The healing power of negative emotions

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turning gold into lead

We live in a world where we have made an enemy of negative emotions. We do everything to run away from them. We turn to drugs, addictions, dysfunctional relationships, distractions or compulsive behaviors to avoid feeling negative emotions. What if they are the lead that we can turn into gold if only we knew the alchemical process?

First, there is no mystery why we are behaving this way because we were programmed by our environment to dread negative emotions. As a child, there were some emotions that were not welcomed into our family environment. The type of emotions allowed or punished depends of the family. For example, in my family, anger was not tolerated however sadness was allowed. Then, we go through the process of socialization through school, our workplace and the community we are a part of. Each one has their own set of rules regarding emotions that are acceptable or frown upon. If this was not enough, we act towards ourselves as the most severe judge regarding the emotions we allow ourselves to feel and not feel. Many negative emotions come with stigma and we carry too much shame about ourselves to admit we are feeling them. We make depression mean lost and weak, loneliness mean unlovable, anger mean dangerous so of course, our ego will do anything not to feel them in order protect our imaginary sense of self.

repressed emotions

As a result, we have become experts in not feeling negative emotions. Because of the powerless state we live in, we thrive for solutions outside of ourselves while all answers are always from within. The global opioid market is $23 billions while the market of illegal mind altering substances is much higher. All addictions come from the fact we are avoiding to feel difficult emotions. This is well explained by Gabor Mate. According to him “Addiction is not a choice anybody makes, it’s a response to emotional pain”. Many dysfunctional relationship patterns are born because we are irresistibly attracted to partners that can express the emotions we have repressed. I would like to invite you to reflect on your own obsessive behaviors or coping mechanisms you have adopted not to feel. The list is endless for everyone of us.

At the same time, there are valid reasons why the society, and everyone of us have been programmed to be afraid of negative emotions. To be fair, the unconscious expression of negative emotions may be threatening not only to others but also to ourselves. The news are full of reports of homicides that happened in an excess of rage. We hear of people committing suicide when they get too depressed. There are more and more teenagers resolving to cutting when faced with overwhelming emotional pain. For this reason, we are afraid to open the pandora’s box as we get closer to our negative emotions. Actually, the opposite is true. By allowing to feeling our difficult emotions, we release the pressure and therefore reduce their uncontrolled expression.

pandora's box

Feeling emotions is an aspect of being human. A healthy integrated human being reacts to life events with emotions. He experiences anger when his boundaries or sense of values is violated. He experiences sadness when faced with loss. He experiences disappointment when he does not attain his objectives. He feels stressed or anxious when he is under too much pressure and feels overwhelmed. He feels depressed when he has lost meaning and purpose. Negative emotions are like messengers. They act as feedback mechanisms as we go through life. They are guides who help us keep our life in the right direction. They constitute our inner guidance system. There are two prerequisites to be able to use emotions as a life compass: awareness and complete self-honesty. We need to learn to recognize the types of emotions that circulate through our body, and have enough self-confidence to see our flaws without collapsing emotionally.

As the person matures, he understands which environment may be conducive to the free expression of his genuine emotions. Controlled anger may be effective to deal with your teenager that lied to you however anger is unwelcome almost every time in a court of law. So, as a first step, we need to develop awareness in the type of emotions that is arising within our consciousness, and secondly see how much we can safely express them within our current environment. We may feel sad, and if we are in the company of good friends, we know we can cry without feeling judged. Or we may be in a different setting where shedding tears could be interpreted as a sign of weakness or feel threatening to people around us. In this situation, we learn to postpone the conscious expression of negative emotions when we are in a safe place.

conscious expression of emotions

I am going to share with you my personal technique of dealing with negative emotions:
1. Recognition
I need to feel I have a heavy emotion that require my attention as it is a call for healing and understanding. It should be painful enough that I cannot easily push it aside through positive focus or immersing myself into an activity. On the opposite, it needs to feel that ignoring this feeling will be damaging to our holistic self. This type of emotions should not happen more than a few times in a month unlike I am going through a particularly difficult time in my life. I see some people doing shadow work so often that they forget to enjoy their lives, and develop a new ego centered around their traumas. This is another extreme to avoid. We have to find the right balance between avoidance and complacency. In case of doubt, trust your body sensations in the present moment to make the determination if you need shadow work or not.
2. Setting a time
If you are finding yourself in a safe place where you can isolate yourself, start your shadow work session right away. However, life is busy and we may not be able to deal with these negative emotions right away. Take care of your key priorities first to put your mind to rest and reduce your stress. Find a safe place where you may not be interrupted. Set-up a time in the near future to work on these emotions. Resist the urge to handle your negative emotions with any external quick-fix in the meantime.
3. Shadow work meditation
If I notice that my mind is restless, I will start first with a physical practice to quiet my mind which is a form of stretching and yoga. This helps me to reconnect with the present moment, my breath, my body in order to ground and raise my frequency. Clearing the mind chatter is critical to be able to listen to our higher intuition. Then I take the position of my favorite asana. From my perspective, the most important is to have a straight back while being comfortable to connect more deeply to our emotions, feelings and thought patterns. This works for me because I have been practicing meditation for many years. However, other centering modalities may be more adequate for you. Journaling makes thoughts more visible and tangible so that you may visualize them to facilitate an inner dialog. Some people prefer a walking meditation in nature. The natural harmony of trees, birds, insects, vegetation is helping them finding this inner center.


4. Be your own therapist
The inner work that now takes place will depend upon your own experience as a healer, coach or simply as an introspective person. However there are a few constants I want to share with you that apply to all shadow work. First, you need to sit with the emotions no matter how painful they are. It involves tearing down the protective walls, allowing to feel the negative emotions without judgment, to eventually accepting them as they are. Raw and uncomfortable as they may be, they act as a rope to bring us back to an aspect of your fragmented self that requires healing. There are many techniques available whether you connect with your body sensations, use creative visualization or validate your raw emotions but the overall goal is to go deeper until you have an emotional release such as tears. If you do not get an emotional release, your process has stayed mental and the healing will be very superficial.

emotional release


Once the emotional release takes place, the healing process shifted from the mind to the body and therefore becomes therefore far more effective. Use breath, body and psychic awareness to help circulate the energy. Show compassion, detachment, loving kindness towards yourself as you experience energy shifting within your body. At that stage, observe without analysis in full presence and deep compassion. The goal is to feel as much as possible. It is about letting go and facilitating the process just like if you were delivering a baby. You are not making things happen, you are watching things happen.
After this stage is done, it is appropriate for mind and intuition to come back and make sense about what happened. What did you learn? What do you need? Did you recover an old trauma? What aspects of you require nurturing? Why were you feeling this way? What actions do you need to take in your life to shift this pattern? What new perspective do you need to adopt to stop suffering?
For example, you may have felt deep loneliness. It may be reminiscent to your childhood being raised by emotionally unavailable parents. You then realize you need to make connection with friends or an intimate partner a priority in your life and not give all your energy to your work. You are deciding to go out to meet new people.
Alternatively, you may be feeling angry towards someone. It reminds you to a situation as a child where you felt trapped. You are deciding to stop the perceived abuse from this person, and hold your personal boundaries. You are not going to acquiesce any more to actions towards you that you see as harmful and unfair.
Sometimes, it takes time to come a new understanding or a new course of action. This is completely fine. It is critical to sit with the feeling as long as necessary and any conclusion cannot be rushed. They should come effortlessly.

Being your own therapist takes practice. Initially, you may want to solicit the help of an outside therapist, facilitator or coach you resonate with as you go through these difficult cycles. Unfortunately, most people are disconnected from their body, feelings and emotions so they may feel overwhelmed at first to lead this healing process on their own. Do not have any shame in requiring compassionate help from a third party. Whether you use a guide or not for this process, you are still the one doing the work. Even the most advanced and compassionate healers cannot do the required healing work without your participation, trust and courage. As you get more experienced, it feels easier and easier to do shadow work on your own. You develop autonomy and the understanding that everything is within you.

Once you master the process of working with your own negative emotions, there are many benefits that will be added into your life.
1. Improved health
The majority of physical illnesses start with an emotional component. By being more in touch with your emotions, you will be able to do the necessary healing before it affects your physical body. You take notice of the early signs of unbalance and misalignment before they make you sick. You stop catching the seasonal flu and your immune system runs as a much higher level. You recover more quickly from life’s inevitable hardships and upheavals.
2. More clarity and sense of purpose
You are never stuck or feeling down for too long. 90% of your life is about creating, connecting and sharing, enjoying and having fun, taking care of yourself and others in a beneficial way. You get more done. You stop resorting to addiction or distractions to fill your inner void. You bring meaning to everything you do.
3. Magical manifestation
As you connect to your heart’s desire through shadow work, the universe hears your silent cry and may start manifesting what you truly desire above your expectations. The woman of your dreams may come into your life or your dream career may materialize. Your business may start developing at rapid speed. Your life mission becomes effortless. A very deep friendship may emerge. Sky is the limit in terms of manifestations. The key is to be truthful, authentic and connect deeply to what you really really while raising above the selfish needs and desires of the ego.
4. Wisdom
You develop self-knowledge and discernment. You become someone people come to for advice and guidance. You read people easily. You avert danger and perilous situations. You are taking better decisions and actions for everyday life. Every difficulty you face in life brings you more wisdom to live better. You win anyway, whether you were dealt good or bad cards from life.
5. Saving time and money
You find solutions from within, fast and without the need to external paid help. You prevent bad financial deals before they happen. Your inner guidance system is wide awake to make you avoid costly life turns you may regret later on. You feel the potential of opportunities coming your way.
6. Enhanced quality of life
You live life at a much higher level. It is not about getting by or surviving but thriving. You have stopped all life energy leaks such as addictions, dysfunctional relationships or compulsive to live a life that is worth living, full of new adventures and dreams to manifest. You awaken to your true self as you heal yourself through the transmutation of negative emotions.

Work on negative emotions is just as important as being present and disciplining our attention in our journey of awakening and achieving our full potential. While we dread them for they bring us misery, they hold the key to our liberation because of their healing power.

Part VII: Interpersonal mature coping mechanisms

Read Part VI – Immature ego-based coping mechanisms

Life brings challenges that often stretch us to our limits. Coping and defense mechanisms are necessary to help us survive these traumatic events. We can actually take advantage of these hardships to help us develop higher responses to life struggles and build our personal character. This process is essential to develop virtue, personal integrity, and experience inner peace. As we make these mature coping mechanisms second nature, our quality of life significantly increases and we develop higher self-esteem, self-confidence, self-control as we live a more compassionate life. The mature coping mechanisms listed below are connected with other people so we are calling them interpersonal.

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  • Undoing
apologies

Undoing is a defense mechanism in which a person tries to remedy an unhealthy, hurtful or otherwise threatening thought or action by engaging in good and repairing behaviors. When we extend sincere apologies, it is a form of undoing. If we feel we have been neglecting our wife, undoing would mean coming home with a beautiful bouquet of flowers with some chocolate. If we feel we punish our child too severely, we can organize a trip together to the local amusement park. At a collective level, the United States, the United Kingdom and many countries of the international community supported or did not oppose the take-over of Palestine by Jewish people after realizing the scale of the holocaust that took the lives of 6 million Jews. It confirmed Zionists’ claim that Jews needed a country to escape persecution and antisemitism. While undoing comes from a good intent, we need to become fully conscious of the consequences of actions meant to undo the previous wrongful deeds. As the old adage says, hell is paved with good intention. One of my best friends has two children with a ex-husband man that we will call John. John is 40 years old, but is quite immature and irresponsible. He still lives with his parents and can rarely hold a job more than 6 months. He behaves more like an entitled teenager rather than a caring father. His parents give him a monthly allowance and pay for any trip he takes with his children. During his custody time, he often drops his children with his parents as he indulges in parties, drugs and girls. John does not provide the structure and the stability that his children need, and his erratic behavior exposes them to unnecessary harm. John’s parents feel guilty towards their son as they are workaholics and were never present emotionally with him when he was a child. They do not realize their financial support is enabling their son’s bad behaviors and is preventing him from taking responsibility for his life. Along the same line, if we give a gift to our wife every time we hurt her, she may start hating our gifts as they will be associated with pain.  The donation of the state of Israel has been responsible for 75 years of war in the Middle East. While Jerusalem holds special significance, the Jews may have been provided with a territory that could have caused much less conflict and allowed them to thrive economically while living in peace. In the state of Utah which is mostly a desert, the Mormons represent 70% of the population. They are now the richest cult in the world and they are remarkably integrated. The Jews would have probably enjoyed an even higher prosperity and peace if they had been granted a territory that was not already populated. Undoing is useful but it is important to reflect if the repairing action will yield the positive results that we intended.

  • Compartmentalization
Compartmentalization

Compartmentalization is actually a form of repression that is mature. We may have been adversely affected by an event but the current situation may require us to focus on something external instead of working internally to process our raw emotions. It is mature only if we are making the conscious choice to commit to take time to process the compartmentalized difficult emotions once it is safe to do so whether through meditation, with an outside therapist, or with a skillful coach. Otherwise, this becomes repression and not compartmentalization. I remember a time when my partner was triggered but we had hardly any time to make our flight connection. We decided to take care of her emotions once we were settled in the next plane. Alternatively, we may be at workplace where it is not safe to process and share emotions so we wait until we can be alone or with loved ones at home who can hold a safe place for us. Or you may find yourself in a dangerous situation with your family. Before taking care of your own emotions, your focus needs to be rightly so on the safely of your loved ones. Compartmentalization gets better with experience and practice. It takes a double awareness, first of our internal state and second of our external environment. Then, we apply good judgment in prioritizing each. This is how we train our nervous system to become more mature. This is an exercise of balance. People who are too concerned about the external environment may be too repressed, and there are others that express whatever comes through them with no concern how it may impact other people. The codependent falls in the first category while the borderline falls in the latter. The conscious individual evaluates both his internal and external world to determine if s/he should compartmentalize or focus on processing his emotions.

  • Conscious emotional release
Conscious emotional release - public punching bag

Our society at large does not have a healthy relationship towards negative emotions. Actually, many people have made an enemy of negative emotions. They see them as unnecessary, and they do everything to repress or suppress them in themselves and other people. They just end up damaging themselves and others, and repression makes things worse not better. And the very thing they are repressing or resisting are then manifesting in their lives in tragic ways. While negative emotions are made of lower vibrational psychic energies, they have a very important purpose for healing. Their purpose is to help releasing traumas, grief and any perceived attack on our psyche. While it is possible to process and transform lighter negative emotions through meditation, introspection and right thinking, we may need to use our body’s incredible healing ability for a conscious emotional release. Once, I participated in a conscious emotional release session at the Pachamama community in Costa Rica. Loud music was played, and we were allowed to scream, cry, hit pillows and lash our anger using swimming pool noodles. The only rule was to keep each other safe and not damage the facility. I experienced my internal hate and anger in ways I did not imagine as I had developed a cover spiritual personality that had censored all these dark emotions. I allowed myself to go fully through the process however. While I was feeling down before starting the conscious emotional release, I enjoyed a blissful state of mind the following days as I had been able to expulse from my system much grief. Holotropic breathwork is also a very cathartic experience for the same reason. It helps to release all the past accumulated traumas in the cellular memories. The body may be crying, yelling, jumping around, hitting a pillow or even vomiting as it goes through its own purging and healing. In an even more intense way, an Ayahuasca journey is meant to help us purge and let go of past traumas and repressed negative emotions. The concept of the necessity of conscious emotional release is slowly becoming more widespread. Public punching bags were recently installed in New-York City in an attempt to stop people from taking their frustrations out on each other.

  • Altruism and compassion
Dalai Lama compassion for a child

Altruism is the concern for happiness of other human beings, animals and even plants. Altruism is form of selflessness which is the opposite of selfishness. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, various religious traditions and secular worldview. Compassion motivates people to go out of their way to help the physical, mental, or emotional pains of another. Compassion is often regarded as having empathy, and feeling the suffering of others and it is based on the concepts of fairness, justice, and interdependence. Focusing on alleviating the suffering of others can be a remarkably effective to step out of depression and rebuilding self-confidence. Several years ago, as I was going through a brutal divorce, I had the spiritual practice to volunteer once a week in jail. I would teach meditation there, provide spiritual counseling and facilitate transformational emotional release with in-mates. While I would typically arrive tired, worried and frustrated from the day, helping in-mates elevated my state of being considerably. They were very receptive to my classes and we often had major break-throughs. This helped me regain self-confidence, feel a sense of purpose and break away from powerlessness and depression. I would come home late at night fully energized. Again, in 2018, after a painful break-up and losing my children through parental alienation, I set-up a healing house where I helped hundreds to work through and heal emotional traumas. It worked like magic to accelerate my own path of healing and recovery while being useful to the community. When we help others unconditionally from the purity of our heart, we are reminded of our true nature and the universe conspires for our happiness. Therapists, social workers and various healers are often people who have been serious traumatized in their childhood. They are looking to heal themselves by helping others. This is the archetype of the wounded healer. My vocation as a coach is following the same pattern. I can bring people out of their own misery because this is a path I have taken myself. By using the wisdom of our suffering to serve others, we transcend our limited ego and the illusion of separateness. The saints that are walking this earth see God’s mirror in every human being and in the whole of creation, and they are obsessed with improving the lives of anyone they touch as an extension of the self-love they feel from within. Selfishness grows from the hurt little boy or little girl in us. This aspect of us got emotionally hurt because no one was there to support us emotionally during a tormented time. We felt abandoned, lonely and we started to feel disconnected and separate from others. We started to perceive this world as dangerous and threatening. Fear took the place of love. We shut down emotionally to others and to the external world. In a desperate attempt to survive, we draw all resources to ourselves. Spiritual awakening is nothing else than moving from this disconnected hurt inner child to our divine child that knows itself as pure love. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, is the inspiring story of Scrooge who undergoes a spiritual illumination to move from selfishness to altruism.

  • Humor
Amber Dawn Lee stand-up comedy

Humor is the act of provoking laughter and providing amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humors controlled human health and emotion. Laughter and humor are indeed some of the most effective forms of emotional release and can help us eliminate toxic negative emotions. Many stand-up comedians are able to transmute their own traumas through humor. I have a friend Amber Dawn Lee who survived a childhood of sexual abuse from a deviant polygamous Mormon. Her brillant stand-up comedies have provided her with a creative outlet of this traumatic childhood. On a similar note, I attended last year in Salt Lake City the TEDx speech of Collin Williams. He expressed how stand-up comedy saved his life by helping him overcoming a childhood where he was sexually molested by a family member. In the same way as altruism, humor allows us to take distance from the traumatic memories. It allows us to disidentify with our limited ego and promote emotional healing. The attachment to our suffering is one of the most important factors that prevents us from integrating our painful past. Humor catalyzes us to stop taking our suffering so seriously. It goes without saying that only the person that underwent the abuse should be permitted to make humor about it. Also humor can only take place after we were able to validate all the painful emotions associated with the trauma. Unless genuine forgiveness has been reached, humor may just damage us emotionally further. Even as we go through the worst ordeals, we can tell ourselves « one day, I will be able to laugh about it ». Yesterday, a friend of mine was amusing us with horrific stories from his divorce 30 years ago. When we are able to laugh about a difficult past experience, the circle of healing has been accomplished. For this reason, I can laugh at my time with a cult in my 20s, some of dramatic past relationships or turbulent business experiences. But there are some still painful situations that I am unable to laugh at. This is a good indicator of what I have been able to heal fully and where there is inner work left to do.

  • Sublimation
sublimation of suffering

This is the highest form of coping mechanism. With sublimation, we take the most painful aspects of our life, and we take action so that other people may not experience the same tragedy. Ryan Thomas was an alienated child and did not have any contact with his father from age 10 to 25 as he had been used as a weapon of war against his own father by his mother and the parents of his mother. In his mid thirties, after fully understanding the dynamics of parental alienation that affected him so adversely, he left a successful corporate career to dedicate himself helping alienated parents and children. His teaching, books and sessions are helping thousands to survive and overcome parental alienation. Our society gets better by the sublimation of people overcoming and digesting their own pain to help others. In less than 100 hundred years, the place of women and minorities in our society changed radically for this reason. Many minorities were able to break away from powerlessness, challenge the status-quo and rise above victimhood to show there was a better way to live collectively. The sublimation of life’s deepest sorrow can serve as an engine for launching a career that we feel truly passionate about. Steve Hassan was a moonie (a member of the Moon cult or Unification Church). After a car accident, he was able to realize his own indoctrination and started to break free from mind control. He has dedicated his life to help people to exit destructive cults since 1976. A personal tragedy can become a stepping stone to change the status quo. What is or has been your deepest pain ? How can you use it to make this world a better place ? 

  • Asking for support
Asking for support

Many of us have learned to be overly self-reliant because we became so afraid of rejection. It takes courage to ask for help and support when we are facing a difficult time. When we are already feeling down because of the struggle we are facing, getting rejected on top of it may just seem unbearable. After my wife and I separated last year, I reached out to my friend Jacques and his wife Valérie to stay with them near Paris to get their support for my aching heart. I was definitely afraid to reach out out of fear of rejection but I am so glad I did as our week together was so important in my recovery. Parents can also be a great source of support. When this is not the case, it is critical to have access to a friend, coach, healer or therapist that can make themselves available on a short notice. Having a support system can be a life-saver in difficult situations. It is important to nurture this support system outside of personal crises so that it may be available when we need it the most. Thinking of birthdays, giving small gifts, keeping in touch through small attentions are part of that nurturing. Personal crises are also the time when we can differentiate real friends from acquaintances of convenience. When I divorced, many so-called friends became unsupportive and even antagonistic and they were influenced by my ex-wife’s propaganda. This is also why we should take any opportunity to help our close friends when they are in need. This will inspire them to do the same from the bottom of their heart when we need it the most. Moving from relationships that are transactional to ones that are more unconditional makes life feel so much better. Most people love helping other people when they feel valued and that their efforts are appreciated. It boosts their self-confidence and makes them feel good about themselves. Asking for support is more often than not a win-win proposition.

  • Humility
Humility quote

Humility is a liberation from the consciousness of the limited ego, a form of temperance that is neither having pride nor indulging in self-deprecation. Humility is the awareness to be simply dust in this infinite universe while understanding we are connected to the whole. Humility keeps us aware of our mortality and our limitations without feeling bad about it. On the opposite, it brings contentment and inner peace as we stop fighting for an imaginary sense of self. Humility is the protection against the inflated ego, the illusion of being higher and separate from other people. This sincere humility grows from our personal experience of hardship, tragedies and losses. This suffering makes us intimately aware of the wrongful actions that create strife and misery. It promotes the development of empathy, makes us closer to other human beings as we get inspired to stop the cycle of pain. Humility keeps us in touch with reality and our place in the world. I love tennis and Rafael Nadal is a tennis champion who shows great humility. Even though he is one of the greatest players of all time, he respects every opponent and never underestimates the opponent when facing someone with a lower ranking. He uses this form of extreme humility to help him deal with pressure and to stay concentrated on every match and every point. At this level, he is aware that complacency can be fatal. Additionally, humility is very much appreciated by other people especially after we attain a significant achievement. It continues to make us accessible and relatable to other people while our achievement distances us from them. Jesus said that others could do better than him “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father”. When it is heartfelt and genuine, humility only provides benefits. Paradoxically, it is indicative of a strong self-esteem. It shows the vulnerability of someone who has no false persona to protect.

Read Part VIII – Personal mature coping mechanisms