Letting It Go

Over-Reacting Means Energy is Stuck

Sometimes you respond to challenges and forget they were stressful; the ones you over-react to are the problem.

My friend and I both over-reacted to minor stress – stressful situations that most people would simply respond to and forget about. We each got stuck in our own past life experiences. We each had forgotten about the old situations but our energy about those incomplete experiences and our emotions associated with them held us in the past instead of letting us solve problems in the present moment and forget about them.

Can you tell when you are over-reacting? Over-reacting is a good signal that you are reacting to something else. Signals that you are over-reacting include:

• You just can’t stop thinking about something. You keep trying to think about something else but you always come back to rethinking the same situation over and over again.

• You always get upset (angry, teary, worried) when you are reminded about someone, someplace, or some event, even if it happened a long time ago.

• Anniversaries or other reminders of difficult experiences are difficult for you.

• You get physically uncomfortable (butterflies, tension headaches, pounding heart) when you need to talk to someone—often an authority figure.

• You get your feelings hurt easily.

• You have an intense reaction (anger, sadness, fear) because of something someone else says or does.

• You feel very judgmental in response to certain ordinary situations like traffic or others making mistakes.

These over-reactions are examples of your life energy being stuck.

When you were born your life energy was freely available and you used it to attach to your parents as all babies do. But as things happen you lose bits of it by using it to try to protect yourself when you react to problems. This happens to everyone because no one had perfect parents or grew up in a perfectly responsive environment.

These problems overwhelm you because you don’t have enough resources to manage them when they occur. That may be because you are a child and simply lack the maturity that comes with growing up—or you may have experienced a truly traumatic situation. In any case you need that energy back for other things now, but you usually don’t even realize that you left it somewhere in your past.