There are few things in this life I feel more strongly about than the emotions agreement, or the agreement we make when we agree to feel one emotion that we also agree to feel equal and opposite on the other side of that emotion. It’s the reason that losing someone we love more than anything hurts like no other. It’s why on the other side of fear exists a freedom that feels better than if the fear was never there in the first place.
Whether you know you’re doing it or not, you’re always making this agreement in life with your emotions. When you’re afraid to love someone because you’re afraid to get hurt, that too is an agreement with the emotions of love and pain. The more you can make yourself conscious to this choice, the more empowerment and fullness you can find from life. You can start to see which emotions you’re afraid of, and how that fear limits your ability to live the life you so deeply desire, you can do something about it.
So let’s see where you stand in relationship to the emotions agreement, so you can ultimately learn how to be in right relationship with your emotions and live a life that you love.
What is the Emotions Agreement?
Have you ever asked yourself, “Why can’t I just be happy?” The emotions agreement really starts at the base of that question. The answer isn’t because you don’t value joy and happiness, clearly you do! That’s what you’re asking about. The challenge is that you don’t have a great relationship with the other side of happiness which is sadness.
Before we get too deep, it’s important to understand that the emotions agreement is really a matter of understanding the subconscious mind. If you desire happiness, you also have to accept sadness. Why? Because the other side of the happiness is the sadness. It’s like playing in a big tournament when you’re a teenager. You’re in the zone, you know you could win or lose but you don’t care, you’re committed to it either way. You give it your all and the outcome doesn’t matter in the moment, you’ve subconsciously agreed that this could end in a way that you might not like. And then…you win! There’s a rush of pride and joy and awe that comes over you. You feel on top of the world, and it’s even more enlivening because you knew you could lose.
For the sake of this example, we’l say the other team is feeling the opposite of what you’re feeling, equal and opposite. Their sadness and disappointment is just as alive as your excitement and joy. They could have won the same game and been where you are, but they didn’t, they lost. Both of you had the same odds, both of your feelings hold the same intensity just on opposite ends of the spectrum, and both of you knew it all along as you were chasing it. You agreed to the game the moment you stepped on the field.
This perfectly depicts the emotions agreement. While you’re chasing the thing you’re seeking, in the example it’s winning the game, in your case, it’s being genuinely happy, you’re also acknowledging that it could go the other way. You could be chasing happiness and stumble upon sadness. You get let down because you don’t get the job you want. The person you swiped right on didn’t swipe right on you. If the prize of happiness is so high for you, then the sadness will be high on the other side of that. And if you’re not open to stepping on the field for that experience, then you’re not going to get what you want because your subconsciously agreeing that you’re unwilling to feel the depth of pain that you may feel if you get your hopes up and get let down.
The emotions agreement has many nuances. I’ll do my best to explain them so you can better understand where you stand in relationship to this concept
Nuance #1: Am I actually agreeing to the negative emotions
Yes-ish. The point of the “agreement” isn’t to move closer in the direction of the thing you don’t want, it’s to agree that it’s there, it exists, and it’s very possible you may feel it at some point. Think of it like a head nod, an “I see you.” Even just the acknowledgment of this emotion looming in the distance can be enough to let your subconscious settle. Often the fear of the emotion is worse than the actual emotion itself. It’s within this acknowledgment and agreement that you deepen your capacity for more of what you do want. If your subconscious isn’t afraid of the let down because it knows you’ll get through it and it knows what it really wants is so completely worth the potential of that, then it’s not going to hold you back. This is how emotional resilience is strengthened, proving to yourself with each big feeling you have that you can get through it so that you’re less fearful of it.
My favorite example of this is in building relationships with others. A lot of us desire deep and intimate relationships with the people we love, but when it comes down to actually building these relationships we have a hard time being vulnerable and letting them be more than just surface level. This isn’t because you don’t know how to be in a relationship and more about your fear of losing that person in any way if you let the relationship get to that point. Inevitably all relationships come to an end, whether consciously or because of the end of a life. So this is one of those cases where you actually do agree to the pain and negative emotions on the other side of that deep relationship you crave. The deeper the relationship goes, the more it’s going to hurt when it’s over. I don’t mention this to scare you, I mention it so that your subconscious understands the game it’s walking into and agreeing to with full conviction. If it’s worth it to feel that pain to have that experience, then just like in the tournament, you’ll be running full speed ahead until that moment comes.
Our subconscious minds are more powerful than we give credit, so while you’re investigating if you’re in a good relationship with your emotions, ask yourself how afraid of the dark emotions you are.
Nuance #2: What if I’m not afraid of the negative emotions at all but I still am not feeling the way I want to feel
I have found my people! This is exactly me. I could swim in the sea of sadness all day. I hold an interesting comfortability with sadness and negative emotions. My deal with the emotions agreement was never that I couldn’t handle the sadness, it was that I didn’t know how to not be sad. It was a big part of my identity and how I kept myself safe because it was predictable. If you feel like this makes sense then I know you get it. If it doesn’t make sense you may as well skip forward since this will likely just confuse you because it’s more rare to be okay with negative emotions.
When I was righting my relationship with the emotions agreement, I had more of a challenge rising out of the sadness. It felt like sadness was easier and required less responsibility. If I was sad, less people would mess with me and I could skate through life without needing to feel the pressure of potentially letting people down. This was obviously a skewed way of thinking, you can read all about it in my article about my addiction to my anxiety. The point being, sadness wasn’t my issue, it was joy. Joy felt like a target on my back that I was unwilling to wear. Sadness felt like my own self inflicted doing. I’d’ rather hurt myself than have others hurt me.
Yet I desired so much more from life than just being a sad girl, it’s an archetype for sure, but not the one I wanted. If this resonates then ask yourself what your relationship with being happy really is. For me it was being a target. It also meant that I could slip and fall back into sadness and I didn’t want to slip and fall, I’d rather just stay put where I was. Sadness also meant I opened myself up to the unpredictability of the world at large. My subconscious was comfortable with a certain level of sadness and though I did absolutely have moments of joy, I still felt like it wasn’t enough and I wanted more.
My process for undoing this was more about making right with my fear of other people hurting me, knowing that I was in fact opening myself up to that possibility and that it would ultimately be worth it. I was less concerned about winning or losing the game, and more concerned about which of my team members was going to trip me so that they could score the goal over me. I was running cautiously observing everyone’s every move and not paying any attention to the game at all. That’s where my work was.
Nuance #3: What if I’d rather live life comfortably in the middle without any of the extremes
Anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications are great examples of this exact nuance. They work to create a baseline so that you don’t ever go too far over or too far under. The emotions agreement still applies. When you choose somewhere in the middle, you won’t be met with the intensity on either side. Life will be neutral and baseline for you. Nothing will excite you that much, and nothing will disappoint you that much.
You can now probably understand why this is true, since you know that whatever you feel on one side exists equal and opposite on the other. For people who have severe swings in moods, those anti-depressant meds are useful because being in the rollercoaster of it all can be overwhelming. For many people over time they start to describe this overall experience of life as numb. Though there is no right or wrong way to live life, living with no real fluctuation between sides of the emotions can undoubtedly become stagnant and devoid of some of the big points of life, in my opinion.
Why Understanding the Emotions Agreement Can Unlock a More Fulfilled Life
I stand by the theory that having emotions is our special gift of being human. Emotions are how we create meaningful lives, even the ones we don’t want to feel because of the emotions agreement. There is no light without the dark, there is no joy without the pain, there is no love without the fear. When you accept that everything exists in opposition because of the laws of the universe, you can choose how deep you want to live your life.
For me, I always wanted a romantic relationship that would bring me the peak amounts of joy, love, ecstasy, you name it. I, however, didn’t want to accept that ultimately I had to choose the pain and agony that would exist when it ended, when we passed on into our next lives. So subconsciously I was holding back out of pure fear and certainly not finding this person for me. I had no idea I was doing this and was continuing to feel frustrated in my own life that I couldn’t find the level of relationship I was ultimately looking for. As I began to dive into this idea of the emotions agreement and all my emotions existing on equal and opposite ends of the spectrum, I finally realized why I wasn’t aligning with the relationship I wanted: I was terrified to open myself up to that kind of pain and loss.
This concept has unlocked more doors for me than I can even begin to explain, it’s aligned me with my dream relationship, the most incredible friends, and a career that feels sometimes like I’m putting a target on my back, but the risk is far worth the reward.
When you bring you subconscious up to speed on your choices, or even communicate with your subconscious consistently that you’re choosing to accept both sides of the spectrum, you can start to make more soul and heart-led decisions. If you want a big and full life and you want to avoid pain at all costs, then you’re not going to live that big full life until you choose both sides of the spectrum. It’s not possible. You can never avoid negative feelings no matter how much you manifest the good. Life isn’t designed that way because we wouldn’t be able to appreciate the light without the dark. The more we value both the dark and the light, the more we stretch our capacity to feel and expand.
The emotions agreement allows you to keep increasing your capacity for feeling. You get to love more, grow more, laugh harder, dream bigger, live wider when you’re less afraid of what the risk is. The risk is big because so is the reward.
How to Be In Right Relationship with ALL Your Emotions
I like to think of all my emotions as little buddies of mine. Personifying them has helped me distinguish between them and show them compassion all the same. The more I show curiosity to how I feel, the greater my capacity to be with my feelings increases. In order to be in right relationship with your emotions you have to acknowledge that they are wise in their own ways. Even the ones that feel like tyrants, they hold wisdom that they can share with you.
This is a process that takes time, especially for those who are afraid of the dark emotions. You can only grow your capacity for things like sadness the more you allow yourself to be sad. If you are someone who suppresses sadness down anytime it crops up, you’re only communicating that you can’t be with that emotion further, thus distancing yourself more from joy as well. But if each time you feel sadness you sit with it a little longer and let it move through you with more ease, you communicate that you can handle it. Your capacity for both the sadness and the joy increases. This is true with all our feelings, even the positive ones. Even joy is vulnerable, it can be hard to sit with sometimes because we may be so afraid of what is going to take the joy away, a concept called foreboding joy that Brene Brown discusses in her work often. If you feel that way about joy, it’s time to examine your relationship with pain.
Being in right relationship with your emotions ultimately means you respect them and let them move through you as they come. It means you don’t demonize them but form a relationship with them. I find that after the emotion has passed it can be helpful to ask myself what that emotion was trying to communicate with me. The more gold I can find from it, the less fearful I feel of it. I know that on the other side of the difficult feeling there will be some nugget of wisdom of even the feeling of pure relief.
How you build these relationships is up to you, but I suggest approaching it similarly to how you’d build a relationship with another human. Meet the emotion where it’s at, show compassion, and don’t try and change it right away. You’ll be amazed at how quickly these relationships start to take place.
The emotions agreement has allowed me to make sense of that which never made sense to me before, “How come I can’t just be happy?” Whenever I notice that question arise I now have a much different approach to answering it, one that involves looking at how I interact with my feelings as a whole, rather than just wishing for something I don’t have. There’s a certain level of responsibility you take when you realize it’s all in your hands, which I think is a beautiful way to live in the world, responsible for how you feel and willing to keep growing because of it.
If we haven’t meet yet, hi! I’m Alexa Joyal—Microdosing coach and passionate about helping high sensitive individuals turn their emotions into their superpower to unlock a life they love. If you like my content and you want more of it in your life, here are a few ways you can connect with me:
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