Tag: emotions

Buried emotions that dance around the graveyard of my mind

Posted on by philipdodson

A lot of my life I have been deaf through talking when I could have chosen to listen, I have starved people of the oxygen to explain themselves and left them fighting to be understood. The fear of being wrong if I listened coupled with wanting to earn another badge of being right.

The attention was gained from hogging the mic, talking the loudest, I’m right.

This is part of the journey that is hard, this where I have been in the last few years, in an emotional dark hole inside me. Braving up to the demons, dragging those buried emotions out of the graves inside my head, where I thought they would all rest in peace and leave me alone. But they didn’t stay in their graves, they danced all over their graves and haunted me.

The last 6-7 years, maybe more intensely in last 2-3 years, and now, as an ongoing journey of rumbling with and digging deep into the emotions of the past, I have been unpicking the past and I have been re-writing the past, changing the narrative to the real truth, not some other ‘truth’ that I have been telling myself, that I have been conditioned to think by ‘them’. ‘Them’ being the others, society all the people who have no right to tell me who I am, how I should behave, think, act. I am now taking ownership of my story, I am now choosing to be the star in my own life film instead of being a frustrated extra.

That way I can become an even better listener and give people who matter to me the oxygen they need to be understood, to tell their story, to share their narrative.

In order to move forward, we have to go back and dig up the emotions that are buried in the dark places. We have to be brave enough to face them, understand them and write a narrative that moves us forward and serves us well. Talking badly to ourselves serves us and everyone else around us badly.

I have learnt to be kind to myself, empathetic to myself, to change my inner voice, to be brave enough to face the emotions and demons. I am still digging up more in the huge cemetery that is the dark corner of Philip’s mind. It is an ongoing journey and a big task as the body count has been high in my life, the corpses have piled high, like an emotional Battle of the Somme.

Was or is it easy? No. But it is a whole lot better than having those demons, untruths and emotions dancing around my mind and preventing me from being me and living my life.

You have to see pain and suffering with purpose, as Viktor Frankl did on an epic scale, and then you can face anything because the pain has a meaning.

Despair = suffering – meaning (Thanks, Chip Conley for these wonderful and simple equations).

The more meaning to the suffering the less the despair.

The dancing party for my demons and untruths is coming to an end, they are running out of songs.

Emotional healing

Posted on by philipdodson


Our emotions are complex things.

Yet, we are conditioned to bury them, to trivialise them and to just soldier on, be tough.

In life we suffer from moments of humiliation, shaming, feeling uncomfortable.

We suffer loss either through the death of someone we care about, or the end of a relationship.

We suffer upheaval of things from the past coming back into our lives that bring back painful memories that we have been conditioned to bury.

We are lead to believe that showing our emotions is a sign of weakness.

Most of us struggle in expressing our emotions, most of us don’t share our real emotions, even with people we are close to.

Our world is often harsh, lacking in compassion, understanding and empathy.

Yet the strongest cultures, teams, families, relationships, connections, bonds and trust comes when we are prepared to be open, vulnerable and to share and be comfortable with our true emotions.

There are three important elements in creating this.

Firstly, we need to create a safe, non-judgemental environment to allow others to feel comfortable in sharing their true emotions and to do that we have to allow others to speak without reply.

Second, we need to all learn the art of listening, and that is true listening with empathy, not the listening where we are only thinking about what we are going to say next and trying to ‘fix’ the other person. They do not want to hear your autobiography, people want people to listen with genuine empathy, understanding and to be without evaluation.

Lastly, we need to have patience, and an ability to walk in moment in the other person’s shoes and understand that no one is broken and their emotions and journey is unique and that their emotions are important to them and we need to be respectful of them and be encouraging to them in sharing and being accepting of their emotions.

The real key element is empathetic listening, not autobiographical advising and fixing.

As always life is about the human touch, kindness, compassion, understanding and allowing ourselves and others to be vulnerable.

The greatest wisdom is to listen without evaluation.

Allowing people to express openly their true emotions gives them a space to heal, a opportunity to delve into those emotions, understand what causes them and then look to write a different narrative in their heads and with world, so that they can move on.

Burying emotions is what brings us all down.

True courage comes from allowing our emotions not from hiding and burying them. This is how we heel and we owe it to the world to help others feel safe enough to express their emotions and to help them to heal. It is how we all feel better.