Emotional integration

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evolve into what we want—and then one day we find that we can’t take it anymore. Meaningful endurance is quite different. It’s us being aware that we are in a tight spot and that we communicate with our partner that we are experiencing a tough period. But we are also experiencing movement. The change might be slow but there is change and the relationship is evolving. As long as we can register a change towards the better, we won’t drain our batteries and the energy that it takes to endure will likely not run out for a long time.

I wouldn’t say that Freud is the father of therapy. I think humans have talked to each other about their emotions since the beginning of time. But Freud did shape it into a somewhat structured process. To talk about our emotions, what has happened to us and what is upsetting us, is efficient, but if you ask me it’s only efficient if the event that upset us happened recently. If instead the situation that is upsetting us happened a long time ago, just talking about it doesn’t cut it. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I claim that our inability to remember correctly is a major factor. Another perspective of this is; if talking about an issue that happened a long time ago was so efficient, why can’t therapists that rely primarily on talking leave a money back guarantee regarding the efficiency of this method? I know it sounds controversial, but the fact is that a lot of people stay in this kind of therapy for years without really transforming their lives.

There was a movement around the 1970’s that recognized that talking about our issues wasn’t the sole solution, and an alternative was created called primal therapy. Simply put, it’s

about connecting to suppressed emotions and letting them out through wild screaming, intense crying, and so on. Just as with talking, primal therapy offers a temporary relief from our issues a short time after we have experienced them, but about a week later the same issues that are holding us back and bugging us are likely back.

The cultures in the East have a radically different approach to strong emotions emanating from experiences that have happened to us long ago. There are many different terms for this approach in these cultures, but I like the term emotional integration. It’s the simplest of all strategies regarding overcoming unpleasant memories and emotions; you simply sit with the emotion, for example when meditating. When the emotion arises in your system and you notice it, you just allow it to be there, you don’t push it away, you don’t enhance it by telling a story of why this emotion is occurring, you just observe it with curiosity. After a while the feelings subside and dissolve. It takes some practice and patience, but this method has proven itself useful for far longer than both psychoanalysis and primal therapy. This approach has successfully been used for thousands of years in cultures that are in one way or another connected to Buddhism.

The trick here is to find the sweet spot in each of the methods, all have their specific benefits and applications areas. Personally, I believe in mixing all three methods—talking, primal therapy, and emotional integration—to maximize speedy results regarding personal growth.

Interesting things happen when we integrate our emotions, they transform and evolve into new personal traits. In the table to the right you find what some different feelings evolve into if emotional integration is practiced.