Emotional Sensitivity
There’s a lot of stigma around emotions, emotional awareness, or in other words, emotional sensitivity. It often tends to be looked down upon as society doesn’t value emotional intelligence, and many have a negative connotation for people who are able to pick up on the different nuances of the experience they are experiencing. This happens for many reasons, including our own family upbringing and survival mechanism, and unfortunately, in other cases, this happens as a form of manipulation.
The most common and successful way for people to manipulate you is to gaslight you and make you question reality. The purpose of gaslighting is to make you feel like you are crazy. People who abuse and manipulate you will make sure that you are the one questioning your thoughts and feelings, regardless of something that was actually said and done and when it actually happened. Now, of course, you are not crazy, and those things actually happened. The purpose of this tactic being used by many is to have you feeling exactly like that, so only their point comes across.
People with Narcissistic personality disorders will take this tactic to the extreme. It’s their favorite. Projection and gaslighting are their favorite tools to make it through life. They will make sure to make their way around your mind. While they are abusing you in the most horrific ways possible, completely tearing you down, chipping away at your self-esteem to make you insecure like them, and making sure you question what you are actually worth and what you stand for as a human being, causing you even physical illness, they will shamelessly turn around, project their own unresolved issues and say you are the problem. You are too sensitive. However, these individuals can’t even take 1% of the abuse that they themselves put you through due to their extremely fragile egos. We see this play out in various family dynamics, religious, spiritual circles, and so forth.
In fact, many years ago, when I was only about 24 years old, I remember encountering a very destructive cult in NYC that called themselves Gnostics. This is the tactic they used with many who threatened their sense of self and mirrored back exactly what they refused to accept and confront within themselves. And no, they are not affiliated in any way whatsoever with the Gnostic church or with what little we know about the true Gnostics or their teachings. These are delusional cults that lead hundreds of thousands of people and families astray on their journey of self-realization, offering teachings that have zero substance. They engage in brainwashing and word salads, propagating distorted teachings that are dangerous for the psyche while their pockets get fatter and fatter with their published works.
While you are a kind individual and come into these various social circles with strong values, strength, regard, esteem, and respect for spiritual teachers or elders, they will take that as a form of weakness. Instead of learning in your presence, intimidated by your inner power, beauty, etc., entitled, they will use it against you. What a great opportunity to deflect the type of trash of individuals that we are and use this person as our target of criticism, as they will certainly make a great punching bag. It’s a great tactic to make oneself superior and never to take accountability for one’s actions or accept how one truly feels about oneself. But of course, they will completely misjudge and abuse you in the process and project all their shortcomings and unresolved issues onto you. It certainly makes them feel better.
They will also have the audacity to make you feel indebted to them for their “grandiose acts” of generosity so that you don’t question their appalling attitudes and actions. These are all favorite tactics of Cluster B personality types. When you run into these individuals in any circle, my only suggestion to you is to get away as soon as you can because you are wasting your precious time among highly disturbed and unstable individuals. Soon, I will be writing a post on cults and cult psychology and the many dangers and damage that so many families and individuals go through when seeking any form of higher and spiritual knowledge among various circles.
Emotions | The Seat of Wisdom
Yin and yang, masculine and feminine, are two polar aspects of the human being, regardless of whether you are a biological man or woman. Integration of both these inner opposites or polar aspects of the personality is crucial to our own self-understanding and self-realization. In Jungian terms, this is called the anima or animus integration. I have spoken extensively about emotional mastery in my first book, How to Get on the Good Side of Life, which you can find on Amazon, even on Amazon Kindle. When we can consciously shift back and forth between these two different polar opposites or perspectives, we are able to attain a deeper sense of self-awareness, which is crucial in leading not only healthier lives but also accessing our own inner potential.
Now, whether we are conscious or not, we all have our own tendencies to get set in our ways. In psychology, our habits do not only arise from the things that may have happened to us but also from the consistent reaction to those events. In fact, our subconscious mind is programmed by how we face the same emotional dynamic and react to it in the same way consistently during childhood. It’s through repetition in both thought and emotion. So, once we have set up a pattern of reactions, we are inclined to stay with that pattern as it becomes part of our nature.
This is why sometimes life can feel like a consistent situation that we cannot or do not know how to break free from, especially when it becomes negatively consistent. Subconsciously, we often seek to repeat these different patterns with different people or circumstances so that we face that same reality over and over again, but the hidden goal is to be able to break that pattern and react to it differently. This is a rare result when most of us go about life living completely unconscious and unaware of these deeper and more subtle patterns and tendencies.
Portals to our own internal landscape
Although emotions generally belong to the feminine domain or principle, the emotional experience itself is similar. Emotions are the same regardless of where your perspective is anchored, masculine or feminine. We all experience the same range of emotions. Everyone is capable of feeling hopeful, happy, sad, angry, humiliated, frustrated, scared, anxious, proud, overwhelmed, shocked, and so forth. On the positive side of the masculine perspective relative to our own emotional landscape, we are able to look at our emotions from a distance, which enables us to have healthy stoicism and to be able to decide whether or not we want to engage in this or that action. From this point of view, we are able to say I like this or I don’t like this, enabling us with quick strategic decision-making and providing us with a healthy sense of decisiveness.
What we have to remember is that out of every situation that arises comes the challenge of integrating our own resources. We are all capable of thinking straight and thinking in a simple, kindly, constructive way. Often, we do not achieve our goals because of the very little effort we make to regulate our own inner landscape. We think it’s easier to force a certain outer conformity and, in this way, avoid obvious difficulties that are indeed the solution to our problem in the first place. Now, the mind alone has a tendency to escape us, and I believe we can all agree on this. Our lack of attention can reduce effectiveness in many different departments of life. A lot of the negatives, on both the masculine and feminine perspectives, come simply from the disintegration of the opposite and not being able to switch perspectives. The masculine perspective, in its disintegrated form, can become very cold and detached from its emotions and pretend that our own emotional landscape doesn’t even exist. This can steer us into being completely ungrounded and away from ourselves and our emotional compass..
Often, this is a defense mechanism we established to cope with traumatic experiences, and you may find that people who do this will say something along the lines of I feel dead inside. This was a very shocking experience for me in my early twenties when I went through it myself. I was living in Rome at the time, and I literally woke up and said: I feel dead inside. Although I was very much engaged with life, travel, friends, and music at the time, what I was actually saying is I feel very disconnected from myself. I didn’t understand it then, but once I admitted that to myself, a series of uncontrollable events happened to help me get in touch with what I was trying to avoid.
Body-awareness and mastery | Emotions
From the feminine perspective, we have the gift of being grounded in ourselves and our emotions in order to attain emotional mastery, but there is a learning curve when feeling so overwhelmed with all the nuances and details and be able to actually decipher our internal emotional city while we cannot make sense of anything. It’s like being dropped into the ocean and not knowing how to swim. As a result, we can become vague, not articulate, and unable to express ourselves from our emotions. We can also become manipulative and passive-aggressive as the emotions remain in the shadow.
Sometimes, the feminine perspective can be too close to read the emotions, so they need the ability to back up in order to see. When we get stuck in the unintegrated masculine or feminine perspective, it’s like trying to watch a small TV screen from a very distant view where you can see some colors here and there, but you can’t really decipher what is happening, as well as with the feminine, it’s like being so close with your nose pressed up onto the TV screen where you can’t see what’s going on either.
When skillfully navigating our emotional landscape from the feminine integration, we can easily regulate our nervous system as we have a deep awareness and detailed view of what is going on with our emotions. We’ve shined a light on it, and it is no longer in the dark and a lot less intense to deal with. In order to do this, we have to be attuned to our bodies at a level of being and hold space for our emotions as they play out in our bodies.
Meditation and yoga are very helpful in learning to anchor ourselves in our bodies without the projection or excuses of the mind, but more so, our willingness to surrender our pride and feel what we try to avoid for so long and what we fear most, as well as learning to trust ourselves. You cannot have a forcing attitude and expect to self-realize, so we have to be willing to work with our emotions, learn to respond to them, and not work against our emotions and have them operate from the shadow. We have to be willing to build resources within our own nature that are stronger than the pressures that arise around us. Nature, homeostasis, wants us to solve things and not obscure them with further pressure.
Emotional awareness belongs to the feminine principle. In contrast, emotional mastery belongs to the masculine. You cannot have one without the other. While the masculine perspective is able to read emotions from a bird’s eye view with a broad stroke, the feminine can have boots on the ground, read emotions well, as well as others’ emotions easily, and put themselves directly in connection with intuition. In fact, this is the reason why, in the last several decades, police forces have liked to bring more women into the field, as they are indeed intuitive and bring their own skills to the table.
Don’t miss this post here: What is Ego? The True Meaning Revealed!
