Humans experience different kinds of emotions like joy, excitement, sadness or anger. Some of these emotions are not easy to express and can make you uncomfortable. Such emotions that do not find an outlet are called unprocessed emotions and can cause serious mental health issues.
What does it mean to process emotions?
Emotion is an energy in motion which prompts you to take action. Emotions are reactions triggered by events or thoughts. The purpose of emotions is to help you identify your needs. If these needs are not met, you experience a negative or unhealthy emotion. When emotions are suppressed and not addressed they are bottled up and this can lead to anxiety and frustration, for example.
Processing emotions refers to facing the emotion instead of pushing it aside. When you suppress your emotions, you do not hear the message these emotions are trying to give – this can affect your mental and physical wellbeing and lead to emotional outbursts eventually.
Your judgement is also affected by your emotions if left unprocessed. Recognising uncomfortable emotions and expressing them timely can help you overcome them without affecting your mental and physical wellbeing.
How to process emotions in a healthy way?
Not knowing what to do when you experience an uncomfortable emotion is a challenge for most people. Thus, before knowing the steps to process the emotion, it can be helpful to understand the potential stages of emotional processing.
1. Recognise your emotion: Be aware of your emotions without labelling them good or bad.
2. Allow yourself to feel the emotion: Let the emotion move through you so that you can feel it and do what needs to be done like a movement, a cry or a scream – remember emotions are literally energy in motion so they need to move. The problem comes when we stop this movement.
3. Identify the cause of the emotion: Identify what caused this emotional experience. This cause can be anything like a trigger, unfulfilled need, false expectation, certain behaviour patterns or a violation of boundaries.
4. Validate the emotions: Once you identify the reason behind an emotion, you can better cope with it. When you validate and accept your emotions, you can let them go and become more self-aware.
Here are some effective strategies to help you process your emotions:
1. Maintain a journal: Maintaining a journal is the best way of processing feelings and emotions. When you read your written expression of emotions, you can understand and control them. You can note down your symptoms and reasons on a daily basis so you can identify repetitive patterns.
2. Talking: Talking with a trusted supporter can be a really helpful way to process your emotions. I try to provide a safe space for my clients through reiki and my spiritual life coaching programme to be able to identify, express and understand their emotions. This level of honesty with yourself can be very healing.
3. Practise yoga nidra and other guided relaxations: This practice can be really helpful in helping to calm the mind and have the space to process and release emotions. It will help you to let go of any thoughts you have in your mind and enables you to experience your emotions fully.
4. Listen to music: Music is an effective tool to feel your emotions. To learn how to process feelings, play music which matches your emotions. This is music for every emotion, joy, sadness, anger, loss, etc.
5. Following your joy: Follow your joy – engage in activities which make your heart glow, whether that be enjoying solitude, going for a walk, playing sport, engaging in a creative pursuit, socialising, etc. Sometimes distracting ourselves from our emotions can be helpful so we don’t get caught up in them and allow them to pass on their own.
6. Space: We need space to process our emotions. Take time out, make space, be with yourself. Cancel appointments, honour your need to focus on you, cultivate space.
Stay calm
No matter how strongly you feel an emotion, remember that it does not have the power to hurt you unless you allow it to. Learning how to process emotions or how to process feelings is crucial to help you better deal with them and maintain your emotional balance in stressful times.
Please remember that our unresolved negative patterning from our past can be triggered by situations in our current life and we can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the emotions and this can lead to bouts of anxiety and depression. At such times it is helpful to remember that ‘this too shall pass’, take a deep breath and step back and try to remember when you last felt similarly. What old memory has been triggered? Often it is a guide, to help you do the deeper work and unstick the old emotion, the energy in motion that got stuck.
Often there is a thought, behaviour and/or limited belief that is associated with the emotion, so just let them flow and let yourself be positively changed in the process.
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