Emotions are energy and like a cold they can be “caught.” The more intimately connected you are to a person, the more vulnerable you are to being affected by his or her e-motions (energy in motion). There's always the danger that you may subconsciously take on feelings they deny, stuff them into your subconscious, and then unwittingly express them as if they were your own.
Luis's Story.. Luise and his wife Tina are a case in point. Luis, a handsome 45- year-old, was an angry person who denied his anger. He was known as a “nice guy.” His wife, Tina, seemed to be the angry one.
Eventually, Tina went into therapy for help with “her” anger. She worked hard in therapy and learned that she could choose whether or not to be angry. When she started to manage her anger, a strange thing happened: Luis started acting like one angry guy.
All those years, Tina had subconsciously carried and expressed Luis’s stuffed anger. Now that her feelings of anger were under control, she no longer expressed his rage for him. This forced him to express it himself, and Mr. Nice Guy, to everyone’s surprise, started having unexplained temper flare-ups.
Are you struggling with a carried feeling reality? When you work with your emotions, stay open to the possibility that you, too may be struggling with a carried feeling reality (also called limbic resonance or “tanking”) You may have made someone’s denied feelings your own and now find yourself expressing them.
Brad's Story. Brad had an unreasonable terror of drowning from early childhood. He learned in therapy that his fear was a “carried feeling reality” that he had taken on from his mother. His mother, as a child, saw her own baby sister drown and couldn’t save her. To deal with the tragedy, his mom stuffed her feelings of grief, and guilt over her little sister’s death. She never resolved that issue and unconsciously, had passed those emotions on to her son who now had an unexplained fear of drowning.
What about you? Are you possibly carrying someone’s emotionally energy for them? Do you want to make some changes? It is always possible to do something different. You can retrain yourself, change and grow, and engage life more fully.
If you want to understand yourself better as well as seeing the research behind iwhat you learn, take a look at Become the Person You Were Meant to Be – The Choice-Cube Method: Step by Step to Choice and Change. The book can increase your self-understanding and also provide 4 Key Steps and simple Tools or techniques to help you get unstuck, change, move toward becoming the person you were meant to be.
