It’s all very well to think positive and to choose to be happy, but what if you don’t actually feel happy and positive? What if actually you really feel scared, angry, sad, disappointed, hurt?
It has become common to view these so called negative feelings as bad. It’s not socially acceptable to spend too much time being angry or bitter, or moping around being miserable. In response to that we tend to then deny these feelings when they arise, but the problem is, by denying them they don’t go away, they just get buried beneath the surface. And that, I believe, is dangerous and unhealthy. Beneath the surface they fester, and eventually explode in some way – either emotionally, or physically.
Louise Hay, is well known for her work around this issue and her best selling book – You Can Heal Your Life. Her basic philosophy is that every physical health issue stems from a mental or emotional issue. Disease is actually Dis –Ease within your self. At the back of her book she has a listing of most physical ailments along with the probable cause of the Dis-ease. Most ailments go back to a root cause of some kind of fear, resentment, anger, disappointment or lack of self worth. Which brings us back to our problem – what do we do if we are feeling these kind of feelings and don’t want to make ourselves sick?
The answer seems like a contradiction – the answer is to actually feel them. A mind-body practitioner that I respect, Dr Dov Phillips, explained it to me with this analogy:
“When something makes us happy, we smile. If we find something funny, we laugh. With our “positive” emotions we feel no need to control them, we just let them happen. The emotion is triggered, we respond, and then that emotion is gone, it’s on to the next one. With our so-called “negative” emotions, we often don’t feel that it is appropriate to respond, so we store it. Something makes us sad or angry, but we don’t feel like it’s ok to cry or yell, so we hold it in and control it. We store it for later, but usually we never go back and release it. So it gets stored and it builds up and eventually it causes us problems because we haven’t acknowledged it. If we had acknowledged it when it happened it would have been gone immediately after, just like the thing that triggered us to smile and feel happy.”
My concern was what if feeling the negative feeling caused a downward spiral – how do you avoid getting caught up in feeling miserable or angry, when you don’t want to feel like that?
Dr Dov’s response:
“Where people get caught up is in their own stories. Don’t attach a story to your feelings (ie, what happened to make you feel this way) or these will continue to replay in your head. Simply feel the feeling – acknowledge what you feel, allow yourself to really feel that feeling, do whatever you need to do to express the feeling, and let it go.
Written by Jacqui Thomas
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