In many articles we mentioned how negative emotions could be harmful. Certainly they don’t make you feel good and have detrimental effects on your mind and body.
Now I will say something that on the surface seems to contradict that idea. Negative emotions are good. Yes, they are good because they show us when something is not working well in our lives. They show us when something is wrong. Otherwise we would put up with situations and other people’s behaviors which are otherwise not acceptable. Simply put it, without the presence of negative emotions we would not know when something was wrong.
Thus, having emotions, all sorts of emotions including negative emotions is a good thing. First of all the presence of emotions is part of being human. Now, if you don’t like being human, then you can medicate yourself into oblivion so you cannot feel anything. Alternatively you can wait a little longer until our science will start intermingling human bodies with robotic parts, and as a well-designed computer you will be like a computer. No emotional reaction at all. Very cool, if you like this kind of stuff.
Otherwise, you could use your emotions (especially the negative emotions you experience) as lessons for your life. They can serve you as a stepping stone for developing new strategies for success, fulfillment, satisfaction and the like.
Here is the problem with negative emotions. Most people get caught in them, and stay caught in them forever. That’s not good. There is no purpose for negative emotions to remain in your mind, and especially in your unconscious mind longer than the moment in which they were initially experienced. Let me say that again: in the moment they are good. They tell you something is wrong. But even 30 minutes later they may have no purpose anymore. And for those of you who think that the memories will disappear once the negative emotions are gone, the answer is no! In fact if you do the process of Time Line Therapy® correctly, not only that you will remember the memories so you can protect yourself better in the future, but you will retain all the learnings you need to avoid those kind of circumstances for the future. That’s very, very useful!
Once you recognize that something is wrong (through the presence of negative emotions) they have fulfilled their purpose. But people are not taught skills of how to let them go. Unconsciously they hold onto these emotions sometimes forever. In this case their presence acts as a barrier preventing people from moving forward. There is a lot of talk about reaching one’s full potential. How do you see one reaching one’s full potential if that person has not moved forward in terms of emotional resolution of old conflicts?
Here is a set of emotions that prove to be very detrimental to your progress, and can act as a massive blockage to your development:
1. Anger (And All Other Aggressive Emotions like Fury, Rage, Resentment, Wrath, etc.)
Anger (and all the other above-mentioned emotions) is arguably one of the most obvious negative emotions. Funny that anger makes people take some sort of action – many times the wrong action but is definitely an emotion that in many instances makes people take some sort of action. We act. Many times unwisely. Unrestricted and uncontrolled anger makes us say things or do things that we later regret. After that we can experience a plethora of other negative emotions like guilt, shame, regret, sadness, etc.
NOTE: I lump these emotions together for the purpose of this article – but they should be dealt with separately, one by one.
If situations that made us angry happened at a time or in a place when it was not safe to express anger (and this is most any place around), there is a distinct possibility that some people develop a pattern of repressing the anger. In other words they “stuff it” down into the unconscious. Consecutively this process can “turn the anger” into sadness or even into a depressive pattern. These people could then become permanently dissociated from that anger, generalizing it into “all anger” which in turn does not permit them to learn the learnings they need to let go of the anger and continue their personal growth through life. In fact many people who swear they don’t have any anger are just bottling it up so much so that it disappears out of consciousness nevertheless lurking in the unconscious for the reminder of their lives.
Bottled anger as well as expressed anger could come up in behaviors completely out of control. This is not a pretty site. Out of control anger could be downright dangerous, although most sociopaths and psychopaths harm others without any trace of anger.
2. Sadness (and Other Depressive Emotions like Depression, Regret, Sorrow, etc.)
All these emotions (again, which only for the purpose of this article I lump under the name depressive emotions but which are to be dealt with separately) can create a spiraling down effect into deeper and deeper unhappiness. All these emotions disable our ability to recover from past stressful events. They halt us dead in the tracks. We cannot move forward in life. Instead of creating new things we find ourselves caught in an endless loop and finally we get stuck.
And if that is not enough, with them comes self-blame and judgment which in turn don’t help the situation be resolved. In fact these are even more destructive in terms of our certainty and self-confidence.
3. Fear (Include Here Terror, Anxiety, Fright, Panic and the Like)
I wrote extensively about fear in many of my articles. Giving Fear The Finger, Does Fear Control You Part 1 and Does Fear Control You Part 2 are only a few examples of this.
Here is what I had to say about fear in one of these articles:
“Fear can be stronger than cement in keeping you stuck. People are scared of not being liked, of not being good enough, of possible terrible situations they envision for the future, scared to do something, scared of their financial wellbeing, scared to act, scared to change things, scared to say “no” to other people, scared of being alone, scared of illness, scared of loss, scared of ….death. There are so many ways in which fear keeps you stuck I would fill pages mentioning them all and I would probably leave out a couple of hundreds. Often people don’t even know consciously what scares them but unconsciously they respond to all these fears. So many fears could be irrational (meaning without conscious rational explanation).”
“If you care about being in control of your life, you have to do that. You have to let go of your fear. Not “control” your fear, “not get to know your fear”, not “face your fear”, etc. LET IT GO! Understand that your life is worth living to the fullest – you cannot do that if you live in fear. If you don’t control your life, somebody else will do it for you through fear.”
“Once you let go of fear, you can do something that in the past could have scared you, and now it doesn’t. Then and only then you take back control over your life. Then you will get to know powers inside you that you never knew before and only then you will begin to wonder – how was it possible that I was so stuck before now? And then, you can really being to create your life and your future and feel empowered.”
There are two more very detrimental negative emotions that keep you stuck and prisoner in your own personal nightmare, but these will have to wait until part two of this article.
Until then be well