If I’m hysterical, it’s historical

I read a brilliant phrase in the memoir of TV writer  Tracy McMillan called I love you and I’m leaving anyway.  She said: “If I’m hysterical, it’s historical.”

What she meant by that is when what would normally only be a mildly upsetting or neutral experience, unknowingly keys into similar past events that have not been fully processed and you find yourself going absolutely nuts over it – you’re in floods of tears, or incredibly anxious or you shut down completely – and no-one, perhaps least of all you, can understand why this has produced such intensity of emotion.

This is our first clue that we have undealt events and emotions locked within us that have been triggered by a new, but similar event.  As if we have not been able to fully process and release intense emotions as we experience them, they build up until just one more of their kind becomes ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.

A period which might contain a number of events that were particularly difficult to fully process is our childhood – when things happen to us and perhaps we do not have the tools to understand, process and release the emotions caused by traumatic or confusing events.

It can be surprising, in an age when people are very much more aware of their feelings and the influence of their upbringing on development, to find that things you honestly felt you had dealt with continue to exert such an  emotional pull on us when triggered by similar events.

And I guess you know what I’m going to say next; EFT is one golden ticket out of being locked into this spiral of emotions, because we can dismantle the intensity of those past, similar experiences, one by one until there is nothing left there to trigger, even if something of a similar ilk happens to us today.

Emotional Freedom Techniques – it is about being free of the excess emotion from events, past and present that no longer serves us. So that we retain the learnings and the memories, but not the intensity.  And with that freedom we can see with a new clarity of mind, better understanding and we can move on from the emotional events that used to trip us up, whenever they echoed with our past.