Emotions and How They Work

Let's think of your emotional body as a pool of water.

When that pool is perfectly still and clear (i.e. an emotional score of 95%), emotions that arise in consciousness are instantly and perfectly reflected, easily identifiable and thus easily processed, acted upon, and released. However, when traumatic events happen, and as a result, our nervous system goes out of balance, waves are created in the water. It becomes less easy to identify reflections (emotions) and often those emotions are perceived in a distorted way due to the waves, which are the result of past trauma, not present circumstances. Those emotions are not processed effectively, and they begin to stay in the water, kind of like algae stays in stagnant water. As the water gets more muddled it becomes even more difficult to identify and sort out new emotions brought on by new experiences, and they also stay, unprocessed, in the water. The algae begins to pile up, making the water ever more dirty and stagnant. We humans perceive that as emotional pain. As a result, we begin to disconnect from the pool altogether - we literally start to exit the pool. You can see this as our emotional scores go down, down, down, until they are at 1%, which is just enough to verify that we have a heartbeat, but we are as far away from that pool as we can get while still staying alive. There is too much pain and distortion in there.

Interestingly, because we have rejected our emotional guidance system and unplugged from it...

... we now begin to process all new information through our other system - the mind. This works all right. We are often much calmer (although not always - that depends on the personality). Without our emotional information to distract us, we may find it easy to be disciplined, to focus on what needs to be done in a rational and logical manner. In fact, it would seem that very little affects us or rocks us - our emotional response to life is extremely contained (this is especially true if the imbalance in our nervous system kicked us into parasympathetic overdrive, which is the freeze/dissociation response of the nervous system). However, this is not because we have no emotional reaction to life, it is in fact because we have pulled the plug on our emotional guidance system and are no longer in touch with it. The downside of this is that we still have a pool full of stagnant and dirty water, which will eventually spill over into our physical system and begin to drain energy from our physical bodies, and that we don't get to experience the fullness of the emotional palette of which humans are capable.

There are also times when that pool of nasty water will become overwhelming, and we'll suddenly feel out of control with the pain that we are holding inside.

Thus, the way out of this mess is to remove the trauma...

...and begin to clear out some of those old, stuck emotions, so that we feel comfortable getting back into that pool again. That's the process of becoming emotionally functional.

But your question deals with a matter of even finer distinction.

Let's say that we ARE emotionally functional, that the pool is pretty clear, and that what we are seeing is some negative stuff. Is it healthy to express it?

The answer is both yes and no.

To understand that, we have to understand that our mental/emotional system is ONE system with two components that are meant to be used together, not separately. We are meant to take in emotional information through our feelings, and to process it in conjunction with the information our rational mind takes in, and THEN to act.

Ideally, this is how it works.

Something happens, and as a result we feel victimized. We feel that whatever happened wasn't fair to us, and this gives rise to anger, fear, or some other negative emotion. It is important to remember that ALL negative emotions arise from the belief that we have been victimized. Without that belief, we would not feel these negative emotions. But wait - our rational mind has some nuggets of truth in it, and one of those is this: there are no victims. Not ever. Everything that we experience is nothing more than a reflection of our own consciousness. The world, and our experience of it, is one giant mirror of our state of consciousness. We don't realize that sometimes because 99% of our consciousness is hidden from us, in our subconscious mind. But this is precisely why the world exists: to reflect to us our subconscious mind, which is a mystery to us. So the more we study our lives and what happens in them objectively, the more we begin to understand our own state of consciousness. The more we understand our own state of consciousness, the more we see where we are carrying negativity (because this is where negativity is reflected to us). Once we are consciously aware of our own negativity, it is easy to drop it.

So is it healthy to express that negativity?

Only if we must, and then only if we do it as a way of getting the vibration out of our system, NOT as a way of directing it, or targeting it, at the person or situation that we believe victimized us. Because that only perpetuates the false belief in our own victimization, not to mention that it also spreads the negativity in the rest of the world, which is to say that it builds the negativity in our own consciousness. If we must express it, it's important to do it with witnesses who are holding a higher state of consciousness for us, witnesses who won't buy into our belief in victimization. When negativity is expressed in the presence of such a high witnessing consciousness, the truth of the situation becomes clear, and we are able to easily drop our belief that we were victimized and remember that whatever happened was merely our own consciousness being reflected back to us.

So no, negative emotions are never healthy.

They always represent a false belief. However, "stuffing" negative emotions is also not healthy - that is what leads to the stagnant pool of water described above. What is healthy is to use your mind to help you find the truth of the situation to which your emotions are calling your attention, and to then release the false belief that you are, or ever could be, a victim.