PRINTABLE: Emotional Journaling Template
It's time you reconnected with your emotions :)
This is a handout I provide to many of my clients who want to learn how to reconnect with their emotions again.
The things is, at some point in our life for many of us, emotions got too painful for us to feel. This might have been a single traumatic episode, or a complex series of multiple ones, or even a period of time you faced emotional neglect.
Whatever it is we had to quickly figure out a way to deal with them.
It was the only way we could survive.
However, out of that are gave rise to various types of coping mechanisms. They are how we have taught ourselves to handle unwanted and painful feelings, example:
Rationalising why we shouldn't be feeling this way
Trying to suppress them
Distracting ourselves
Numbing ourselves
But as you've probably experienced by now, while these strategies worked once upon a time, don't work in the long-term. And that means now.
In fact they are probably the source of the problems you're facing now. They are what has created the deeply rooted idea that "feelings are bad and I cannot tolerate them", "feelings are too painful to feel".
So we need to try a new way.
We need to learn how to gently feel again.
And gentle is the keyword here okay? Start with the lower intensity emotions, then move your way up.
This will help you to get in touch with your feelings again, allowing them to be there, as they naturally should.
Take care,
Hernping
Psychologist and Therapist at IASH.SG
Originally posted on www.kayatoastforthesoul.com