The Pool of Unresolved Emotions

Very often, people come to me asking how they can resolve the trauma caused by a handful of very specific events that happened in their lives. They believe - possibly due to misconceptions of a traditional talk therapy approach to inner healing - that all of their pain truly stems from one or 2 specific events that they can remember.

And yes… it is certainly true that in some cases the majority of their issues stemmed from some severe emotional experiences. Soldiers who experienced war, people who were kidnapped, beaten, abused, almost killed, etc…

These experiences absolutely carry a massive amount of emotional weight and it may very well be the case that without those experiences they never would have been pushed over the edge into their inner turmoil which now takes the form of anxiety, depression or PTSD.

But it’s very simply not the case that you can or should be focused on specific events when it comes to finally healing the pain that you are in.

I like to express it like this…

Your emotional baggage isn’t divided into neat little containers where one event is separate from the other.

No… your unresolved emotions are more like water in a pool.

Imagine you’ve got this big pool inside of you that is capable of holding 10,000 liters of unresolved emotional energy. And let’s say that so long as there is less than 3,000 liters in there, then you will experience no adverse effects in your life. If there is between 3,000 and 6,000 liters, you’ll experience noticeable pain and problems in your life. And any more than that it will be genuinely debilitating in horrific ways.

Now imagine that every traumatic event that you experienced adds a certain amount of water to the pool. The day you got dumped by the love of your life added 50 liters. The day you almost died added 250 liters. The day that you got judged for being too outspoken added 100 liters. And that went on and on for years.

Well, now the pool is fairly full.

But… if you were to go to that pool, dip a bucket in, and pull out a liter of water… is it at all possible to determine WHICH traumatic event the water in that bucket came from?

Of course not! Because all of the water is now mixed together.

It’s not neatly separated into ‘this even’t and ‘that event’. It’s just a pool filled with all of the unresolved emotions that you never dealt with.

Inner healing is not about chasing down the source of each drop of water in that pool.

It’s simply about developing the skills and tools of how to finally start draining the pool.

You don’t care where the water came from.

You only care about how much water is left in the pool.

Stop trying to focus on healing specific traumatic events.

Instead, focus on learning how to heal unresolved emotions in general.

That’s what my whole ‘Emotional Fitness’ approach is about.

If you’re interested in becoming genuinely emotionally fit without ruminating endlessly on all of the events that added water to that pool, reach out. We can accomplish this together. Guaranteed… or your money back.