What are emotions?
What has been our conditioning about emotions?
Why do we have these emotions?
Is it ok to express these emotions?
We always have been taught to mask our emotions, "chin up girl"
We always have been taught to bottle up our emotions, "drama queen, don't be so dramatic"
Or
We have been taught to avoid or ignore our emotions, "hey let's go shopping, Mann badal jayega"/ "kuch dusra kaam karlo, just divert yourself"
But have we been taught to embrace our emotions.
In my workshop on Decoding of Emotions,
I was doing this workshop for 3 to 8 year old kids, and I asked them if someone really annoys you who is your go to person and their answer was either mom or dad, yes for sure, even for us at that age, but the point here is if the person whom we are annoyed or upset with is either our mom or dad then are we able to tell them our exact feelings, and then what did we do, we either learnt to isolate ourselves in sadness or we went into the bathroom and cried our heart out loud or may be silently.
But.... Could never convey this message that we are upset with them or have a problem with their statement. We often would get angry and do some absurd things for attention, or probably would want to get out of the situation.
...... And clearly we saw our elders also do so.
We were always taught, "boys don't cry," or may be "don't cry like a girl"
For girls "don't dress like a boy", or "behave like a girl".....
.
No one ever understood the emotions behind these statements, what an impact these statements made.
.
Well my point is we were taught that
Anger is a bad emotion or probably a negative emotion.
Jealousy is bad for health, again don't be jealous.
.
And today I would like to say all the emotions exists to guide us, signify us, to navigate us.
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What we actually need to understand is, how do we feel in the current situation?
We need to Name our Emotion,
Acknowledge our Emotion, that "yes I am feeling like this"........
And scale our Emotions at the scale of 1 to 10.
First we need to know our basic Emotions, eg, Happiness vs Sadness
Trust vs disgust
Fear vs Anger
Anticipation vs Anger
Have we ever tried understanding our basic emotions, or even Decoding our emotions.
To share my personal bit of story, I was into Anxiety for good 14 years which was very very severe, which further lead to panic attacks in a way of throwing up.
I must have gone to Mumbai's number one gastrologist, got myself treated and then in a year it all started back again, then it was like probably once in 6 months very soon, it became once in 3 months and then it occurred like every 15 days so and so, I started living in guilt and shame that I, being a mother of two children couldn't handle my kids at all. My attacks were so severe that all medicines stopped suiting me, at a point of time, the doctors used to inject me just so I could sleep for straight 12 hours.
.
Again the point here is, that I was in denial of any of my emotions. Whenever I was overwhelmed with emotions, I threw up. I would throw up Going to the theaters, at a wedding, for an occasion or even a vacation.
When I pursued my career in Counseling there in I learnt, that in our 0 to 7 years, we picked up certain messages that are wrapped up in verbal and non verbal responses that are directed at us from several authority figures, which we unconsciously incorporate into our lives as dysfunctional problem solving strategies during our formative years. These messages have a binding effect on us and eventually begin to 'drive' our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
There I learnt, what we behave today 90% we operate from our subconscious mind. I was caught in my patterns, where in, being a 36 year old adult seeing how I am not being able to break my patterns or come out of them, but instead just getting caught into those patterns were choking me. I just wanted to give up on my life and felt totally unworthy.
But....
Only through this beautiful journey of Counseling, I could learn that,
" I am enough"
" I am worthy"
And through this I just accepted that those impactful messages yet existed in my life.
And I acknowledged the fact of their existence and did a whole procedure to
" Unlearn to Learn"
And today I say that my anxiety existed to signify me each time that I was being submissive, where in I need to make healthy boundaries, it tried to guide me each and every time the severity to handle myself better, but I could never decode and was deteriorating day by day.
Today I proudly say my anxiety is motivating me, it's helping me to understand my thought process much better and makes me fully aware of my current situation in the here and now.
So my friends the point is we need to Decode each and every emotion lying inside us.
We need to make our "why's " very clear.
We need to know " what is our Intrinsic motivation? and what is our Extrinsic motivation?"
We need to know " What makes us truly happy!"
we need to master ourselves, we need to understand our strengths and our weaknesses.
We need to Repair our Relationship with ourselves, that is Self love.
Pinky Bajaj
( India )