Sometimes the weight of adverse experiences crystallizes within us in the form of emotional "knots", states that block our well-being and our human potential. How to act in these cases?
Last update: June 08, 2022
Many of us carry the weight of pending situations that hurt, slow down and distort reality. You see everything with more gray tones, despondency and even the mind has difficulty thinking clearly and making decisions. In these cases it is essential to untie the emotional knots.
It is quite difficult to manage one's psychological universe. Translating what we feel into words means giving space and presence to what happens to us. However, many times we choose to repress or avoid any emotion we feel, especially if it has a negative value. Disappointments, fears, sadness and anguish are relegated to a "disaster drawer" deep in the mind.
Similarly, an increasingly frequent phenomenon appears today. When life hurts, we prefer to get distracted, escape from reality. This immature strategy reinforces emotional blocks or knots.
Nowadays mobile phones, social networks and everything that new technologies offer us are full of stimuli that allow us to flee momentarily from what worries us.
Ignored emotions have physical and mental repercussions. We must take action with adequate strategies to understand, regulate and channel every sensation, feeling and experience.
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, enjoy them and dominate them.
-Oscar Wilde-
How to untie the emotional knots
By emotional knots we mean the set of unregulated psychophysiological feelings and sensations that remain within us. They are due to one or more adverse experiences not addressed.
The knot analogy is not accidental. What is not managed hinders and blocks well-being. Inside of us we feel a block that affects emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally.
In the same way, it is common to carry on this psychological reality for years and even decades. The consequences of a breakup, for example, can accompany us for half of our life.
The same goes for frustrated expectations, disappointments, mistakes or disagreements with loved ones can harbor in a corner of the mind to distill constant but silent suffering.
In general, these discomforts have their origin in the past. They become knots because instead of dealing with emotions, we repress them and turn our eyes elsewhere. We take it for granted that time heals and even erases what hurts us. However, a study by the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India clarifies one detail.
Emotional repression has a serious impact on health and very often causes depression. What can we do then to undo the emotional knots?
"You can't untie a knot without knowing how it is tied."
-Aristotle-
Observe, try and recognize
We are not our emotions. We are not the sadness, pain or anger we feel. We are the people who contain those emotional states and we can regulate them. To use a simile: we are the bottle that contains a drink made with many ingredients. The ideal is to understand which ingredients make up this "liquid".
To do this, it is necessary not to run away from what hurts and to tune in to what the body and mind transmit. Let's give presence to every feeling and let's call it by its name.
"Here is the hatred, the frustration, the anger, the anxiety, the sadness, etc." Remember that emotions offer information about what is happening to us and are the key to untying emotional knots.
Validate and vent: all emotions are allowed
We have opened the bottle of our emotions and we have them in front of us. The feeling is not comfortable, it is true, it is not easy to open yesterday's wounds and see what they are made of.
However, you have to accept every emotion and allow yourself to feel it. They are there for a reason, let's not repress them, let's not look for escape routes to disguise suffering. Let's accept them and don't be afraid to express them and let off steam.
Everything we feel is lawful, let's not judge ourselves for having felt so much sadness, for having felt anger, fear or disappointment.
Process, accept and integrate that part of your story
Emotional knots are the ballast of badly resolved stories. Aftermath that we preferred to forget or move from the mind and which, however, remained there, latent to alter your well-being.
The time has come to integrate those experiences into the narrative of our life, but reinterpret them in a different way. A healthier, braver and more resilient way.
Speak to yourself with compassion, affection and love and give those experiences another meaning. They made us suffer, it is true, but we are no longer the same people as yesterday, but capable of overcoming the past and courageously moving towards the present.
Feeding healthier thoughts to untie emotional knots
The mind is inhabited by cognitive biases that intensify the emotional knots. Telling ourselves phrases like “I have to be brave and turn the page”, “I have to go on forgetting everything that happened”, “I have to be strong and stop joking” only adds to the suffering.
Using healthier thinking means speaking respectfully to each other without invalidating what you are feeling. No one is weak or imperfect because they have accepted to feel hurt. Nor for allowing yourself to be vulnerable and vent what generates anger or frustration.
Authentic intelligence consists in giving presence to every emotion, in understanding its message, not letting ourselves be carried away by it and regulating it.
We think and reason in a healthy way so that every emotional knot loses strength. Don't be your worst enemies, talk to yourself as you would talk to the people you love and respect. Healing is a journey of ups and downs where only we are our best allies.
