber
