Emotions are messengers. They are not positive or negative, as you may have been led to believe. They are messages. These emotional messengers tell you either that something is right, or something is wrong. They either tell you that you are in Balance, or you are in Imbalance and in need of balancing.

When our natural programming gets overwritten and twisted by trauma, we can get our messages twisted. We can feel like something is wrong when everything is going right. We can feel like everything is fine and normal or even happy, when in fact things are NOT okay. 

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that people who regularly accept their negative emotions and allow themselves to feel them, experience far fewer of them overall. Feelings of disappointment, sadness or resentment inflict more damage on those who avoid them.

There is a tendency in the western world to want to be happy at all times. We even view it as a measure of success – how often we are happy. Happiness is equated with success, with winning. If we experience any other emotion, we look to immediately remedy it.

Many of us do that with a drug like alcohol. Or we can do it through validation (addictive online dating, anonymous/casual sex), or something else that is exhilarating and adrenaline fueled. Anything to make the bad feeling go away. We don’t know how to just SIT with our so-called ‘negative’ emotions. We don’t know how to LISTEN to them. And we certainly don’t view them as our species’ internal wisdom and teacher, which has evolved for hundreds of thousands of years. 

But that’s exactly what we should do. Anger, rage, grief, sadness, apathy, boredom, jealousy, anxiety, self-harmful urges… all of them are telling us something. All of them are like family members with a specific ability and something to say.

Listening to all of your voices is the hallmark of the Integrated Human.

“Healing”: Otherwise known as “letting emotions out of the boxes we’ve stuffed them in”.

Emotions are messages. Symptoms are messages. Not “diagnoses”.

You are a human being. You’re not capable of “breaking”, at least not in the same way we drop and break a glass. Let me repeat: Trauma and abuse does NOT break you. You are NOT “broken”. And you don’t need “fixed”. 

What you MAY need, is to learn how to use all of yourself. All of your consciousness. The full spectrum and range of emotions. 

When you view your emotions synonymous to your children, you will learn that they are smaller, more primal versions of yourself that do not know how to hide themselves. It is your job, as the adult (as the parent) to accommodate and listen to your emotions, as you would any small child.

When you engage in psychedelic therapy, we encourage you to view your emotions in this way – things that need to be acknowledged, processed, and released. Sometimes, emotions are so intense that they need several iterations of processing and release before they leave us permanently. Other times, during a full dose experience and working with older events, we can often go back, process and release the emotions or trauma in one session, and they are gone permanently. It’s not that we forget what happened, but the grief or sadness will feel different – more integrated – than before the session.