Emotional Health And Relationships

This is a 30-minute talk about emotional health. Are you connected with your emotions? If you struggle to know what you feel, you may have grown up in an emotionally neglectful family environment. How do you know though? In this talk, I help you understand emotional connection and emotional disconnection and what is the difference, as well as the relationship between our level of emotional connection with ourselves and our ability to create healthy boundaries.

Transcript

So today I wanted to talk about the question of knowing who you are,

Discovering your true self and bringing out your authentic expression in the world.

The key to knowing who you are is really,

I believe,

A healthy relationship with your own emotions.

It's being able to use your emotions,

Which your emotions are energy in motion,

Your physical,

Emotional,

Spiritual,

Soul energy in motion,

Wanting to express.

So if you're able to really be in touch with your emotions and name them,

Understand what you're feeling,

Frustration,

Anger,

Sadness,

Depression,

Happiness,

Joy,

Elation,

And literally kind of move with this emotional state,

Express it in a healthy way out into the world,

Whether it's in your relationships,

Via strong boundaries,

Whether it's making art,

Whether it's making music,

Whether it's in your work,

Then you find your authentic expression,

You find yourself,

You start to know who you are.

But the problem is,

If you have been taught in your childhood by your family system to repress certain emotions,

Because it just has not been safe for you to express them,

Which I think is very,

Very common.

From my understanding of and my connection with many people,

Many of us have been taught either consciously or subliminally.

So the messages are either very clear in our families that,

Okay,

Anger is not okay,

You're going to be shut down,

Sent to your room,

Stopped in whenever you express anger.

Sadness is also a problem,

We need to fix that straight away.

We're not allowed to just cry and be sad.

This is problematized,

Pathologized.

So I think these kind of reactions to emotions in childhood are very common amongst families where there is not a healthy emotional expression in between the parents and when the parents probably have also not been taught by their parents how to healthily channel their own emotions.

So therefore they repress and try to dampen or stop or control in some way the emotional expression of their children.

So as a result of this,

If you're a child in this kind of family,

You basically learn to repress your feelings.

Maybe not all of your feelings but maybe quite a lot of them and especially so-called negative feelings like anger,

Like sadness,

Like frustration,

Like anxiety.

And the huge problem with this learnt repression of your own feelings is that as you get into adulthood,

Late teen years,

Early adulthood,

You start to realize that you don't even know who you are.

Because your emotions have been repressed for so many years,

You basically lost touch with your own energy system.

Because your emotions are your energetic guiding system,

They are absolutely essential for you to be able to navigate life successfully.

If you're not in touch with your healthy anger,

You're not allowed,

You're not able to create a boundary with somebody who is abusive towards you.

Because your anger is repressed,

Somebody comes into your adult life,

They're abusive towards you,

But you basically aren't able to react appropriately from a healthy sense of anger protecting yourself because you've been taught in your childhood that anger is not allowed.

So somehow instead of reacting appropriately to this abuse,

Saying hey no this is not okay to treat me in that way,

And also probably recognizing that that is not a safe person if they are abusive towards you various times.

So not also recognizing this and walking away.

This basically means that we're going to be hurt in relationships and it means we're not going to be able to stand up for ourselves because we've been trained to repress our own feelings.

And essentially this means that we,

Because we don't have access to our true authentic feelings and we're not able to act according to our true and authentic feelings,

We then need to work out a whole lot of complicated ways to basically survive in the world and to basically manage to build a life and to look after ourselves.

And this is where we develop people-pleasing syndrome which is because I'm not in touch with my healthy emotions because I've repressed them after a whole lifetime probably of conditioning to do this,

Then I am not safe in the world because I'm not able to respond to my own internal emotions because I cannot actually feel them.

So in order to be safe in the world what I need to do is to try and manage the emotions of other people,

Try and manage the reactions of other people towards me and try and change my behaviors based on what I think other people are needing or wanting from me.

This is basically a disaster in terms of building healthy interpersonal relationships and trust me I know this because this has been my life experience.

Now I am nearly 50 years old and I'm really just I think starting to recognize how impactful this has been in my life and I feel like just now I'm really actually starting to have and grow some strong boundaries.

So the first thing to do if you notice that you are also have repressed or your emotions have been repressed through your childhood experience is obviously to feel some empathy towards yourself because that's a really difficult thing and it kind of,

I've forgotten the name of the woman,

There's a woman who teaches,

Helps people with emotional neglect and she has a book called Running on Empty.

Running on Empty just meaning that basically you're going through your life as normal but you just feel like you're not in touch with your own power,

Like there's not fuel in your tank,

Like you're running on empty.

So that's because there is not fuel in your tank because there's a disconnect between your self,

Your thinking mind if you like,

Your consciousness your consciousness and your emotional experience,

You've cut something there,

You've disconnected yourself from your emotions.

So you need to really be empathetic towards yourself if you recognize that that is the case with you,

That's really the first step to slowly reconnect,

Slowly start to reconnect with your true emotions and then the step after that is actually to start to channel these emotions that have been repressed into your life in a a much more empowered,

Strong and effective way.

So the funny thing,

Funnily enough with me I've just recently been in a relationship which turned quite abusive and though that has been a really very difficult experience and I might talk about that more in further videos,

One positive that has come out of that difficult experience is that because I have been the target of abuse I slowly learned to stand up for myself against the abuse and this is what's called reactive abuse.

So I've been in a relationship where I've been regularly yelled at for no particular or special reason and my partner would start yelling at me and usually there did not even need to be any particular reason for this but if I just want to note if this is you as well even if there is a reason for somebody to be upset with you,

Yelling in your face,

Screaming at you is abusive behavior and it's just it's not an okay way to treat another person.

Yeah it's very unhealthy and it's very toxic to any interpersonal relationship but the what I do recognize,

What I've learned,

What I did learn from this experience of being with a person who has been regularly yelling at me is I was able to start to get in touch much more with my authentic anger which I think has been repressed,

Was repressed very much in my childhood where I grew up in a family where anger was not a welcome emotion so I definitely learned that.

So thanks to this abusive relationship where I was getting regularly yelled at I would start to need very much to get in touch with my own authentic anger and I would yell back at this person and of course this also does not help the situation,

It generally will spiral the conflict up into a greater conflict but what I did learn was I can be in touch with my healthy anger and I can use that healthy anger to defend myself which is what I did.

This is what is sometimes called reactive abuse so somebody starts abusing you,

Yelling at you for whatever reason and you react with yelling back at them.

Yes,

Reactive abuse.

I did also yell which is also unhealthy.

In my relationship he would then use that to gaslight me,

Point the finger at me and say look you're the problem,

You're the problem here because you're yelling at me now and trying to deflect their responsibility onto me for the fight which he had started.

But as I said I am grateful for this experience because in some way it has really helped me to get much more in touch with my own anger,

It's helped me to own that legitimate anger,

It's helped me to bring it out more in my life and even though when I brought it out with him it was often reactive yelling back,

When I am with non-toxic people thanks to this kind of new connection with my own anger I am able to more clearly place a boundary with somebody if they treat me in a way which is really not appropriate.

So in my people pleaser phase I used to just be so concerned about the other person,

So concerned about not offending them,

So worried about their feelings,

So worried about whether they would like me or not if I responded to something which they had done which I felt was inappropriate.

Now thanks to being more in touch with my healthy anger I am able to place a clear boundary when needed.

So just for example the other day where I live here in Bali it's a rented apartment and I am long-term renting here,

Just the other day somebody came over and one so somebody who looks after the apartment came over with a couple unannounced and asked if they could just look in around my apartment while I'm while I'm living here.

This has happened before to me and the previous time when it happened I allowed that,

I allowed that situation to unfold,

I said yes even though my inner feeling was that this is a violation,

I live here,

I pay for this,

There's no advance notice,

This feels wrong,

This feels not good.

The time before even though that was my internal feeling I let those people come in,

They walked around in my space and left and I felt violated.

This time thanks to me my abusive relationship where which has helped me to awaken and grow this new connection with my own healthy anger I was able to just place a clear boundary without being angry at the person who asked me if if I could show these two random people through my my house at at known without any notice.

So I just said no that that doesn't feel right for me sorry and that was it and that was just such a an awakening and such an empowering moment for me because I recognised that I was on my own team,

Let's say I was standing up for myself,

I was no longer a people pleaser,

I was not doing what they wanted just to make sure that they were okay,

No I was making sure that I was okay and so then the people don't come into my house,

I don't feel violated,

I've maintained my healthy boundary,

I maintain a healthy relationship with the owner of the apartment because I was very clear I said that's not okay with me.

So this is also of course the foundation of good relationships,

If we cannot place and create healthy boundaries between us and other people,

If we don't know where we end and they start,

If we're not the owner of our own experience then we cannot create healthy relationships because we violate ourselves based on these people-pleasing tendencies and as a result of that violating ourselves we then start to feel resentful towards other people and that builds mistrust and that means that relationship starts to feel unsafe and unhealthy.

So strangely enough through this really challenging experience that I've had in my recent relationship of being abused,

Being regularly yelled at,

I was able to learn to get much more in touch with my healthy anger and so this is a hugely necessary part of healing yourself from any people-pleasing tendencies,

Healing yourself from basically a disconnect between your consciousness and your emotions,

Growing back healthy boundaries which you may have actually never had.

So a huge part of the developmental stage,

Developmental learning in childhood that a parent needs to transmit to their children is basically teaching boundaries,

Teaching those children that they are allowed to have their own emotional expression,

That they have the right to protect themselves,

That they have the right to stand up for themselves,

That their job is to be themselves and that that is okay and that is safe to be themselves and to express themselves.

But if you do grow up in an environment where your parents or caregivers are consciously or unconsciously giving you the message that it's not safe for you to express your emotions,

Then basically you're not able to learn to create a healthy sense of yourself and you're not able to create healthy boundaries because instead of doing that process of expressing yourself,

Of coming into conflict,

Of a healthy adult reflecting back to you your emotional experience,

Reflecting back to you that experience in a way that teaches you that it's completely okay and valid and right for you to emote,

For you to express,

If instead of that what you got was shut down,

No,

Not okay,

Basically you become frightened into yourself,

You disconnect with your emotions and you become an anxiously attached people pleaser because we all need,

Especially as children,

We absolutely need to maintain that connection with our parents,

We absolutely need them to look after ourselves,

We're going to be maybe even die literally if we don't have adults looking after us.

So basically what we need to do if we find ourselves in that situation where we learn that our certain emotions are not welcome,

We literally have to move into a different mode of being,

We move out of our own authentic self and our own authentic expression and we move kind of,

Almost we move out of our self,

We can also even become a little bit disembodied,

It's like we live next to ourselves,

We're not fully in our body because it's not safe to be fully in our body,

Because it's not safe to feel our emotions,

Because it's not safe to express our emotions,

Because we're going to be shut down or shamed or blamed for that.

So we kind of move outside of ourselves,

We're kind of floating outside of our body and we become hyper vigilant to the emotions of other people and we learn to focus really closely on them in order to somehow work out how the fuck to be safe and really it's kind of a mindfuck to be honest.

It's a bit of a mindfuck and after a childhood like that you are very likely to come out of that just literally not knowing who you are,

Not knowing up from down,

Not knowing left from right,

Just because you're not in touch with your authentic emotional experience in the world and you're not,

You have not learned how to channel that,

You've not learned how to show yourself,

You've not learned how to share your true feelings and trust that you will be safe in the expression of those feelings and you've also probably not learned very well how to find safe people to be in relationship with,

Because if you,

The people that you were in relationship did force you to shut down your emotions,

Then that's all you actually know,

That's what you know of relationship,

That's what relationship is for you,

You don't know anything else,

You don't know what a safe relationship is,

Feels like,

Where a person actually holds space for your emotions,

Where they allow your emotional expression,

Where they can basically accept and process your own feelings,

You just don't know what that is because you've never been modeled that in your childhood.

So this is also of course the reason why we attract abusive people into our lives,

Because we are people that have not been in touch with our emotions,

Have perhaps no boundaries and are somehow even blind to the abuse because we're just used to being shut down in our families of origin,

We're used to being shut down by people who have power over us which is our parents or caregivers and we're used to feeling submissive and afraid.

So basically we attract what is our normal,

What was our normal psychic emotional situation in our family of origin dynamic.

So we will,

Until we really,

Really heal that wound of emotional neglect,

Emotional cut off,

Emotional disconnect,

We're basically going to attract the same kind of relationships into our life.

We're going to attract people that remind us of our original wounding and the gift of course in that although it can be very painful to get into an abusive relationship,

This work of soul alchemy that I'm trying to do on this channel Akasha Love,

Space for Love,

Is really about seeing that every experience in our life is essentially for our own growth and in order to benefit from every experience,

Whether supposedly negative or positive,

We need to see that our soul has invited that experience in and so in this case,

In my case of my recent abusive relationship,

I've had various other abusive relationships in the past,

I just have to see that my soul has invited this in because I still need this teaching.

So I have to see my abusive partner,

Ex-partner as my teacher in boundaries,

As my teacher in standing up for myself,

As my teacher in not being afraid to say no,

In not being afraid to call somebody out,

In not being afraid to just call bullshit when I see it and also of course in not being in,

He's also been my teacher in learning how to discern who is healthy for me and who is not.

Yeah,

The healthy people are the ones who allow and welcome your emotional expression,

Don't shut you down when you express your feelings and are interested in your emotional expression.

So if you're in relationship with someone who's not interested how you feel,

Who's only really interested in how they feel in the relationship,

That is a massive red flag that that relationship is one where you will start to feel invisible and that's going to be extremely unhealthy for you.

So I have to say thank you to my ex-partner for really helping me to get in touch with my healthy anger and I do feel now that I am on the right path,

I am finding a much stronger self-expression,

I am finding it much easier just to stand up to people and I am finding it easier to clearly recognize people who are,

I don't really like to say toxic people but let's just say people who are good for me and people who are not.

So that's what I wanted to share with you today,

Thank you for watching,

Please share in the comments if you have any thoughts or feedback about this topic of emotional expression,

Healthy emotional expression,

What it is and why we might be completely disconnected from our essential self which is our emotions,

Which is our feelings.

So I would love to hear from you,

Yeah just let me know,

Ask me any question in the comments and subscribe of course to this channel if you would like more videos on these kind of topics like being authentic,

Expressing ourselves out in the world,

Being who we really are,

Growing healthy relationships and being a really empowered and beautiful strong version of yourself.

So lots of love from me here in Bali and I will talk to you next time.