The truth about releasing your trapped emotions inside

There’s a lot of information on how to deal with emotions inside of us, and to be honest, most of the information is misleading and incorrect. This isn’t purposely done so don’t think that people are intentionally trying to mislead others. The fact is that most solutions presented on how to deal with our emotions and release them have been published by those that have not successfully done it themselves. My intention in writing this, for you, is to give you some clarification on what actually needs to be done if a person truly wants to change their emotional state.

Releasing emotions versus expressing emotions

Most people think that when they are expressing their emotions, they are somehow releasing them from their minds and body. This is not true.

Here’s an example of expressing emotions:

Person A gets mad because Person B said or did something to him so he goes and tells Person B what he thought about the situation and how mad he is about it. He expresses his emotions by speaking loudly and acting in an aggressive manner.

After this happens, person A feels better, because he thinks that “justice is served “and he is able to express himself without holding it inside. He now believes that the motion has been released.

When this is done, this creates a couple of effects. First of all, person A is conditioning himself in thinking and feeling in the same state as the anger that he just experienced. In other words, he is conditioning his body to feel the sensation of anger by expressing it in anger. He is also conditioning his mind to think in the perspective of anger when he told person B what was on his mind as he was feeling angry. These actions continue to support both his body and mind to have anger more easily triggered in the future.  

The reason why Person A feels better by expressing his anger is that he was able to let it out so the energy wasn’t causing further discomfort inside the body and mind. However, by doing so, he also develops habits, behaviors, and thoughts to further create more anger in his life. The more he tries to express anger to release it, the more easily he can become angry in the future.

Second, when person A expresses his anger to person B,  person B will become angry, and offended, and will defend his position and give his side of the story in anger as well. This will only cause person A to become angrier, fueling this vicious cycle, which is how arguments and fights are created. Even if person B does not react in anger and tries to stay calm, this event will cause damage to their relationship. Person B will remember what happened and the next interaction with person A will already have underlying emotions which will lead to more anger and conflict.

Here’s the same example of releasing emotions:

In the same situation as before, Person A is angry because Person B did or said something to cause Person A to be angry.

Instead of expressing his anger at Person B, he decides to relax his body which is tense from being anger, he brings his attention to his breaths as he slows them down, and he fully feels his body where he is experiencing the emotion.  The relaxing of his body allows him to feel his emotions more easily and the act of feeling the emotions allows them to be released.

Person A realizes that he is responsible for the way he feels therefore he doesn’t blame Person B for his anger.  He does his best to speak calmly and with respect as he continues to relax, feel and release his emotional charge.  Reacting this way also helps Person B recognize his own behavior towards Person A and he may end up apologizing if he thought his actions were wrong, or simply remain calm because he is not being emotionally triggered by Person A’s anger.  

This is a general but very common scenario of the difference between expressing vs releasing emotions.  

To further explain this approach to releasing emotions instead of expressing I’ll use the analogy about getting rid of bullets from a gun

To release your chamber of bullets in your gun, you can either fire them at something, or someone, or you can simply release them from the gun by opening up the chamber and removing each bullet.

Both methods will release the bullets at this moment. If you decide to release bullets from your chamber by firing them all the time, you will continue to condition yourself with the behavior of firing bullets from your gun. If you decide to, instead, remove the bullets from your gun chamber, you condition yourself not to shoot things anymore and just remove bullets from your gun chamber every time you accumulate them.

Over time you will stop accumulating bullets in your gun chamber and become less encouraged to shoot things.

Learning how to connect to your body, so you can release your emotions, is a skill set like anything else in life. If you’re committed to learning how to do this, you will improve and master this ability.  

In my younger years, I did not realize how much my emotions have dictated the way I think, act and feel and all of the outcomes of my life. Now that I have connected the dots to how much our emotions really affect every aspect of our life and that the most important factor is changing our state of mind, I have made it my mission to spread this information on how to do so.