1-416-561-5780The capacity to experience feelings is synonymous with the capacity to give and receive happiness. To the degree you shy away from any kind of emotional experience, to that extent you also close the door to the experience of happiness.
Emotions and feelings are like a pendulum that may swing from negative to positive situations. If you suppress the negative emotions, you also suppress the positive ones. Immature emotions lead to unhappiness. So the child learns to suppress them. By suppressing negative emotions, one also suppresses the positive ones. This leads to emotional numbness and hence a crippled personality.
Trial and error is a much better accepted process of learning and developing in the physical and mental aspects. Not so much for the emotional growth. The world has long lived by the Greek motto, later expressed in Latin: “Mens sana in corpore sano” (“A healthy mind on a healthy body”). Emotions were left out.
If you didn’t grow emotionally as a child, you have to do it now, as an adult. Otherwise your personality will remain crippled. So, be tolerant with your emotions, even if they seem immature to your more developed adult mind. Let such emotions flow, be felt and gain expression in a purposeful and adequate way. By that it is meant that you should express your emotions in a way that will not hurt others, while still giving you full acknowledgement of their existence
Because the manifestation of immature emotions leads to unhappiness, we learn to suppress them and often superimpose feelings that we think we ought to have (as unconsciously dictated by our idealized self-image). By so doing we prevent the real feelings to flow; we ignore what exists underneath and hence hinder our emotional growth.
To allow emotional growth to happen we must feel the emotional pain of our hurts, even if they were immature emotions. This is necessary to properly assimilate each emotional experience.
What has not been properly assimilated in emotional experience but has instead been repressed will constantly be reactivated by present situations. These remind you in one way or another of the unassimilated experience. Such a reminder may not be factual. It can be an emotional climate, a symbolic association that lodges exclusively in the subconscious. As you learn to become aware of what is really going on in you, you will also notice such reminders. Learn to read these signs. Pay attention to “emotional climates” and symbolic clues (to unassimilated emotions) that dwell in the unconscious.
The emotional side of your nature, when functioning, possesses creative ability. To the degree you close yourself off from emotional experience, to that very degree the full potential of your creative ability is hindered in manifesting itself.
As long as you remain emotionally immature, you cannot rely on your intuitive processes, you must be insecure and lacking in self-confidence. You try to make up for this by relying on others, or on false religion. This makes you weak and helpless. But if you have mature, strong emotions, you will trust yourself and therein find a security you never dreamed existed.
So, build your true security. You have nothing to fear from becoming aware of what is already in you. Looking away from what is does not cause it to cease to exist. Therefore, it is wise on your part to want to look at, to face, and to acknowledge what is in you — no more and no less!