By The Self Development Coach, Johnny Lawrence.
Defining Emotional Freedom
For clarity, Oxford Languages defines emotion as a strong feeling deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others and the instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge. It defines freedom as the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants and the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved. I couldn’t find a formally recognised definition of the term emotional freedom. But, for the context of this article, I want to combine the definitions and define emotional freedom as the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved by instinctive or intuitive feelings as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge. I also want to share my personal definition, which I have derived from extensive observations and experiences. I define emotional freedom as the ability to identify the emotion(s) being experienced to learn what they are attempting to tell me. Emotions are messages, and they are how our soul makes requests.
The Emotional Earthquake
As humans, we experience many life-altering events. These events can be joyful, nurturing and kind but also devastatingly traumatic and cruel. We rarely feel inspired to analyse the former, although we might commonly enjoy reminiscing about them with loved ones. However, we understandably avoid thinking, speaking or revisiting the latter. That said, these traumatic events imprint on our lives, and we feel as if they hold the power to imprison and enslave us in the memory of that event. They trap us there, perhaps resulting in a slow and silent spiral towards depression and self-destruction, leaving us unable or unwilling to move forward with our lives. Respectful if the event is no longer occurring, then what if it is not the event itself that’s causing you emotional distress? What if when the event happened, you experienced such powerful and overwhelming emotions that now, whenever you experience even a minor version of that same emotion, it becomes a gateway to your trauma, resulting in a trauma response? The event was like a devastating earthquake, and the trauma responses were like aftershocks. Perhaps the event left you with an overwhelming sense of fear. When you experience any moments of fear, you become activated in your fight or flight response, which is likely more destructive than helpful in situations that are not emergencies.
How Can we Become Emotionally Free?
For many of us, it's easy to surmise that our emotions compel our behaviour, and if we were being honest, we all have behaviours we would like to change. The life-changing question must then become, how? We generally accept that at this moment in time, we cannot go back and change past events. However, what if we can change the impact of that event that has taken the form of a story trapped within our memory? What if we could rewrite the story's meaning and how we carry that meaning forward with us? What if we temporarily remove the resentment, judgement and hatred so that we can analyse what happened? When pharmaceutical companies develop vaccines as an antidote to disease, they use a small amount of the disease to formulate the vaccination. This is true of our emotional distress. To develop an antidote to our trauma, we must expose ourselves to the emotions of the trauma itself. What if the letter ‘E’ in emotions stood for ‘Energy’ and the concept of emotions represented energy in motion? If the emotions cannot continue to move and be in motion, then they remain stuck, still, stagnant, and dominating. This sounds problematic. For example, imagine the primary emotion was inadequacy, and that emotion felt so traumatic and sensitive that we understandably opted to have the secondary emotion of resentment instead. If resentment becomes the stuck emotion, it can become the lens through which we see the world. Understanding how this perspective and worldview can hinder helpful progress is not difficult.
Following the Golden Thread of Emotion
The fundamental difference between thinking and conversation is that one is done out loud and with a partial filter, and the other is performed within our mind and is predominately unfiltered. This line of thinking runs with the notion that humans organise their minds through conversation. This is helpful because, through conversation, you can adopt different perspectives. Your thinking is challenged, and the components of your thinking process must be defined to build a logical narrative. It's that narrative that flavours the meaning that the thinking offers, which becomes the story we tell ourselves and sell to others. I love a saying: “The freedom you are searching for is found in the thing you are avoiding”. Our emotions are the golden thread of our life story. They are components of our personality. They are who we are. When those emotions reflect the truth and are accurate, they offer a helpful way to identify a path forward. Hidden within our emotional experiences is the freedom you require to accept what has happened so that you can move forward with your life. Let’s use the emotion of anger as an example. Experiencing anger is not a pleasant experience, and it can leave us feeling drained, bitter and resentful. However, telling yourself you’re not angry or shouldn’t be angry will not help because you are experiencing anger. Asking yourself why you are angry will not help because you will likely not know. So how about becoming an emotional investigator and asking yourself, what has left you feeling angry? This exploratory question will allow you the freedom to explore your emotions and adventure forward towards some answers.
What Does Emotional Freedom Mean to You?
Our emotions are our software, and our bodies are our hardware. Much like popular software, it can glitch, be impacted by viruses, and require an update. The information we need to thrive in our world is held in the coding of our emotions. We just need to learn how to accept and listen. What they have to tell us will not always be what we want to hear, but it will always be the truth. The truth is a solid and stable place to begin to make difficult decisions about what to do next. Emotional freedom is not about becoming free from your emotions. It’s about working with your emotions in real-time and learning from the wisdom they are trying to show us. The process of emotional freedom is different for everyone. What does emotional freedom mean to you?
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