Processing Your Negative Feelings
June 18, 2009
Want to feel better? Process your emotions
If there is one common trap nearly all of us fall into again and again, it’s our failure to process our feelings.
Processing your feelings means identifying your negative emotions and releasing them by getting in touch with your underlying desires and positive feelings. Processing these emotions means using them to bring you back to your true self.
Negative emotions can have great value in helping us to gain a sense of balance. Consider the natural balance of positive and negative feelings in a way similar to the sense we get when balancing ourselves while riding a bike. Constantly we are making small adjustments from left to right. Getting in touch with our true wants is like shifting our weight to achieve balance, only in this instance we are balancing our emotions to achieve that goal. Without negative emotions, how could we distinguish positive emotions. That sway between the poles of happy and sad, excited and disappointed is what moves us forward. A life lived in neutral is really no life at all.
Whenever our negative emotions begin to overwhelm us it is a sign that we are moving to far over to one side or the other and disconnecting from our own sense of balance. That sense of pulling  away from our true sense of who we are and what we want is represented by that center point.
There are twelve negative emotional states that can be captured in these words that express our various feelings.
1. “I am angry.”
2. “I am sad.”
3. “I am afraid.”
4. “I am sorry.”
5. “I am frustrated.”
6. “I am disappointed.”
7. “I am worried.”
8. “I am embarrassed.”
9. “I am jealous.”
10. “I am hurt.”
11. “I am scared.”
12. “I am ashamed.”
Okay, let’s break this down. When you feel stuck in anger, take some time to feel and express what it is that you’re angry about, and then ask yourself what you feel sad about. Anger is generally a reaction to what happened; sadness is a reaction to what didn’t happen. Quickly you will feel a release of your anger as you shift to another feeling and you begin to go deeper in the process.
Move down through the list and you will find that one negative feeling will take you to another and through this process of shifting the negative feelings themselves will begin to lift. Fear, for example, is generally our reaction to what could happen that we don’t want to have happen. In each case as you go down the list, you will experience a shift and release by processing through one emotion and then moving down the list to the next.
Worried to embarrassed, jealous to hurt, or ashamed back up to the top of the list to anger, however you place them together every negative emotion has the potential to lead to another.
To complete this process, write out what you are feeling. If you are frustrated with someone in your life explain to them how that has caused you to be disappointed in their actions. Now imagine the response that you know at the center of their being they would want to write if they had the courage to do so. They would most likely apologize for their actions and ask for your forgiveness.
Negative feelings can be a self consuming fire. A far better approach is to process those feelings through a range of negative emotions and then let them go so that you can come back to center and move your bike forward on the journey through life.
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