Emotional Alchemy: The Catalyst for Healing and Growth

Emotions: The least popular kid on the block:

Emotions have gotten a bad rep in western culture. They are viewed as less reliable than logic. From the time of the ancient Greeks the prevailing idea has been that logic is superior to emotion. But wait! Cutting edge research from the field of neuroscience is shedding light on how ill advised this assessment has been. It turns out that emotions are a highly evolved information processing and signalling system that is vital to our survival and overall well being. Take that, logic.

Wait, What? Emotions Enable Decision Making: 

Research on individuals with brain damage highlights the importance of this system in our ability to function. Without input from the emotion centres of the brain, such individuals are unable to make decisions and take actions. They become immobilised, as they consider all possible options from the endless stream of data that the brain receives. Such studies show that raw data and thinking alone do not provide sufficient information to impact meaning, decision making  and to direct action. 

Thankfully, we have emotions. Emotions allow us to sort through this information and highlight what is personally meaningful and relevant. Emotions are vital to decision making and make it possible to take actions that build a meaningful life. 

Emotions Enable Action:

Beyond being a filter in decision making, emotions also literally move us toward actions. Emotions can be differentiated into a wide range of emotions but according to emotion researcher Ekman, there are six universal and innate basic emotions that are each connected to action tendencies. 

• Joy, elicits openness, engage, expand, connect, broaden and build, and approaching behaviours
• Surprise, elicits curiosity, increased attention and approaching behaviours 
• Anger, elicits assertion, fight, defence, movement toward goals, and approaching behaviours
• Shame, elicits withdrawal, shrinking, hiding and avoidance behaviours
• Fear, elicits fleeing, freezing, fighting and avoidance behaviours 
• Sadness, elicits withdrawal, recollect, comfort seeking, or avoidance behaviours

Emotions Enable Communication and Connection:

These emotions are also vital to enabling communication and relationships. Emotions show up in facial expressions that communicate important information to others. These facial expressions are universally recognized by humans from very different cultures. The facial movements can be extremely subtle, and barely perceptible to the conscious mind, but they are picked up by mirror neurons in the brain. These mirror neurons enable us to feel what others are feeling, and empathise. Emotions therefore make it possible for us to connect deeply with others by enabling us to attune to and understand each other thereby facilitating our ability to care for one another. 

What is Emotion Regulation?

Emotion regulation is the ability to notice, name and feel a wide range of emotions without losing your internal balance. It is the ability to tune into and moderate the intensity of the emotions so that you can make meaning, and take adaptive actions that promote your wellbeing. 

The Role of Emotions in Anxiety and Depression. 

How a person regulates emotions is intimately connected to their mental health. The avoidance, suppression, or rumination around emotions are connected to a wide array of psychological disorders, especially anxiety and depression.  

Emotions and Depression:

Specifically, depression is connected to suppression and avoidance of emotions. This strategy requires a lot of energy to achieve. Even though a person may not be consciously aware of how effortful this is, studies show that their heart rate will increase, and stress chemicals will flood their bloodstream. Under increased and prolonged stress eventually the nervous system becomes too tired to maintain this strategy. At this point people experience what is called the ‘rebound effect’. Somethings gotta give. Much like pressure building in a volcano, emotion that was effortfully suppressed is released in a burst of energy. Despite a person’s best efforts, suppression and avoidance are not effective long term strategies.

Emotions and Anxiety: 

Anxiety is connected to the chronic activation of the nervous system and emotion centres of the brain. People who experience anxiety ruminate on real or perceived threats and the brain then generalises these threats to other previously neutral situations. This causes a cascading effect where fear and anxiety take over more and more of a person’s life. People experience a flooding of emotions which is experienced as overwhelming, confusing, and disorienting. The heart rate is elevated and the body is bathed in stress chemicals which have many negative side effects for mental and physical wellbeing. Understandably, this is experienced by people with anxiety as highly uncomfortable and distressing. 

Emotions, The Unsung Hero of Therapeutic Change:

Being able to feel and put words to emotions is a vital step in regulating emotions and creating lasting therapeutic change. Therapists love to say that ‘we can tame what we can name’ and this is more than a trite rhyme. There is excellent research to back this jingle up. 

When we can sit with emotions we can make sense of them and change their impact on our lives. Specifically, there is research showing how one’s ability to be specific about what they feel, how they experience the emotion in their body, and their ability to put this experience into words is correlated with less distress, quicker regulation time and less harmful coping strategies. 

Learn to Name it, to Tame it:

People struggling with anxiety and depression show substantially lower ability to name their emotional experiences with any specificity, which increases their distress, lengthens their regulation time, and is correlated to unhealthy coping strategies. Helping such folks gain specificity and complexity in experiencing and then naming emotions substantially reduces their distress. Go science! 

Using Emotions to Heal the Past: 

EFT therapists believe that their clients are the bee’s knees. They believe that people have all they need to heal and grow inside them already. All that is needed is support to kick start the healing and growing process and remove barriers that pop up to prevent progress along the way. And emotions are key to initiating and facilitating this process. 

Emotional experiences play a powerful role in memory, and learning. We can all relate to how one bad emotional experience can impact us. It may have only happened once, and it could have been years ago, but we still feel that same sting of shame, disgust, or fear. Anyone else getting flashbacks to highschool?

Thankfully, the opposite is also true. In EFT we use the power of corrective emotional experiences to rewrite the impact of negative experiences on the nervous system. Yes, you read that right! While we can’t change the past, we can use emotions to change the impact of the past on how you feel today. 

Becoming a Black Belt in Vulnerability: 

To do so, a skilled EFT therapist guides the client into their experience of frightening, alien and ‘unacceptable’ emotions to slowly and safely expand their tolerance of vulnerability.  An EFT therapist is in the role of a surrogate attachment figure for the client. Specifically, they use their own nervous systems to attend and attune to the clients nervous system. Much like a thermostat, the therapist is monitoring the client to make sure they are not too emotionally cold or hot. They are working to ensure the client is feeling just the right amount of emotions to enable them to feel empowered, yet safe, within the new experience of vulnerability. Feeling too much of an emotion overwhelms the system, while not having enough contact with the emotions disconnects the client from themselves and blocks progress. They also assist the client to understand how their previous relationship with emotions, and their reactive responses to them, made complete sense in childhood but may now be keeping them stuck.  

Accessing Core Emotions for Lasting Change:

As therapy progresses, the EFT therapist supports the client to deepen their experience from surface level reactive emotions to core emotions. Extreme safety is needed for the client’s nervous system to trust and follow this deepening process. Without safety, the nervous system stays stuck in the surface level reactive emotions which prevents progress. Deepening is necessary for clients to access vital information about previously denied emotions, longings, and needs. As this process unfolds, clients learn to trust their emotions as a wise internal compass that can be used to safely steer them through any storm.

 

Conclusion: 

Emotions are the agent of change that support clients ability to become more open, emotionally flexible and behaviourally adaptive. This process helps to heal old wounds, construct new meaning, formulate new actions, and ways to reach for and respond to loved ones. In short, emotions are the key to unlock clients’ natural capacity to heal, grow, and thrive. And EFT therapists’ deep understanding of the potency of emotions make them a skilled guide to support clients through this exciting process.