Emotions are good. They let us know when something isn’t right for us. At least that’s what they are meant for.

However all too often the emotion you feel now in the present is actually based in a memory from the past. When this happens it means you can’t make the best decisions for yourself. You will find it hard to be 100% present and in the now, because the past is always pulling you back.

Sadly exactly how to recover from the past isn’t well known and here are the 3 biggest mistakes that people make when trying to deal with their emotions.

1. Understand them

Do you know someone who knows exactly WHY they have their problems? They know the cause, the events that led to them, how it all happened. They will know and fully understand all the patterns and triggers, and often they will find every opportunity to share them with anyone who seems even remotely interested, they will launch into their “story”. The problem is they still have the problem. Knowing why you have the problem and understanding it is a bit like knowing your car doesn’t work because its fan belt has broken, but not actually replacing the fan belt.

2. Express them

Many therapies focus on crying, talking about your problem or even shouting and screaming.

Crying does not release the emotions, nor does it resolve the problem. Although crying can give temporary relief and release endorphins, this simply masks the problem and, in fact, reliving the painful event reinforces the problem and makes it worse, rather than better.

Rather than releasing the emotions this actually reinforces them in your neurology. Every time you think a thought, feel an emotion or recall a memory, the neurons fire in your brain along the same original path. Each time you do this you will actually be strengthening that path, making it easier for that pathway to be fired up next time. This is why small events in the present can trigger past trauma. Expressing emotions does not release them.

Therefore each time you relive a traumatic event, you will strengthen the neural pathway. But if you RELEASE the negative emotions new, positive and empowering thought processes can then be installed.

3. Suppress them

This is also called denial and we do this in a variety of ways. Most people will simply kid themselves or deny that they have any problems at all. Often emotions are suppressed or anaesthetised out of consciousness with addictions. Smoking, drinking, video games, TV, eating too much or a compulsion to eat a particular thing, even caffeine will anaesthetise your pain.

However, the pain and the problems are still there. The neurons are still firing, but out of your conscious awareness. So you are radiating out all that energy completely ignorantly until boom some big problem lands in your life and you can’t understand where it came from or why it happened when you were thinking happy thoughts.

Telltale signs that you have suppressed emotions

A) Overreactions

You overreact to small things – this is known as emotional leakage. The emotions, denied in one area of your life, literally spill out in other areas. So if you are irritable, overly sentimental, get hurt by small things, even road rage, are signs that you could be suppressing emotions in another area.

B) Low or no Energy

Feeling tired – it takes energy to carry emotions (that’s why it’s called emotional baggage) and it takes even more energy to suppress them. If you are lacking in energy, need more sleep than most people or just have no get up and go. Many of my past clients were suffering from chronic fatigue or ME, which disappeared once they released their emotions.

C) You have physical pain or even illness

I’ve received a lot of questions about illness, heart problems, chronic fatigue, auto-immune, chronic pain and so on.

Pain, illness or physical discomfort is one of the ways our unconscious minds communicate with us. Your unconscious mind is communicating with your conscious mind all the time, but in the highly logical, rational, left brain society we have been conditioned to ignore those silly irrational feelings and only to pay attention to rational thinking.

But no matter how irrational they might seem they do have a rational cause. It’s just that our conscious / logical mind doesn’t have all the information. So it assumes the unconscious mind is wrong and overrules it.

This is what happens with our emotions and illness. Our unconscious mind will tell our conscious mind that something needs to change or move or it will just give us some feedback. But our conscious mind ignores it, so our unconscious mind gives it louder and louder and we turn it off and become numb to our emotions.

The problem is still there so our unconscious mind tries another way of communicating. The unconscious mind runs the body and it governs all those automatic processed like our immune system and muscles etc.

So if we ignore our emotions our unconscious mind gives us the messages as pain or illness. But when we pay attention to the emotions and release them the physical problem can disappear.

This is particularly true of all those psychosomatic illnesses. That doesn’t mean they are not real. The pain and the problem is VERY real, but it is caused because we don’t have a mechanism to release our emotions so we suppress them.