Trauma is Recycled By Rationalization

I want to talk about legacy emotions, what they are and why it's so important to realize what they are and how they show up. So legacy emotions, they're really from the past, they're from difficult experiences we had in the past and they're so kind of overwhelming when they happen to us. It's something that we can't really process from the past. Obviously it's traumas or it's past failed relationships or disappointments, pain essentially from the past, often from childhood really. And the real big ones we're looking at here are any kind of sense of being abandoned. The really big one, the legacy emotion that shows up for a lot of us is guilt and guilt is a strange one. Really when we're talking about guilt, what we're talking about is a kind of a sense that there's something wrong with me or unworthiness or inferiority, those types of feelings. Shame is another one. And then of course the last one then is this feeling of anxiety that shows up in our life. Really if you wanted to add another one, you could add in anger. Anger is quite often a legacy emotion. Okay, so it's, I'm going about my day to day life and these emotions are showing up. Okay, now if we don't understand that a lot of these emotions that we're experiencing are due to the past, they're old and maybe we repressed them and pushed them away because we couldn't deal with them at that point. Well, the problem with that is now in our day to day life, these emotions are surfacing and we go into these rationalizations about why do I feel like this? There's nothing obvious I can really point to. And if we can't find anything obvious, well, we go into a story or we go into, we kind of formulate some kind of explanation, desperately trying to understand why this feeling is here. So I'm not saying that there's nothing that could happen in your, in your day to day life that would make you feel anxious, for instance, okay. But typically what we'll find is maybe an anxiety provoking event comes up in your, in your day to day life, in your current life. Okay, there'll be some anxiety around that, but quite often that anxiety itself is piled up on from this legacy negative anxiety that we carry with us from the past. So really what we're talking about here is noticing all often, especially when you feel one of these legacy emotions of maybe being isolated, abandoned, unworthy, guilty, ashamed, or anxious or angry, that we don't really need to find an explanation for them. In fact, we don't even quite often need to go into where is this coming from exactly in my past. Really what we're looking at here is the whole trick about this is to just not go into rationalizations about what this emotion means in the here and now. Okay. It's through rationalization that we really avoid just dealing with it when it's here. Okay. These stories and these explanations really are all up here and the experience emotionally for these legacy emotions is in here. It's in our body. So when we just give ourselves full permission to accept, okay, this is probably coming from the past. One question we can ask ourselves when feelings like this come up in our modern current life is, is this the first time I've ever felt this emotion? And, you know, typically if it's a legacy emotion, we would have been carrying it for such a long time that it shows up again and again. And we realize, okay, there's a pattern here with this. This is just a feeling that wants to come up. Now the experience wants to be given some space to be met without judgment or the need to go into a rational rationalization, which is really just a way to avoid dealing with it. How do we deal with it? Again, it's just to completely give yourself permission to experience it. Okay. And the tricky one here is any feelings of guilt that we have. Okay. Because guilt is basically, it's really the most important one of all. Now it's not the deepest one, the deepest of these legacy emotions, perhaps the most painful of them all is this feeling of being abandoned. But of course we go into stories around that. And this is where this guilt comes from the shame that there's something wrong with me. And so many of us have this story, this legacy emotion of guilt or unworthiness or shame. If we can start to be with that and come out of the story of there's something wrong with me and actually into your body and realize, if I don't put any labels on this, what is this? Okay. Even if you remove in your experience in that, this guilt and shame, what if you just remove the word guilt? What if you remove the word shame or embarrassment or unworthiness? And just really bring all your focus, attention and awareness into the actual experience of that sensation in your body. Now you're doing something very different. You're certainly not in a rationalization about it anymore. So this is the opportunity now is for us to realize where have I been rationalizing about my anxiety? Where have I been rationalizing about my unworthiness or maybe my inferiority, feelings or complexes? Or where have I been rationalizing about being rejected or abandoned? And actually just go into the experience itself. Okay. Without the labels, without the stories, without embellishing it other than just the experience it is in itself. It's kind of a difficult thing to explain, but it's just the awareness that you bring awareness without judgment to that experience in the body. We'll do more than five therapy sessions talking about it. So it's really the much more direct approach to dealing with this old stuff from the past. Really, this is what a lot of things like meditation is all about. Meditation is like, okay, I'm not going to distract myself. I'm not going to be busy. I'm going to take some time to sit and be with myself. And, you know, I'm going to sit and be with myself and I'm not going to really go in here with any agenda at all. I'm going to go in here and just show up and see what's going on inside myself. And typically when we do that, if there are these legacy emotions, if we do that regularly enough, we will come into contact with these legacy emotions. Okay. They're always with us. So through meditation, we show up not to change it, not to get rid of it, just to show up and without an agenda, notice it, become aware of it itself. The actual feeling in the body. Of course, meditation is all about kind of, you know, you observe your thoughts and you let the thoughts pass by because you're not going into the thoughts. You're going into the actual experience of what it's like to just be with myself. So this whole, the point of this video, just to recap on this is legacy emotions. When we rationalize them and we go into a story, we keep them. It's a way that they stay with us. Okay. Because really they're going to come up. It requires a huge amount of energy to keep them repressed and pushed down. Invariably we slip, if you like. And then these emotions do start to come up again. And it's through rationalization that we keep recycling them and they'll go back down. They're not dealt with and they go back down and then they come up again. So it's this kind of a recycling of legacy emotions through rationalization about them. If we come out of the rationalization and into the awareness, into the permission, into just acknowledging the emotion without any labels, there's a huge degree of progress you can make with that. So maybe give that a go on your own practice and just something to think about. Hope it's helpful. And as always, thanks for joining me here. And I'll talk with you again soon. Bye for now.