Many brain retraining programs teach us to redirect our thought patterns away from ‘negative’ ones. I know many have an issue with this because in doing so it can feel inauthentic and doesn’t allow us to process our emotions. On the flip side, other healing programs such as JournalSpeak encourage facing emotions directly and releasing them. These are seemingly opposite practices, but in my experience both are beneficial. I am going to share my experiences and what I have been learning and working through recently. I have touched on some of this on a previous post where I contemplated if brain retraining is a form of gaslighting ourselves, but today I am going to share more of my personal journey with this.

When I first started brain retraining I worked really hard on redirecting away from heavy emotions. If I was feeling a ‘negative’ emotion I taught myself ways to redirect it, and I really focused on elevating my emotional state throughout the day. I would use DNRS rounds to redirect and move myself away from these emotions, and I would fake laugh my way through laughter yoga classes even when my brain just wanted to mope and complain. This was extremely beneficial for me!

Looking back, I can see a lot of the thoughts and emotions I was having were just learned responses and habits, and I needed to break that loop with some rigidity and by being strict with myself. I pretended as if I didn’t have any health concerns and broke my emotional ties to illness. At times this did feel like I was lying to myself, but with time and repetition, these new thought pathways have become second nature and my natural way of being. Looking back, I can see that being in a state of nervous system dysregulation created thoughts that weren’t true as I was seeing the world through a lens of fear.

During this process I have also learnt not to label thoughts as ‘negative’ (hence my use of inverted commas for the word negative throughout this post) or judge myself for having them. Instead I notice them, label and validate how I am feeling then move into a higher emotional state. This is a technique I learnt from my coach Tessa. For example, when I notice I am feeling an emotion, I will say to myself, “Ok Alex, I can see you’re feeling frustrated, that’s ok, of course this situation is frustrating. Is staying in this emotion serving you or is there a higher emotional state you can move towards?”. I also love the quote from Gabby Bernstein, ‘I forgive this thought and choose another’. These techniques were a go-to for me and I would do this multiple times a day at the start of my brain retraining journey. For me it was a way of redirecting with a bit more authenticity.

I can see that I needed this rigidity around certain thoughts. My brain was addicted to being in CAN chemistry (cortisol, adrenaline and norepinephrine) and was trying to keep me in that state. For example, I remember a time when I was starting a fight with my sister over nothing, my brain just needed a ‘fix’. I also look back to appointments I had with therapists prior to brain retraining and they were big, repetitive loops of thoughts and emotions without any true changes. I needed to disrupt my learnt way of thinking and being, even if it felt like it was inauthentic or uncomfortable at times.

However, with time, my nervous system has gained capacity and resilience, and recently I have started to feel as though I have the strength to process some emotions that have been coming up. I have been learning to distinguish between true emotions and when my limbic system wants to keep me stuck in a lower emotional state. Usually when my thoughts are looping and repetitive and take over my mind, these are more of a limbic response where my brain is staying ‘addicted to its most comfortable emotional response’ and this requires emotional elevation or tools to redirect. Other emotions that I feel are heavier and have a different energetic feeling in my body and these are the ones that need to be released. With the guidance of my holistic therapist Karima, I have been learning how to feel these. As somebody who grew up avoiding emotions this has been a learning process!

This is almost an art form to learn as redirecting away from emotions, and moving towards them and FEELING them are total opposites!

Now that I am learning to lean towards certain, real and heavy emotions (not the limbic emotions), I am becoming aware of a learned automatic reaction in my body that tries to hide emotions and runs away from them. This is a different feeling to redirecting with brain retraining, in that it feels different in my body – again this is just a felt experience that I am learning to distinguish with time as I become more and more regulated and connected to myself and my body. It is a little difficult to put into words, but as they say on social media, iykyk.

In Primal Trust one video explained that our limbic system can categorise emotions as unsafe and this is why we avoid processing them. I am learning that it is this fear and resistance to emotions that keeps us stuck, not the emotion itself. For example, I experienced a big emotion recently where I felt hurt by somebody, and it lead to my lashing out in anger. This was described as the limbic system seeing this emotion, feeling fear around the hurt caused and thinking it would be too much to feel, and instead going directly into protect mode which caused the lashing out. Seeing how our limbic system is linked to our emotions was important for me. Firstly, in giving myself grace, as I am still gaining capacity in dealing with these emotions as I continue to regulate my nervous system. But secondly, knowing and understanding this, and that anger is my brain trying to protect me and keep me safe, will hopefully give me more impetus to take a deeper breath and move into a less reactive state next time.

With Karima we have spent a lot of time feeling emotions such as grief, anger and sadness that I experienced as a result of my time with chronic illness. One of my earlier sessions with her she lead me through a meditation or ‘internal inquiry’ where I had to connect with my body and describe emotions I was feeling. A pain in my chest that recurs sometimes came up and I described it to her, with her help we came to a description of the pain as feeling like I had been punched in the chest. Karima asked me about a time in my life when I had felt like life had punched me, I instantly connected this to my experiences with illness. I found I was scared to sit and connect more closely with the feeling in my chest, but with Karima’s help we explored it. This caused me to feel an intense emotional release. I shed many tears and we spoke about how hard being sick was for me. Karima helped me to see that when I feel an emotion and truly turn towards it and let myself feel it, it transforms and is released. After this, the pain in my chest transformed and was dulled! I had never experienced something like that before, where I felt the connection between my physical body and a specific emotion, it was quite amazing to witness! I have since noticed that when I am feeling heavier emotions I feel it in my chest, and try to run myself through the same process, where I don’t turn away from the emotion but really tune in and feel it.

This is still very much a work in progress for me. I can see that during my time sick I was in survival mode, and I didn’t have the capacity to process what I was going through. Now that I am coming through the other side I am starting to have these emotions come up.

Since I have started this work with Karima I have noticed, especially in the last month, that I have been able to feel more, and feel into my body more. About two weeks ago I felt nauseous with anxiety – this isn’t a feeling that is common for me to experience at all! I became curious about it, stopped what I had been doing and sat with it and really turned towards it, giving my body permission to feel whatever it needed to feel. I ended up bawling for a good half hour with big, heavy, sobbing tears. At times during my illness I remember feeling like I needed to let out tears but they wouldn’t come, I would even watch sad movies or TV shows because I felt like I needed an outlet and that would allow me to have some sort of release, but I wasn’t able to sit and cry for myself and my own pain. It feels as though my body is coming out of survival mode now and is slowly processing these emotions.

Stay tuned, this is an area I am still very much learning and going through the motions of, and balancing the opposite practices of feeling with redirecting has been an interesting process for me.

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