Methods for Emotional Release
From my experience emotional release can be a very valuable experience or it has been a valuable experience for my clients that I've been using throughout my time in practice.
Over the years in I've lost count of the number of audios for emotional release I have created or I have used with clients.
From my initial musculoskeletal pain research in 2004 I observed the power of emotional release to create change. Change that would effectively release blocks, or obstacles people had in their health, their career or their relationships.
How can Emotional Release be Individualised?
Each client came to me with their own stories, their own past experiences. Therefore, each played their scenarios as movie clips using internal thoughts or visualization of past events or trauma in their life.
They could make changes maybe from suggestions.
o Change the colours.
o Change the people involved [changing size was often an interesting technique].
o Change the sounds that were happening.
o Or more………
With these suggestions from me they were then left to work in their own way.
The Private Nature of Emotional Release.
A client may identify or discover a previous occasion in their life causing problems in their present life. Perhaps causing health issues such as stress, chronic pain or fatigue. I believe the most important aspect for emotional release is to allow the person to perhaps follow an outline but then create their own neural networks around their experience.
It is a private experience. This may be in complete contrast from having a therapy session sitting and talking through their experiences or their trauma. This can be a negative experience or something people may want to avoid effectively reliving their experience.
Whereas in creative visualisation around a story they are just grabbing those unexpressed emotions and doing something with them.
Sometimes my clients would share their visualizing experiences.
One that comes to mind is a woman who had been working on personal relationships.
In her creative visualisation she turned all involved into beautiful butterflies and they flew away or were blown away by the wind.
I believe the advantage of being creative whilst processing unexpressed emotions makes changes in the neural circuits and the neural pathways in the brain.
Use of Emotional Release for Trauma
I want briefly to mention releasing past trauma There is much written about trauma such as the descriptors ‘big trauma’ and ‘small trauma’. I don't fully agree with these. I understand that we do experience trauma very differently and to call it big or small trauma is a judgement that is not necessary.
There are indeed judgments of how one trauma experience may be much worse than the other. However, it is the person themselves that experience trauma and the concomitant unexpressed emotions they have effectively held onto.
The hippocampus the part of the brain that learns and remembers can certainly rediscover subconscious past events by some triggering present experience. It is those unexpressed emotions from past events that emotional release can create change in the neural networks and the neural pathways in our brain.
Two Types of Emotional Release – Fast and Slow
I want to share with you two examples of emotional release. Firstly, one we could label slow emotional release.
Example of slowly letting go of an emotion.
I take you to the beach.
Then give you time to discover an unexpressed emotion.
Then you write the emotion or emotions you no longer want to carry with you in the sand with your finger or toe.
Next you sit on the beach observing in your mind's eye the tide coming in and slowly washing away the emotion.
You have control of the waves and how quickly the emotion in the sand is washed away.
This gives you time to perhaps,
o sit with that emotion,
o to understand it,
o understand yourself more.
As it is gradually washed away.
Example of quickly letting go of an emotion
One of the most popular audios that I have is the “hot air balloon ride”.
This is an example of fast emotional release.
You imagine yourself riding in a hot air balloon perhaps a sunny day watching the world go by beneath you.
You take a sandbag from the side of the basket
The sandbag may represent: -
o The emotions,
o the trauma,
o the negative thoughts,
o whatever you want to literally get rid of, to throw away.
In your visualization you throw the sandbag out of the basket, it has gone.
You can image that sandbag very rapidly disappear.
This is a different process to the slow release I mentioned above. It allows you to say I've had enough of this - time to throw it away!
There is an addendum to this particular recording that is important. In these audios I allow the person to experience their own emotional release without overdue directions.
One feedback was that a person had taken hold of the sandbag but just couldn't throw it overboard. This is OK, they weren't ready - perhaps there was some more processing needed.
o More learning to experience before they were able to release the emotion.
o Perhaps to rewrite their experience.
o Or to finally learn the lessons they needed to from that emotional release.
The power of releasing past unexpressed emotions cannot be underestimated. Neither can the individual nature of each experience which makes the variety of creative audio recording I produce necessary. To enable clients or those who choose to purchase a recording or to find their experiential match.
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