Emotional reactivity - gone

The feeling of sudden, intense emotions is finally gone

Photo by Piyanut Suntaranil on Unsplash

We all live in two worlds.

The outer world surrounding us and the inner world that lives within us; the second one, no one else but us can experience.

In a way, this is quite miraculous. It's like hidden secrets that live inside of us that are difficult for anyone else to understand.

If we want to connect to a fellow human being, it's a good strategy to share parts of our inner worlds with them; it's vulnerable, for sure, but better than letting them guess what our inner world looks like.

But there is also this intermediate world, where the feelings and the energy of our inner world exits into the outer world and makes itself visible, hearable and perceivable.

This can happen through us crying, being angry and shouting, laughing or any other expression of emotions. Including body language, facial microexpressions and subtle voice undertones.

All those serve as clues to how someones inner world looks like in a certain moment of time.

Of course, there are people who have great poker faces, its difficult to read them; I am surely not one of those. More the opposite, like an open book :D.

And there are also people who have a certain sensitivity to feel and perceive other peoples inner worlds and emotional states.

I have lived my life, being able to perceive and feel other peoples feelings and accurately get a good impression of them. I am neither a CIA agent, police officer or psychologist. I guess it’s what is called empathy, feeling other peoples feelings.

There are tons of theories about empathy, e.g. it being a trauma response etc. I don’t want to go into detail into any of those, neither do I want to claim I am “right” with my perceptions. Cos I believe we all have this capability.

The tricky thing about it is, that I used to take those external feelings from others on to myself, as my responsibility to help or fix them; especially when they were “negative” or unpleasant ones.

After all, I felt it too right? Shouldn’t I help then? And the other person even shared more details with me, wanted this help from me.

While I am all in for helping others whenever I can, I know now, that I am not responsible for anyone else’s inner world but mine.

This type of hypersensitivity to other people’s emotions also made me react very emotionally intense inside my own inner world. It kind of got infiltrated. And I got preoccupied with things that were not mine.

And sometimes, it didn’t just stay inside, it exploded to the outside…

I remember a situation where a friend told me a very upsetting thing about the family and behaviours of their partner. It was too much for me, it was SO bad, because I felt my friends upset-ness and I saw the negative implications this will have for her, so I let all my upset-&terrible feelings out in an explosion. and it was too much. Also for her, cos in a way I amplified her worries & thoughts & when I do that, those unpleasant feelings swamp over to the other person… well, and if its related to a partner, you can guess yourself what effect that can have… this was not the reason our friendship broke, we entered our path of separation already a bit before.

Luckily these scenarios are not happening anymore, I do still feel strong emotions, but my emotional reactivity is mostly gone now and I don’t allow it to explode in such an unhealthy way anymore.

How do I know that its gone?

Simply: I don’t feel those extreme external emotions anymore. It’s like my inner landscape has changed, or maybe I managed to build a fence around it, so its more protected.

And I tell you, it feels amazing, but also weird and scary, even sometimes “wrong”. It basically means that I rewired 30+ years living with an internal emotional reactivity that exhausted me & made me feel that I truly “care” about others.

Cos strangely enough, I felt that I cared about people when I took on their emotions.

I still care about others, but not in such a reactive way anymore. In a more calm way, that does not take away from my own energy, so I can be of proper help & service.

How did I manage to get here?

Phew, it took years, and not just on “thing”, action or practice.

It might have started with cold exposure and ice baths 5+ years ago, something I don’t do anymore.

It continued with Mantra meditation class for 5 years, still ongoing… then:

Breath work, healing sessions, coachings, my own company development, relationships, friendships coming and going, reflecting, going inside, learning how to feel strong emotions and not suppress them, many deep conversations with loved ones, some spiritual experiences and sessions including psychedelics, reconnecting to my faith, healing many issues I accumulated being a human, learning to trust my intuition & soul, reconnect to my heart as my artistic core of myself… and I bet I forgot many others.

Oh, and I totally believe that the fact that I moved away almost 13 years ago & immigrated to Sweden all by myself was the start of all that :)

Now, how can all this be of help to you? I don’t know if it can.

I could explain to you what I did, how and why. Maybe it would help, maybe not. I also don’t think all I did could be the right thing for you to do. Cos we are different. We process and perceive differently, and we lived different lifes.

What maybe could help is to describe different situations where I felt this shift occurred and how I perceived it. The core changes that manifested in myself in a certain situation, so you get a grasp of what is possible and how it could feel when you change and get rid of behaviours that are draining you.

And maybe you can find yourself in those situation & deem it worthy to have a similar outcome, so you will start your journey to shift yourself and change your behaviours.