If you decide to do an emotional detox, you can expect one outcome to be happier emotions. You will get that and much more.
Emotions play an important role in your life. Maybe more important than you realize. Many people find that releasing toxic emotions results in some pleasant surprises.
While you might discover unique outcomes, there are three that many people have.
What can you expect? Read on to find out.
The importance of emotions
Did you know that emotions are crucial to every aspect of your life?
Antonio Damasio, author of The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), tells us that “emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life.” The term organism in this quote refers to you.
Damasio goes on to explain that one function of emotion is to produce a specific reaction to a situation and that “emotion is integral to the process of reasoning and decision making.”
As you can see, emotions are important for your happiness and even for your survival. You want them to be giving you accurate information about your life.
Why do you need to detox your emotions?
Emotions from the past can create problems. These emotions were created during unpleasant or traumatic events in childhood and became stuck in your mind and body. These emotions are still with you.
You may be aware of these emotions or not. Many of us realize that painful emotions have their roots in childhood. Other people have stuffed their emotions and don’t realize that they are still carrying emotions from childhood.
3 surprising outcomes from an emotional detox
There are many ways that an emotional detox can improve your life. Obviously, you will be free from painful emotions from the past, but there are other common and surprising outcomes.
Here are 3:
1. You will discover lost aspects and qualities. Often these are the best parts of yourself and they have been lost for a long time. In a trauma, parts of you can become split off or frozen in time. I believe this happens as a way to protect our most precious parts. You may rediscover creativity, compassion, fun, adventure, and more.
2. Your health will improve. Any health issues you have that are related to inflammation will improve. These painful emotions are sending out the message that you are in danger or in a crisis. This happens even if you are not aware of the emotions.
This message engages your fight or flight system, which then pumps out the stress hormones: adrenaline and cortisol. Living in a constant state of stress damages your body and results in many of our modern diseases. This outcome is described in greater detail in Childhood Disrupted (2015) by Donna Jackson Nakazawa.
3. You will recover your intuition. Your intuition has been there guiding you all along. You were just not able to hear it. If you are feeling the emotions from your past, they are so loud that you can not hear your intuition. If you stuffed your emotions, you stuffed your intuition too.
It will take some practice to start hearing your intuition. It is small and quiet. It can be a voice, a feeling, an image, or a knowing. I suggest sitting in a quiet place and asking your intuition to communicate with you. Then wait for a response. It gets easier with practice.
How to do an emotional detox
The first step is to identify a starting point. This may be a painful emotion that is causing you problems. Or you may need to start with the lack of emotions.
Once you have identified a starting point, the poetry of emotion process can help. It is a way to release the past without reliving past traumas.
Click here to read more about the poetry of emotion process. It is free.
Check out my free report, “5 Lies You’ve Been Told about Health and Happiness”.
(Image: Robo Android)
