Why Do We Misreport Our Emotions?

 Disclaimer - this blog contains affiliated links for which I will receive a small sum; call it supporting an artist who needs to fund his imagination

I will soon be sharing with you some very cool stuff, a brand new course designed to help you meditate and come to terms with your emotions in our noisy and modern world. 

The world is still noisy, it was even when we were in lockdown; we still had rolling news and updates and social media and negative reporting and it was, still is, too much.

My course will help you to deal with all of that and give you some great tips on using arts to meditate and to listen to your emotions. Listening to them helps you react to them which ultimately helps you to deal with them in a positive way, regardless of the emotion. 

What I don't do is lock them up; ignore them or wish to slay them. My emotions are not a monster or a dark serpent or anything like that. Yes, they are sometimes bad, but they are not criminal and I do not hide from that part of me anymore.

If you want to find out more please follow me on Twitter @28thraves or on Insta, @28zacthrav. I am keeping my course entirely personal and it will be for you. It will also be fun, and you will come away from it feeling ready to stand tall and recognise that you are unique, and you can boss your world. 

We are all heroes. 

So why do we misreport our emotions? It's a question I have pondered for some time now and one that I can't say I have a real handle on. I try to think of us as this:

• a collection of thoughts and feelings
• whizzing about our psyche at lightening speed
• some good and some bad
• some judgemental and some pure love
• clashing and bashing like atoms
• some may explode 
• and all this, our unique personal universe, encased in a body

And then once we filter all of this through our mind and sort it like the postal service sorts letters we place a selection of thoughts into an order, analyse them, and decide which ones to issue out of the body and which ones to leave, store or discard.

We are reporters of our minds.

It's actually quite weird when you break it down, but at the same time it makes sense. Our minds are a bit like that sentence, a sequence of words that sound odd but right. 

We become our own censors; like Trump's censorship code for the internet or back in old Hollywood when they tried to convict so-called Communists. In the UK we had censorship on TV and definitely no sex. You can't have sex that's disgusting!

The trouble with that is the ideas of the censorship distributes throughout our society and into our psyches and then it becomes something that we do to ourselves. We are actively censoring our thoughts and becoming our own thought-police. That is what leads us to misreport our emotions because we decide which of our emotions are right and which are wrong.

What if I told you that all of your thoughts are right, how would that make you feel?

Sex? What's wrong with sex, I mean we need to do for the human race to survive, why are we so prudish?

Suicide? What's wrong with thinking about suicide? 

Self-harm? What's wrong with thinking about self-harm?

Thinking about those are not an issue nor are they wrong; even the act of doing is not wrong. What is wrong is society's reaction to those acts and to people who have done it. We collectively make it wrong which then pushes them deeper into our minds where it can grow into a snarling monster; like Medusa in a lair or the Kraken from the deep. These monsters of myth are our monsters...our emotions, made large.

For example, when a thought comes to our minds about harming it is instantly pushed away and the language used to push it away is that we are bad, that we shouldn't think that, it's disgusting; all those people you would hurt, that's so ungrateful; guilt.

All those hateful words are actually worse than the thought of self-harm; and could lead to the act happening with more force, or worse, with fatal results.

Here's one that gets me (after the harming and suicide thoughts):

I want to make $3000 per month doing something I love.

Now, when I write that or say it to myself I feel bad, because then I think that's greedy; I'm not worth that; I don't have anything to offer; who would listen to me; you should be ashamed of yourself. Rich people are monsters, that is so selfish.

?

It is exactly the same thought process for me to want to succeed as it is to want to die. That is true for me anyway. You can argue that success is great, it gives drive, it's a target. Yet those monsters still appear for me when I think of making money. Because I have been conditioned to think like that in the same way I have been conditioned to thinking that self-harm, or just having depression in general, is a bad thing. 

The conditioning is there from childhood, through school and into working life. And the silly thing is that it is not the fault of parents or teachers, because they too have been conditioned to think like that. It's a problem in parts of society. 

Someone has to change the thinking of the greater society and that someone could be you and I. We can all start to take that step to thinking differently by changing our language, understanding that we are emotional and that we have powerful imaginations that change the world and give us enough to sustain a life. There's nothing wrong for me to want to survive and the only way to survive our current world is through earning money. I chose to survive, and my survival story is in my current book (ad above), and with that I want to survive having a life where I can reduce the stress and succeed by producing something that I feel passionate about. 

Is this not right?

You can do that too. Start to think outside the box, because the box is not of your design. There is only one person who can change your world, and that is you. By each of us doing this individually we can shape a new way of thinking. If you think about changing all of society you may go...WOAH, that's too big!

But actually, if we just focus on ourselves and change our thinking, and share and talk and open up, then gradually it can all change. All of it, forever. 

Just a thought.

I hope you enjoy my fortnightly blogs. Please do follow me on social media and keep a look out for my course which will be downloadable worldwide soon. I want to help us all take a step to a better world.

I recently finished reading this book by Dr Pippa Grange and found it incredibly helpful in giving tips on how to overcome fear. We can all be trapped by fear, mainly for me it is failure and self-worth. Her words and the stories she told of real people overcoming their fears were inspirational, and I do recommend a read of her book. The link is a UK one, I am sure it is also on Amazon.com. Search it out.