The Secret of Emotion, By Catalina Patane

The Secret of Emotion

When I was 20, I was heartbroken because my boyfriend at the time decided that he was done, all of the sudden. I spent hours listening to the same song over and over again. This song expressed what I was feeling, I was so disconsolate, the person I “loved” abandoned me and I didn’t know why so the most “logical” thing at the time it was to think that it was me. I cried for days, begged him to try again, to not abandon me, I blamed myself, I spoke to his mom, maybe she could help to change what he had decided. I stayed in bed for over 3 weeks, I only wanted to sleep so the pain would go away. When I was awake, I was crying and listening to that one song while drinking. Up to this day when I hear that song, I can remember the feelings, I don’t relive the experience anymore, but I used to, and it was painful to think about that experience. At 24, I found myself living a similar experience with someone else and the funny thing is that I found myself playing the same song, repeating the same patterns. When I became more aware of who I was, aware that something had to change in my life because I was extremely unhappy, I kept asking myself WHY a song, or a smell or a person could make me recreated an experience that was in the past, but it felt like it was happening now, why I was living the same situations with different people, I could not understand it.

When I decided study for my coaching certification, I understood the why, it was such a discovery and it truly changed me at my core. It was one of the biggest aha moments I have ever had so far in my life and I want to share this secret with you as it might help you understand yourself. To start to share the secret of emotions with you, its fundamental for me to point out a distinction between feelings and emotions as we have used these 2 words as synonyms, but they are not.

A feeling is a conscious experience that is a result of a thought process, you have a feeling after you had a thought. We use many words to describe a feeling such as frustration, despair, content, resignation, motivation, gratitude good, rage, upset and many others. In contrast an emotion can be an unconscious experience that is triggered by a circumstance lived through our senses. The main difference is that an emotion it felt raw, in your body first, before you can actually recognize it logically. This is because it activates your nervous system, it brings neurophysiological changes in you. In simple words is the positive or negative experience that is linked with a certain physiological pattern. We have 6 main emotions, Anger, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust, and Joy, that’s it!

When you live an emotional experience, it is recorded in your body and mind as a core memory or a belief. This is because your brain has to be extremely efficient to be able to process everything that it does simultaneously and anything that you experience from that point forward that brings up that belief, thoughts and feelings will be linked up to that emotional experience, therefor you will repeat the pattern of how you think feel, act, and ultimately the same results than in the past.

When I was examining my personal life after I became aware that I needed to change or something had to change I realized that in every romantic relationship I had I was living the exact same patterns, I was entering into relationships with men that weren’t ready for a committed serious relationship, I saw red flags but I ignored them, and at the end they would “abandoned me” and I would feel heart broken, feeling deserted, without knowing what do to different than just repeating the pattern from the past, drinking a lot and crying a lot. Discovering this made me ask myself when then the pattern was form, what was the belief I had formed around relationships and self-worth and the answer was in front of my eyes – a belief was formed while my childhood through my relationship with my father, I was relating to men how I learnt during my upbringing, since I experience a form of abandonment from him. I also discover something AMAZING – thanks to my relationship with my father I knew what I didn’t want, therefor I knew also what I wanted in man. I honor my father for this- as he was not aware of the amazing gift that he was giving me, and he was also repeating patterns of his childhood. The most important thing that I realized is that A BELIEF was controlling my emotional experience in my personal life that I kept repeating as my truth and not getting the results I really wanted, so I was a victim in my mind.

You see, emotion is what shapes our lives, the meaning that we associated to an experience will determine our behavior, and the driving force of the meaning comes down to 2 things: the need to avoid pain and the desire to feel pleasure, everything that we do in our lives is out of desire to feel pleasure or to avoid pain. When you understand that everything you do you do it because you are running away from pain or running towards pleasure you will be able to change your conditioned emotions to the environment and therefor control your fate. Managing your emotions and interrupting old patterns of emotions and creating empowering emotional patterns around experiences is essential. We cannot control what happens outside of us but we do control what happens inside of us and even though your core belief system were built during your childhood, you can change the meaning of the disempowering ones and upgrade them to empowering ones. THIS IS THE SECRET OF EMOTION, you can use emotions to create new neurophysiological responses that can change the thoughts, feelings, actions and ultimately the results you get in life.

Your Heart is Powerful.

Catalina can help you to release subconscious programming, so you can enjoy life!