Emotionally Available
In Homeopathy, we make a distinction between emotional stress and mental stress. It’s easier to see clearly with mental stress. Some disease states are made better from mental stress and some are made worse. Emotional stress is a little harder to define, but in the years now in practice, the emotional stress is an obvious trigger for the return of disease symptoms after a period of wellness. Think of it as emotional distress causes the disease to come out of remission.
It’s always been hard for me to define emotional stress. I’m in it all the time – mostly others’. Thinking of this discussion this week… mental stress doesn’t bother me. Yes, I may become fatigued, but I do not press past my limits. I can easily say, OK, can’t think, must sleep. It’s easy for me to rationalize that and then support that boundary.
Emotional stress is different. I don’t have a limiter until I unconsciously disengage. Disappear. Take a powder. In “work” drop the ball. Or become defiant, making my schedule immovable. There are other ways I think this shows up, but I’m still fresh in the awareness.
How this relates to our topic this week, is that I do not feel able to make a boundary to the emotional stress. I feel obligation. I feel a sense of duty to care for others emotions. I am well past my ability to interact in this regard, yet I am frozen in a state of obligation and guilt. It’s kind of like a hyperventilation of sorts.
In a way I am busy with other people’s negative emotions. I’m holding them all and the weight is unbearable, and yet I agree to put more on top. I feel guilty. And yet I have detached and can’t make the needed phone calls.
Why is this a good topic for some day? Obligation causes the “adrenal exhaustion” symptoms and diseases. Emotions cause the negative chemicals. My own in ability to make those boundaries, means I am crossing my own boundaries. That is the exact recipe for auto immune.
Busy is as busy does.
Great exchange Amber. I don’t have arthritis, but my Mum does. This awareness and my choices about what I allow to “busy” me in my day, what conscious boundaries I make, will be the prevention of that disease potential in me.
I’m loving this too… my Mum was my first Arthritis patient. She was for our entire class. She is almost symptomless now because she created those boundaries in her own life, by changing how she operates in relationships. Yes it was the remedies that “cured” the physical pain, but it was her change in how she thinks that stopped the degenerative process.
Wow.
