What happens when you get accosted by an emotion that doesn’t feel good – a negative emotion? How do you know if that emotion is your own or if it’s something that you picked up from someone else.
I recently experienced this and after chatting with others about it, I realized it happens all the time – more often than you think. It’s very common among women because we are naturally empathic.
I had two family members visit me for the weekend and we had a lovely time. Usually when we go home I feel a little homesick. This time, however, I was blown away by the depth of melancholy and sadness that I felt and this preoccupation with catastrophic thinking. Even as I went to bed that night my husband asked me “do you miss them?” and I bawled my eyes out saying yes! In my mind I had these thoughts of “What if I never see them again? What if they die? I wish I’d given them one more hug!” This crazy, crazy sadness just enveloped me.
So, I took the steps that I typically take when dealing with negative emotions – all the things I teach my clients to do – and I went to bed. In the morning I woke up and did my meditation and as I was reflecting on this experience I had an intuitive nudge that these emotions actually weren’t mine.
Even though I was feeling the emotions so deeply they had come from my family members who had visited, and that hadn’t occurred to me as I was dealing with the emotions the previous evening.
Has that ever happened to you? Let’s say you’re having a great time with your family, at work, or in a mall and all of a sudden, completely out of left field you get accosted by anger or sadness or frustration. Or, you start to worry about money all of a sudden or your to do list. You might think “whoa! what just happened? I was just having such a great time!”
If you’re in the habit of making yourself wrong for things and judging yourself, or in the habit of thinking you’re not good enough, you’re screwing things up all the time, not doing enough, and not feeling worthy, then this type of emotion can really masquerade as your own.
When you feel such strong negative emotions then it’s easy to think there’s something wrong with you because all of a sudden you’re just feeling this crap.
The truth is, 98% of emotions are not our own, they come from someone else – from our past, our conditioning, our society, our culture, our family, etc. And yet, we’re so used to feeling all these emotions that we stopped questioning where they originate.
How do you differentiate these emotions?
What do you do when you feel a negative emotion so deeply?
The first thing to do is to slow down and pay attention to the thoughts you’re thinking and the location of that emotion in your body. Your mind will keep talking and thinking and you simply want to refocus on that physical sensation of the emotion in your body.
The second thing you do is ask a question: Is this emotion mine? Or does this emotion belong to me?
The biggest trick here is remembering to ask yourself this question instead of just getting wrapped up in the negative emotions. I discovered an app that you can get for your phone from Access Consciousness that can remind you to check in with yourself and notice whether what you’re feeling is yours. These reminders help you stay more mindful throughout your day and paying attention to your thoughts and feelings. This allows you to more easily discern whether what you’re thinking and feeling is, in fact, yours or if you picked it up form someone else.
If you work as an empath or this is a skill you’re developing, you want to learn how to protect yourself from other people’s emotions.
I invite you to try this:
When you experience a negative emotion, slow down.
Become aware of what’s going on: are you thinking and catastrophizing or worrying and that’s why this emotion is coming up? Or were you having an amazing day and all of a sudden someone else’s emotion attached itself to you and you’ve taken it on as your own?
Keep practicing this because the more you practice the better you will get at identifying what belongs to you and what’s someone else’s emotion so that you can go from there and release the emotions appropriately.