How You Lost Touch with Your Emotions

Many of us have lost touch with our emotions. In my last post I wrote about one client who lost touch with his emotions, yet realized the importance of working with emotions.

Losing touch with our emotions starts at a really young age before we even realize what is happening. We don’t even notice it.

By the time we become adults, we think being out of touch with our emotions is normal. We don’t realize we have lost an important part of being our true selves.

Are you out of touch with your emotions?

The history of emotions

Emotions have long been associated with being disorganized and creating a loss of control. Philosophers, such as Rene Descartes, viewed emotions as part of our primitive nature and not to be trusted. Reason was thought to reflect our higher spiritual nature.

More recently, many training programs for therapists focused on cognitive and behavioral methods. Emotions were something to be controlled or managed, not an aspect to be engaged to create transformation and change.

Even though many therapists realized the importance of emotions, they did not have methods to engage emotions. These therapists would often err on the side of caution, sometimes bypassing emotions altogether.

What science is telling us

Neuroscientists are painting a very different picture of emotions. They are finding that emotions are the prime organizing force that shapes how we cope with life’s challenges. Antonio Damasio, author of The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, says that emotion shapes and organizes our experience and connection to others.

Without emotions we cannot make even the simplest decision. People who have brain injuries that affect their emotions are not able to learn from their mistakes. People who cannot feel emotions struggle with relationships.

Even though we may not be in touch with our emotions, they are not hidden from others. We can read an emotion in another person’s face in 100 milliseconds and we can mirror that emotion in 300 milliseconds. We can literally feel the other person’s emotions by mirroring their facial expression.

Now, how did you lose touch with your emotions?

As you are realizing, our culture is not very comfortable with emotions and your family may not have been either. Usually we learn to label our emotions and that is about it.

When the adults around us discount our emotions or tell us that we are wrong for feeling a certain emotion, we begin to doubt ourselves. After all these are adults and they must know more than we do.

Some examples might help. Young boys are often told that “Boys don’t cry.” When a young boy is not able to cry, he is forced to suppress or stuff any emotions of sadness or pain.

You may have been told that it was not okay to feel a certain emotion. Perhaps it was not acceptable to feel anger toward your mother. Or you may have been told, “You’re not really upset. Just get over it.”

As children we learned to doubt and stuff our emotions.

How this affects you today

When you stuff an emotion, it does not go away. If you have been reading my blog, you will know that your unresolved emotions remain stored in your body. Even if you don’t remember the emotion, it is still affecting you.

We know that emotions such as anger, fear, and shame cause stress in our body and depress our immune system; while love, gratitude, and acceptance support our immune system, our health, and happiness. We also know that suppressed emotions can keep you from feeling accurate emotions from the present moment.

Becoming more in touch with your emotions will not happen overnight. One step you can take is to let go of the unresolved emotions that you stuffed in childhood. As you let go of emotions from the past, you will automatically have access to your true emotions – accurate emotions about the present moment.

How would feeling your true emotions change your life?

(Image: joegreen2007 @Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/37510826@N06/3451194212/)