The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You: Revised and Updated Paperback – June 27, 2023

I always look at the negative reviews on everything just to kind of get a feel as you can tell and get the feel of something through the negative. Then I’ll look at the positive reviews and see what they say and kind of see if there’s a balanced perspective from both, I am glad I didn’t listen to the negative ones.This book and I’ve just dipped into it here and there, so far, has completely validated a lot of my experience and she gives you a map for our emotional world! As someone who does a lot of internal work this is invaluable. As someone who helps others get in touch with themselves, this is invaluable.Now, is everything completely right or true? No, but that’s part of being emotional intelligent and having the ability of discernment.So far, I don’t agree with burning all your contracts. Some of what she says to put into your contracts doesn’t need to be burned they often just need space and presence(love) and will eventually fall away on their own without you knowing it or re-integrate back into the wholeness of our being. So, she may not be as fully educated or familiar with trauma work as I’d like to see, but it’s the map of emotions that is invaluable within this book for me.I haven’t read very much of the first half of the book that negative comments point to going a bit to far yet(her experience). I’ve only gone to it to find more info that’s referenced in the breakdown of the emotions part and so far it’s been invaluable. Shes great at telling you what parts to go to in each part to look at the different branches of complexity she’s mapped out and I love it!From my experience a lot of what she’s pointing to is really difficult to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced any of it or whom is highly disassocitive or distracted within book form.It’s probably far more likely to throw people deeper into the experiences above and give them a bad or bland taste taste in their mouth, but if you’ve done a lot of internal work or are working with a trauma therapist or are a therapist interested in helping your clients delve into their emotional world I think this gives you a great map of it. Just remember you can’t help your clients if you haven’t done the work yourself. You can’t fake being grounded, focused and the ability to hang with others emotions/experience if you can’t do it for yourself.I am profoundly thankful for this book that came to me with perfect timing. I hope it does the same for you.

All too often we categorize our emotions into good ones and bad ones. In Karen McLaren's book, the Language of Emotions, And What Your Feelings Are Trying To Tell You, we learn that all emotions are good, and each and every one of them is trying to tell you something. To push down any emotion will only bring it up in ways that can be less than helpful. In the end, our bodies and our psyches will pay the price.In the fascinating book, McLaren goes through each emotion, one at a time, and it's sister emotion, to show us what each emotion is trying to tell us, and what healing that emotion will bring to us if we allow it. I'll show with one emotion, how McLaren goes through each one, delving deeply into each emotion to show us exactly what she means."Grief--the deep river of the soulGifts--Complete immersion in the river of all soulsThe Internal Questions--What must be mourned? What must be released completely?Signs of Obstruction--Unwillingness to accept or honor loss, death or profound transitions.Practice--Stop, drop everything, and ask your internal question. When the river of the soul takes your weight until itself, you canrelease that which has died into the next world so that you may live more fully in this one."It's so easy to get stuck in grief. Our western society doesn't have wailing and renting of clothes, 3 day funerals, the body in the parlor, as some other cultures do where grief is a full-on contact sport. We keep children away from death, and as McLaren points out, if we don't grieve properly, with enough tears to send our loved one off to the other world, along with rituals that give us closure, we might end up being haunted by our dead.I've read in some books that our dead might not know they're dead if it's sudden, maybe a big production of grief and then closure, can help our dead be on their way. Maybe we wouldn't need a uniquely American show like Ghost Whisperer, if we knew how to show our ghosts that they truly have left us.McLaren also points out that if we don't go through all 3 steps of an emotion, we can become stuck. With grief, we can get stuck and want to relive death over and over again with horror movies, which might explain our fascination with death. And if we don't make room for death in our lives, we can't make room for life. We can't welcome in our children to this life because it's too crowded with our ghosts. Our society certainly doesn't make a show of honoring children when we don't put their welfare, and schooling as the number one things on our national agenda. In fact, we spend more on our national defense than anything else.Is this because we're so afraid to die? If we could know that death is not dying, but a doorway to another world, maybe we could lose our fear, and start taking care of the living amongst us. We would honor our elderly who are soon to make the transition to another world. We wouldn't spend millions keeping bodies alive beyond when it's wise to do so.This is a truly thought-provoking book, and wise beyond its mere words.

I am still in the midst of reading this book, but after digesting the information in the book I realize this information is truly groundbreaking in the area of emotional discovery. I don't think many other books come close to really getting to the heart of what bothers us in life and what prevents us from taking action in such a principled core way. This book really focuses on getting us to harness the abilities of ourselves to act, feel, think and dream in a balanced and consistent way in order to solve our imbalances and insecurities. When I read this book I think other self help gurus must be slapping their palms against their foreheads realizing what they've been missing in their instruction. This is not just a book you just rush through though, I find myself having to go back and re-learn and really learn how to develop the knowledge within me. This book does take a patient mindset as some of the exercises can take a while both to understand and for you to be able to assimilate them into your own lives. But this is definitely groundbreaking for those looking to understand just how to feel in relation to the world. If there is one complaint I would have about this book is that I don't think it truly points out that our imagination is not only for creative purposes it also allows us to visualize things that sometimes bother us and that allows us to truly separate the emotion we're feeling from the thought in a natural way and then we are able to logically look at the emotional thought. I think I've read over 150 books in the last 5 years and this one has already jumped to being in my top three! It really does cover so much without getting into a hundred different areas of things. If you want a truly principled foundation to start your psychological journey of discovery this book is it!