How Do We Untie Emotional Knots That Cause Us Pain?

Emotional knots rob us of our energy, freedom, and ability to grow. They have arisen through disappointments, wounds, emptiness and painful relationships that we are still attached to, through conflicts that are not yet over. Getting rid of these mental strands takes psychological artistry that allows us to move on without pain or fear.

Over time, we may notice that part of our luggage, in which all of our experiences are stored, can no longer be untangled. Unresolved experiences from the past can manifest themselves in the form of emotional knots. This is often a reality when, for example, we have left a complex relationship behind us, or suffered personal loss, or when we are deeply wounded by a traumatic childhood.

The knot analogy couldn’t be more appropriate. In a certain way, these mental states act like a space-consuming process on the mind, they strain our heart and take away the air to breathe, while at the same time we only look into the past. As a result, we are trapped in a difficult state in which we lose our ability to enjoy the present and develop ourselves as people.

“We cannot untie ourselves from a knot if we don’t first know how it came about.”

Aristotle

Emotional lump – a wound that does not heal on its own

Emotional knots don’t work themselves out. Sometimes it is not enough to pull on one end of the thread to get that knot or tangled tangled ball undone. Most of these knots are actually complex tangles, loose ends, and double tying that contain all of our thoughts, fears, and worries that are causing more pressure and suffering every day.

This type of situation is usually worked on in Gestalt Therapy. This psychological approach states that if a person has faced an unfortunate situation but failed to overcome its effects, something remains unsolved. The pain remains, and the never-ending suffering is proof that there is something we have yet to resolve. So we have emotional debt to ourselves.

Furthermore, we must remember, and this is just as important, that emotions have a huge impact on the part of our being that holds them: our bodies. Therefore, an emotional knot affects us in different ways: it paralyzes us or makes us flee. It also torments us, affects our muscles, digestive tract and cardiovascular system. This pressure will be even greater if we do not act. Doing nothing and just waiting for that knot to work itself out will only make it more complex, thick, braced, and tangled.

We have to learn to untie emotional knots

It has happened to all of us at one point or another. Without really knowing how this could happen, our shoelaces or the cables of our headphones have become so complex knots that we have lost patience with them. However, if we do know one thing, it is that there is nothing like looking at how this extremely tangled knot came to be in order to untie it.

Little by little and meticulously we loosen the knot, move, twist, untangle, until the complete knot and the tension loosens, until the shoelace or the cable loosens and takes on its normal shape again. As strange as this may seem to us, exactly the same thing happens with the emotional knots. The only difference is that we do not return to our original form. These emotional knots change us. In the end, our emotional framework is much stronger than before.

In the following we would like to take a look at how we can untie emotional knots.

Pain and suffering are not the same: we have the opportunity to end our suffering

The Buddha said in his day that pain was inevitable, but suffering was optional. What does that mean? Gestalt therapy tells us that we humans often go on with our lives with two types of arrows stuck in our hearts.

• The first arrow is this pain that we cannot avoid. It represents the original injury, pain due to loss, disappointment, or breakage.
• The second arrow represents the suffering we occasionally inflict on ourselves because we hold onto this wound without fully accepting it. Instead of healing the wound, we nourish it with the memory of it every day.

Emotional knots hurt, but we no longer have to suffer as we choose to accept this internal hurt while trying to find a solution to our personal reality.

Present emotions and the importance of focusing on the here and now

These emotional knots are the result of one or more past experiences. But we have to understand one thing : we cannot change what happened in the past. What we can change is how we feel today. We should let sorrow become calm, fear security, and insecurity serenity. We should learn to recognize our present emotions and say what ails us and give this emotional knot a name: worry, nostalgia, sadness.

When we acknowledge our feelings and channel them, we give ourselves the opportunity to come full circle and break free of that knot.

Take responsibility for your life: you are your feelings, your thoughts and your actions

Gestalt psychology focuses on the whole and aims to enable the patient to understand their problems holistically. For this reason, it encourages the patient to become aware of everything that is happening inside him, and at the same time wants to make him take responsibility for himself.

To do this, we have to be aware of our feelings at all times. Because an emotional knot is the consequence of the fact that we have disregarded something, that we have not taken responsibility for something and that it has then become a ballast, an emotional debt to our personal growth and a burden that causes pain every day .

Everything that disturbs us, worries us, makes us feel insecure or afraid, has to find attention in the here and now. Therefore, we should learn to be more attentive to our emotional universe, we should learn not to run away from what hurts or scares us. Otherwise, all of this will negatively affect us, manifest itself physically and mentally, until an emotional knot develops from it. We should avoid that – now we still have the option.