Talking Out Our Negative Emotions

According to The Lancet, around one billion people worldwide suffer from psychological difficulties and mental health concerns. Emotional distress has been a leading cause of global disease burden for the past two decades. Globally, we are seeing an increasing number of people grappling with fear, inertia, loneliness, hopelessness, helplessness and a lack of meaning in their lives. However scientific research reaffirms that speaking freely to someone about our deeply felt emotions is helpful.

Recent neuro-imagining studies conducted at University of California observe that when people talk about their bottled-up feelings, their emotional reactivity decreases, and they feel calm and composed. This process helps them in understanding their feelings, modulating sweltering emotional intensity and taking away unwarranted sense of fear and stigma from them. As people talk freely about their emotions, they realise that what they are going through is quite normal, there are ways to deal with it and that it is certainly not end of the world.

Short, crisp and abbreviated dialogues via smartphones have altered human communication to truncated and stilted fragments. Consequently, people feel clueless and hesitant to express themselves and end up suppressing disquiet, agony and pain. But these stubborn negative emotions keep pushing for expression and when this expression is denied, they create strong ripples inside our body and our mind, harming and sabotaging us in multiple ways. We feel tormented and take twisted routes to express these emotions often in the form of depression, self-destructive behaviours, physical diseases, suicidal tendencies, addictions, violence or aggression. In other words, unexplained chaos that we often see in our physical bodies, intrapsychic spaces, interpersonal world and social relationships can be easily traced to these repressed and unmetabolised emotions. To work through this chaos, reclaim our health and bring back positivity in our lives, we must learn to deal with our negative emotions in a constructive manner.

Between the two extremes of suppressing our emotions and unleashing them in a raw manner, there is a third choice that we often forget - speaking our heart out. Chandogya Upanishad explains that our heart is meant to serve as a bridge between external reality and our inner divinity. "Go into the cave and you find treasures of heaven. The sun, moon, stars, space, clouds, lightning and rains - all these miracles of creation are within man's heart. When it rains outside, it rains inside also, and stellar regions shine resplendently within the heart of man." But we can find the pathway to these luminous zones only when our heart is released from suffocating grip of emotional turmoil. Otherwise, we will continue to see the darkness, feel it, identify with it and believe that darkness is our true nature. Therefore, let us learn to express our bottled-up emotions freely in words, in benign presence of someone whom we trust, so that our pain heals, and our heart feels liberated to travel once again to its primordial and eternal state of bliss.

Authored by: Pulkit Sharma