Healthy Emotions VS Toxic Emotions
Healthy Emotions Vs Toxic Emotions
In today’s world, we often judge certain emotions as good and certain emotions as bad. Happiness, Joy, Love, Peace and Excitement are deemed desirable and emotions such as Anger, Rage, Grief, Sadness, Shame, Guilt and Disgust are deemed undesirable or wrong. The modern-day surge in personal development often subscribes to the above notion as does many new age thinking groups. I used to believe that this was true. Anger was simply wrong, when feeling sad just think happy thoughts and that will make everything better. Unfortunately, it didn’t. A common term for this overly positive approach is what many therapists will call spiritual bypassing. This is the practice of using spirituality to avoid feeling or expressing emotions that are considered “low vibe”. The danger with this approach is that suppressed emotions can often lead to depression, disconnecting from our needs and can cause a cost of physically painful symptoms to emerge.
Having being a client of both Kinesiology and Compassionate Inquiry as well as training in both of these modalities, I have come to see the value in all emotions. I no longer view emotions as good or bad, instead I view emotions as healthy or unhealthy (toxic). For example, toxic anger may look like somebody accidentally bumping into to you at the shop and you begin verbally berating or physical abusing them. Healthy anger may be when somebody infringes on your boundaries and you ask them kindly but firmly to please respect your boundaries. For example, if I was attending a lecture of some sort and the lecturer decided to give the whole talk while standing right in my face then I would need to assert a certain level of aggression in order to reclaim my personal space.
Another way of viewing emotions is like nutrients. If you have a deficiency or excess of any nutrient you may experience difficult symptoms. Take vitamin C for instance, a deficiency may lead to scurvy, an excess may lead to diarrhea. Not enough anger can lead to poor boundaries which can lead to numerous health issues. Toxic anger also contributes to ill health.
In his international bestseller “When the Body Says No” Dr. Gabor Mate talks about the devastating toll repressed emotions can take on one’s health. In chapter 9 titled “Is there a Cancer Personality?”, he writes “ Repression, the inability to say no and a lack of awareness of one’s anger make it much more likely that a person will find herself in situations where her emotions are unexpressed, her needs are ignored and her gentleness is exploited. Those situations are stress inducing, whether or not the person is conscious of being stressed. Repeated and multiplied over the years, they have the potential of harming homeostasis and the immune system”. On the other hand, too much angry expression has been shown to lead to increased risk of heart attack or stroke and may put the safety of the self and others at risk.
Guilt can also be helpful and unhelpful depending on the context. If for example you make a commitment to teach a class of ten people on a Saturday morning but in the last minute decide not to attend because a friend asked you to go shopping then perhaps a certain level of guilt is healthy and useful. You made a commitment, people took time out of their lives to show up for you and you chose to suit yourself based on how you felt in the moment and totally inconveniencing the people who made a commitment to you.
Toxic guilt may look like somebody making a request of your time and when you decline you feel this overwhelming sense of guilt and perceive that you are a bad person because you didn’t give up your time and energy to something that wasn’t in alignment with you. Such toxic emotions require thorough examination and often have their roots planted deeply in suppressed childhood traumas.
If as children we are shamed for feeling certain emotions often we will repress them in adulthood. Often children are put in the naughty corner for throwing a tantrum. As if being frustrated at such a young age is wrong and shouldn’t be the case. Although the adult’s intentions are good, often the message the child gets is “if I show my anger I will be rejected and be alone”. Being rejected at such a young age is unbearable for a young child. They believe that they have to adapt themselves in order to survive. The problem is that these adaptations can lead emotional issues in adult life. They may have toxic levels of certain emotions or they may lose the willingness to express healthy levels of unpopular emotions.
Through my own personal work, I have found that often our deepest emotional wounds could also have started either in a collective trauma experienced in our country or community, could be inherited from our ancestral lineage, or could be carried over from a past life (if you believe in that sort of thing).
Collective trauma can be defined as the psychological distress that a group usually an entire culture, community, or another large group of people experience in response to a shared trauma. Examples could include bombings, natural disasters, political upheaval and war. Collective traumas experienced in Ireland include centuries of colonialism, famine, the troubles and the church’s toxic influence on Irish Society.
Regarding the theory of multi-generational trauma, Dr. Rachel Yehuda who is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience has done studies with children whose predecessors survived the Holocaust. The Guardian newspaper reported on the studies:
“Genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors are capable of being passed on to their children, the clearest sign yet that one person’s life experience can affect subsequent generations.
The conclusion from a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital led by Rachel Yehuda stems from the genetic study of 32 Jewish men and women who had either been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, witnessed or experienced torture or who had had to hide during the second world war.
They also analysed the genes of their children, who are known to have increased likelihood of stress disorders, and compared the results with Jewish families who were living outside of Europe during the war. “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents,” said Yehuda.
Her team’s work is the clearest example in humans of the transmission of trauma to a child via what is called “epigenetic inheritance” - the idea that environmental influences such as smoking, diet and stress can affect the genes of your children and possibly even grandchildren”.
Personally I have gone through some emotional experiences which I believe come from the generations who went before me. I will be writing about these experiences in a later blog.
The idea of reincarnation and past lives is present in most eastern religions and philosophies including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikism. Greek Philosopher Plato also believed in the concept of an immortal soul that reincarnates and lives many lifetimes on earth. There are sources out there that say reincarnation was present in the bible up until AD 543 when it was removed by the then Roman emperor Justinian I.
The idea of trauma from past lives causing physical and mental symptoms in one’s current life was put forward by Dr. Brian Weiss in his book “Many Lives Many Masters”. Dr. Weiss is a highly academically successful Psychiatrist who was highly skeptical of any alternative or out there ideas. This all changed when he was working with a client named Catherine who suffered with anxiety, insomnia, sleepwalking, nightmares, depression, panic attacks, heart palpitations as well as a host of other physical symptoms. After studying her childhood memories and traumas Catherine experienced no relief whatsoever. Everything changed when through hypnosis she accidentally stumbled upon past life memories. As more and more of these memories were made conscious Catherine began to experience healing on both a psychological and physiological level. After a year of working with Dr. Weiss all symptoms abated.
Through various modalities I have experienced lots of past life regressions and with that an all-round increased sense of wellbeing. (more on that in a later post).
So having talked a bit about healthy vs toxic emotions, the consequences of repressing healthy emotions and expressing toxic ones and their potential origins, here are some possible tips to start expressing more healthy emotions and how to possible heal the toxic ones:
1) Next time you feel yourself being triggered whether it’s anger, sadness or any other painful emotion, ask yourself where is it in my body? Really let yourself feel the physical sensations of it.
2) Ask yourself “what is this emotion trying to tell me? You could also ask “If the emotion could speak what would it say”.
3) Ask yourself if you’ve ever had a similar experience to the one you’re having in the present moment. Notice if your body sensations change as you remember a similar situation.
4) If you are made to feel shame for expressing whatever emotion you have expressed or if you are feeling shame for how you’ve dealt with a triggering situation ask yourself “If my best friend was going through this right now and told me what happened, what would I say to them?” You could sub in your child, spouse or parent instead of best friend.