If we reach for our app to spiral up, all hell breaks loose in our amygdala.
It's committed to avoiding feelings, which is a circuit of its own. That's not new information if you are an EBTer, as it shows up as resistance to reaching for the app and beginning to travel along the brain's resilience pathway by talking about what is bothering us.
The first lead-in is "The situation is . . ." which should amount to a welcome opportunity to unload whatever is on our mind, but often it is stressful. We have to gather our thoughts and talk about what is bothering us. It's so much easier to distract ourselves with one of dozens of Survival Circuits (read: addiction).
Whether you are just starting EBT or a seasoned EBTer, consider finding your "I suppress my emotions" wire and seeing if a more global approach to your emotional health is helpful.
I get my X (need) from Y (an external solution)
How might that look? Well, it means using the formula for all the addictions, which is: I get my fundamental need from something that doesn't meet that need and, in fact, blocks my joy in the long term.
If you are intrigued by finding your "I suppress my emotions" wire, consider finding it. Just start your Cycle with, "The situation is . . . I do whatever I can to distract myself from feeling. I learned early in life that feelings were bad, and I override them with overthinking, and my whole family does that—or expresses feelings in explosive, unhealthy, and self-damaging ways . . ."
Here are a few common unreasonable expectations to get your emotional juices flowing:
I get my existence from shutting down my emotions.
I get my safety from avoiding my feelings.
I get my comfort from resisting emotions.
I get my survival from denying my feelings.
Emotional clutter removal?
If you are like me, once I discover a circuit, my emotional clutter starts showing up with images of when that wire was encoded. My mind goes back to having stomachaches at the kitchen table during stressful family dinners.
At the time, I didn't have the skills to process my emotions effectively, so it wasn't that I was addicted to emotional suppression but that I had no effective process for doing something with my feelings.
However, any maladaptive pattern caused by not knowing better can morph into a Survival Circuit because it becomes familiar and, therefore, rewarding.
My emotional suppression wire was "I get my safety from ignoring my feelings and focusing on the feelings of others."
Can't you hear a merge circuit lurking there?
If it's not fun, it's not EBT
Then the fun begins because the brain's reward center starts those dopamine surges that come from self-recognition, really knowing and understanding ourselves.
If you start on this pathway to stop the emotional suppression, notice that desire to understand how this all started. For me, emotional suppression went from a skill insufficiency to a drive at the age of 12, when I did not know who I was, and the pain of it all was too great. Having no feelings or dimming them turned into a Survival Circuit.
Check with others in your support group. Perhaps they have an emotional suppression circuit, too. As always, have fun with rewiring. The biggest joy in life is knowing ourselves on the deepest possible level, and perhaps discovering this circuit will bring that for you!
In the meantime, please check the next blog for another way to avoid the emotional bypass.