Emotional Constipation
When you feel an emotional pain you are experiencing it now in the present tense. Even though you may remember something from yesterday that was painful or anticipate pain from a situation in the future, you actually only feel it today.
Pain felt in the body can be depicted on a pain time-line. Negative emotion is felt in the body as stress. All emotion is felt in the present at various levels of intensity; low, medium and high. Each time you experience a negative emotion, such as a hurt in the present, anger or resentment from memory, or fear and anxiety from perceived pain in the future, you are adding to your store of stress.
Accumulation of negative emotion in the body is stress – emotional constipation. The stronger you feel an emotion in your body, the greater the amount of stress that is accumulated in your body.
Deepak Chopra describes the cycle of emotions in his book, “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind”. Cognitive appraisal, he explains, arouses only two impulses – pain or pleasure. “We all want to avoid pain and experience pleasure. Therefore, all the complicated emotional states we find ourselves in are because we are unable to obey these basic drives.”
Chopra describes the cycle of emotions, beginning in present reality (where only pain and pleasure are felt) and ending in complex emotions centred exclusively in perceived reality (such as anxiety, guilt and depression). The cycle that is repeated over and over in our lives is as follows:
* Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.
* Pain in the past is remembered as anger.
* Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety – a lessening of mental relaxation, associated to the alert reaction.
* Unexpressed anger – redirected against yourself and held within – is called guilt.
* The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.
The cycle of emotion tells us that stored hurt is something we all have experience of to some degree, and is responsible for a wide range of emotional constipation. Chopra says, “Buried hurt disguises itself as anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression.” To live in the present we need to learn to avoid the easy emotion – anger, and deal with the hurt that is more difficult to confront. Unresolved anger will only grow worse, feeding on itself.
Sometimes another person can be hurt by something you do or say. This behavior may be intentional or not, but results in you also experiencing pain; guilt, remorse, shame, and regret – that is, stress. It is common for a person without the skills of effective communication to drag up past history in arguments to hurt their partner, having had the perception that the partner is hurting them or blaming them in some way. They use a conditioned response to ease their own (present tense) pain, not realizing that the behavior will have a physiological impact (meaning stress) on their own body.
Emotional constipation – emotional distress – is “dis-ease”; an illness of how you think. You are what you think. How you feel depends on how you think. The pain time-line helps you understand your emotional constipation and the physiological impact of negative emotions felt in your body.
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