Old Emotion

When your hit with a very deep old emotion.  These are hidden issues in life.  They tend to make you feel funny or strange.  On the surface you feel fine, but deep, deep inside there's a storm raging.  It's quite an odd feeling experience.  Sometimes this happens to me.  Once, I had to take action, and I knew there was going to be a bad result for a particular person.  I had been working with this person for a long time.  The patterns  that arose in them were self destructive in nature.  In the end, there was nothing I could do about it.  It's like watching a train wreck in very slow motion.  The guilt emotions came up even though I see I had done everything I knew to do.  These guilt emotions were familiar to me.  When I was very young, my parents divorced.  The guilt feelings developed then; now they were back.  This is nothing less than emotional trauma.  After consulting with my highly sensitive friends (hsps, empaths), I figured out how to deal with the situation.  I'll talk about the symptoms, the investigation, and the recovery of this trauma.

The first thing I want to talk about is the symptoms.  For me the symptoms were emotional and a little weird.  Overall I felt fine, but the underline emotion was not fine at all.  I could sense that.   I couldn't shake my mood.  It was like my emotional being was preoccupied, and it couldn't handle any new emotional situations.  So I was not myself.  In that state you question what could be the matter.  I had to rationally think of what the matter was.  I could not use my intuition to help with that but I had to use my analytical brain.  A sense of panic was starting to come over me, and a sense of hopelessness as well.

To get a handle on my emotional situation, I had to go into a deep meditation state and started to ask questions to myself.  These were inquisitive and investigative questions.  I got my answer.  It was guilt I was experiencing.  Then I kept on asking questions on why the guilt was.  I got my answer again.  It was a guilt pattern as when my parents divorced.  To me that was a revelation.  Years before, I wondered if I experienced guilt due to the divorce.  I was very young and did not remember much from that time.  I only remembered some glimpses of scenes.  You really don't want to remember the bad stuff.  Sometimes you just blank out the bad stuff, but emotional evidence of them will probably remain.

The first step of recovery for me was in the meditative state.  I reasoned out my feeling of guilt.  I told myself that my parents divorce was not my responsibility and was not my fault.  Surprisingly that went quite well.  I suppose it's because over the years I gathered enough information about the divorce, and I reasoned how it indeed was not my fault.  So it seems though I knew that, I still had a pattern of guilt operating in me.  Now I was dealing with it.  Then I had to move on to the more recent situation.  I told myself that I was not responsible for the outcome and that I did do what I needed to do.  That I also did everything in my power to make things better.  That was the first step.  The next steps is day by day living with the outcome.  Though I feel fine, I do have a residual feeling that I went through something very traumatic.  So I have to take it easy.  I have to do some grounding exercises, and push out the old emotion to move on.  It's a struggle, I have to admit.  It will take time to fully recover.

Trauma of any kind has symptoms, needs an investigation, and demands a recovery.  Emotional trauma is not different.  You may experience some emotional shock.  Make sure that you keep yourself comfortable, warm, and hydrated.  Talk to others to help sort out the pieces.  Seeking help from a psychological counselor is a good idea.  These old emotions are wounds that have festered over years.  Recovery won't be immediate, but immediate headway is possible.  I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist.  I'm just a highly sensitive person sharing my experiences, recommendations, and opinions.