Emotional Pressures To Emotional Independence Part-1

Emotional Pressures Make you feel depressed.

Emotional Independence Make you happy to your heart's content.

Emotional pressure, It seems very difficult to handle and it seems very depressing. There are many pressures that make us weak in handling emotions and we feel a pressure.

For an instance we have to deal with:

• Parental Pressure

• Social Pressure

• Religious Pressure

• Status Pressure

• Responsibilities Pressure

• Work Pressure

• Relationship Pressure

• Parenting Pressure

Everything leads to Mental Pressure

So many Emotions inside you will surely create Pressure.

Under all these pressures you are buried, Your actual identity is lost, you feel unappreciated, unnoticed and your own people fail to understand. You feel lost, You feel lonely despite being in a crowd, you have lost self esteem, you are feeling depressed, Love is missing from your life, all your dreams seem to be scattered. This is not the life you ever expected. And you are trying to find friends to open up or speak to.

Under these situations usually you try to work around, try to copy others or compare yourself with others and try to live like others with silly expectations that life might change and you will be noticed again. But nothing seems to work. You get stressed out, get depressed, crazy thoughts pop up like no one likes you etc., you feel lonely. Basically There is a lot of emotional pressure developing inside you.

What exactly are emotions?? Emotions are small desires to do small things that make you happy or give you heart’s content. As a child wishes to buy a specific toy or an elder wishes to buy a book. Or maybe even choosing a specific career path.

Such small or big will, wishes, desires of life that make you happy to your heart's content are real emotions.

All the way from your childhood you have been taught about different kinds of rules and how to handle them under different situations,

If a child wants to do something that makes him or her happy, the child is mostly stopped with a big NO and is told to do something else. As the child belongs to a society or religion or its some other reason, but either way the child is forced to suppress his or her emotions. This in turn develops lots of pressure unknowingly to cute little minds. But as a child, even though any of the emotions are not fulfilled, the child feels bad for a while and then ignores them and gets involved into something that makes the child happy. So no impact on life or mind, hence everyone loves their childhood a lot.

By the time you grow into adults you basically forget your real emotions, and even though you remember or feel any emotion, you end up doing the same thing that was done to you when you were a child. For example if you feel like wearing something you tell yourself, a big NO. “No I am grown up, how can I wear now or what will others think etc.”

But if someone else tells you a big no, like your partner or your boss, you feel a lot of emotional pressure as an adult, as it is associated with your self respect. And if you are helpless you blame others and feel, “OMG I can’t live free. I can't even wear what I want, my life has become a joke.” And it's obvious, you are helpless, You cannot be blamed. That's what you learned or I should say you are actually trained for.

Let's look into real Pressures of life.

Especially when it comes to society , religion, maintaining status, in many countries, the story is entirely different. As a human you need to follow the list of do’s and don'ts because you belong to a specific society or a religion,and you need to always maintain a status. Parents use society and religion as a weapon to control the child. Just like a ringmaster controls the ferocious lion in the Circus with a whip. Before even you can realise you had wings to fly, your wings are ripped off.

After you get into a job or get into a relationship or get married, these pressures might continue on an entirely different level. Because that's where the real emotions come to the picture.

Now that it's your life without any ringmaster you feel you can fly and you can live all your dreams. But you are completely unaware that you have a ringmaster inside you. That's your well trained mind. Along with that, if unfortunately you get a boss or a partner who doesn't understand you and your emotions, that's it your life is screwed.

This is the time you feel lonely, and you feel you have lost your identity. Everything seems like a problem. Love is missing in life, and you want it desperately. You try every silly thing and feel that you will get your happiness back. You try everything to understand what is missing and what is that you should do to get your happiness back. So you might want to change yourselves, or even might feel that “ I'm not smart or I'm not good looking or I don't have a great complexion, or maybe i don't have a great personality”, Such silly thoughts pop up and everything seems like a problem. Others in their life are always happy and you are not. You start to believe that this is your life, it can never change. You have to suffer this for the rest of your life and in all these chaotic situations, you don't speak up, you don't open up, you feel its waste as no one cares what you feel. And unknowingly you accept every wrong thing that's happening in your life. And others will take you and your life for granted.

But now just,

STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP

Take a pen and paper and let's make a list of certain realities of your life, Be it small or big. Write each and everything about yourself. Now download the Questionnaire from the link below and fill in the answers. (Please enable macros)

Questionnaire link

Now that you have downloaded and filled the questionnaire, let's highlight them. Please follow the instructions in the downloaded sheet. If your answers from the left column matches the right, highlight them green. If it does not, highlight them red. Now that you have answered SECTION A & SECTION B, look into the SECTION A. If you have more reds, it's a pity right, life is so unfair with you.

When it comes to SECTION B, if you have reds, then whom should we be pitying. You have been unfair to yourself. So, let's convert every red to green in SECTION B. Because unless you do this, you cannot expect any green in SECTION A. In simple words, unless you be fair to yourself, you cannot expect life or people to be fair with you.

When you can convert every red to green in SECTION B, you will feel confident, you will feel happy to your heart's content, you will feel liberated. Somewhere you will fall in love with yourself and when you love yourself, all the things around you will start to seem different & beautiful. You won’t find problems in everything because then you will get a right perception to look into things.

Perception makes a huge difference in life, for more details visit Perception..

To convert reds to green in SECTION B, the most important thing is BELIEF, you should always believe in yourself that you can be happy and your happiness always starts from you.

Now that you have a ringmaster (your mind) as you're trained over years, your mind will keep on coming in between - saying a big NO.

So, let's go baby steps.

Make another list of things you always wanted to do. Prioritize them from the easiest one to the impossible one. Start from the easiest one, and do it; enjoy the smallest success, feel the happiness, feel the joy, feel confidence. Tell yourself a big YES. “I can do things that make me happy”. DO NOT TRY TO FINISH THE LIST AS IF YOU ARE COMPLETING A TASK. You need to live those moments, enjoy them, and every time say a big YES. Now go to the next thing in your list and do it, live those moments without leaving the first one, then go with the third without leaving the first two, continue the pattern.

Your mind might be scared to face the world but don’t worry when you do something with confidence you are always strong to face the world.

Let's take an example, if you find someone playing with a remote car in your office during lunch hour, and he speaks out with confidence that I love cars and I feel relaxed with these things, what will you feel?

There will be two kinds of people, Bad guys and good guys.

Good guys will feel happy and say, Nice dear, happy to see you living your life.

Bad guys, who try to poke, but since the guy is really confident with what he is doing it's not easy for the bad person to poke him. Bad guy would say you seem childish or something. But the guy who is actually living his life happily will always be confident to face it. And he will give a strong reply saying, “What is wrong in it, I'm doing what's making me happy, I didn't buy it from your money right!! That's it…”

Let me share my story and my experience:-

I am a very childish person from heart. When I started my first job I thought I could do whatever I wanted. So I purchased those baby butterfly clips and wore them to work. One of my colleagues commented that I'm wearing baby clips at this age and looking like a nursery kid.

I felt really bad. I didn't wear them for a couple of days but every time I looked at those clips I literally used to cry and tell myself, what's wrong in it, who sets age limits to these things, it was not even written on the package. And after crying for three days I was so furious that I wore those clips again and went to my work. Unfortunately, I ran into the same lady and she again commented to me the same thing. At that time I vented out everything that I was telling myself. I told her, “Who said there's an age limit for these clips, I wear them coz I like them and I feel good and happy wearing them, and I am sure I have every right to be happy. As long as I'm not hurting anyone the way you are hurting by not minding your own business, It should be fine. If butterfly clips are against company policy HR will contact me” After I said all these, there was a huge silence. I just walked from there acting confidently. But I was very scared from inside but was happy too.

My other colleagues (the good guys) walked to me and said, you did a great job, there are only a few people who can stand for their happiness. That's it, nobody could stop me after that from doing things that make me happy. And to my surprise some of my colleagues told me to get them those butterfly clips as they felt the style is unique and nice; and the way I carried myself became a style. It kind of became a trend, most of the ladies at my workplace started wearing butterfly clips. (This is not just some story my dear, it's a real life experience) People started admiring me for what I am. As I never ever left myself no matter what. At times I might seem silly, childish but that's ok, that's me. Love it or leave it. End result seems very nice and easy, but believe me it needs constant motivation, I needed to motivate myself, I needed to tell myself that it's ok to do what makes me happy, I needed to stand up for myself every single minute.

People are different, every one cannot like pizza, likewise I don't expect everyone to like me. At Least don’t hate me. If someone hates me I pity them, I feel they don't have anything better or productive to do in their life other than wasting time and energy in hating me.

Moral is, your confidence and your happiness always carry a huge amount of energy to attract people around you, to appreciate you, and to love you. And you need not have to worry about bad guys, who cannot be happy with your happiness. I'm sure you don’t want them to rule your life right, Right!!!

So please try to live your happy list and feel confident each and every time, and try to open up. Speak up. Stand for yourself. Once you stand for yourself and speak up, Your fear that's eating you up over the years will go away, your ringmaster inside you who says a big NO will vanish with a big YES every time you say.

It might seem difficult to move out of your comfort zone of a trained mind. But in reality it is the most uncomforting zone. Just believe yourself and take a step. Let's do something different that you have never done. You have nothing to lose, any how you are discontent, what’s there to lose.

Now comes the most important thing, emotional independence: We will see it in detail in Part-2