Old grudges, past hurts, recycled pain, all those painful memories each have a unique quality about them. Specifically what they activate inside your body as soon as you think about them or talk about them or engage your feelings with all that lives in the past.
The image of one of those heated arguments you had with someone you love. In the heat of the moment when blame is thrown around and hurtful words exchanged. As these images run within our minds, emotions trigger a biochemical response within the body.
We may have replayed this argument in our minds-eye, reviewing what we could have said or still reeling from what was actually said. It’s as if you have memorized that painful emotion and are now living by the same emotional reaction whenever conflict arises. All the remembering has now stored the emotions of that argument in the body. In the body’s effort to protect you from getting hurt again, the internal defenses become knit inside the musculature of the body keeping your body tense and tight.
Our subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. So as we bring up the images of that heated argument from the past, we retraumatize ourselves with the images, the hurt feelings and the residual pain. The body creates a habit of storing all these negative emotions at the physical level.
This is called a maladaptive stress response, when our past stress lives on in present. You could think of it like emotions trapped in nervous system sending out-dated information to your brain.
Here’s an example of how that might show up in your life. Let’s say your ex-husband cheats and this ends your marriage. Today your new boyfriend comes home late – can you guess what is your first expectation will be?
When we reinforce the emotion, it tends to become exaggerated, before you know it the emotion runs you, now this emotion is carrying you away, then a whole chain reaction of suffering starts. Often the suffering exists in the mind, not in our present day reality.
We actually view reality in the emotional condition we’re in. Our subconscious mind is the lens of our perception, it is literally how we see our world. Our subconscious mind generates 95% of our thoughts, feelings and reactions. This clearly shows the importance of clearing the window we are looking at life through.
Comments