Have you ever felt an emotion that didn’t make sense, because as you recall back into your personal history – there isn’t anything that these feelings could connect to make sense of why you feel the way you do?
Why is it so hard to change?
Why does it feel so real – but it doesn’t make sense?
Why is it so hard to “let go”? You want to, but your emotional responses of fear or anger keep showing up! Why won’t they go away?
Why are the emotions, the feelings, your reactions bigger than “normal”?
When we enter into the world of Mental Health we learn what emotions really mean to us personally, how they connect and relate to our mind & body, to our immediate world at home, work, school, and how they connect & relate to the world around us.
When we respond in anger, especially the kind that causes us to feel guilty afterwards, anger is most often a symptom of an emotional wound in need of healing.
Science continues to evolve as we dig deeper into the meanings of each emotion and how they show up in brain scans and throughout the body. Dr. Galit Atlas, an award winning psychoanalyst has participated in decades of research to help us identify the links between our life struggles and the “emotional inheritance” we carry.
“What we’re talking about when we talk about emotional inheritance is those experiences that our ancestors had… With humans, we’re thinking about right now only our parents and grandparents and maybe great, great grandparents, which means that in therapy, I sit not only with you but with your parents and with your grandparents. So we have many generations in the room with us… Through the expression of genes. It doesn’t change the genes, it changes the expression of the genes, which some people like to call it memory. The genes have memory. The epigenetic research can tell us something really important about the expression of genes and what we carry from generation-to-generation… what we find in our clinical work that is fascinating is that we don’t only inherit the anxiety, for example, or the biological piece. But we also know something about the content.”
– Dr. Galit Atlas, author of “Emotional Inheritance“
She continues to write about her book saying, “The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, and these things shape our lives in ways we don’t always recognize.”
Learning about her work in epigenetics really gave me a renewed perspective on my own emotional healing work. I felt moved to put this new knowledge of what we all experience, as we choose to confront the difficult emotions and learn more about where they come from, and how to transform them into expressions of love, into a visual illustration:
As we sit down to mindfully and intentionally speak to those parts of us that show up as overwhelm, anxiety, anger, sadness, loneliness, confusion, depression and grief… the parts of us that connect to hard experiences we’ve had and the deeper parts that are presently unknown where they root from… we discover that all of our emotions, memories, physical reactions are valid and true to the reality of what we feel! Literally, physical parts of us – the DNA that programmed our body, stores the memories of not just our own lived experiences – but also those ancestors who lived before us.
How our body responds to those memories connected to those very real feelings is what we can choose to better understand. When we understand better where they come from, we have the opportunity to transform them into feelings of compassion – and that compassion is what heals our mind & body over time as we learn new ways how to understand & respond to life.
In this painting the people don’t have faces because in therapy we focus on feelings we can’t always see, emotions that often times lack all the words to completely describe the feelings. But as we continue to do our best to understand the “why” behind the way we respond to others and the way we respond to ourselves, more clarity rises to the surface and our mind becomes less tangled and more organized. That’s a great feeling! 🙂
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