Emotions and your Body
With Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) being the main modality that I use to inform my practice, I often get caught up with how our thoughts can influence our mood and behaviour (Side note- if you have no idea what I'm talking about, take a look at my previous post: Your Thoughts Are Not Always True to bring you up to speed). In focusing on and modifying our thoughts, we are able to quickly manage our emotions and the associated behaviours that arise.
Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?
It does, but there's a catch here.
In doing so, we end up skipping the part where we allow ourselves to feel the emotion. In CBT, our goal is to eliminate or reduce the emotion by challenging our thoughts. In listening to a great talk by Hilary Jacobs Hendel, I realized that much of our society doesn't emphasize the need to experience emotion. We are taught that emotions that make us feel bad are not acceptable. We should learn to quickly "get over it" and move on. I definitely fall into this category as I am very much a "mind over matter" type of gal.
Jacobs Hendel goes on to explain that emotions are a necessary part of survival and it is engrained in ourselves in such a way that it is firstly a biological/physiological response, therefore, our emotions are not under our conscious control. Imagine a tiger walking into your room. Our response to this tiger (running away from it) is so instant that we don't even have the time to think about the emotion that we're feeling. There is an immediate physical response that occurs prior to us feeling fear. No one pulls out a Thought Record (CBT homework) and analyzes their emotions and thoughts and then challenges them. You wouldn't survive!
Since emotions are primarily a physiological response, we should allow ourselves to physically feel emotions as well. The tricky part is learning how since we are taught the opposite from a young age. I believe that we all have a physiological profile when it comes to emotions. Think about the last time you got angry. Where did you feel it? Personally, I know that when I get angry, I feel it in my chest and I experience this HUGE energy surge, especially in my hands. That's my anger profile. My sadness profile is something else. With sadness, my chest feels heavy, my shoulders are dropped and I feel a chocking feeling in my throat. I would describe my happiness profile as having butterflies in my stomach and smiling from ear to ear. These are all examples of how we physically feel emotion.
Emotions don't have to be an abstract idea. It's absolute in the way that it manifests in our body. Listen to your body and allow the emotion to play its way through. This fosters better self-awareness, an understanding of the relationship between your emotions and body, and it's another avenue of emotion expression. Try it out and let me know how you did!