Elephant 2: Unconscious Sensations, Feelings and Emotions
Glenn Bracey
Transformative Coach. Facilitator. Co-Founder of Future Vision. Designer. Embodied & Ai Integration
Before exploring the second Elephant, here’s a 6-point summary of Part 1, if you missed it or here to view the article.
Distract, Suppress, Disown, Deny and Reject
All human behaviours are attempts to FEEL good - Even the divisive and abhorrent ones. It’s essential to emphasise the word feel because unconscious sensations, feelings, and emotions act as the driving force behind many of our outward behaviours. They are the foundational layer of our psychological landscape and the deepest part of the root that blocks inclusion.
Emotions operating beneath our conscious awareness will influence our thoughts, decisions, and actions by subtly shaping how we perceive and react to the world around us. For instance, tiny sensations of unease may lead to me being overly cautious, reluctant or non-inclusive, even when there’s no real threat in my surroundings.
Imagine when you were a child, you were embarrassed in front of your classmates for giving a wrong answer in class. Over time, you may have forgotten the specific incident, but the emotional memory is still there. Now, as an adult, you might feel anxious or uncomfortable speaking up in meetings, even if you have something important to say.
A shadow part of your personality, like the self-critic or the perfectionist, might take over. The self-critic might flood your mind with doubts, convincing you that what you have to say isn't good enough, to prevent you from speaking up and risking embarrassment. Meanwhile, the perfectionist might push you to over-prepare or rehearse endlessly, trying to ensure you won't make a mistake.
These parts are working to protect you from the feelings of inadequacy or rejection they don't want you to experience again.
This means that even when we believe we're making logical, deliberate decisions our inner world fuels our outward behaviours.? While these two interwoven dynamics (our parts and the emotions) continue unrecognised, full acceptance and inclusion of ourselves and others won’t happen.
All is not lost because there is a positive intention behind this interplay. Our parts are trying to protect us from feeling vulnerable, unsafe, and helpless. Their job since childhood has been to protect us from sensations, feelings and emotions that we can handle and naturally dissolve but often we are unaccustomed and unskilled to do this as adults.
It is why so many of us struggle to regulate our emotions and end up distracting, suppressing, disowning, denying or rejecting them instead. Preventing us from achieving true unity and harmony from the inside out.
Inclusion initiatives therefore must account for these two driving forces. We can only co-create inclusive and safe communities from the foundations from which we work.
The News We Might Call Good - We Are Not Alone!
There are many leaders, politicians and everyday folk who have a distant and divided relationship with their feelings and emotions. How often does the human body-mind experience a sensation, feeling or emotion?? Every single second until death. We have so many of them, that it could be said nature is asking us to utilise them as valuable intelligence. Which it is.
Despite the worlds of sensation, feeling and emotion being our primary intelligence, pre-natal through our first 2 years on the planet, it’s an intelligence and wisdom that we struggle to master in our formative and adult lives.
We are the most emotionally dysfunctional species on the planet and our divisive behaviours only survive because we are unwilling to recognise the usefulness of our emotional system that enables us to non-judgmentally own them and learn how to let them go.?(Not the same as brushing them off)
If I distance myself from the fuel of my emotions I cannot take responsibility for the behaviours that come out.? Even when I choose to take responsibility after an unhelpful behavioural reaction that I’ve noticed in myself, does that mean the problem is fixed?? No, not until I learn the art of being with or becoming familiar with this intelligence in real time.
For some reading this, you may recoil because one of your parts might be thinking, something like,
If so, listen to that narrative and notice in what area of your body you physically recoil, contract or go tense. Is it in a slightly grimaced face, raised eyebrows, inner huff, or furrowed brow?
Why notice this? - Because unless we identify the starting points of how we unconsciously slip into division, we can’t take responsibility for our inclusivity.
it’s your opportunity to notice if your inner starting point for inclusion is already divided.
Saying that, for those who don’t ‘get’ emotions I have empathy for this struggle. I have struggled with this too over the years. It’s an opportunity to catch out our inner division and reconsider the dilemma we find ourselves in. The path of waking up to our emotional drivers and healthy change doesn’t have to be excruciating. It might be unfamiliar and therefore vulnerable but there is no growth without vulnerability.
Sensations, feelings and emotions are essential data, chemicals, or flags your system is alerting you to. They fuel all the unwanted behaviours you recognise in yourself. They fuel all the unhelpful behaviours you see in others. They are the fuel for any prolonged areas of stuckness you suffer. They are the fuel for the narrative in your head that you can’t get rid of.
Begin noticing them because once you start bringing them to the light of your awareness they begin to loosen by themselves and the early reluctance you hold about embracing them changes.
The Stoic and Zen traditions utilise similar wisdom with sensations, feelings and emotions. The only way out is through. The obstacle (emotion) is the path. To our freedom and growth.
Go Beyond Symptoms and Conditioning
If, as a child, my parents/role models struggled with recognising the feelings that drove their reactions to perceived differences (race, religion, or culture) I am likely to learn similar reactions because it could FEEL unsafe for me to do otherwise or because I FEEL included and therefore safe, if I agree with and act like them.
On the surface, it can appear the root of the problem lies with our conditioning, what is role-modelled and a lack of education.? However, these are all symptoms. The base root is our inability to non-judgmentally acknowledge and dissolve those feelings we haven’t yet learned to hold.
My early caregivers may be ill-equipped to see that their divisive reactions are a direct result of their emotional avoidance. Let alone the importance of accessing the tools to make peace with their sensations and feelings.
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They are unlikely to realise their sensations, feelings and emotions are the fuel that keeps in place their inner narrative. Such as, “I suppose they (others) are all right as long as they don’t come near me” or “I’m not sure about their kind”.
We humans have become so good at distracting, suppressing, rejecting and avoiding our emotions across our history, that it could be the basis of a novel Olympic event. Each country would have a really decent shot at winning Gold!?
As a species, we’ve done a very effective job until now to normalise our suppression, distraction and denial of our emotional world. Yet there seems to be an increased trickle of signals coming through to change this. Something Gabor Mate eloquently writes about within his New York Times best-selling book, ‘The Myth of Normal’.
Early signals are appearing within the new work generations too. It seems they are seeking more emotionally in-tune workplaces that ask more from their leaders, now.
Helplessness
Helplessness is a state where we feel powerless to change our circumstances, often surrounded by other feelings including defeat, loss, resignation, despair, hopelessness, sadness and anger.?
This is particularly impactful when experienced during childhood, as it shapes our cognitive and emotional development and long-term adult behaviours. As children, we are all placed in situations that trigger helplessness. From being tiny in this huge world, through to an unpleasant home environment, facing so many new experiences including ‘new and strange’ people, school, and social situations for the first time, to early trauma.
Helplessness and its many accompanying sensations and feelings cut through every human life. They sit beneath
How did you feel during the recent race riots in the UK? At whatever distance you saw or ignored them.
Helpless? What else? Maybe sadness, anger, rejection or indifference that it has nothing to do with you.
Some of my friends and family experienced these and a few almost immediately went into indifference, disengagement, withdrawal and sensations of lethargy and heaviness. And if not heaviness, an indifferent ‘positivity’ that helped them justify such events has nothing to do with them.
A few went into resistance and rebellion. Experiencing sensations of pent-up contractions, push and fierceness.
Whatever their actions, their behaviours were all fuelled by the sensations, feelings and emotions beneath. There is no criticism here from me. All of us to different degrees have experienced helplessness and learned helplessness. In which we experience uncontrollable events that begin to have us believe that all outcomes are out of our control. In which we unconsciously abdicate what is within our sphere of influence.
Specifically, we can recognise, non-judgmentally hold and dissolve our sensations, feelings and emotions. That’s the one contribution we can always make.
What Can I Do As a Tiny Step Forward?
Let’s conclude with an experiment that brings some of these talking points into your real-time, personal experience.? I invite you to try this tiny practice (in a playfully-focused way) to increase your awareness of some of the unconscious sensations, feelings and emotions that influence your inclusive/exclusive reactions. To begin noticing the tiny sensations and feelings that your conscious mind, your busyness, your distractions and your parts may be preventing you from acknowledging.
First, we need a context. Here are two suggestions below (Choose a more suitable one if required)
Here’s what to do
Science shows that our bodily sensations and contractions appear a split second before our inner thoughts comment on the other person, thing, or situation. However, It can take more than one practice to realise this is happening in you.
If at first, you can’t detect sensations, contractions or feelings repeat the experiment several times in different situations. Rather than get lost in an internal debate about which comes first feelings or thoughts.
If in your first attempts, all you notice is what your internal dialogue is saying, record and utilise that and then notice afterwards the residues of sensations, contractions or feelings that showed up around that.
If you want to be a super experimenter see if you can name that part in you (The Judge, The critic, etc) that is behind the contractions.
In next week’s article, we will build upon your findings so bring them with you.? In which we explore how an imbalanced nervous system works against our innate ability to be fully inclusive, accepting, open and curious to all of life’s wonderful celebration of ‘difference’.
See you next week, Glenn :)