Treasure Chest: A Place For Suppressed Emotions

03:01

03:01

Treasure Chest: A Place For Suppressed Emotions

by Ashley W Cummings

Type

talks

Activity

Meditation

Suitable for

Everyone

I often hear clients say they just ignore what they are feeling. Please don't! This is a recipe for emotional disaster. Your emotions are valuable information about how aligned you are in life at a given moment. Emotions give us direction on how to heal. But if we bypass our hard emotions, we limit our understanding and growth. The beginning of learning from hard emotions is to safely express them. Learn how with this Treasure Chest exercise. Please note that this exercise is meant to support your wellbeing and does not replace professional mental health care.

Therapy Journaling Emotional Check In Prayer

Meet your Teacher

Ashley W Cummings

Houston, TX, USA

Meet your Teacher

Ashley W Cummings

Houston, TX, USA

Transcript

Hello, Friends. Today I'd like to offer you a tool for handling overwhelming emotions. So this is a trick that I first learned in trauma therapy and I am going to apply it today as I do with clients for any time we run into overwhelming emotions or being short on time and we're not actually able to face what we're feeling. What I'd like to advise against. Do not get in the habit of suppressing your emotions. I hear this very often in my work. I just keep things to myself. I don't have anywhere to share it, So I just act like it's not happening. Please don't do this. This is a recipe for emotional disaster, Burnout, And feeling more depressed or anxious than you already may be. What I offer you instead is the treasure chest in the therapy world. We refer to it as container. But with my clients, I refer to it as the treasure chest. I borrowed my daughter's. Here as an example. But what you do in this exercise is you even imagine that you have a container that only you have access to, Or you get your own physical container. And when you are feeling. Overwhelming emotions, Overwhelming thoughts, Things that you don't have the capacity to handle at any given time, You put it into your container. So whether it is you sitting in silence and letting the thoughts and emotions come to you and moving them to your a container or you're actually writing them down because that feels good for you and physically moving them into a tangible container or a vessel, Then please do that. But the goal is to not continuing to suppress what you feel. We must remember that our emotions are information and we need them and we need to examine them. But recognizing that we don't always have the time in the middle of a workday when we're doing things with our families. Etc. But we don't want to ignore or suppress them. So create a container for yourself. Move your items, Your thoughts, Your emotions into them. You can set a specific time each day when you do this. So perhaps before bed, Or taking a break over the course of your day. And then at another time, Perhaps the beginning or the end of your week, Sitting down with your container, Examining what you've put there, Considering if you have the capacity to address what has come up for you. And if not, Move it back to your container. Honor what you've thought and felt, But move it back. And for some of us, It becomes a prayer box, Things that we are going to surrender to sovereignty for help in recognizing what to do. But most importantly. Don't suppress, Contain in your treasure chest.