A myth that many people believe is the idea that with enough rational thinking and logic it is possible to change the way they feel. Unfortunately, it’s just not true. You might be able to trick yourself into thinking you’ve changed your feelings. Maybe even for a long period of time. But what you have done is managed them. You have not changed them.
Just to clarify, when I say feelings, I mean emotion. Emotion is energy in motion in your body. When energy moves inside your body, you feel it. Otherwise, you would not notice it.
The reason it is not possible for you to change your feelings
The reason it is not possible for you to change your feelings is that once energy is in motion in your body, that energy cannot be unmoved. Consequently, the deed is done. Once the motion has occurred, the cascade of physiological changes begins to happen.
At that point, all you can do with the sensations in your body is to let them out or learn to manage them.
The first way you learned to hold back emotion was to tighten your muscles and block the movement of energy so that it does not overtake you, which would cause you to fight or flee. In other words, you learned to freeze. Then you learned to use the thinking part of your brain to convince yourself that holding in the feelings was wise and prudent because you will be either ignored, punished, ridiculed or shamed if you do not. Your muscles stay tight, holding the feeling, and you are now unaware of it with your conscious mind.
Over time, as you manage your feelings with your mind, your body ends up holding the energy of many unexpressed emotions. You might have a stiff neck, back, hips, ankles or shoulders. You might have bad knees or arthritis. Your digestion might be poor. The list goes on and on. In addition, your ability to have easy, enjoyable interactions with a variety of people might be impaired because so many things that other people do or say trigger you. This makes you uncomfortable, frustrated or angry.
You are not the Hoover Dam
You are not the Hoover Dam. Your body was not meant to hold a buildup of a massive amount of energy over a long period of time. Everything that enters or is generated by your body is meant to flow out of it again. When you think that you can change your feelings by using your mind, you are defying this fundamental physical reality. Think about it.
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