Trajectories

How understanding the way our emotions impact us can improve our relationships

Noticing how we receive inputs is an important part of reflective practice. This is something I incorporate in both my coaching and counselling work. For example, how we receive positive and negative feedback. Do we have a tendency to accept one rather than the other?

What other people think about us matters: it’s fundamental for connection and meaningful relationships. However, what we think about ourselves often gets in the way of being able to receive input.

Much has been written about negativity bias and its disproportionate affect on our mental state — which goes some way to explain why we find it difficult to accept compliments. However, a trauma informed approach provides an additional layer of understanding in regard to how our emotions affect our ability to receive.

Communication is a collection of signals and responses. However, between the former and the latter, there is a lot of ‘noise’. This noise is a collection of our emotions which correspondingly informs our beliefs — about ourselves and others.

In EMDR there is a concept of negative and positive cognitions. When thinking about an adverse life event, I ask my clients to think of the negative belief they have about themselves in that situation. It is this belief that keeps us stuck in the past, and prevents us from adaptively processing it. The positive belief is something that we would like to feel about ourselves in the same situation. Understandably, this can be really difficult to do. How can we possibly feel different about something that we experienced as traumatic?

We all have our own trajectories in our experiencing. The noise is rarely the same in any given situation. However, we do have patterns of relating and responding, and understanding these can improve our understanding of both ourselves and others. For example, with EMDR when we adaptively process an adverse experience; we are re-writing the trajectory in how we think about ourselves in a particular situation. “I’m not safe” can become “I am safe now”.

I am often asked whether we can change how we feel. My answer is a resounding yes! This is both my professional and personal view. We don’t move past things, we move through them, and the route we take to do so will be different for everyone.

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