How we handle our emotions are the result of the emotional conditioning we’ve been programmed with, from our families, from our culture, and from the messages we absorb from all around us. Many of our emotional responses are based on this emotional programming that we’ve adopted over the years. Our emotional patterns are often subconscious, meaning they’re beneath our conscious awareness, and we don’t know when they’re happening. They are instinctive and habitual in nature – we form patterns around our emotional responses that become so second nature to us, that we default to often without even thinking about them.
Positive vs. Negative Feelings
For many of us, one of our common emotional patterns revolves around judging our emotions as positive or negative, and from that assessment, determining which emotions we’ll allow ourselves to feel and which we will suppress, avoid, resist and run away from. Many of us have been conditioned to favor the “good” feelings, the ones that feel light and easy, the happiness and simplicity, the ones that we don’t feel require too much inner work. We’ve also been conditioned to ignore the “bad” emotions, the ones that are difficult and challenging for us, the sadness, the burdensome, heavy feelings, the complexities of our lives. Within this programming lie so many fears – the fear of doing the hard work of facing our emotions, the fear of letting ourselves feel our emotions, the fear of being totally overcome and debilitated by our feelings if we do allow ourselves to feel them. We’re conditioned to think that our emotions are so powerful and painful that we’re not strong enough to endure them. We’re conditioned to think that strong people suppress their feelings, and that weak people are overly emotional and sensitive. We think people who cry easily aren’t in control of themselves or their feelings. We think the people that are the most stoic, the ones that hide their pain the most, the ones who most easily put on a brave face, are the ones who are strongest.
Fear and Resistance
When we’ve been conditioned to suppress our feelings, we often don’t know any other way of interacting with them. We don’t know how to deal with them. We haven’t learned how to process our emotions, how to move through them, how to express them and how to communicate them. We don’t know how to make sense of them, and how to make peace with them. We hold on tightly to our feelings, forming strong attachments to them, not knowing how to release them, ultimately causing ourselves so much more pain. We fear and resist our emotions, not knowing how to have acceptance for them. Many of these patterns emerge from the emotional programming we’ve learned and have been conditioned to believe over the years. A hugely important part of our recovery work is undoing this conditioning, reprogramming our minds and hearts to believe new truths, and finding new and healthier ways of handling our emotions.
At The Guest House Ocala, our experience with addiction and recovery makes us uniquely equipped to be able to understand the struggles you’re experiencing.
We’re here to help.
Call 855-483-7800 today for more information on our treatment programs.
theguesthouseocala.com
3230 Northeast 55th Avenue Silver Springs, FL 34488