Hi everyone! I want to help you better understand why it is so darn hard to let things go sometimes. I am going to do this by assuring you that you are absolutely not alone because I am going to be vulnerable and share a recent story from my own life experience. I am going to explain why we have stored emotions. Why it is so hard to distract ourselves when we are hyper-focused on something and what you can be more aware of to help yourself? 

When was the last time you had something happen and you found yourself lying in bed that night still thinking about it? Perhaps overthinking. Maybe feeling negative emotions about it. It happened 12 hours ago but it is still right there at the surface. Right? Can you think of a situation like this in your life? What was it? How did you react to it? What was happening in your brain to keep you so focused on it? Did all the ruminating help? Or did it just exhaust you and end up beating yourself up for it? Making you feel more tired and stressed and stuck?

We are made this way by design. It is not our fault or anything we have done wrong. We just aren’t taught tools to help combat our human nature. When our brain interprets something as a negative or a threat, it will keep that on standby to protect us. It actually stores it away for future reference in your central nervous system. It does this to protect you. Very simply if a child burns their hand on a stove this is stored so they won’t do it again. This is to protect you.  What happens is we have these life experiences and childhood traumas and they are stored. So if you wonder why things come back up with such intense emotion this is why. 

Now imagine that this something happened to you 10 years ago. You might assume that it should be long gone. Nope, not really. 

When something connects to us and our central nervous system is disrupted, it is stored. This specific part of our brain that stores past experiences does not understand a timeline. So when it comes up for you today, it is like it is bringing all the same intense emotions from the past. Think about that. Something you experienced in the past. When something brings that back up years later, your nervous system will feel the same feelings as it brought you back then. It is no wonder why we can’t let it go. Why do we ruminate and catastrophize and add stress to our lives by worrying about something that most likely isn’t as bad as our brain is making it out to be? And even if it is. This use of our valuable energy does nothing for us to be able to think objectively, and creatively and see the problem through possibility rather than through problems. 

Ok, so the story I want to share is something that happened to me recently. I will tell you, this really threw me for a loop. I was quite embarrassed and ashamed of how I showed up. Remember, I tell you this all the time. I have been working on these tools for some time, and sometimes things still get me. I am going to be honest because we are all in this together and we can help each other by sharing our experiences and what we learn along the way. But I am so so much better than I used to be as far as handling stressful situations in my life and showing up in a better manner than when I was on autopilot to my primitive brain. 

As you listen to my story try to see if you have ever experienced anything like this in your life. Awareness is the first step in all this so if you can relate my story to something you have had happen this is a great thing. Alright, so here is what happened to me. When our daughter was 5, her kindergarten teacher advised us to have her eyes checked. She thought there could be something going on. We had no clue whatsoever. We couldn’t visibly see anything. We had no awareness that she was struggling in any way with her eyesight. We made an appointment with our local eye doctor and were told that she had refractive amblyopia and was born with it. Her left eye was essentially considered legally blind at this point. The eye stops being recognized and your brain sort of forgets it. It is caused by a focusing difference between the two eyes. The brain only sees with the stronger eye, and as a consequence, the vision in the weaker eye does not develop. So all this time she had been doing everything she did with essentially one eye. I was so shocked. I wondered how did we not know. How could we never have noticed? As Mothers often do we start to blame ourselves because after all we are supposed to be superheroes and know everything about our kids. Right?

We were informed of our options and I of course wanted a second opinion because I didn’t want it to be true. We decided to travel 1 hour to a university to get a second opinion. The diagnosis was confirmed and we were again given our options. We would need to get her a glasses prescription that had a very thick lens on the one eye. We would start this red/green reading therapy and use an eye patch for so many hours per day. All this was being done in hopes of waking the eye up. We were also told that getting her in contact lenses at the earliest opportunity would be helpful to make the most progress with improving her vision. 

For the next several years we would visit this university twice a year and around age 7-8 the desire to get her in contact lenses became the focus. I cannot tell you have traumatic it was for me to sit there and watch her cry and scream as two students and a doctor would sometimes attempt to put in the contact lenses. I felt so helpless. I was so upset each and every time, but I was trying to act calm for her even though I wasn’t. I tried to use the “it could always be worse thought” to make myself feel better but it didn’t help for very long. 

This went on for many years. Try again, cry, leave. Try again, cry, leave. I wanted those contact lenses in so badly to try and give her the best chance to awaken the eye and improve her vision. I didn’t want her to ever struggle. 

At some point, we stopped going to the university and came back to our local eye doctor and explained that she was not in any place to entertain the contact lenses and the whole experience was traumatic. She wants nothing to do with touching her eyes. It would just be what it is. Do the best we can with glasses. They understood and I remember the doctor saying she will get along fine but things like pulling the car in the garage when she starts driving will be a challenge for her to gauge depth and distance. Ugh, this is not what this controlling Mom wanted to hear but I had to accept it. 

Ok, now fast forward to this year. She began to play soccer and would not wear her glasses. She told me she would like to try contact lenses. She is 14 now and I didn’t hesitate, I thought sure, I will make the appointment. 

I really didn’t think much of it until we were sitting in the room with the lady who was assisting with training for the contact lenses. 

I had this flood of emotion come up within my body. I felt panicked. I felt fear. I felt frustrated. I wanted to just run out of that room. And as my daughter sat there trying to get these contacts in, it just got stronger and stronger.

When the lady decided to leave the room and let her work at it alone she asked me to move closer and the emotion just got that much stronger. I could tell my panicked energy was annoying my daughter. Anything I would say just added to her frustration. 

After quite some time, she got one in on the better of the two eyes. Then she went to work on the other. More time passed. Now I am feeling stressed because I know we only have this room for so long and we have been in here for quite some time. So now I have this impatient energy coming up. That can only help with a frustrated teenage girl right??

When she got the other eye in she was overwhelmed with emotion at what she was able to see. This just caused me to be flooded with emotion. It made me think that these contacts must work. This is crucial. 

So clearly, the past experience was still stored in my central nervous system. So when this experience came up now, it was like I was feeling a flood of emotions from all those previous appointments. 

Well in an effort to keep this short I am not going to go into all the details of what followed. But what I will say is that she was having trouble getting them out but we were allowed to leave with the hopes she could do it herself. Later that night she spent 2 hours trying to get them out with me hawking over her like a crazy woman that can’t handle her emotions. This led to the contacts staying in for 20 days before I succumbed to defeat and asked my husband to please take her and get some help. 

This is where the stored emotions got in the way. I became obsessed with making these contacts work. It felt like life or death to me. 

This was the moment I realized the importance of knowing what is stored within me. When your reactions do not match up with the situation and what to do when this happens. This really should have been a neutral factual circumstance. My 14-year-old daughter wants to try contacts again. I had all this stored emotion that impacted how I was able to hold calm space for her. I turned this into a huge ordeal that could have been very routine. 

Again, awareness is the first step. Seeing what is happening and acknowledging that it is not helpful. Then spend time to go back and look at this stored emotion and process it to release it. In a future blog, I will share all about releasing stored emotions.

Brooke Castillo is the master coach whose training I received. I was listening to her podcast where she shared that we should all take note of the amount of energy that we have in a situation and does it match up with the situation itself. Pay close attention to this as it can be a signal that there is something more here that we are bringing into the situation. I know without a doubt the emotion I was feeling sitting in that room with my 14-year-old daughter was way out of alignment with what was happening. This was stored unresolved emotion clouding my ability to think clearly. 

Can you think of a situation where you have had more emotion than the situation calls for? Can you think of stored emotions or unresolved trauma you may be storing in your nervous system just waiting for it to present itself?

Spend some time thinking about that. Awareness is everything. Once you see it for what it is, you have the power to choose how to respond. 

This journey we are on is not a straight line. It is so curvy with twists and turns and ups and downs. If we add more tools to our emotional toolbox we can feel lighter and more in control than we ever thought possible. And if you have an area of your life where you are struggling, I am accepting new clients for my one one-on-one coaching. You can easily send me a message by visiting my website at lifecoachingwithcarisa.com. I’d love to chat with you about what I do and how it helps you feel lighter, less stressed, and more in control. 

“Stored and stuffed emotions take a great toll on the body, and eventually the old built-up energy will be released in the form of painful physical manifestations.”

Barbara Marciniak (Writer)