"The body keeps the score, and it always wins.

Your biography becomes your biology."

Bessel van der Kolk, MD

Introduction

Emotions shape the essence of our lives, lifting us to the greatest heights or plunging us into the deepest lows. Our innate ability to experience joy, love and happiness enriches our lives and the lives of others. Still, knowing this, we don’t receive emotional education at school teaching how to deal with negative feelings and trauma to improve personal happiness and mental health. If someone tells you it is needless to have emotions and feelings, stop there and check if this person can experience good feelings. If not, it’s a problem. Our positive and negative emotions are essential to our survival. However, good feelings don’t last. Bad feelings prevail, leaving us in a constant loop of feeling low and depressed.

Why do we feel bad? Why are we stuck in a negative cycle of emotion?

Throughout my life, I often asked myself those questions, wondering why I have a phobia or anger triggered by people’s behaviour and trivial situations. I wanted to understand the deep psychology behind the causes of anxieties limiting people’s lives. I struggled with fears and depressive states that were blocking my personal growth at work and in romantic relationships. I wondered why some people had more emotional baggage than others.

Nearly a decade ago, I began experimenting with personal growth, emotions and healing, revealing valuable insights about myself and my past. On that memorable day, I unlocked the door to my biggest phobia, the fear of public speaking. I lay on the bed with my eyes closed. In my imagination, I focused on a terrifying scene from my past of me giving a public speaking presentation at work. The audience’s eyes were fixed on me, the drops of sweat were dripping on the edge of my temples, my heartbeat was racing, and the loud thoughts about how useless I was when presenting flooded my mind.

Deep breaths and mindful focus on feelings and body sensations opened the gate to my past. An image of my surroundings as an infant appeared in my mind, a memory of my birth. Surrounded by medical staff, I felt a rush of anxiety. I connected to the fear and broke into a raw and deep weeping. I understood that to uncover the fear of public speaking; I had to experience the deeper layer, the fear of dying created when I was born.

Our emotional triggers, loaded with negative feelings of fear, anger and sadness, are windows to our subconscious mind with stored emotional experiences that can impact us in various ways, like, in my case, creating anxiety. That night, I didn’t just cry but experienced a cathartic healing, a release of survival energy trapped in my body and mind that came from an event I’d never known about. The act of crying and connecting to the very first traumatic event – my birth resulted in a permanent change in the way I felt daily. I haven’t resolved my fear of public speaking completely, but I’ve become more confident as the anxious lump in my psyche that I carried my whole life was gone. I always felt uneasy, but I couldn’t tell until I released it and felt the difference emotionally after processing the grief.

This initial cathartic experience gave me confidence that instead of managing my anxiety, I could take action to release it for good. The new perspective set me on the path of self-discovery and inner child healing. It ignited my determination to heal the past and my negative emotions. Initially, I perceived phobia, anger or feeling bad about myself as obstacles to my growth. They became a source of self-empowerment and unlimited healing potential we all once possessed as children.

This book aims to share a simple yet powerful practical process for healing negative emotions and trauma. With enclosed exercises and insights collected from years of my emotional processing, you can develop skills and emotional resources to improve your mental health and transform destructive behaviours driven by past experiences and trapped feelings.

How are Negative Emotions Created?

Negative feelings burden us with their pain and overwhelm. But those feelings serve a purpose. They make us aware when we are treated unjustly, without respect, or when someone crosses our boundaries. These automatic responses protect (to fear) and defend (to anger) us. Negative emotions give us deep insights into who we are and what happened to us. It's like a gate we can open to access snapshots of the past and how we have become who we are. Who we have become has a close link with our childhood, with the conditioning and trauma we have endured.

Traumais a lasting emotional response to living through a stressful event in adulthood or childhood. As a result of trauma, the person faces a range of negative feelings that can cause flashbacks (reliving the past trauma in the given moment) or dysregulated emotional reactions, often expressed as emotional triggers in dreams or daily situations involving people and circumstances. Trauma inhibits a person's connection to their authentic self and true emotions, causing dysfunction in personal and professional relationships.

We can distinguish between overt and covert trauma. Child neglect and separation from caregivers, parent's death and abandonment, household dysfunction (mental illness, domestic violence, parent divorce, substance abuse, and incarcerated relative), and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are overt traumas. Attachment trauma and unmet childhood needs, such as the need for safety, unconditional love, connection and boundaries, can be seen as forms of covert trauma with long-lasting impacts on an individual's emotional and psychological well-being. A surgery or surviving natural disaster can also cause trauma. Trauma happens as a one-off event or multiple events. Covert trauma can have a significant impact on a person's life when many events occur over a person's lifetime rather than one single event. Accumulation of those adverse events can lead to mental health struggles.

One of the facets of covert trauma is childhood conditioning. Parents and society teach children what it means to be a good boy or a good girl through the lens of their belief systems, personal trauma, and their own childhood experiences. As children, we may have adopted a skewed perception of personal boundaries. To be a good child, we may have to be quiet, not disturb anyone, and never say no to others. We found ourselves responsible for our parents' feelings and expectations. The child will suppress feelings about saying no and being authentic to suit the environment. A parent may disapprove of a child's unusual hobby as not good enough and without prospects. The child will take note and dismiss this part of their identity as not good enough and worthless, creating a blockage to potential sources of natural talents and joy in pursuing them.

When a parent notices only the child's achievements in the subjects they endorse, it creates a feeling and belief system in the child, saying: we love you for what you do, not who you are. Caregivers and society teach children what love is, how to love by the behaviour they model, and how they treat the children and each other. Emotionally neglected children, as well as spoiled or put on a pedestal in childhood, can develop narcissistic traits. When a parent doesn't spend quality time with their child, the child can't establish a secure and loving connection with the parent. The child's mind will form false conclusions and beliefs about themselves and why the parent behaves this way. It's saner for the child to conclude that something is wrong with them instead of the parent they depend on to survive.

Small children communicate using emotions. Before we were able to speak and form thoughts, we were able to feel first. We all once had an innate ability to feel overwhelming emotions. That is what kept us authentic and connected. While growing up, we learned to forget how to feel; we switched to our minds and thoughts because it was safer than feeling. We lost the innate capability to stay connected and heal ourselves by disowning the parts of ourselves that our parents and society did not accept. When we expressed sadness or anger as children, our parents and society may have dismissed these feelings, preventing us from experiencing them. Lack of attunement by our caregivers to our emotional needs raised our survival response, losing connection to ourselves and in turn adapting to the needs and expectations of our environment. One generation passes these teachings to the next, perpetuating the cycle of pain and emotional dysregulation.

Emotionally suppressed parents avoid their emotions and discourage their children from expressing them. Often, parents pressure their child to stop crying, saying it's not so bad, projecting false positivity. Later, positivity is employed in adulthood to distance oneself from one's experiences and self. Not to cry in pain means to suppress it instead. Caregivers don't accept bad feelings in children as those feelings remind them of their unresolved wounds. Parents use manipulative techniques like bribery with sweat and activities/toys to stop tears. They make violent threats when the child doesn't comply. This teaching has a significant impact on dealing with trauma and negative emotions later in life. By the time we reach adulthood, denial and dissociation of emotions become a default unconscious method when coping with the slightest emotional overwhelm and negativity.

Society and caregivers urge us to suppress and numb our responses to emotional events following belief system; for example, to show emotion is weak, you must be strong; big girls don't cry; good girls don't cry, and so on. Our environment decided it was too painful and too hard to feel those feelings. We became puzzles trimmed to fit the existing belief systems and expectations. However, when we view this belief system logically, strength and courage are required to deal with pain, not the opposite. These qualities aren't needed when suppressing and avoiding pain, as it's easy to deny, avoid, dissociate, and reject negative feelings. To survive, we comply with demands and take on a façade, a mask, to get love, support and approval from the caregivers and the society.

Experiences of overt and covert trauma in childhood cause a surge of fight, flight or freeze survival energy responses. We can translate these energies into anger, fear, and terror emotions. Children dissociate from the negative experience by disconnecting from their bodies and feelings to feel safe and comfortable. Dissociation ensures a child's psychological survival. It's too painful and overwhelming to experience those feelings. Stuck negative feelings create holes and emotional wounds in the child's psyche. False beliefs about love form in the formative years of childhood, impacting personality and distort our authentic selves. Love is unconditional, but we learn through wrong conditioning, inadequate treatment, and parental expectations that love is conditional and we must behave in a certain way to be important, loved, and protected. In adulthood, we use this distorted perception of love to form relationships with others and ourselves.

The body and mind store the response of survival energy created during a traumatic event as an emotional signature in the memory and nervous system, making associations between the negative feelings and characteristics of the traumatic event. The rush of trauma energy (emotions) must be completed in the nervous system, meaning it must be emotionally processed. Emotions are energies in motion. They need to flow in the body and mind as energy. Suppose the channel of unresolved trauma in childhood remains open in the nervous system. In that case, it stagnates and gets stored in the nervous system affecting the person in adulthood. It remains open until it's resolved. An individual will experience the world, others and himself through the lens and blueprint of suffered trauma, fragmented and emotionally frozen in time at the age the trauma has occurred.

Negative feelings produced from past trauma events disconnect us from our bodies and feelings (emotional mind) creating dysregulation that results in emotional triggers and physical symptoms. A person may engage in self-destructive behaviours (addictions) to harness and stifle the negative feelings that want to break out.

Prehistoric humans responded with survival energy when encountering a wild animal threatening to kill them. They either fought the animal, fled, or froze in fear. Fight, flight or freeze response allowed them to act and stay alive in dangerous circumstances. It's a protection mechanism of the human species, an alert system helping us to survive. However, modern humans get the same triggers as fight, flight or freeze responses in day-to-day situations, which are not life-threatening. These are signs of unresolved emotional wounds from the past that once were real but now cast a shadow on a person's life.

Animals, in comparison to humans, process trauma instantly. When traumatized by another animal's attack, they don't stop bodily symptoms of the traumatic event like shaking, sweating, heart pounding and muscle pains of terror but allow these sensations to overwhelm their body. After the animal experiences the effects of a survival response (fight, flight, or freeze) in the body, it returns to a calm state. Thus, the animals don't experience the results of stored trauma over the years as humans do.

Failure to process the traumatic event in the moment traps the body and mind in the constant stress response, making it hard to relax and stay present. Our body and nervous system require lots of energy to maintain this state. Humans use their minds and logic to stop the expression of emotion in body and mind. It's too overwhelming to feel negative feelings, but it also hinders the experience of wide range of emotions. Suppressing one aspect of the emotional self (e.g., fear of abandonment, fear of flying) limits the experience of positive emotions like love, joy, happiness, inspiration, and creativity.

Our brains learn from traumatic experience and constantly search for danger patterns and cues in the environment to protect us and ensure survival. Unresolved trauma stuck in the body and mind causes the brain to perceive threats everywhere, making the person feel stressed out and overwhelmed with intrusive thoughts. Living with overwhelmed feelings without processing them causes the brain to block clear reasoning. The emotional brain takes over the reasoning brain by default to ensure our survival. How can we recognise a real threat in this state of distorted perception caused by a stuck survival energy?