Your Emotions Don’t Know That You Exist
Right relationships will let them know.
My life was a complete emotional mess for the last five years. I was continuously searching for methods to improve how I was feeling. All I did was pretending, obsessed with motivational prescriptions which further added to the complexity of the problem. Pretending to be okay is exhausting. Understanding you are not okay is healing.
When I invited genuine understanding into my life, things started to change. I started to change.
The Download
Before diving into understanding the unresolved emotional package, let’s see first what is mental pain. In my experience, it’s emotional conflict.
The first years of one’s life aren’t conscious experiences. We don’t remember what happened in that period. Communication at that particular stage in life is done at an emotional level. The deepest level.
Whatever emotional trauma you experienced in your childhood — especially in your early childhood when all you download is emotional communication and connection — is manifesting itself in your present relationships with people.
Denying my conflict brought me closer to the people that embodied what I had to understand and learn.
The script we use to act
In our early life, we are the most open-minded but also the most vulnerable. Memories and beliefs are painted on the canvas of the unconscious through neural paths. The brain builds models to navigate.
In my childhood, I felt fear from certain experiences and I suppressed some of it. Suppression of fear comes from not understanding how to cope with pain. I developed layers of protection. A patterned path. I put on a mask. Most of us do. A script is created.
Unsolved superstitions and fears are dictating feelings and therefore behavior. We learned it in a specific context, and it worked in that exact moment, but now we are no longer there, no longer in the same environment yet our reactions tend to be the same.
The recognition of these patterns brings consciousness to unconscious expressions. When we learn alternative ways of perceiving means we’ve built different neural paths which consequently leads to different behavior.
‘’Damaging memories have no age. You emotionally remember something and at the same time unaware you remembered it. They don’t have a sense of time since they were never fully processed consciously. Lingering in their original form, they don’t care about your happiness and mental stability. All they account for is survival which means protection.’’ says Dr. Menis Yousry in his book Discover Your Hidden Memory & Find the Real You
Awareness brings autobiographical memory (an event happened to me „then”) so it makes sense of the memory and puts an end as a by-product of understanding it. Hidden memories take us to the past, awareness takes us to now.
Once I started to make sense of my feelings, they just integrated with me in one being, I had no more conflict with it, I am it. I didn’t want to fight it anymore. When you fight the war with a war you never get out of the loop. It’s a self-reinforcing process. I wanted to make it visible to myself.
Reversely, when there’s no sense made, it’s incomplete, it just keeps popping up until you integrate it with yourself be it through acceptance or letting go.
Human consciousness strives to complete the incomplete.
‘’Imagine a bunch of islands that form a country. At one point in time, a war was present on all those islands. Think of it as the moment you experienced emotional trauma. It’s a war declared to your emotional equilibrium.
As time goes by, inevitably, war comes to an end. The declared peace is sent all over the country, but some of them never receive it, they are forgotten and left fighting with what’s not real anymore. Anytime someone enters their territory they just keep fighting and fighting because no one told them there’s no more war, no more danger.’’
— Dr. Menis Yousry
Simplifying it very much, it’s how our emotions seem to work. The moment you were traumatized is gone, yet some parts of us remain paralyzed and they just keep seeking to relive an old experience even after decades, to find peace and compassion never received when needed.
What happens is we are meeting new people that project difficult experiences and often painful.
Put it this way, if you have a tendency to repeat the same emotional behavior with different people over time and you’re observing it is damaging to your well-being then there’s definitely an internal conflict going on which craves to be understood and consciously accepted.
How did I observe it? I was overly triggered. Triggered by associations between a situation in the present and certain memories from the past.
My father left me when I was 6 years old. After more than 15 years it happened that we shared a house for a year and a half. Our present situation wasn’t very much of a problem but memories of him, which stayed untouched by true acceptance and communication between us, never dissolved and I always felt like I’m an abuse. That’s what abandonment makes you feel.
Memory is an associative process but painful memory led me to an associative bias. In other words, I associated external stimuli — which had to do with my current situation — to memories that had nothing to do with the present.
Certain hidden beliefs make us gravitate towards people who smash that belief right in our face. Such dynamics hurt us but simultaneously prove we are right. These beliefs don’t ‘’care’’ if it brings you pain or frustration, they want to be right. They care about identity confirmation. This is all emotional consistency, yet detrimental. The way out of the loop is a true understanding of sources, of where it comes from.
‘’My commitment is to truth, not to consistency.’’
— Mahatma Gandhi
The past can be changed through the reconstruction of the present.
Yes, the past is malleable. In what sense though?
If you change the way you look at things, what you look at changes.
— Wayne Dyer
Here is what I learned:
Memory isn’t perfect, not literal. It’s a reconstruction of facts and experiences, and it’s done by a brain that is different from the one that formed the memory in the first place.
Our ability to observe and process information is evolving as we age and expose ourselves to the world. That’s why we can rise above the useless beliefs and convictions. Our model of reality now is different than the one when those convictions were formed.
It’s not the past that adds weight to your life, it’s the denial of it.
I was pondering this idea for a long time, it never helped as long as it remained an idea. It needs support, bold decisions, action, and right relationships.
What I had to do was making sense of my past and present experiences by putting myself in an environment with people close to me that reinforce acceptance. To leave the past behind but to change my perception of it. To bring the emotional medium working with me in the ‘’Now and Here’’. The new environment I chose is not special. I feel special here. And that has made all the difference.
Healing is a process, not a method.
Internal emotional ‘’wars’’ interplay with human interactions and only through human interactions can be sent away. They crave to be solved, so they continue to appear again and again until we are aware of their source.
Time doesn’t always heal, sometimes it just throws everything at the deep bottom so you don’t have to deal with it consciously but it very much lets you know emotionally it’s there and awaits to be understood and integrated.
We are modified by experiences that are primarily social in nature. Making sense of our unresolved memories through relationships and difficult conversations dismisses the compulsive suppression of fear. It takes you back to the present. Most of us are searching for a path back to the present.
I was endlessly intellectualizing my emotions but it didn’t work that way. I needed different types of relationships. With other people and with myself. You can’t intellectualize relationships. They are experiences, not intellectual tasks. Intellect sees methods and formulas. Relationships build compassion and acceptance.
To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
— Bruce Lee
I considerably improved my understanding and awareness thanks to Dr. Menis Yousry, a phenomenal and compassionate psychotherapist. The thing that helped me the most was his empathetic approach to humans. It connected dots in my life.
