Online StoreEmotional Intelligence - Understanding Emotional Pain
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We can depict pain felt in the body on a time-line. A negative emotion felt in the body is experienced as stress. The emotions that we have are felt at various levels of intensity; low, medium and high. Whenever we have a negative emotion, such as hurt (present tense), anger or resentment (past tense), fear and anxiety (future tense), we are adding to our store of stress.
Accumulation of negative emotion in the body is stress - emotional constipation. The stronger you feel an emotion in your body, the greater the amount of stress that is accumulated in your body.
The cycle of emotions is described by Deepak Chopra, in “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind”. He explains that cognitive appraisal in the brain arouses only two impulses - pain or pleasure. “We all want to avoid pain and experience pleasure. Therefore, all the complicated emotional states we find ourselves in are because we are unable to obey these basic drives.”
Chopra explains the cycle of emotions that reoccurs in everyone’s life countless times. It begins in the present reality ” where only pain and pleasure are felt ” and ends in complex emotions rooted in perceived reality (past and future) - such as guilt and depression. The cycle is as follows:
* Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.
* Pain in the past is remembered as anger.
* Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety - a lessening of mental relaxation, associated to the alert reaction.
* Unexpressed anger - redirected against yourself and held within - is called guilt.
* The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.
In the cycle of emotion we can see that we all experience accumulated hurt to some degree. It is this stored hurt that is responsible for a wide range of emotional pain. Chopra holds, “Buried hurt disguises itself as anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression.” In order to live without this emotional pain we need to learn to confront it rather than use the easy emotion of anger to deal with it. Anger that is not resolved feeds on itself and only gets worse.
Sometimes you can cause another person pain by what you do or say. This external event may be intentional or unintentional, and may also create a pain for you; guilt, remorse, shame, and regret - that is, stress. For example, people who use ineffective communication often drag up “history” in arguments to hurt their partner. Their perception is that their partner has hurt them or is “blaming” them in some way. They are using a conditioned response to ease their own pain felt in the present, not realizing the physiological impact their behavior is having on their own body.
Emotional constipation - emotional distress - is “dis-ease”; an illness of how you think. You are what you think. How you feel depends on how you think. The pain time-line helps you understand your emotional constipation and the physiological impact of negative emotions felt in your body.
