Post-traumatic stress is an interesting term. In any given situation we will react or respond which triggers an emotion or series of emotions which we will add thoughts to and form a perception around it, over time we may constantly shape it by adding more thoughts as we endeavour to make sense of it.
Sometimes an experience can be so traumatic that it literally knocks us sideways and an explosion of emotions are dumped on us like an avalanche that we feel so overwhelmed and unable to dig our way out of the barrage (of emotions).
So many emotions leaves us feeling scattered within, not knowing where to start in deciphering what it is we felt?! We are left dazed and confused in emotional energy that weighs as heavily upon us as the avalanche itself – an avalanche of emotions that can be expressed as ‘mixed emotions’, each emotion carries its own energy, if only we could decipher which belongs to which?
If we don’t go ‘into’ each and every emotion, digging our way through and identifying each one as we uncover it and acknowledge what it teaches us we begin to feel suffocated by our own emotional energy that is calling out for our attention, it becomes suppressed from the surface only, yet it is always simmering beneath the surface, it just never seems to go away. And it won’t until we identify its origin.
Whether we take a moment to go within will determine its outcome on our lives, it will affect us regardless if we acknowledge such or not.
Whether we communicate to someone else what we have experienced and our understanding of the emotional energy we have felt or do so privately in our own time can have us move onwards and upwards in the family tree of emotions. Or as more life experiences come along with similar emotional energies they will build upon and intensify that which already exists and bring them to the surface and have us feel as though we are constantly re-hashing out old stuff. We are, until we have dealt with it and laid it/them to rest.
Whether we seek counsel outside of self or in someone we know who can come from a place of pure empathy or skill based empathy (taught), a place that is unbiased or we are capable of giving to self-such can we relinquish from feeling held back.
When we truly understand the teaching of an emotion we are no longer held, directed or entangled by it nor drawn to it in others can we be of better service to all, including self. We can respond without bias or need to even remotely manipulate the truth and feel validated that our experience was real in how it made us feel and what we learned from it, and then are we permit ourselves to moving onto the next lesson. Until that time, it stays with us, growing in intensity and impacting everything we do.
Do we really want to feel the same emotion repeatedly knowing now that by learning what it brings to teach us, we can move onto the next emotion and so forth and that in doing so we are given ourselves permission to evolve in our empathy?
It is quite simple, if we do not evolve emotionally, we are held by it, whatever that emotion(s) is and our lives will be continuously directed by it.
Christel Broederlow © 2015 The Universal Empath 101