The Depth of Your Emotional Blocks.
Have you ever had something in your head that just wouldn’t let you do what you needed to do. No matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t seem to find the emotional energy to accomplish whatever it was that you knew really needed to get done.
No words could explain it, no feeling seemed to describe it, but you knew in your heart that something, somehow, someway was stopping you.
Welcome to the wonderful world of emotional blocks.
They can be terrible, and they can be tough. They’re usually a result of some kind of trauma in your past, even though you don’t necessarily see it as such.
At a point in your life, you learned to associate a particular kind of pain to whatever it is that you need or want to do, but it didn’t necessarily occur in your conscious/aware mind. It happened deep in the dark recesses where you made a connection, and now your brain gives you that uneasy feeling every time this action comes up.
We all have them, so please know you’re not alone.
I have two very specific ones that I’m working through right now. One I have had for many, many years, and the other is fairly recent. The first is so deep that actually trying to break through it creates within me a powerful feeling of distress, while the other actually makes me physically nauseous.
The funny thing is I can tell you how each of these came to be, but knowing it is just not enough.
And here’s where my theory of depth/intensity comes in.
Because both of these blocks were created out of intense emotion. The first was pretty much a single incident in my life, which was very intense, at an emotional level that was probably 8/10, where 0 is calm and 10 is very painful. An event occurred, and I took a very specific meaning from it.
The second occurred at a 3-4/10 but frequently over a long period of time (many years). Both of these built up huge emotional intensity/depth, and so trying to deconstruct these blocks while I’m calm is not going to work.
You have to reach the block through the emotion, which is where the fun begins.
I do this with coaching clients in one of four ways. The fastest and most direct is to blow it apart with an intense emotional experience equal in intensity to the original event. As you can guess, that can get painful, so we avoid that as much as possible, but sometimes it can happen.
The second is the chisel, where you slowly chip away a little at a time, as if you were breaking a chocolate bar into tiny pieces and eating it a little at a time. You get there, but it can take a long time.
My preferred methods are much more fun.
Of the two, the ‘meaning twist’ is far more elegant. This is where we play with the meaning, twisting it inside and around your moral code, until not breaking through the block becomes a violation of your most intrinsic ethical rules.
Sure this takes some serious manipulation, but I tell you, when it works, it’s incredible to see how sudden people can break through when it’s the only way to stay a good person in their mind.
The last one is what I call ‘a case of compulsion’.
We all have wants, and we all have desires. Setting up a significant desire to break through an emotional block is like watching a child ask a thousand times for an ice cream.
Once the desire becomes a compulsion, you’ll see the person blow through the block like the child ignoring the ‘No’ until it gets what it wants. If you’ve ever seen this happen you know what I mean – they’re relentless.
So whatever your emotional block, please know that there is almost always a way through it.
Sure it might be deep, and it really might be painful to go through, but with enough patience and the right kind of guidance, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.
Because what your mind has learned it can change.
And sometimes, change is your very best friend in the world.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings