‘I don’t suppress emotion, I always express it’, ‘I say how I feel’. I hear this many times especially from people who often project their emotions onto others. I have also been guilty of this many times myself. We think that by expressing our emotion we are free from it and that it has been let go of. We think that by voicing our own anger about a perceived injustice this means our own pain will be resolved. This unfortunately is not the case because we almost always attribute blame to something outside of us. We may express our emotion but we do it at someone or something.

Voicing and expressing your emotions can allow the release of some of the energy but if we do this by apportioning the blame towards a person or circumstance then we can never fully release our emotion.

If at any point in an interaction you blame someone or some circumstance for how you feel, then you are not taking responsibility for that emotion. When this happens, that emotion will remain in you and then continue to affect everything you do. The only way to release it is to take full responsibility for the creation of that emotion. There is no other way.

How do you take full responsibility? By understanding the emotion that you feel didn’t come from the other person. It was already in you or it was created by you. It was just triggered by the other person. This emotion which is within you attracted circumstances or people into your life so that it could be made conscious. Why did it have to be made conscious? Because any unconscious emotional elements cannot be healed.

What happens when you take responsibility? You no longer become the victim and when this happens you have more power. Now you have the power to make significant changes, not just in your personal life but in your work and relationships. You start to release those emotions that once bothered you and when you do everything changes. Your external world begins to change in direct correlation with what you let go of.

If we take the step in understanding that what we feel is our creation, then we can make a quantum leap in changing our reality. We can gradually let go of all those emotions that continually plague us and when we do, we create the life we want.