What You Run from, You Run Towards

What You Run from,

You Run Towards

In childhood, we learn what emotions are safe and unsafe to experience. We develop strategies and personalities to protect ourselves from reexperiencing the unsafe emotions. Unhealed, these emotions are active wounds, open and exposed to more pain.

You can’t skip the healing process; the more a person runs from their emotions, the more those emotions run their life. Most people are rarely aware of the emotions they avoid, yet they may be aware they continually experience the same undesirable situations.

If a person runs from their experience anger (perhaps even believing it’s a virtuous quality), they will continuously have their boundaries broken…until they acknowledge and lean into feeling that anger. Accessing and harnessing the energy of anger, paired with patience, compassion, and tact is an effective tool to creating healthy and fair boundaries.

Common emotions that people run from are rejection, abandonment, shame, guilt, and even, joy. We create strategies to never encounter situations in which we’ll experience these unhealed, vulnerable emotions—but, in doing so, how many beautiful situations will we never experience? These strategies follow us into work and relationships, but they are also in the crevices of every day, moment-to-moment living, guiding and dictating how we sit, stand, walk, talk, and even breathe.

We’re given the same situations to experience as opportunities to emotionally transcend. That’s our divine gift to continually unwrap. If we leave that gift incarcerated and bound, we live a life according to the biddings of others and the world.

What life gifts have you yet to unwrap?