Know Potential Pitfalls
In Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, Joan Borysenko, PhD, outlines the three most common emotional mind traps:
- In denial, the conscious mind is completely unaware of an emotion, but other people may be reading clues in your behavior. Or, the body may be expressing this blocked energy through illness.
- In over-expression, people are fused with the energy of an emotion, becoming the emotion at the loss of their own identity—for example, they personify anger, becoming the anger. This can be a dangerous state, as the intellect is not in control of the behavior. Totally overreacting relative to the circumstance may occur here.
- Lastly, repression is the difficult place of being aware of emotions, but disallowing its expression because of shame, fear, or unworthiness.
