Emoclear Self-Helpapedia

Where to Start is a good taking off point, as is the Feeling & Integrating page. 

The A to Z page will give you a catalogue of all techniques, exercises and activities. 

Tips & Skills catalogues articles on various topics such as anxiety, depression, anger, longevity, and more.

You'll find the Self-helpapedia Topic Index (Coming Soon) of great help in looking for articles & techniques by topic.

 Visit our online community at the Emoclear Forums. The forums are a global community of self-motivated learners who share and support each other in their personal growth hobby.  It's  also the home of Ask Steve, the daily blog where you find Steve's answers to many questions about a wide variety of stimulating topics. 

from Your Emotional Power:

 

Are feelings and emotions important? Need we look any further than the shipwrecks of many persons’ lives? Who hasn’t heard of anxiety, depression, addiction, stress, broken relationships, and failed aspirations?

 

 

Avoiding feelings, being unable to feel feelings and express feelings, and having no way to make them less intense, painful, or attention grabbing can create major havoc in our lives. At the heart of anxiety, depression, problematic anger, mind-body illnesses, addictions, severe stress, broken relationships, and failed aspirations is often our inability to feel, accept, express, and decipher our feelings. Next to having food, air, and shelter, feelings are a necessity for survival, health, and well-being. Frequently many of us are inexperienced in the area of feelings and emotions.

 

In learning to feel our feelings we will be bringing our awareness to our feelings and noting what happens in our inner world. The major challenge facing folks in knowing their feelings is that we simply don’t put time aside to experience our inner natures. We may have other responsibilities, work, families, education, relationships, and hobbies. Many of us are externally oriented rather than inner-directed. We miss our interior life because of this and feelings get brushed aside.

 

We often don’t become aware of our feelings until the emergency calls us and we start to become conscious of feeling overwhelmed or stressed. Feelings were long ignored and out of awareness. Being unaware of our feelings went on too long. It’s usually during crisis when we become aware of our emotions and feelings. Addictions. Anxiety. Depression. Stress related disorders. These painful areas may be our first introductions to our inner world of feelings.

 

Our feelings, emotions, and beliefs require our priority if we wish to live meaningful, stimulating, and enjoyable lives. What stands in the way of feeling feelings? Avoidance. Not putting time aside to be with them. Our attention drifts elsewhere. Not putting feelings on our priority list. Impatience. Denial. Sometimes even believing we’re selfish for paying any attention to our inner life. For folks with strong negative self-views, looking inside may ask for courage and patience. It isn’t easy being with intense and painful feelings. What this book and its methods provide are approaches for emotional exploration and growth that can be accomplished with a minimum of pain and overwhelm.

 

How important are feelings and beliefs in your life? What priority do you assign them? If you’ve ever had a major emotional crisis you likely give feelings and beliefs high priority.

 

Allowing ourselves to feel feelings brings relief and greatly lessens symptoms, habits, compulsions, stuckness, panic, depression, anxiety, and moodiness. Feeling and  integrating feelings operates on the observation that when feelings are resisted or negatively judged they intensify and persist. Yet when feelings are fully experienced and accepted they integrate and lose their emotional intensity and attention grabbing power. This is our nature.

 

Resistance and over identification create challenges in our lives. We don’t receive our feelings' important information. Emotions hang on and on holding our attention and making our tension and stress grow.

It is wise to feel your feelings and allow them to be there without trying to get rid of them. Failure to feel our feelings and avoiding them leads to intense, attention grabbing, uncomfortable, and enduring emotions that can stress us and hinder us. Better to feel, accept, and appreciate feelings. Read more about this in Learning to Feel Your Feelings. 

It is recommendable to use emotional integrators and written exposure techniques to integrate or desensitize emotions that have become intense, attention grabbing, uncomfortable, and enduring. See the Emotional Integrator (in Your Emotional Power), the Emo Integrator, and the Heartbeat Integrator.

Written exposure techniques can desensitize powerful and traumatic memories through a written review of the details of traumatic scenarios over and over. See the Emotional Writing Process, the Emo Reviewer, and the Event Reviewer (found in Your Emotional Power).

Challenging and scary situations can lose their fear and anxiety provoking elements by confronting them.

Challenging emotions can be greatly reduced by learning

to think undistortedly. Learning to challenge and change distorted thinking can help us overcome depression, anxiety, jealousy, envy, and anger. See our Tips on Distorted Thinking. 

It is important to take action no matter how we initially feel. This helps us overcome procrastination, emotional paralysis, and can lift our moods by giving us a sense of real control. See A Call to Action , The Action Maneuver, and the As If Action Maneuver.

Self-defeating behavior can be overcome by repatterning the behavior or doing a new activity in a behavior's place and practicing the new behaviors until they feel natural and become habitual. If the self-defeating behavior is compulsive, we can learn to feel what feelings are being covered over by the compulsion. This helps dissolve the compulsivity of the behavior. See the The Pattern Tree, the Behavior Repatterner (in Your Emotional Power), and the The Habit Cracker.

Folks feel more alive and involved with life when they follow up on well-made goals and visions, which can be done with The Creator, an envisioning process.

A large part of feeling good and okay is self-acceptance, choosing to unconditionally accept yourself and separate yourself from what you do and have. Self-criticalness is stressing and limiting and built on name calling based on distorted thinking. See our Learn-ins on self-acceptance in the Forums.    

We recommend a look at Steve's growing Tips and Skills article base, including new tips on Overcoming Addiction, Guilt versus Healthy Remorse,  Grieving, as well as tips on Overcoming Loveaholism or Love Addiction.  It's also likely you'll find the new Hand Warming – Belly Breathing Exercise an excellent way to stimulate the vagus nerve and turnoff fight/flight overwhelm, stress, anxiety, and other forms of arousal.