Love!
What is Love?
So many different meanings in different decades. It’s hard to define love just by listening or reading to just one love story.
Not all emotions are Love. But yes Love is not made of only a single emotion, it changes each day, comprises different feelings, distinct emotions and it becomes hard to classify love as a singular complex produced as a result of liking someone, or some experience, or something uniquely quantifying as the wholesome one emotion i.e LOVE.
Every Love story is different and the kind of love we experience is also different. No love story has the same love. Yet we are boisterous enough to define it into a person, things, memories, places, and feelings.
We have a habit of holding on to the feeling we feel, deep inside, profoundly placed that hurts, bring happiness or even hatred as love and fail to recognize love with an open mind, or open arms when it comes knocking on our door, and yet somehow we cannot let go of the feeling submerged due to a person, place, song whatever it is deeply inscribed inside of our head.
Stigma of Love!
We have so much confusion in our life that we have managed to bifurcate love based on the relations we have with people. Friend, Child, Mother, Cousin, Colleague, Guard, Driver, Neighbour, Husband, Wife, Classmate, etc.
We are scared to love, we fear destruction, we fear not being able to move on, to be too much emotionally involved, attached, we want love right there, right at that moment, we fail to be patient, love makes us act childish we say, and yet it makes us so much mature. When it comes to love there also comes the need to label it!
Love as a Process!
Love is the process of knowing oneself. You are scared to give it your all, after you gave it your all the first time, that one unrequited love, That first love.
It is different for even two people loving each other! It is never the same.
It all depends on the emotional wiring of our feelings inside ourselves.
We do not want to get betrayed by our own feelings, we believe in magic and we see it being destroyed in front of us.
We think love is too pure to exists in this world, and yet it creates miracles every day, and we see the magic happening everywhere.
We think, there is probably a reason for everything that we feel, God never makes us feel things that eventually won’t exist. And so we keep finding answers to our own emotions and we look and search for them outside, blaming and cursing ourselves to feel to an extreme that we find ourselves broken.
Whom to ask in Love?
And there is no one capable of giving the perfect advice when you love someone other than your own heart, and it gets complicated when another heart is also involved.
The feeling you find highly romantic, another heart may not be feeling that way, thanks to a romantically fed version of our lives to us.
I never came across a person emotionally pragmatic and sane without a heartbreak. The roller coaster of emotions makes you highly intelligent if managed efficiently. Emotional Intelligence, a derivative also used to define not the logical part or also called the Frontal Lobe of the brain but Amygdala, that recepts to emotions.
Love Inventory of the Brain!
Some of us find some other person to let us heal and some of us never heal, with time you learn to live with it and those emotions are buried deep inside the sand of time and you are only reminded of the feelings when you come across a person, song or a movie portraying the feeling that you once felt, our brains have a complex structure that learns to relate everything that happens to store inside the limbic system of our brain.
And so whatever you relate or feel, there are certain keys to the storage in the limbic system that will trigger those and you start feeling those again.
The things in the outside world determine the captures by your brain, and the way to respond and feel emotions is stored in the nature of the person, and here is what goes wrong. You can control whatever you see in the living age span of your life but you cannot control how your brain is going to react to those captures, and we unwind in the form of dreams inside your little movie time while you sleep, correlating things with one another, for you to explore what feelings are there and what is the brain’s response to those.
Everything is connected, and everything happens for a reason, and the way you react and respond is not always how you feel but it depends upon the perception you have for things like those in the world.
Flawed Love or Love Stories?
People often fall in love with the concept of love and forget that there is no one person who you love, The concept of love is flawed and there is no one to blame. Love stories portrayed on the silver screen will be perceived by everyone individually and differently.
No one is going to judge a love story unbiased, whether it be a critic or it is a normal individual. A critic will always have past excrescence, better direction, screenplay to consider from and an individual will have their emotions while watching to check on how was the movie and how it triggered their own senses and how it made them feel.
What is emotional intelligence?
We plan our trips, our days, our life and we fail to manage our emotions, because we never managed our anger, we never managed our feelings, so we fail to manage our emotions when we feel vehement about something and we often end up being confused, hurt and in drastic emotional states due to mismanaged concept of emotions and what is going on about in our lives.
It comes from being able to identify your emotions.
You feel all kinds of emotions, but if you cannot classify them, you cannot manage these emotions. In love, you feel anger, fear, happiness, sadness, interest, surprise, disgust, and shame.
All due to many reasons, with varying quantity at different times, some emotions, first and some during the process and some afterward.
Managing emotion is not a cakewalk!
Here comes the hard part in the wiring of our nature, perceptions, and feelings. How to manage emotions, especially when we are connected to a person and, we have no control over why we keep feeling these emotions, in particular, our reasons fail, our judgments fail. Everything seems out of place, we fail in everything, we feel like being judged every step of the way, we feel all the things suddenly, we were earlier happy and now we feel disgusted, we cant look at ourselves, we feel low self-esteem, we feel betrayed, we feel lost, we feel like there is no way out.
We want answers, why these emotions ever surfaced? Why? What? When? and questions never seem to end.
Sometimes, talking to our friends, our family our therapist seems to be all in vain and all you want to think about is your happy ending, about being with a person causing the influx of these emotions, making you vulnerable.
Cursing doesn’t help, Drinking, Having rebound and everything in the world is more destructive until you begin to heal from the outburst of the extra load your brain has been processing. The crazy madness post feeling emotion extravaganza extends the healing timeline by 2-3 weeks and takes up to 5-7 years.
Realisation & Acceptance: Often takes times!
We often misinterpret our emotions and how we feel, to be able to truly feel emotion is a challenge. It gets even more challenging when we are unable to differentiate between two emotions and there are many suitable reasons. Feel the happiness, Feel the joy, Feel the pain, Feel the grief, feel everything completely.
People sometimes, have a slow influx of emotional trauma and we take up to 3-4 weeks to realize that there is something wrong, and we fail to classify the main source of their emotional state until finally, the brain manages to find the answers to the puzzle emotions have been drawing day and night.
Though I cannot stress this enough, everyone has their own way of dealing with their emotions. But the coping and healing process can be fast-tracked if we are able to identify them, classify them to find out the source, instead of being stuck with the mixture of them, coming at us in waves, hitting us hard every time, we see and can’t run away, rolled up in our tears.
Just like the first few years of financial freedom and independence are hard, starting a business is hard, this process is also going to be hard.
The problem is, this is less sought and less talked about, and ever since mental health came into the limelight. These things are often missed. All of which leading us to depression, anxiety, and other trauma, that is hard for us to accept.
What are the issues that cause us to actually suffer mentally, they are the smallest of things we feel and let go of, thinking it as a problem with our own thinking process leading us to pile up and ultimately making us suffer traumatically?
People may often listen to you and even after you vent it out, you don’t seem to feel normal. You still are unable to let go of this anxiety, this uneasiness, this mental torture of emotions whirl-winding without signaling the cause and warning.
And you are all messed up, fucked up and your life sucks! Just mere emotion has the power to do that, Unmanaged emotions.
Debate or Relate?
Now it comes to a topic of debate, why we need to manage emotions, why can’t we just be we, whatever we feel, wear our hearts on our sleeves, let our emotions be all over our face, in our actions, what is wrong with that. Why can’t people accept me as fat, or ugly, or with too many unmanaged emotions? Or being too emotional, or being too reactive!
People have started calling out different things on social media, being black, being fat, being depressed, being a survivor, being a shamer and what not, well so are the emotions, the only difference between the things is we cannot see them and your emotions, can trigger other person’s emotions.
Myth or Truth!
While it is hard to understand your emotions, it is always easy to understand others! Here is what goes wrong again. People think we have so good understanding of ourselves that whatever we feel is true, not knowing what is the primary cause of feeling those emotions?
Nobody has their shit sorted better than you!
It is not always how it looks like from the outside, everyone is fighting their own battles and no one has their emotions managed, people are just good at hiding them. But when you can manage your emotions, why there is the need to hide them.
Then comes the other category, who suppresses their emotions and we fill up inside creating bottlenecks. It comes out in the form of anger, panic attacks, indulging too much in food, stress, weight loss, weight gain.
Such is the power of emotion, We can cause changes in the physical structure of the body
and yet there is no education or awareness on the management of emotions!
Emotional Independence
The independent state of mind is completely free of emotions governing our decisions and our every action, but at the same time realizing that
To heal oneself sometimes we need to feel something entirely and what is necessary.
Our emotional healing process can be hard, if we do not confront our emotions, be it after the loss of a loved one, or a bad marriage, a hard divorce, being financially stuck, anything that may cause a rupture in your brain!
Although we tend to mix stress and emotions together, without realizing that emotions cause stress, thinking about how to go through the suffering of the loss of a person, relationship, marriage, divorce, finances, and other things can be a reason for the emotions to stir up and since our brain is wired to store things related to one another we tend to feel all the things at the same time and get lost in the pain.
The key here is to detach yourself from the infinite connections to things.
Detach feeling happy with the marriage, detach feeling safe in the marriage, instead attach yourself free and happy from the marriage that isn’t working. Or a relationship going south!
People have a habit of diverting their minds, making themselves involved with some other person, in other things, in some other life experiences, living life differently, leaves the city, and what not so that we don’t have to think about these emotions and we can avoid feeling these emotions so that we can move on, and this is where we make the mistake. We think, out of sight is out of mind, but that is not how the brain works, being busy not giving your brain enough time to dwell on the past is a good thing in the short term, but it can do more damage than heal you.
A wound is better healed , than not being paid attention to!
It gets healed by time and being busy but do you think, it could have been healed better with you paying attention to managing your emotions, detaching yourself and the key here is to not get overwhelmed. It is natural to feel those emotions, let yourself drown in those emotions, but once you understand why are you drowning when you can easily swim through them. It gets easy to pick yourself up and move in the right direction, to be freer than ever, to attain the right level of mind and consciousness, to achieve true inner peace.
People often suggest meditation and they fail to explain how it is beneficial for our human brain or in our case for emotion management?
All the meditation to focus yourself is the one thing I never agreed to, because sometimes this seems bizarre. How does meditation have the capacity to make you focus, but I realized that the human brain, cannot wire or classify emotions until the brain itself does that for you, and meditation is that secret trick, it is your secret servant in disguise that brings to the forefront the emotions that you are battling with and then, the emotions on the forefront are the ones you need to pay attention to and then you finally feel happy after having dealt with them.
Dreams play an important role in highlighting our emotions!
Often while finding the meanings of our dreams the key to looking for in the dreams is to find the emotion that you are feeling throughout the dreams, that is the one strong emotion that helps you understand yourself better. It might be the emotion, you have not felt in a long time, or it may be the emotion you are feeling, but not able to understand, or the emotion driving you in your present life and you are paying little attention to it,
Our dreams are manifestation of our own emotions.
Emotion Management
So it is very important to collect your focus from the questions to the plutchik’s wheel of emotions and the very first step is to identify what emotions are you feeling?
So the emotion chart can be used from inward to outward, or from outward to inward, depending upon whatever you feel at a particular moment.
If you feel Trust+ Fear+Submission you are in the green zone of the chart, move on to identify the next set of emotions in level 2, and then to the core emotions that resolve to 7 key emotions! So first you need to identify which circle of emotion you are in.
More on Emotion Management in the next Part! Stay Tuned
