The connection between our emotions and our health has been the subject of debate and study for decades, but now a question arises: Could repressing our emotions really lead to serious diseases like cancer?
Carlos Malatestaan entrepreneur who has personally faced the battle against cancer, shared his story on The Hot Table offering a unique perspective on how emotional burden can play a critical role in the development of diseases.
“I had stage three cancer. The doctor gave me a 30% chance of survival,” Carlos revealed, highlighting the direct impact his emotions had on his health.
“It was a time in my life when I was very stressed, angry, frustrated. I was very emotionally burdened, with resentments that eat away at you inside and that led me to this diagnosis.”
Carlos Malatesta
Learning to channel emotions or how to alphabetize feelings
Many adults have a hard time realizing what they are feeling or what the true feelings that are overwhelming them are, and if that emotion is powerful, it becomes difficult to channel. That is why it is necessary to become emotionally literate in order to be able to channel those feelings.
Many experience varying degrees of emotional illiteracy: an inability to understand and manage one’s own emotions and the difficulty in understanding those of other people.
But like conventional illiteracy (inability to read and write, due to lack of basic education), can be solved through adequate teaching of these skillsthe inability to manage our mood swings and alterations can also be reversed through adequate emotional literacy, according to specialists.
Emotions need to be felt in the body to release the trapped energy they carry with them.”
Miriam Tirado
“Feeling is always valid and legitimate. Judging emotions and repressing them prevents us from living them and accompanying them in an assertive and connected way. Emotions need to be felt in the body to release the trapped energy they carry with them,” he explains. Miriam Tirado.
Tirado is a conscious parenting consultant and offers conferences, workshops and consultancies to help mothers and fathers connect with their sons and daughters. In her new book, ‘Feel’, invites us to take a “journey to learn how to accompany our emotions and those of others.”
Waves of feelings
“Most of us have not received emotional education, tools or resources to know what to do with what we feel. However, it is our responsibility to support the emotions of our children, family members and friends. How can we do this if we don’t even know what to do with our own?,” she says.
Regarding the widespread emotional illiteracy, he points out that One of its roots lies in the fact that “when we were little, no one taught us what we could do with what we felt.”how to channel emotions.
In this sense, when we are adults, “contact with children and their emotions acts as a mirror for us, awakening in us everything that at the time we did not integrate or live assertively” and that encounter “It is a golden opportunity to become aware of our wounds and heal them,” as he explains.
Tirado proposes “think of emotions as if they were waves of the sea that come and go. Nothing is permanent, and neither are emotions,” emphasizes.
Examples of emotional illiteracy
“It is very common for mothers and fathers to become emotionally overwhelmed when their children are overwhelmed because they are tired or angry. The adult gets as angry or more angry than the child, because she is not able to move through and channel the emotions, what she feels in a responsible and adult way,” explains the specialist.
He adds that “Emotional disagreements are often the reasons why so many couples separate. Its members confess that they do not feel understood or emotionally accompanied by the other party in moments of difficulty. This happens because Many adults do not know how to support themselves emotionally.”, according to this author.
“It hurts us so much when we see our loved ones feel anger, sadness, fear, or any emotion that We find it uncomfortable that instead of empathizing and connecting with what we are feeling, we tend to deny, look away.downplaying or reacting in ways that do not help the person we are supposedly trying to support.”
The first step
Tirado recommends start by asking ourselves, every day at some point:
- How am I?
- How I feel?
- Can I identify the emotion I am feeling now?
This daily exercise “It will mean that we have some time a day to listen to ourselvesto stop for a few moments, breathe deeply and turn the focus inward.”
We will only be able to realize what is happening to us if we dare to listen to ourselves, to look inside, feeling that we are worthy of our own gaze.”
Miriam Tirado
“Often we don’t do it because we relegate ourselves to the last place, considering that others come first, and ultimately, we come first. That’s why we need to establish as a daily and natural practice knowing how we feel and what we need,” concludes the author.
(With information from EFE)
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