What are you feeling today at this moment?  Can you name your feelings?

There are at least two ways to avoid ownership of our feelings.  One disowns feelings by blaming someone else for creating it (i.e. he ruined my day).  The other way is rationalizing it as a mental exercise to avoid feeling the actual feeling.  We may lose a pet and have grief associated with it.  We may avoid feeling our grief by saying,” he lived a long time” to make it OK not to grieve the situation.

It is important to investigate those parts of our life where we take ownership of our feelings and what parts of our life we use blame or rationalization to avoid feeling our feelings.

Emotional By-Pass 

There are many defense mechanisms
to avoid feeling our feelings. 

At first we may blame others
when we feel a negative emotion. 

“You made me angry.” 

“You wrecked my day.” 

We abdicate our responsibility
by not owning our feelings. 

We may also avoid feeling our feelings by rationalization. 

“I feel better when I do not read the paper.”

“Don’t feel bad. It happens to everyone.”

“This is not my responsibility.” 

Using rationalization and blame to
avoid feeling our feelings
is an emotional by-pass!

Avoidance instead of acceptance!

Escapism instead of being in the moment!

Feeling our emotions is not just about feeling good! 

It is about connecting and being consciousness.

Do you allow yourself to feel all your feelings
or
are you sedated by your emotional by-passes?

Copyright @ 2012 by Shervin Hojat

www.shervinhojat.com