Is the coach that yells at his team into doing greater works justified in his emotion versus a coach that speaks calmly to his team?
Is the teacher who trains their student to become greater than he or her, supposed to submit to the student?
If you are being wronged in a relationship, should you just let it slide?
These are the tough topics that will be broken down into three parts today:
- Repression Can Be Healthy
- Repression As Unhealthy
- Relinquishing All of It
#1 Repression as a Healthy State:
This sounds backwards right? But here’s a scenario I was in just a month ago. A President of a local nonprofit organization was doing a presentation for the community on how they’re improving it. During the Q&A, a community member got loud and started yelling how her organization has been negligent on certain spots, they need better support and he is tired of them.
The President responded with “Firstly, I am grateful for your passion, let me address your points one by one”…Then after she addressed every point in a calm manner, she went on to say: “To better support you, I have brought all of my leadership team here today, please give us your contact information and we will keep you apprised of every movement towards every point you brought up”.
Clearly we know who the person in control was in this scenario.
In line with that, a person who can be triggered to yell and act violently is prone to automatic weakness from a mental perspective. Example: A girlfriend is being ignored by her boyfriend in terms of attention…The only way he seems to give her attention is if she makes off-hand commentary that alludes to her having thoughts about an ex-boyfriend. The girlfriend now has an unhealthy, yet effective grip on how her boyfriend reacts out of weakness (fear, rejection, jealousy). Of course, this is a sad scenario, but folks use this sort of stuff ALL THE TIME.
#2 Repression As Unhealthy
This is something I have been very purposeful about addressing this year, because I received consistent feedback that my speeches could use more fire. And even in relationships, I always would hide emotions so as to protect myself & others because in my life, strong emotions usually had negative consequences (such as divorce, rejection, neglect, etc).
So I dug deep and found a lot of my childhood pain is what held me back from realizing full emotional freedom to inspire myself into deeper action, and therefore deeper inspiration to others. The biggest 3 factors for this started at Evolving Out Loud, then getting deeper into Faith, and then getting deeper into my childhood through Gwen’s amazing Emotional Freedom company Your Strongest Life (whom ironically I met at Evolving Out Loud).
What did using my emotional capacity in a healthy way accomplish?
- I’m 99% sure I have met the love of my life-Whom I would’ve ruined the opportunity with if I did not work out of my heart instead of cold-blooded reptile brain
- My real estate business is booming beyond my goals were set from barely any effort
- I have several other investment opportunities that I have been entrusted to drive forward
#3 Relinquishing All of It
This is the biggest point I hope you take out of this blog post:
True emotional freedom is not about seeing a story from your past and seeing what you can take from it AND YOU’RE DONE. It’s really about feeling out the reflection and fully submitting to it no matter the end result, because you can take back the end result after feeling.
AND FEELING IS NATURAL. AND IT FEELS GOOD.
This realization hit me hard, especially as a man who had shame with emotions during my upbringing, because when I hit this realization several times…I felt true joy to express my emotions in tears, laughter, pain or whatever the hell I desire with full force-And now I can appreciate & facilitate it for others. And regarding that, I feel sadness for those who choose to force it down into their stomach for it to IMPLODE out into horrible action or addiction. I have had that in my own life, and boy that hurts not only others, but most of all: self. Because you have to be selfish enough to care about yourself.
Which makes me think of: I always tell my formerly close friends who were bad at balancing their checkbook: Hey, did you know what happens if you have $100 and give $99 away? Yeah, that means you don’t eat. How are you going to keep helping others if you can’t eat?
In summary, repression is a balancing act that no one will ever be perfect at.
What matters is that you try.
Hope you have an amazingly Merry Christmas!