Are you your own worst enemy? Do you always find reasons to procrastinate, hesitate or simply change course just before your project is about to pay off?
Then chances are your suppressed emotions are holding you back.
To understand the power of suppressed emotions we first need to acknowledge that everything we do is driven by emotional needs.
We buy expensive clothes, fast cars and exotic holidays not for their practical benefits but for the emotional needs they satisfy. Actually, when your really think about it, everything we do is driven by our desire for pleasure and our need to avoid pain.
All of our decision making is determined by our perception of pleasure and pain. We choose the alternative that we believe will give us more pleasure and less pain. Often this decision making process occurs outside our conscious awareness. We come up with all sorts of stories to justify our daily choices but when we look closely and honestly we realize that we are always driven by pleasure and pain.
Sometimes we experience more emotional pain than we can cope with. Something or someone triggers us to experience large amounts of anger or sadness or some other unpleasant emotion.
When we hit our emotional pain threshold we stop processing the painful emotion and shut down emotionally, at least temporarily. The result is suppressed or unprocessed emotion. Since we don’t want to experience this pain on an ongoing basis we drive it deeper into our unconscious, the invisible part of our mind.
Avoiding the emotional pain is only a short term solution however. Driving the pain into our unconscious makes it invisible to us and hence more dangerous.
What we fail to realize is that unprocessed emotions stored in our unconscious sabotage all of our decision making by skewing our perception of pleasure and pain. The result is constant self-sabotage.
This self-sabotage can be largely invisible to us for long periods of time because it takes place at the unconscious level.
Very few people realize the enormous cost of their suppressed emotions. Suppressed emotions are responsible for many unfulfilled relationships, missed financial opportunities and untold health problems.
Suppressed emotions are a major blind spot for most individuals and for society as a whole. We pay a very high price for avoiding and hiding our emotional pain.
Once we understand the source of our “bad luck” we are able to take constructive steps to resolve the underlying issues.
The good news is that we live in a time where many wonderful therapies are available to assist us in clearing our emotional baggage quickly and easily.
Next time you find the world conspiring against you take a deep breath, a healthy dose of self honesty and see if you can catch a glimpse of your emotional self sabotage that is the real culprit of your self inflicted misfortune.
Isn’t it time you lightened your load and did a spring cleaning on your emotional baggage?
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