What Emotion Code Implies About How We Are Composed of Energy
A blueprint!
This published work is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon as medical, psychological, coaching, or other professional advice of any kind or nature. Enjoy my full disclaimer for more information!
My years of doing Emotion Code with my therapist have been beyond instructive in how I think about the ways human beings contain and hold energy—and also in how I understand my own telltale emotions.
Sure, we think we know what our emotions are! But if I’m real with myself, lots of my experiences are just like Michael’s in The Good Place: confused and angry! And without Emotion Code (as I’ve described adapting it), I would have very little idea of the best positive emotions to fill in, in order to thrive.
The Blueprint
The simplest way to imagine how I see human beings holding energy is to picture a person made entirely of 1 cm–squared cubes. Every cube in the space of a human might be full of optimal energy or pure light, might be full of suboptimal energy, or might be held by placeholder non-beneficial energy.
We all know optimal energy when we feel it! Love, awe, beauty, gratitude, you know the ones.
Suboptimal energy includes your stuck emotions, and any stuck emotions you are carrying that aren’t yours to boot.
Placeholder energies are just taking up space or directing your good energy away from where you need it. They include false beliefs about our potential and our worthiness, and interferences that are negative.
As we imagine all those little cubes, innocently stacked into the shape of a person, becoming our most bright and light-filled selves becomes much less fraught, and much more like being a very thorough janitor! If it's clean, you don't need to clean it. If it's dirty and gummed up, you do need to clean it. If it doesn't belong, you want it out of the house.
And then, wherever any cubes get cleaned out, all of those available spaces want to be filled with light and goodness. (I guess that part is more like the interior decorating part. You get to choose anything good that you want in there.)
When we think about it this way, the process of janitori-ing is completely neutral. The part that isn’t neutral is the importance of the end result: to be the people we are, as we’re meant to be, without anything in our way or gumming up the works.
The Importance of Relationship in (my) Process
I’ve been very grateful to use Emotion Code with my therapist, because we get to explore a bit more than traditional Emotion Code when it seems relevant. Sometimes we explore things you’d talk to a therapist about, like my origin story or a difficulty that cropped up recently. And sometimes we explore things that are pretty weird—impossible, really—at least given the schema by which we understand normal life, like archetypes and the influence of groups, and strange vibes.
I’ve had Emotion Code and Body Code done by other practitioners. I found that very informational, but less satisfying than working with someone who has the history of the context of my life and my journey with energy. Getting to build understanding with someone else, about me, is very rewarding.
Different people will have different desires in that area of Emotion Code, and that’s okay! Everyone should have permission to explore these different methods as suits their individual makeup and preferences.
Emotion Patterns Over Time
Something that’s been fascinating is discovering the emotions that turned out to be my personal signature, and which of those were big in the beginning of the work and later hardly turned up at all.
There are 60 emotions in the Emotion Code chart, and not all of them have come up for me. Especially in the beginning the emotions stuck in my heart were the emotions of defensiveness and pride.
To me, these two go together very well! They are pretty low-cost emotions. After all, being defensive seems way less horrible than having heartache or being devastated. However, going back to the (pretend) blueprint of the little energy-holding cubes of a person, any defensiveness and pride will take up space that I want to use for other, truer expressions of myself.
Defensiveness and pride, though less horrible than emotions like terror and unworthiness, are not the moving flow of living energy that is the truth of a person. Our telltale emotions tell us a bit about how we’re shaped, but that’s not who people truly are. They’re more like reactions to where we’ve been.
Creative insecurity definitely also came up a lot in my earlier days of Emotion Code. All three of my telltale emotions—pride, defensiveness, and creative insecurity—also went back many generations. This was one of the ways I got in the habit of asking my therapist, “Is it mine?” And sometimes the stuck emotions would be mine, and it would be inherited—as if I inherited it, and my own emotions just naturally tagged along.
As time wore on, defensiveness showed up less and less. So did creative insecurity. But pride is still sticky for me. It’s so ironic that being full of yourself, and having that get stuck, then takes up space so that you can’t be full of your truest self!
The Janitor Keeps Going, Bad Attitude Notwithstanding
At any rate, like a good janitor, I just keep clearing the cubes wherever they turn up full of things that don’t serve me. My plan is to keep going, poking into the corners in as many dimensions as it takes to run clean. Because I think this journey to be myself is worth it.
And that would be a great place to end a post, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you the emotion that makes my therapist laugh the most! And that emotion is peeved.
Peeved comes up for me almost every session, in all kinds of contexts! Because although I am willing to be this janitor, I clearly find it totally irksome that it is necessary at all.
