The Rhyme and Reason: Experiencing the Same Emotions on Repeat
Bridgette W. Gottwald LPC, NCC
Did you know that emotions have the ability to be prompted by a mental experience, but also take place in our bodies, which is why we sometimes feel them so deeply? Something your brain and body may not have put together before is the fact that typically, humans experience the same emotions on repeat, just in different ways where they “take on different forms and are projected onto different situations.”
What’s Keeping Me Stuck?
Emotional healing and physical healing are completely intertwined – you can’t have one without the other. Regardless of how these patterns are triggered, it’s your thoughts and feelings that are keeping you stuck, as well as how your body has responded and attached to the issue at hand. If you want emotional healing, you have to experience physical healing as well.
Emotions: Physical and Mental Experiences
When we have unresolved trauma trapped within us, it can make us think that things are worse than they actually are by tapping into a feeling that was cut off and stored within our bodies through cellular memory. The reaction here is that when we experience new stimuli that are similar to an experience that was never processed, the response is panicked and instantaneous.
Moving Forward
The only way to break out of this pattern is through “rewiring” your body to “automatically participate” in new patterns, which is what you’re already doing, but it needs to be done in a way that promotes healthy emotional growth. By breaking free from cyclical patterns of this unhealthy emotional cycle, you will no longer be controlled by the same patterns that leave you feeling stuck. In order to cause a breakthrough and stop the pattern, you must work through the process, and the following steps may help!
1. Find the root of the problem
In order to unravel and process emotional patterns, the first step is to find out where and how they started.
2. Finish the feeling
Go back to the beginning, and finish the emotional experience where it started. This can be done by honoring and closing out the pain, resistance, and fear. In this step, you are going to want to be particularly careful to not project the emotion onto any other areas of your life.
3. Learn to “ride the wave”
When you experience emotions in a healthy way, it’s very similar to waves. Typically, they can be intense at first, and ease up with time. Most importantly, except that they are not permanent and that they will in fact pass. Knowing that they are temporary makes it easier to process them fully without the fear of the undesirable feeling never going away.
4. Find a type of physical release
An example of a physical release could be anything that you do to take care of your body – working out, crying (which is releasing stress hormones), stretching, or self-care. Releasing the leftover emotional energy through physical activity will give you the ability to rewire preexisting neurological connections.
5. Find ways to respond to new stimuli within the present
Life and getting through its difficulties is all about coping mechanisms. The entire reason that you experienced this repetitive and ruminating emotional cycle is that you either didn’t have or weren’t practicing coping mechanisms in the first place. When we feel our emotions boiling up, we must remember to be intentional about thinking rationally and clearly. In doing this, you will be able to respond to stimuli in healthy ways as opposed to attaching to unhealthy cycles.
Although we are not always able to control our experiences, or how we feel, one thing that we can control is how we respond. Taking the initiative to process emotions more deeply allows us to redirect cycles that are unhealthy in more positive directions.
Reference:
Wiest, B. (2019). Why You Keep Experiencing the Same Emotions on Repeat. Human Parts. Retrieved from: https://humanparts.medium.com/why-you-keep-experiencing-the-same-emotions-on-repeat-7f31218e05e9?