Our minds naturally focus on the unusual and unexpected as part of our survival attention reflex. This not only applies to the external world but also to the internal world when we notice something emotionally or physically different.

The early teen years through your mid-twenties can be a particularly difficult time. We experience multiple emotional responses at intensities never felt before, along with increasing social pressure to suppress those responses. paternity; work; Losing loved ones to death: These types of life events can create mind-shattering experiences.

Of course, older generations also have to deal with their own unexpected emotional problems, but they benefit from having learned the full extent of their biologically imposed limits and will usually have developed more effective coping strategies.

Unfortunately, those in the know rarely get the chance to share this social store of advanced knowledge with others, and this means we have to squirm in confusion every time our minds realize we’re having an emotional experience that we can’t easily explain. I found that a natural three-step approach works for processing unfamiliar emotional experiences:

• name it
• tame it
• never shame him

Several years ago I was using exposure therapy to eliminate my panic attacks. After three months of this self-work I began to have a very strange physical reaction. While researching the experience on the internet, I came to the conclusion that I might have become a diabetic. I made an emergency appointment with my doctor.

She was aware of my self-therapy program and listened intently as I explained that during the previous three days I had begun to feel very heavy. The sensations had started in my thighs and gradually spread up my back to my shoulders and walking had become a struggle. I felt as if hands were pulling me to the ground. The pressure to collapse to the ground seemed to be getting stronger and he couldn’t explain it.

He told me that this was a normal response to prolonged anxiety and that he regularly saw it in his panic attack patients. She had previously read about the freezing response and she confirmed that that was what it was. She told me to take it easy and that she had nothing to worry about.

When I left the doctor and went home I realized that all the physical symptoms had disappeared. The doctor had normalized the experience for me; we had named it, he had fully experienced it and by telling me that it was a normal human reaction he had been able to accept and clarify it. My focus had stopped caring about it.

I used the same approach when healing a difficult grief reaction. I’ve lost a few people to death in my time, but I’ve never experienced a grief reaction quite like this: burning, paralyzing bodily pain that left me feeling helpless and frozen. I had to consciously drag myself out of it just to perform normal daily functions. I found that no matter what I did to get out of it, the reaction was still floating around, waiting to pull me back. So for a couple of days I named it, tamed it, and turned it off.

Naming an emotional response

If we have an emotional experience that we cannot place on our internal non-predator list, we will continue to draw our attention to it. Because our minds interpret pain as a sign that a predator is in the neighborhood (even if it’s one of our own emotional responses), our unconscious will keep asking questions about the unexpected intruder until we can show it the full scope of what it is. the intruder can do. do all of us The unconscious will not give up an emotional response unless it knows for certain that it cannot kill us.

In order to name an unknown answer, you need to spend some time looking in the external world for similar signs in others – what do they call it? Talk to other people you trust, and if you can’t bring yourself to talk to the people close to you, go and talk to a professional about it. That’s what they’re there for and chances are they’ve seen more of the human condition than anyone else you know.

Do some research and when you feel like you can choose a name for the response, give it a name. Is it mourning? Is it disgust? Is it a shock? Name it and it will give you a shape.

Taming an emotional response

What’s that? What can you do to me? are questions that will continually capture your unconscious attention, especially if what you are looking at hurts. To tame an emotional response, you must fully experience it from beginning to end so that your unconscious can reach a point where it knows the full scope of the experience. Then your focus of attention will let it go. Focus on the triggering event that led to the emotional response, and be sure to mentally link everything from the triggering event, to how you felt about that event, to accepting the emotional response. By going over and over these aspects of the answer, you will gradually reduce their impact on you.

never shame him

When we see that our emotional responses cause us to feel pain, it is an easy mistake to think that the emotional response is bad. None of your emotional responses are bad. Nature does not produce bad emotional responses. All of our responses are designed to aid in our survival. If you fully explore your answers and what they mean, you will find a good motivation behind the painful feelings. If you consciously label your feelings as unacceptable, you assign your unconscious the task of fighting them off just as you would any other predator.

However, this does not mean that we should allow our temporary feelings to dominate our external actions. While our emotions are not harmful, an external action can be. It is a myth that the only way to release an emotion is to act it out in the real world. We can fully release emotions simply by continuously feeling them until they have left us. When we have an emotional response that leads us to commit a harmful external action, we should naturally feel some shame about this: shame is a sign that we are damaging our social relationships. Just remember not to be ashamed of your shame.

Also, our emotional responses often tell us what we need but don’t consciously want to listen to. Do not shoot the messenger. If an emotional response, for example, tells you to leave a situation, eventually you will have to agree to leave the situation. Just because the external situation is bad doesn’t mean the emotional response to it is.

Taking the time to fully explore new emotional experiences, no matter how painful, will free us up more quickly to move on with our lives. The paradox of achieving unconditional and unconscious happiness is that the more you focus on, name, and tame your most painful emotional responses, the sooner you can eliminate their effects.