Brianna Wiest - The Mountain Is You_ Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (2020)

158 BRIANNA WIEST
Your trauma is not “in your head”; it is literally a changed
state in your brain, and the only way you will help your
body to return to its actual state is by recreating the feeling
of safety that allows you to “turn off ” survival mode
and return to normal life.
RELEASING EMOTIONAL BACKLOG
Your emotional backlog is like your email inbox.
It might be a simple analogy, but it’s an effective one.
When you experience emotions, it’s as though you’re getting
little messages from your body stacking up one at
a time. If you don’t ever open them, you end up 1,000+
notifications deep, totally overlooking crucial information
and important insights that you need to move your life
forward. At the same time, you can’t sit around all day and
respond to every message just as it comes up; you’d never
get anything done.
It is a mistake to assume that emotions are optional experiences.
They are not. But we are masters of avoiding our
feelings, and we do it in so many ways. Often, we rely on
substances that physically numb us, projections and judgments
that place the attention on someone else’s faults as
opposed to our own, all kinds of other worldly pursuits,
and on the most basic level, tensing our bodies up so efficiently
that we are rendered incapable of feeling.