When you feel an emotional pain you are experiencing it now in the present tense. Even though you may remember something from yesterday that was painful or anticipate pain from a situation in the future, you actually only feel it today.
Emotional pain felt in your body can be shown on a pain time-line. Stress describes any negative emotion that you feel in your body. Every emotion is felt by individuals at a particular level of intensity; low, medium or high. Hurt is a negative emotion that you feel in the present. Anger or resentment is a feeling generated from memory of something in the past and anxiety from a situation you think may happen in the future. All emotional pain adds to your store of stress.
Emotional constipation is an accumulation of negative emotion in the body, commonly referred to as stress. A more intense negative emotion means a heightened level of stress.
The cycle of emotions is described by Deepak Chopra, in "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind". He explains that cognitive appraisal in the brain arouses only two impulses - pain or pleasure. "We all want to avoid pain and experience pleasure. Therefore, all the complicated emotional states we find ourselves in are because we are unable to obey these basic drives."
Chopra explains the cycle of emotions that reoccurs in everyone's life countless times. It begins in the present reality " where only pain and pleasure are felt " and ends in complex emotions rooted in perceived reality (past and future) - such as guilt and depression. The cycle is as follows:
* Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.
* Pain in the past is remembered as anger.
* Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety - a lessening of mental relaxation, associated to the alert reaction.
* Unexpressed anger - redirected against yourself and held within - is called guilt.
* The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.
The cycle of emotion tells us that stored hurt is something we all have experience of to some degree, and is responsible for a wide range of emotional constipation. Chopra says, "Buried hurt disguises itself as anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression." To live in the present we need to learn to avoid the easy emotion - anger, and deal with the hurt that is more difficult to confront. Unresolved anger will only grow worse, feeding on itself.
Sometimes another person can be hurt by something you do or say. This behavior may be intentional or not, but results in you also experiencing pain; guilt, remorse, shame, and regret - that is, stress. It is common for a person without the skills of effective communication to drag up past history in arguments to hurt their partner, having had the perception that the partner is hurting them or blaming them in some way. They use a conditioned response to ease their own (present tense) pain, not realizing that the behavior will have a physiological impact (meaning stress) on their own body.
Emotional constipation - emotional distress - is "dis-ease"; an illness of how you think. You are what you think. How you feel depends on how you think. The pain time-line helps you understand your emotional constipation and the physiological impact of negative emotions felt in your body. - 15431
Emotional pain felt in your body can be shown on a pain time-line. Stress describes any negative emotion that you feel in your body. Every emotion is felt by individuals at a particular level of intensity; low, medium or high. Hurt is a negative emotion that you feel in the present. Anger or resentment is a feeling generated from memory of something in the past and anxiety from a situation you think may happen in the future. All emotional pain adds to your store of stress.
Emotional constipation is an accumulation of negative emotion in the body, commonly referred to as stress. A more intense negative emotion means a heightened level of stress.
The cycle of emotions is described by Deepak Chopra, in "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind". He explains that cognitive appraisal in the brain arouses only two impulses - pain or pleasure. "We all want to avoid pain and experience pleasure. Therefore, all the complicated emotional states we find ourselves in are because we are unable to obey these basic drives."
Chopra explains the cycle of emotions that reoccurs in everyone's life countless times. It begins in the present reality " where only pain and pleasure are felt " and ends in complex emotions rooted in perceived reality (past and future) - such as guilt and depression. The cycle is as follows:
* Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.
* Pain in the past is remembered as anger.
* Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety - a lessening of mental relaxation, associated to the alert reaction.
* Unexpressed anger - redirected against yourself and held within - is called guilt.
* The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.
The cycle of emotion tells us that stored hurt is something we all have experience of to some degree, and is responsible for a wide range of emotional constipation. Chopra says, "Buried hurt disguises itself as anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression." To live in the present we need to learn to avoid the easy emotion - anger, and deal with the hurt that is more difficult to confront. Unresolved anger will only grow worse, feeding on itself.
Sometimes another person can be hurt by something you do or say. This behavior may be intentional or not, but results in you also experiencing pain; guilt, remorse, shame, and regret - that is, stress. It is common for a person without the skills of effective communication to drag up past history in arguments to hurt their partner, having had the perception that the partner is hurting them or blaming them in some way. They use a conditioned response to ease their own (present tense) pain, not realizing that the behavior will have a physiological impact (meaning stress) on their own body.
Emotional constipation - emotional distress - is "dis-ease"; an illness of how you think. You are what you think. How you feel depends on how you think. The pain time-line helps you understand your emotional constipation and the physiological impact of negative emotions felt in your body. - 15431
About the Author:
More expert advice on recognizing the emotion cycle, dealing with unresolved resentments and emotional constipation is available from Karen Gosling's website, which is all about surviving emotional pain.
