Getting emotional and loving it!

By Nathalie Khalaf
Holistic Counsellor

I’ve had many clients seek my help to change or control the emotional state they find themselves in. They reach a point when they feel more emotional and don’t understand why.

When I ask them what they mean, they explain that they cannot control or manage their emotions as well as they used to. And, more often than not, they experience bursts of rage at the smallest things, or break down into tears for “no reason”.

Feeling our emotions

What all these people have in common is inner loneliness and pain from the desire to protect themselves from the outside world, which is causing a lot of undesired emotions. They feel ashamed, unable to control something their body seems to be doing without their consent.

There is no such thing as “being emotional”. We are either feeling our emotions as a natural part of being alive, or “being emotionless” which goes against our nature. We cannot wish our body to stop eliminating what it does not need anymore; it is simply part of what has to happen in order for us to be well. Emotions are as much a part of our “aliveness” as is our physical body.

A river of emotions

Imagine a river for a moment. The river is made of a “container” — which is the riverbed of sand and rock — as well as the water running through it. Together, these elements create a river. Now imagine piling up rocks to form a dam somewhere along that river. The rocks eventually stop the flow of water along the river.

The blockage of water can be stopped for a while, until the water seeps or bursts through the dam to continue on its way down the riverbed. We may notice an increase in the power of the water as it accumulates on one side of the dam, unable to continue its natural path down the riverbed. On one side of the dam, there is heightened energy from the water and on the other side there is the calm which comes from emptiness as the riverbed may have little water left or is completely dry. Once the water force overpowers the dam, there is a bit of a rush of water until the balance is restored and the river runs as it naturally should.

That river is us. We are the container. Our emotions are the water. In order for a river to be a river, it needs the container as well as the water passing through it. The rocks are our emotional blockages. When we decide we do not want to feel something, it starts with a thought, which gets translated into blocked energy (a dam), if you will, to the flow of natural energy passing through our body.

The impact of childhood on adult emotions

As we grow up and go through our life experiences, we encounter times when we feel hurt, let down, disappointed, jealous, angry, sad or just fed up! That’s all normal. Our unconscious mind will, by default, want to protect us from that pain, and we start building mini dams in order not to feel those unpleasant emotions.

As emotions are energy, and energy will sooner or later over-ride any mental decision we have made not to feel, the accumulated and stagnated energy breaks the dam and continues its path onwards. At such points in our lives, we feel overwhelmed and may break down. That’s what happened to me! And by the age of 36 there were so many emotional “dams” within me that I had several physical diseases, hardly any energy or a will to live and certainly not one ounce of happiness! But that’s all for another article so watch out for it!

We have been gifted this life. I see lives represented by rivers, all apparently similar yet so different in size, flow, power and journey. As all rivers are crucial for their surroundings, so are we to everyone in our lives. In order to live a good life, we receive a physical body and emotions to feel our way through our lives. Emotions are a crucial part of our existence. They are meant to flow through our body. We are meant to simply allow them to pass through us; in other words: Feel your emotions. Feel the anger, the love, the hatred, the fear, the joy, the pain, the disappointment, the forgiveness, the jealousy and the sadness. Feel it all by allowing it to pass through and out of your body.

As children we are born with our natural ability to laugh, love, scream and cry. It is only as we grow older that we start trying to manipulate and control emotions. By not feeling, we create blocks. We hold our emotions in. Then one day that energy surprises us; we collapse in a fit of rage or tears and we think something is wrong with us. There is nothing wrong with us at all. We are simply being taught by our bodies how to be human. And expressing emotions is part of being human.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine