And so picking up from earlier today the goal of today's in general thoughts is emotion integration and the ability to feel and connect with emotions and understand the messages that they carry and be able to integrate those implicit feelings because the emotional mind speaks to us through largely the body,

be able to understand those messages and be able to rather than act out on them to make them go away.

You know, when we're angry and we express rage,

that's the desire to get, to expunge,

to push out that feeling of frustration and disappointment.

And on the other hand, when we shut down, when we emotionally dissociate,

we lose connection with the body when we essentially vanish and we feel ourselves moving

into the back of our mind and the actions around us become kind of, you know, fuzzy, that's a way to essentially shut out the experience, to numb ourselves.

And if we don't learn to find that third middle path of the Buddhist both about, which is being able to connect,

to hold, and then to address our emotions in a constructive way,

we'll develop a lot of strategies that are the telltale signs

that there's a lack of emotion integration

going on in our life.

Some of the most obvious ones are of course what Freud called signal anxiety when we're

repressing the emotions that need or attention. What will happen is of course we'll start to

see avoidance coping which is we will avoid people and situations where we get triggered.

And avoidance coping is simply the idea of when I'm around you,

I feel X, I don't want to feel X, so I'm not, I'm going to avoid you.

And of course, if it's somebody that you don't see in a regular basis,

Avoidance coping might seem that it works.

Of course, people will take avoidance coping into relational

experiences where they cannot sidestep the person. For, it might be somebody we work with, a family member, it could

...