Where is Your Emotional Home?
Your emotional home is the emotion you automatically attach as your experience life. This is the emotion that feels safe or comfortable to express.
As a human, you experience a wide array of emotions throughout your life, heck even throughout your day. These emotions can be happiness, joy, anxiety, calm, sadness, anger, grief, confidence, irritation, jealousy, gratitude or love just to name a few. There are many emotions we experience but generally we tend to have a top one or two that we like to attach to.
Now, I want to be clear that there are an array of emotions that you can move through in a short amount of time. Your emotional home is the emotion/s that are your default emotional experience. For example, when I'm having a tough day, I tend to get down on myself and feel depressed. Depression is my emotional home because it's the emotion I feel comfortable feeling more than other ones.
Your Emotional Cave
I often think of our emotional home as the cave we choose out of a line of cave openings. Like I’m standing in the forest looking at a huge mountainside with a line of dark entrances. Each one is an emotion I can feel when I step into it. In this cave, I am enveloped with the emotion and I can stay as long as I choose.
This is what an emotional home looks like to me. I’m comfortable there. I’m happy being depressed sometimes because it’s very familiar to me. It’s a place I go to feel safe.
Breaking the habit
Going to your emotional home is a habit. We create a habits by continually choosing to go to this place. Often, this home is created when we were children because we are trying to cope with life around us.
There are many reasons I have chosen my emotional home. I’ve had trauma, loss, and abuse all which have made me very sad. I tend toward depression because it’s home for me as I lived through my experiences. But, as I work deeper with emotions, and bring awareness to them, I create choice to experience different emotions that can widen my experience.
Choice Matters
As I work more with understanding human emotional landscapes, I can see how there is also a choice of emotion we can attach to or not attach to. You always have choice.
Remember that emotions are meant to move, so sometimes the choice will be not going to any emotional home. Instead we live the emotion, let it move, feel it fully, and then go to the next one.
I invite you to get curious about your emotional home and reflect on the questions below.
INNER REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
- What emotion do you tend to go to when life gets overwhelming? (you can learn more about emotional overwhelm here)
- Where is your emotional home?
Let me know how it in the comment box below. I love hearing from you.
Until next time!
xo, Monique