Transitions, Transformations and a Little Photography
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Expressing Emotions
It’s an interesting exercise - give yourself 3 minutes and list off as many emotions as you can think of - write them down. I came up with 20 before I started repeating myself - only 20! Brene Brown surveyed 7000 people and they averaged 3 emotions (anger, sadness, joy). I find this so hard to believe and yet it makes sense based upon the dysfunction I see in our society today.
As humans we are not particularly good at naming emotions let alone expressing them - I most certainly am not. Some cultures are even less proficient at openly expressing emotions than others. I have spoken in the past how I come from a family that did not encourage openly showing feelings especially “bad” feelings such as sorrow, grief, frustration, etc. - you get the gist. This actually made it quite confusing for me to understand and name what I was feeling. I really appreciate that most children today are taught to verbalize what is going on for them and use words to name what they are feeling.
Numbing
The definition of numbing is - depriving one of feeling or responsiveness which seems like a good thing when you’re visiting the dentist for a root canal, but not so good in other situations. Taken to an extreme, numbing can result in addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling - any number of negative compulsive behaviours. Seeking professional help to address these behaviours is a healthy and loving gesture to oneself.
There are less extreme/less obvious or perhaps more accepted numbing behaviours such as mindless eating/snacking, binge watching tv, shopping, cleaning or reorganizing. To me, numbing is any behaviour we engage in so that we don’t have to face uncomfortable feelings/situations - mine is mindless snacking and compulsive cleaning or organizing. On the surface these may seem harmless behaviours, but when they interfere with processing emotions or problems then they can block you from resolving the underlying situations.