I remember watching 'The King's Speech' a number of years back. It had a very powerful scene where the speech therapist continually talks over the king, antagonizing the king on purpose to make him mad enough to shout out, "I Have A Voice!". I can remember feeling so connected to that scene. I won't lie, I was emotional after watching it (haha).
At the time I felt that I had a lot on my heart to share but I had no way of expressing it. I had lost my own 'voice' so to speak. Mostly due to a low self esteem I developed over the years of my life through unhelpful habits and thought patterns towards myself (yikes!). What I've come to realize recently is that connecting to the emotions held in our body can be a huge benefit for ones mood, and the health of their relationships.
I always seemed to have a general mood of anger and/or anxiety during my everyday existence up until a few years ago. I felt anger with no apparent cause or reason. I thought that's just the way it is. I was repressing my 'voice' I've come to understand. Here are some practical steps I took to un-repress my voice.
Connect With Your Emotions
One of the first things I had to practice in order to remember my voice was to connect with my emotions. It's amazing how unconsciously we can float through our day to day lives without being aware of the emotions we're holding in our bodies! Here are some practices that helped me connect:
Bring yourself into the moment by breathing deeply with your stomach. Relax your body (shoulders, arms, anywhere that you feel tension). Our bodies are the vessel of our emotions.
Speak out what you are feeling in your body. If you are feeling angry for example speak words like, "I am frustrated. I am feeling irritated" etc.. If you are feeling sad you can say things like, " I'm heartbroken. I'm feeling blue" etc..
This is a vital practice to assist a person in becoming aware of what is actually being harbored in our bodies. It's a great benefit to yourself and the people in your life to honor your emotions! The alternative to honoring our emotions is to repress them. I'm a firm believer that repressed emotions are the destroyer of many a relationship. Repressed sadness becomes depression. Repressed anger becomes rage, fear becomes anxiety and so on. Yeah I'll take a hard pass on living repressed again! Once you're feeling connected to your emotions you can begin to process them. This is great news because once the negative emotion is processed you can release it and get back to the default human emotion - joy.
Speaking Your Truth Relationally
Let's imagine a situation where someone close to you has offended you through a comment they made. "It's not a big deal" you tell yourself. "I really shouldn't feel this way. I'll just not bring it up." Hell no! Like I said, it is a great benefit to honor the emotions we're feeling. Most of us choose to repress that offence because we are afraid of confrontation with our loved ones leading to conflict. Fear not, we can express that we took offence while remaining relational.
We already are aware that we are feeling offence. So the next step will be to gently inform the person how we feel. I'll give an example from my own life. I sent the person I wanted to talk to a text asking, "Hey can I give you a call?". Then once on the phone I said, "Hey I appreciate your friendship a lot, you're awesome by the way..." It's a benefit to begin the conversation with a compliment or something uplifting. Remember, we don't want them to become defensive by speaking condemning words. Then I continued, "...But I called because when we were talking and you said 'this' I didn't feel very honored..." Again, let's avoid passing judgement on our loved one. Simply say how you felt after the conversation happened.
To end my sentence I said, "I just wanted to let you know how I was feeling because I didn't want to have any resentment between us." Boom! The person feels appreciated but also knows how you felt. The relationship can proceed unhindered by negative baggage.
I hope this short post reminds us how it's important to guard our hearts from repressed, unprocessed emotions. It really is our own responsibility to have a healthy, peaceful joy in our bodies as a default. Life is best lived with an open heart, filled with the natural human emotion joy, expressing itself in love.
Cheers friends!