Plum, I was wondering if you had an explanation for this question. If our repressed emotion is in the unconscious ( we are not aware of them) then why do we journal and try to figure out what they are? Are we never to figure that out? Are we only to be aware that this is the reason we have pain? If it is unconscious, then we theoretically will never know what they are. Then, what is the point? Is that why people who beat their pain just say to let go? I really appreciate your answers. You are very knowledgable and helpful.
Ines,
Your questions tease the quixotic heart of tms and while there may be as many answers as there are people, I shall attempt to grapple the mystery into some semblance of order. Consider it a
working hypothesis rather than anything definitive.
The short answer is
we journal to develop an awareness of our emotions, and with that a very real sense of how our emotions are connected to the reactions of our body. Journalling is simply a tool to garner this joint awareness, so much as I mentioned in the post above while we are aware of these in relation to stress, with tms we are not. Journalling helps us deepen our consideration and sentience of them in relation to our pain and the hows and whys it serves to protect us. Invariably these are very personal and intimate and journalling affords us a place and process to do so gently and compassionately.
You don't have to journal in order to reconnect to your emotions. You can favour more body-oriented approaches. You certainly don't need to dig around till you find the seed. It really is enough to know that you have built an emotional castle around your heart and that your body is armoured. It is the shedding of this unconscious padding and protection that heals, not the means or the ends in themselves.
***
The elaborate answer is we
do not journal to seek out and destroy our pain. This is effectively putting the cart before the horse. Rather while we are focusing on the psychological, we are
simultaneously tuning into the arising physical sensations which hopefully will help lead us to the emotion that has been repressed. Thus journalling can assist us in feeling and recognising our true emotions (catharsis and insight). Once we achieve this, the need to create distractions through pain dissolves.
The first step is to become a little more emotionally literate by simply writing about how we feel. With time we naturally begin to integrate emotions with our personal story and it becomes clear where we have dissociated, numbed out or cast our emotions into the shadows because to feel them would be too dangerous.
This is where our pain speaks for us; the rage we dare not express, the grief that eats away at us, the fear that we suppress, all locked down beneath the veneer of holding ourselves together, fitting in and being good. But that is not who we are. We are wild and primal at heart and at our core.
We journal in the spirit of increasingly being able to consciously bear the unconscious emotions. As we explore events and memories on the page we develop emotional resilience and self-guided emotional release. The page is a safe place for us to clarify, nourish, focus and practice self-expression. Journalling unravels knots by helping us develop our natural voice and confidence in its expression. It is a way of penetrating our inner self and noting patterns and meaning, expression and reflection, imagination and dreams.
Events themselves exist somewhere in spacetime but our emotions live timelessly within us. The nervous system is a closed circuit and so the
unexpressed emotional energy will lodge somewhere. Thus many people are emotionally constipated. They do not feel the waves of feelings as they pass through the emotional digestive tract* and the net result is undigested fragments of memory and feeling, bio-chemical messages that are marked
return to sender embedded in the body (the body is the subconscious mind - Candace Pert) as pain, stiffness and tension.
When people who have recovered speak of letting go they refer jointly to outcome independence and this emotional cleansing and liberation.
I hope this helps a bit.
Plum x
*The smart vagus..?
The vagus nerve is poetically called
"The Wanderer" and anatomically the tenth cranial nerve. It links head-brain to primal/gut-brain.
