Identify Toxic Emotions That Have Controlled Your Life
Humans are imperfect beings and make mistakes. Everyone says that as if they “know,” but knowing and accepting are very different. If you accept the part of yourself that isn’t perfect, you don’t have to beat yourself up over shortcomings. You need to come to your truth and understand how your toxic emotions developed. If you grew up believing that you were the reason for someone else’s feelings, or believed that you were bad, you will do whatever you can to avoid more shame or guilt. It’s a survival skill. It’s also an excuse to keep you from realizing your dreams or living a satisfying life.
Toxic emotions don’t happen overnight. They are accumulated over time and based on tons of emotional exchanges. Everything you do has a purpose and a value, whether you realize it or not. After you establish your truth from your story, you’ll come to find the value and purpose of your choices. You can’t change history, but as you learn about emotional and energetic imprints, you’ll begin to see how unprocessed toxic emotions have held you back from some of life’s greatest moments.
Understand Your Emotional Imprints
What’s interesting about an emotional roller coaster is that most people think they are seeking the high because it “feels” good. We know the high is temporary and the higher we go, the lower we will fall. In regard to vibrations and our addiction to them, we actually seek the low. The low is the high. The low is what feeds and traps us to our emotional imprint comfort zone. The low confirms we aren’t good enough and don’t deserve to be happy.
Similar to drugs, the low is what keeps us addicted. If we didn’t have the low, be it a hard day, stress that needs to be released, pain that needs attention, or sleepless nights—we wouldn’t need the high. To make the ride smoother and close the gap between highs and lows, use the AAA Method:
- Acknowledge what you’re feeling—good, too good, or bad.
- Accept that you’re seeking a high, to distract you from your low; only to take you back to chasing a high.
- Act by stabilizing your emotions and taking small micro-steps to sustain a vibration that feels somewhat higher than your baseline.
Many of us would like to move from 0–100. We hope for a spontaneous miracle to help us forget the negative place we came from so that we can move into a new territory of green grass and daisies. This is why the “letting go” theory is so popular. It supports the idea that if we can just move on, our life will change and we will be free.
But it doesn’t work that way. Building a new imprint doesn’t mean killing off your old self. It means fully acknowledging and accepting who you are with conscious thought and taking action to rebuild from a place of acknowledgment and acceptance.
Food, again, is a good example. You know that a box of chocolate chip cookies is not good for you and that eating the entire box will make you feel bad. When you’re in control, you can stop at one or two. That’s a balanced emotional day. When you’re out of control and need a hit, you eat the whole thing. What you’re really doing is seeking the low that is associated with your pain points. Addiction to food is a source of self-sabotage. For many, it’s easier to control something tangible that affects how we feel physically than to deal with emotional pain.
To raise your vibration in a healthy way, do it slowly, consistently, and consciously. Don’t seek the highs or lows—seek self-love instead. Take micro-steps to build confidence in new patterns, and learn to trust yourself by sustaining new patterns in an ongoing way. That’s growth. That’s achievable.
Recognize Your “Truth” from Your “Story”
It is possible to take control and feel good again. Releasing the addiction to pain and our stories will expedite the process. Simply asking yourself how you really feel right now as opposed to relying on the addiction of toxic emotions as your guide can jumpstart recovery from our addiction.
A helpful healing exercise that applies the AAA Method in a broader sense is to figure out what kind of movie your story would make. If your movie is filled with drama, trauma, and dangerous storylines or characters, you may need to meditate or work with a qualified therapist or healing practitioner to gain emotional support. Part of this work is learning to trust your current adult self to create a safe and committed practice that will build confidence and offer a deeper sense of self-love.
ACKNOWLEDGE
- Identify the characters in your story.
This may include family members, friends, relatives, teachers, babysitters, or other regularly present people who played a role in your developmental years. Try to include those who were present in your life from the ages of two to ten. List these characters in your journal by name. Also include people who were not always present, but played a key role in your thinking and actions. This may be someone you wanted to be close to who didn’t seem critical in your story. Develop two storylines: Main Stars and Supporting Roles.
ACCEPT
- Write at least three pages that detail your “story.
Write it as if you are telling a friend about a movie or book. Include important details including any experiences that made you feel either loved and encouraged or scared, slighted, ashamed, embarrassed, or not smart enough. Be as open and vulnerable as possible.
ACT
- Review your list of toxic emotions
and write the word(s) that most correspond with your story next to the corresponding event. Use a red or colored pen to highlight the word.
This process can lead to a better understanding of our toxic emotions, core wounds, emotional imprints, and vibrational frequencies. Seeing how it all connects can free the subconscious mind of false beliefs and invite in new experience. Your story will never be erased, but you don’t have to keep pressing rewind if you use the support of the AAA Method.
The characters were real. The experiences really happened. And the combination of these events and relationships created your emotional imprints. It can be triggering to retell your story, but remember that you are doing this to acknowledge your history and find acceptance to be able to move forward and rebuild your operating system.
Heal Your Inner Child
One of the most productive ways to cut through patterns and communicate with your inner child is to ask questions.
Dedicate a journal or coloring book as a means of communication with your inner child. Perhaps choose a playful cover. Whenever you are triggered or doing self-care work, write back and forth in this journal or book, talking to your inner child. Here’s how this is done
- With your dominant hand, ask your inner child how they are, or what they need today. Just a single question is fine. Remember, you are communicating with someone who has limited language skills and emotional capacity. Keep this simple.
- Using your non-dominant hand, write the response from your inner child. This may be frustrating, but that’s okay. Writing from your non-dominant hand allows your brain to slow down and hear the inner child. Young children are typically challenged to write and share emotions, so this aligns with their natural state. The response from your inner child may be short or simple as well. Just start a dialogue in this safe place of your journal. Check back when you are feeling a bit off, anxious, or triggered.
- Talk with your child and be curious. Your inner child may reveal that they need more downtime, or they may be fearful. Your inner child may let you know that they don’t feel safe with your new love interest, or something is not right with a certain friendship. Your inner child may need your attention or want you to be more childlike at certain times. Don’t filter the response from your inner child. Let them have their own voice and keep in mind that your inner child has wisdom but also limitations.
A good parent doesn’t allow the child to have everything they want. But parents should honor what the child says, listen to how they feel, and be the person who validates them, showing discipline and unconditional love. Healthy parents don’t judge, they accept. As adults, parents make the best possible decision with the information they have, and that’s how you should re-parent your inner child.
Welcome Self-Love as Medicine That Heals
commercial market and social media world, self-love and self-care have become the trend, forcing every conceivable form of pleasure or escape in order to live your best life, get your act together, and eliminate pain.
But there is real value in self-love. In healing, it is a step toward empowerment and confidence, and it leads you to the highest vibration possible. There is great reward in allowing the time and energy to love yourself, and it doesn’t encourage you to become narcissistic. There’s nothing selfish or vain about genuine self-love.
Loving yourself does not take away or diminish the love you have for others. Never. This belief is part of the problem. The idea that to love and care for yourself is selfish comes from an energy belief based in “lack” thinking, which is attached to shame. People who believe that self-love is selfish or narcissistic have limited beliefs about worthiness and abundance and fear capacities to love out of fear they aren’t “enough.” It’s not entirely their fault. Over time they’ve learned that being a good person means you should put others above yourself. These learned beliefs developed from a place of fear.
Self-love is not only thinking about ourselves, it is also about taking care of our needs in order to establish good boundaries and healthy interactions with others. Subconscious self-blame has its roots in the desire to fix someone else’s problem. When we stop putting the problems of others ahead of our own and use conscious thought, we can acknowledge the parts of us that are suffering while participating in relationships with others.
Self-Love Contract
Date: ____________________
Location: ____________________
Name: ____________________
I, ________________________________________, hereby commit my best efforts to the growth and practice of self-love. I now recognize that I am worthy of my investment. Loving myself adds great value to my life and to the lives of others.
I, ________________________________________, am capable of learning new skills and techniques and I will apply them regularly to heal my inner child, build confidence in my adult self, and remember that self-love does not take away from my love for others, nor does it replace another’s love for me.
I, ________________________________________, commit time each day to a mindfulness practice that is focused on the reality of my truth, and the expansion of my vibrational baseline. I am grateful for the stories of my past that shaped me, but they do not have to define me.
Loving myself,
Signature __________________
Date __________________
