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Pamela Levin, R.N., T.S.T.A.
Pamela Levin is an RN and Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst in Private
Practice 42 years. She teaches and trains therapists and lay audiences internationally, and is
the award-winning author of several books and numerous articles on physical and emotional
health improvement. [Your affiliate link to
YEN]
A
re emotional hungers – ones you may not even be
aware of – driving you to make choices based on emotional need instead of what’s actually best
for you? If so, what kind of consequences might you expect, and what constructive steps can you
take?
Emotional Hunger
No doubt you already do some things to take care
of yourself. You look before crossing the street, you eat, you sleep, and you wear more
clothing when it’s colder and less when it’s warmer. That’s great – as far as it goes. But
taking care of yourself in the face of emotional hungers requires a different kind of strategy
because these needs arise, not from a physical, bodily base, but from an emotional
one.
Emotional hungers that go unattended can cause a wide variety of
symptoms and lead to all kinds of negative outcome. You know how this works with your eating
patterns: go without food long enough and you feel weak, tired, cloudy-headed, negative,
depressed, confused, irritable and so on.
In the same way, unmet emotional hungers have similar negative
consequences. Feeling fearful, anxious, ashamed, unmotivated, insecure, aggressive or depressed
are just some of them. It’s a simple truth we too often overlook: just as we all need
nutritious, healthy food every day, so we need good emotional nutrition™ every day.
Too many of us are emotionally hungry – even emotionally starved.
Our strategies for plodding on anyway may be creative, but ultimately they are doomed. We over
eat, or starve. We sleep too much or not at all. We’re highly reactive emotionally or
absolutely dead to any feeling at all. Eventually we’re overstressed, overworking, under
producing, over consuming, leading boring lives or taking senseless risks and depending on wide
variety of substances – legal and otherwise- to manage. Failing to deal with emotional needs
can even lead to physical illnesses.
How can this be? How can emotional hungers that we may not even
be aware of – but that are going without nourishment - lead to so many negative consequences,
including some that are physical?
How Emotional States Become Physical
Ones
First, not being aware of such hungers lessens their impact not
in the least! It’s a commonly accepted that some 95% of our emotional lives are unconscious and
that these unconscious goings-on drive us both to do things we don’t want to do or prevent us
from doing things we want to do!
That biological pathways of our emotional selves not only exist,
but how they affect every part of us was scientifically demonstrated by Dr. Candace Pert, PhD.,
former professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University. She established that
our subjective self constantly creates information molecules that control our health and
physiology. In other words, our emotional selves ceaselessly produce physical and emotional
changes! What that means, is that everything from headaches to gall stones to autoimmune
disorders, motivation or relationship problems, self-sabotage – all of these negative outcomes
can result from our emotional state.
As Dr. Pert proved, “the molecules of emotion color our
perception and hence our creation of reality… they are the biochemical links between our
awareness, our thoughts and emotions and our physical well-being.”
That said, we can’t just will ourselves to change it. We can’t
just force ourselves to shift from an emotionally hungry state into a well-nourished one. We
may have the desire to be secure, relaxed, stable, confident and energetic - to base our life
choices on what’s likely to produce the best outcome. But our physiology will not be convinced.
When was the last time you just decided to make new biochemical links so you would no longer
run your life from the unconscious needs that produce self- sabotage?
How can we do this, then? How can we go from being emotionally
undernourished, malnourished or even starving to abundantly well-nourished? How can we change
something that sounds as immutable as our biochemical links?
Emotional
Nutrients
TM
The answer to this question was revealed to me in
over 40 years of working with people in private practice, workshops and seminars around the
world. My background as an R.N. a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst, and a
clinical nutritionist enabled me to assist people to create this physiological shift. They were
able to do this by altering their emotional diet. They accomplished this by taking in and
‘digesting’ certain key emotional diet components that provided what they needed to be
well-nourished emotionally. It’s the same basic process as taking in certain basic nutritional
components (protein, vitamins, enzymes, etc.).
These were delivered in two ways. One was through
teaching people how to give these essential messages to themselves. The other involved
educating them in how to give them to another via their social
relationships.
How, we may ask, is it possible that a message we
may give ourselves or take in from another can nourish us emotionally to the extent that it can
change our emotional state, our physiology and biochemistry? The short answer is that every
single one of the 50 to 70 trillion cells in our bodies is always busy adapting to our
environment.
“Well”, you may think, “I can’t command my cells.”
And yet the truth is our brains are doing exactly that all of the time, as cellular biologist
Bruce Lipton, PhD., demonstrated. In fact he discovered the exact ways such messages control
our biology and that they can even run our genes.
It turns out we’re giving ourselves and each other
such messages all the time. In other words we’re already instructing our bodies with various
emotional messages – and some of these communications are commanding our bodies to create
discomfort, dysfunction and illness!
That’s why it’s so important that we keep
ourselves emotionally well nourished – that we keep ourselves in a state of positive emotional
sustenance. Part of the benefit certainly is about feeling good, feeling our core selves
developing, our individuality blooming in a positive way. And changing the environmental
signals that elicit the behavior of our cells results in better physical health
too.
But there’s a social benefit too. Our
relationships improve since we’re no longer relating from an emotionally needy place, plus
we’re full enough emotionally to offer emotional nourishment to others.
Scientific studies have repeatedly demonstrated
that when we receive emotional support, we are less ill less often and our illnesses when they
do occur are less severe. Further, studies have confirmed that those who are already ill
survive longer. (For example, women with breast cancer and people with malignant melanoma who
received weekly emotional support lived longer, people undergoing surgery who had positive
emotional preparation had more successful outcomes.)
Indeed, as we give emotional nutrients™ time to
work, small and large changes begin to take hold in a process that is no more magical than
taking in a essential nutrients in your food diet. And the results are no less
profound!
Do we have to go to some group, seminar or
workshop to access these core emotional nutrients™? Or be part of a scientific study? No.
Because I’ve had the opportunity to see and experience how powerful these nutrients are, and
because I know the world is a far better place when people are emotionally well-nourished, I’ve
made them available 24/7 online.
To sample them - to "taste" an emotional nutrient
meal, go to
http://www.youremotionalnutrients.com
and click on the sample. You’ll find an key emotional nutrient message to nourish your
core self, another that feeds your independent self and supports your making healthy
boundaries, and a third to nurture your skillfulness.
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