A recent, painful experience inspired me to write this. I’d love to know how you feel about this.
As a culture, we use our rational approach and apply it to the emotions, and by virtue of those two approaches needing to be totally different, we cause harm on a daily basis. The emotional body by definition is not rational. The mind is designed to be rational, but not the emotions. So when you take your approach to resolving issues on the mental plane to the emotional body, you might as well take a knife to a child. Or use salt instead of sugar when you bake a chocolate cake. It does not work and the results are horrendous.
As a culture, we do not yet know how to work with emotion in a way that renders and reverts the emotional body to the supple and fluid state it once was in. We only know how to reinforce the scars that had been caused by people unable to recognize and meet emotional needs, inadvertently.
One of the ways we create disconnect is that we do not know how the emotional body works and what it needs to restore itself. And therefore, we constantly corroborate in the injuring of other people’s emotional bodies as well as our own.
And yet, our relationships are all built or destroyed by our ability to relate emotionally. Maybe that is why the epidemic of loneliness is so huge?
All of our distortions that we experience as adults, whether they are our physical well being, our mental wellbeing or our emotional state, go back to the multitude of unresolved emotional traumas we all experienced as children.
Emotional trauma is not only a result of severe abuse, of severe violence, of extreme conditions. Emotional trauma happens whenever a child is moving through an emotional experience, unsupported, unseen, and left alone. As it is not able to cope with the emotional energy and as a result has to disown parts of itself to make it through. This is how we loose everything that we are now so eager to find. Our sense of self, our self worth, our deservingness, our clarity of purpose, our ability to connect and be intimate, our ability to receive, our ability to relate to ourselves as the divine being that we are, our ability to related and connect with others easefully, the list goes on.
Hence, learning how to heal the emotional body is key in order for us to make any noteworthy progress in life.
It hurts me to see and experience, how as a culture, especially within the sector of “conscious entrepreneurs and change makers”, we take a mental/rational approach to layers of our being that actually need an emotionally sound approach. We often downright dismiss the need for emotionally sound, which you can also refer to as emotionally safe. We all had plenty of experiences in life, that taught us to toughen up, and get on without the safety. And hence, we developed a somewhat condescending attitude towards anyone needing or requesting emotional safety, including ourselves.
In order for emotional healing to be successful versus damaging, empathy and unconditional presence are key. No judgment, no critic, no suggestions allowed, no withdrawal of love or approval allowed.
Empathy, kindness, gentleness and a non-judgmental approach are key. Anything short of that will cause more damage then good.
With love,