Mental health articles

How to Stop Negative Feelings

Working through negative feelings

It is absolutely necessary to work through most or all of these negative feelings. If they did happen to arise from your parents being unable to love you in the way that you needed to be loved, then there are some inherently powerful conflicts lying under the surface. I am not saying here that your parents did not love you, but I am saying that they may not have loved you in the natural and healthy way that you needed to be loved, as a baby and as a child. They were probably not perfect, nor did they always get it right for you.

It was not necessarily their fault, so they should not be blamed. They tried hard and did well according to their own lights. And it was also not your fault, yet you are the one who is suffering from some of this deficit, and you are the one who is having to carry the consequences. And you may be caught by having to love them as well. Part of you, I am sure, does love them. But there is a part of you (because of the existence of these negative emotions) that may not be able to do so easily. So, they have to be worked through. The traumatic events that tend to create these negative feelings may have occurred as the result of an incident or accident, or a circumstance in childhood that (say) took one of your parents away from you, or from a bad school experience, or a hospitalization or illness that made things very difficult, or from some other form of distress or abuse. No one is really to blame in this sort of situation. But they also have a profound emotional impact.

When we do not receive the right emotional “food” in childhood, then our “emotional body” cannot grow up properly and healthily. The result of this emotional lack creates an effect, such as low self-esteem, or the need for recognition and appreciation, for example. This process can be seen to be a little like the childhood disease of rickets. (Rickets is a distortion of the bones in childhood, caused by a lack of vitamin D, that leads to the leg bones being too soft when they are growing, resulting in bent legs or lameness.) So the “lack” of the “right stuff” in childhood causes a distortion throughout their life. Luckily, with the right sort of help, even later in life, our emotional bodies can pick up again, and start to heal, when we start to address these negative feelings and begin to work with them more positively.

Tags: feelings, negative, negative feelings