When you least expect it, you can find yourself overwhelmed by your emotions. You are just living your life and all of a sudden you are feeling fear or anger or the depths of sadness. These emotions seem to come out of nowhere. Your emotions have hijacked your life.
Do you blow up over every little thing? Do you have more fears than most of your friends? Do you worry because you overreact to everyday events? Does your family call you touchy or irritable?
What is really going on when your emotions hijack your life? Could these reactions be caused by painful events from your past?
You are your history
Where do your emotions come from? If you think about it, your emotions can only come from two places: you are reacting to something in the present moment or you have unresolved emotions from the past.
You are the sum total of your past. Everything that has happened to you makes you the person that you are today.
Making peace with a problem past
When you make peace with a problem past, events from the past are just your history, without any emotional charge.
Making peace means that you have forgiven yourself and other people in your life. You aren’t holding on to shame or guilt. You don’t dwell on past problems.
When you let go of the past, it no longer haunts you or hijacks your life.
How do emotions from the past hijack you?
Unresolved emotions are stored in your body. To understand more about how emotions are stored in the body, see the post: How Your Emotional System Works. Briefly, unresolved emotions are stored in every cell of your body in the form of neuropeptides. Until you resolve an emotion, it sits in your body waiting to be released.
For example, you have unresolved abandonment. Every time you experienced abandonment in the past, that pain became stored in your body. If you feel abandoned in the present moment, you feel all the abandonment you have ever experienced in your life.
When you feel a lifetime of painful emotions all at once, you become overwhelmed. This is how your emotions hijack your life.
Finding the emotions that hijack your life
Common emotions that can hijack your life include:
Anger
Rage
Fear
Guilt
Abandoned
Rejected
Shamed
Discounted
Beliefs can also hijack your life. Some common beliefs that can hijack you include:
I’m not good enough
I’m not lovable
I’m not worthy
I’m undeserving
I don’t belong
Make a list of emotions and beliefs that hijack your life.
What do you now?
You can release these emotions and reclaim your true emotions. Remember these emotions were learned in the past. These emotions are not the true you.
One way to reclaim your true self is by learning the poetry of emotion process and using this method to free yourself from the past.
To get started…
(Image: bark @ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/barkbud/4257136773/)
