Name Your Fears

I am, inherently, a very emotional person.

I am primarily driven by my feelings, in all that I say and do and choose, for better or for worse.

It is for this reason that my friend Steve affectionately dubbed me as the "emotional fireball", and refers to solving any emotional crisis of mine as "defusing the time-bomb". He is fully aware that, left to my own devices, I will rethink and reanalyze something until it eats away at me and I eventually (metaphorically) explode...often with unfortunate consequences. My feelings need to be kept in check.

In some ways, my extremely emotional nature has been a positive force in my life. I am capable of loving, caring for, and enjoying things more deeply than most people...my feelings on such matters run deep and impenetrably. Yet, it can also manifest in very negative ways. I am prone to extreme fits of sadness, anxiety, fear, helplessness and anger. Most of the time, I'm very good at hiding these bouts -- sometimes, not so much, and it ends up negatively impacting my relationships with people.

I've been needing to find a way to control these emotions, and have a better handle on them. At 23 years of age, and with a full span of life ahead of me, I don't want to be owned and kept down by my own negativity. I want to live happily and positively, no matter what the situation. I want to be confident in myself, without needing the approval of others. This can be accomplished by becoming the master of my own feelings.

One way of doing this, as I was recently reading in Self magazine (July 2008), is to give those negative feelings a separate identity from yourself...even up to donning on them a name or an image...so that rather than accepting those emotions as an inevitable part of who you are, you can deal with them and confront them...do something about them. You can tell that mean little voice in your head to be quiet, and silence it. You can choose to talk back to every insult, every put-down, until you begin to believe in the positive reassurance yourself. Until eventually those negative, irrational feelings begin to back down, and you can replace them with positive, logical thoughts.

Apparently this is something practiced by Buddhists, known as vipassana or apostrophizing.

In scientific studies, it apparently changes the activity location in the brain to label an emotion rather than to simply allow yourself to be engulfed in it.

I've been practicing it today. Every time that a self-deprecating thought floats through my mind, I try to challenge it and negate it...strip the thought of its power, and thus divert the emotion. So far, it seems to be helping, if only a little bit. But I imagine that with a great deal of practice, it can really help to silence that awkward, self-conscious voice that everybody has in their mind. I'm hoping especially that it can help me to get over my relationship anxieties, so that rather that succumb to worries about my boyfriend, I can merely identify my fears and say, "Those thoughts are unlikely. He loves me, so just relax." And hopefully, I can listen to that voice instead.

I'll try to update a little bit more about how this works out for me in the future.

But hey, I'm trying.