Have you ever heard someone saying “he made me feel x” or “because of her I felt y” ? Maybe you even said it yourself. Stop for a moment and think about it, did they point a gun to your head and forced you to feel something? The truth is we and no one else are responsible for our emotions.
Have you ever felt great even though something you consider negative happened? For instance maybe it was raining and you were all soaked and you still smiled and enjoyed the moment, or maybe something you consider good happened and you still felt bad. These examples show us that we can choose our emotions and we don’t have to react to the situation or to the others.
Change your negative emotions into positive emotions
Usually our decision to feel a certain emotion is unconscious but it doesn’t have to be that way. At first you’ll notice your emotions only after you feel them. Start by accepting your emotions and take full responsibility for them, you can’t change something until you accept it.
Think about the positive intent of the feeling. E.g. Perhaps the fear helps saving your life or gives you a feeling of safety. If you don’t know what the intent is you can use the Six-Step Reframing technique to find the positive intentions and to find alternative ways to accomplish your positive function.
Permit yourself to feel sad, frightened, angry or any emotion you consider negative. Explain yourself that it’s ok to feel that way and distinguish between the emotion and yourself. If you feel angry it doesn’t mean that you’re an angry person and if you feel scared it doesn’t mean you’re a coward.
Don’t try to block the emotion, instead let yourself feel it as much as you can. If you’ll stay with the emotion you’ll find peace.
After you felt the emotions, if you still feel a negative emotion in your body, you can breathe through your mouth and direct the breathing to the discomfort area in your body. If you don’t feel a discomfort in the body you can direct the breathing to your heart. All of our feelings are filtered through the heart. The breathing should be deep and slow. After a few minutes you’ll feel relieved.
Realize that you don’t feel that way all day long, there are times when you feel great. Think about all the instances when you felt bad, what do they all have in common? In most cases you’ll find that it’s related to a few areas in your life that require your attention. It can be areas like self acceptance and love, making independent decisions, loneliness and so on. These areas are related to limiting beliefs. Talk to someone about the things that bother you. It’s best to talk to a professional but your friends and family can help too.
Think about all the times you felt great. Remember what it was like to feel the emotions, remember the things you saw, heard, smelled and so on. Make a vivid image of the good times you had, make the colors of the image bright and sharp. Make the image bigger and bigger and notice how you feel about it. Play with it until you feel wonderful. Our thoughts influence our emotions, If you have a negative sentence that you keep repeating in your mind simply replace it with something short and positive.
