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On...
Transforming The Negative
Verbalizing our feelings makes our sadness, anger and pain less intense,
according to a new brain imaging study by UCLA psychologists. We know
from experience that this is true, and now we know why.
Virtually
all negative emotions are fear-based, despite what we might otherwise
try to justify. This puts these emotions under the influence of the
amygdala – a region of the brain which serves as an alarm to activate a
cascade of biological systems to protect the body in times of perceived
danger. This alarm goes off whenever we experience anything negative.
One of
the ways to turn off the alarm has been confirmed to work, which is to
verbalize whatever negative feelings we have. This is not a process of
explaining them, but simply identifying them and naming them accurately.
What
happens when we name the negative emotion is an activation of the right
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which turns down the emotional levels,
and a decrease in activity in the amygdala, which reduces the negative
emotion and the fear underlying it.
Paying
attention to what we are feeling requires reflection, and then labelling
the feeling might require learning some new vocabulary – words that
describe feelings.
We need
to remind ourselves that while verbalizing negative feelings is
beneficial, justifying or rationalizing them is not. When we justify the
feelings we have, we affirm the intention of keeping them. Defending
their presence within us only intensifies their activity. We do not then
make the shift to the higher functioning parts of the brain in the
prefrontal cortex but reinforce amygdala activity.
It is
often helpful to verbalize your feelings to someone else or to write
them in a journal. It does not matter how you do it. The process itself
is what is important.
We can
take this a step further if we want to enhance the process to a point of
transformation, thus integrating personality with soul to a further
degree. This step is to find the meaning of what we are experiencing,
realizing that a negative state is some kind of imbalance or resistance.
We can do this by answering the following questions about the negative
emotions we are experiencing so we can move beyond them.
1. What
do I need to understand?
2. What do I need to let go of?
3. What do I need to open up to?
4. What different choices do I need to make to
experience something different?
5. What soul quality do I need to express?
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Exercises:
When you experience some negative feeling within yourself,
ask yourself:
1. What is this feeling? And then answer the question with
something like: Right now I am feeling angry. Do not say, I am
angry, because that is a statement of identification, not
feeling.
2. What fear hides behind this feeling? And then answer the
question with something like: I am feeling afraid of ...
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This is one of 150 Soul Perspective articles.
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