You can't bypass your emotions

I was chatting with a friend a few weeks ago who is a police officer and we were talking about my podcast series on grief. BTW if you haven't listened to it yet, I had some awesome conversations on there and you can listen right here. We were talking about their job and how they deal with a lot of grief and highly charged emotions on a daily basis and I asked them how do they process all that. Their answer was - shutting it away so that they could move on to the next job, because if they didn't do that, they wouldn't be able to do the job at all. I was intrigued by this, and also not surprised. Having worked with people in crisis myself - drug addiction, young people in care, I could understand what they meant. The continuous waves of emotion that come at us from working with people in crisis, can leave little room for us to process our own. So where does all that emotion go?

You see, we are human beings. We are emotional creatures. We are energetic creatures. We are connected to each other.

If you live with other people, work with other people, spend any length of time with other people, you will experience the effects of that. Do some people drain you? Do some people energise you? Do some scare you? Do some make you feel safe?

Do you know someone, who on paper, is a really good person? Everybody likes them. You like them (in your head), but your body when you're with them tells you something different. (I know you just went 'YES').

However rational, logical and thoughtful we think we are, our emotions are running the show, and they live inside our body. A lot of the time we are not even aware of them. The thing is, if we ignore our emotions, then they stay in our bodies, and then they can cause problems - tension, pain, and illness.

So, what I encourage you to try today, is spend a few minutes just checking in with yourself. Ask yourself.....

'How am I feeling right now?' What sensations am I aware of in my body?'

You might want to write down what you notice.

Becoming aware of them is the first step.

Our emotions are felt in our bodies. Our bodies are always trying to communicate with us, but often we spend so much time in our heads, thinking, that we are completely detached from them. This is why mediation, yoga, journalling, just a simple check in with ourselves during the day can be so useful to understand what is going on and what we need to do next.

In my various jobs, I have been lucky to experience some excellent levels of support in helping me process my emotions. When I worked in the drug service where I would be supporting up to 30 people a week, all with various situations and problems, I would sit down with another colleague regularly to talk through what I had been dealing with and the effects it was having on me. This was so important for me to release all that emotion, so that I could stay healthy, sane and keep doing the job.

So, if you feel you have lots going on in your life right now, lots of emotion that you need to release, then maybe having a Brain Dump session with me could help...