If you are like millions of people worldwide, you have made some New Year's Resolutions to improve your life through statements of conviction.
We want to do or not do something that will make our life better. Get and stay healthy and fit. Stop procrastinating. Improve our mind or skills. Volunteer. Make more money. Reduce stress. Have better sex. Spend more time with people that matter to us. [1]
All great goals.
Most new year's resolutions are abandoned within the first month. And if not then, they are gone by spring. Why?
Common advice suggests that those new year's resolutions are not specific enough and are not framed positively. The resolutions are not about you. [2]
New Year's Resolutions are statements or promises that we make to ourselves—things we want but don't know how to achieve. If we knew how to achieve them, we wouldn't need the yearly promise.
Here is a different way of looking at our failures:
· New Year's Promises target changing or fixing some fault or bad habit.
· And you are not going to change any behavior until the underlying emotion is eliminated.
I work with a different kind of resolution in my work and personal life called Emotional Resolution or EmRes, for short. The resolution in EmRes is about removing the emotions that we don't want—"resolving" the emotions that keep our procrastination or bad habits in place.
If an unwelcome habit is present in you, Then you can be sure there is an unintegrated emotion at the base of it.
Unintegrated emotions linger in our bodies when high-stress circumstances prevent the body from tending to the emotion and all its physical components in the moment. Our bodies have an innate capacity and knowledge to "process" emotions immediately when they occur. But if, for some reason, the body is not able, sensorial fragments of the emotion remains embedded in the tissue.
Later in life, in similar situations these sensorial fragments are triggered into reactive emotions that disturb us. Often they are so uncomfortable that we cover them up with behavior. After a time, the emotion fades as the behavior becomes a subconscious routine.
And voila! We have a habit we don't want and can't seem to change, despite our best efforts.
Emotional Resolution addresses the root cause of our unwanted habits by eliminating the buried emotion. The good news is
· We don't have to know what the emotion is
· We don't have to know why or where the emotion came from.
Unwanted habits and behaviors are excellent signposts to our unintegrated emotions. Working on them is the best form of emotional hygiene to results.
Making an EmRes resolution makes your life better through emotional hygiene. It is like giving yourself the gift of a better life with every EMOTIONAL RESOLUTION you do.
Are you ready to clean up your habits, patterns and behaviors?
References
1. 50 New Year's Resolution Ideas And How To Achieve Each Of Them, https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/50-new-years-resolution-ideas-and-how-achieve-each-them.html
2. A psychotherapist says there are 3 common reasons so many people's New Year's resolutions end in failure, https://www.businessinsider.com/new-years-resolutions-failure-advice-jonathan-alpert-2018-12
Photo by Sebastian Pociecha on Unsplash
About Sue
Sue Siebens is an intuitive holistic healer based in Dallas, Texas. In her practice, she uses techniques that work at a fundamental level, where the roots of the illness, fear, and pain can be accessed and resolved. Sue teaches and blogs to broadcast and raise awareness about these new technologies so that as many people as possible can find relief and peace in their life.