She stares at me from vacant eyes. Her ‘fire’, ‘passion’ and ‘joie de vivre’ (cheerful moment in life) has been missing for ‘sometime’. She can’t quite put her finger on exactly when it happened though. She slumps in her chair, sighs despondently and mutters “I’m feeling emotionally drained”.
Many of my clients have sat across from me and expressed this sentiment, this feeling arising for them so strongly at some point in their life. At any point in your life, this can occur. Whether it is caused by:
- The ending of a relationship
- Building pressures of living
- A dead-line at work
- Mounting pressure on maintaining financial security
- A big upcoming social event
- A high-pressure situation and so on.
Whatever the cause is, feeling emotionally drained is not an unfamiliar feeling or conversation many of us have had in our lifetime. When the going gets tough, when expectations in life not met, when the pressures is on, or tensions are high, any time that your nerves on edge, your emotions can be all over the shop and usually the final outcome is exhaustion. Literally, exhaustion caused from being drained of energy due to trying to control the whirlwind of emotions that we are experiencing. Your absolutely burnt-out!
Emotions can feel like a whirlwind because emotions are not felt in isolation. Usually a predominating or primary emotion and a secondary emotion are occurring simultaneously. It is completely normal to feel more than one emotion at a time. When you go through emotional disturbances, for example:
- The loss of a loved one,
- A fight with your lover,
- The ups-and-downs of parenting, or
- Managing the expectations you place on yourself
Whatever the disturbance is, you still have to deal with the emotional disturbance and still get everything else done; work, prep meals, take care of family, keep your routine… life doesn’t ‘cut you some slack’!
In the 21st Century lifestyle of go-go-GO is not conducive to taking time out in order to fully process your emotions. When was the last time you completely stoped and felt your emotional state and then consciously learned from them? Returning to my clients experience above, the answer was ‘way too long ago’. Tuning in to your emotions and actually feeling what is there can become one of the biggest challenges when you are on the go-go-GO merry-go-round.
Not only are you are dealing with multiple emotions at the same time, life is not giving you a break or cutting you some slack, you are also being required to generate emotional reactions or responses all the time. New scenarios occur that require your undivided attention… and that is where your system can become overloaded, your entire being says ‘enough’! Enter, ‘the straw that broke the camels back’ and I’m sure you may have witnessed this and probably even experienced it for yourself. It looks like a normal interaction but then something mundane and often trivial triggers a major emotional upheaval and perceived as an emotional outburst. For example Michael Douglas’s character William Foster in the movie Falling Down (1993).
In states of emotional overwhelm, it is quite often easier to just push these emotions away, ignore them and ‘keep on moving’. Sometimes our emotions are too difficult or too painful to face (for example losing a loved one) so the more comfortable solution is to deny them. Either of these short-term solutions is not ideal because in the long term they will rob you of your energy and leave you emotionally drained. It would take less effort and energy to process them on the spot, let them go, and be emotionally free, so that you can return to living in the moment.
Can you remember an interaction where your significant other was ending a relationship with you or possibly you with them? People normally say they felt sad, but at the time you could have also been feeling angry because they were not hearing what you are saying. You could have been feeling grief because you were at the beginning the mourning period of the relationship. All of these emotions were arising in the one interaction, however you could only focus on one of them because they were so overwhelming to process. You probably ended up carrying them around with you for days, trying to escape the discomfort whenever you could. Eventually you may have realised that you were having disproportionate reactions to life in everyday interactions. When you were playing with your kids and a simple question causes you to yell, when you were trying to do work and the slightest interruption caused you to become excessively frustrated, even becoming aware of the other repressed or ignored emotions that arose from the interaction then caused you difficulties trying to fall asleep and get some rest from it all! How emotionally exhausted did you feel?
The old ways of overcoming emotional disturbances can be quite a process. The good news is that there are new ways of overcoming emotional disturbances that are not a process, do not take days or hours to implement and are in fact fast, easy to use and robust. They are known as Rhett Ogston Applications (ROAs) and they are an array of tools to assist you to rise above emotional disturbances and to simply and easily process your emotions, let them go naturally, and get back to living your life optimally and purposefully.
Possibly the best benefit is that they are simple solutions and the more you utilise them, the stronger your emotional processing systems become, the more emotionally intelligent you become, therefore the more you use them the less you need them!
I hope you enjoyed reading this post and to say thank you for being part of this community my team and I have a gift for you – A FREE EBook by me [Dr Rhett Ogston (Chinese medicine)], Rewire your Reality – 10 Secrets to Letting go of Emotional Baggage.
Download your copy HERE and begin to implement these simple and effective strategies to help you let go of past emotional baggage and start living a little lighter by processing your emotions. Regain your energy levels so you can live the life you have always dreamed of.