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Write your Emotions Out

by Haystack Creatives LLC

Do you have a healthy relationship with your emotions? How do you express pain, guilt, anger, and sadness? The pressure to handle our relationships can evoke disturbing combinations of emotional stress. Instead of processing these emotions, most of us subconsciously avoid them to push the discomfort away. Hiding emotions is something we all do very often. But even when we do, these emotions always stay and come back from time to time. From an early age, we are conditioned to believe that expressing emotion is weak, vulnerable and out of character. Thinking that sharing what’s inside is forbidden, we bottle up our fears and silence the pain.

Not expressing emotions is unhealthy. In fact, holding back can actually intensify them. When we suppress our emotions, it can build up a large pile of held in feelings until the pot becomes full. As we start to learn safely express our words, much more may flood out than we thought. These are stuffed energies and they need to be channeled to acceptable mediums of expression.

One useful exercise to get rid to the root of lingering feelings is keeping a diary. This diary is not the typical journal of your daily activities. Rather, it’s a way to identify and take action around your feelings. Grab a pen and scribble down a few thought. Pour down your emotions into a poem and translate feelings of sorrow, euphoria, hope and disappointment. According to Robert Frost, poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. All theories of poetry explain how our body meets our soul in the written world.

The great miracle of poetry consists of precisely the admirable interplay of words which lends itself to the expression of such diverse emotions. It forces us to feel and communicate the exultant joy of a healing patient, the deep sadness of a father who has lost his son or the outrage of a woman being betrayed by her man.

Many poets draw on their own personal experiences when it comes to their writing. Christopher Reid, wrote a collection called “The Scattering” about the illness and death of his wife. In his book, he detailed her final days, his happy memories, and his wife’s belongings, untouched in their once shared home. Another author Jeanne Schaeberle in her book “Mom… Let’s talk”, revealed her son’s life initially filled with wonder and gentleness, which eventually invaded by mental dragon of terror and desperation. Expressing emotions through writing plays an impact on our mental health. The act of writing your emotions without censoring what’s coming out of your pen can be tremendously therapeutic. Behind a pen, you can be very elegant, expressive, imaginative and well versed.

It is an indisputable fact that poetry is aimed at communicating feelings and emotions in the best possible way. The willingness to express feelings through poetry is totally dependent on how we feel about ourselves. It takes time to learn the ways to identify the connection between your feelings and specific events in your life and putting them into words. So learn how to address your emotions constructively. Don’t be discouraged when you find yourself struggling with the process. Just be honest with yourself in telling your story.

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