How to Heal Your Negative Emotions

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The first step to managing our emotions is to understand what emotions are.

Emotions are mental feelings. They are not physical feelings or sensations detected by our body. That is not to say that emotions cannot affect our body. They can and they do affect our body, but here we are separating emotions from physical sensations.

How do emotions arise? Mostly, they arise because of our desires. We want something, and in that wanting, we feel hopeful when we expect a desired outcome or fearful when we expect an undesired outcome.

When we achieved our desired outcome, we feel happy. This happiness may come with other accompanying positive emotions, such as gratitude, excitement or contentment. Conversely, when we get an undesirable outcome, we feel sad. This sadness also may be accompanied by other negative emotions, or may manifest in other negative ways.

In truth, our emotions are much more complex than this simplified representation. Our emotions are multi-layered. Psychologists called them primary emotions, secondary emotions and even tertiary emotions. We can see how complicated our emotions are when we realized that even for primary emotions, psychologists are not fully able to agree on them.

Fortunately, it is not necessary for us to fully understand the origin and fundamentals of our emotions in order to manage and heal them. It is sufficient for us to be able to recognize and name the emotion. The Wheel of Emotions is a diagrammatic representation of various primary, secondary and tertiary emotions created as a tool by psychologist Robert Plutchik to help us better understand our emotions.

A general understanding of our emotions helps us to recognize and name our emotions. This is the second step to healing negative emotions.

Naming our emotions helps us to improve our emotional awareness and emotional vocabulary, as well as provide a greater insight into our inner state of being. It may also provide us with greater understanding of what triggers the emotion. With greater understanding, we become less reactive to our emotions, thus enabling us to respond and navigate our emotional landscape in a more positive way.

The third step is expressing this negative emotion in a healthy way so as to release any pent-up energy and resistance, and simply accepting and allowing it to be. There are various ways to do this, such as verbal expression, creative outlets and physical exercises.

Verbal expression can be in the form of just talking about your feelings with someone you trust. Being able to verbalize your feelings in itself gives a sense of relief. Another way is journaling – writing down your feelings and experiences on a regular basis. Creative outlets such as drawing, painting, music or dance can also be healthy forms of emotional expression. So too physical exercises such as tai chi, qigong, yoga, walking in nature, running, hiking and sports like soccer, basketball, badminton, tennis, etc.

Self-reflection and meditation are also helpful in this regard.

What is important is that these are healthy forms of emotional expression. They are good for body and mind. Healthy emotional expression frees up any obstructions or resistance within our heart, releasing pent-up energy and allowing a new state of being that is calmer and more at peace.

It would be unrealistic to think that we can heal all our negative emotions in just one or two sessions of the above activities. In reality, it will take many, many repeated sessions to reduce our negative emotions.

The process is like pulling a tissue out of a tissue box. Each time you pull one out, another piece appears. To empty the box, we will have to pull out one tissue at a time continuously until there is no more tissue left in the box.

In the same way, for every negative emotion that we feel we have sorted out, another will appear. So we just have to keep working on each negative emotion that arises until there is none left.

It can be done, and the reward is great!

I wish you luck.