When to and when not to
In the beginning, I usually suggest to people that they should be shielding every time they walk into a new situation. Looking at this clinically, this is very much a sliding scale that is dependent on the person that is learning, and especially the work that they’re willing to put into themselves along the way to understand their own emotions. It can be very confusing when you start to feel different people’s emotions around you or understand that you have been feeling different people’s emotions around you and mistaking them for your own. That can be a very difficult lesson for a lot of people to learn and truly understand that they can let go of what’s not theirs, no other input is required.
I’ll give you a perfect example using anxiety! I think just about everybody on the planet has dealt with anxiety at one level or another at some time throughout their life. Let’s look at this very simply. We get anxious about something; we then start to research or rehearse different scenarios in order to give ourselves comfort in that moment. If it moves into an unhealthy manner, we quickly dive into overthinking and potentially lock ourselves up within a panic attack if it gets out of hand. All of this, under the guise of making ourselves feel better. Now and then in a normal healthy scenario we are anxious about something that is giving us pause. We romanticize or fantasize about the different outcomes in order to prepare ourselves for how or what we are about to do. What if we go through those motions for no reason whatsoever because the anxiety that we’re feeling is not actually ours, it’s somebody else in the room?
We tend to base a lot of our decisions or our reactions on a day-to-day basis rooted from our emotions and sometimes we don’t take the time to understand the emotion before we react. We are stuck in an autopilot scenario. By shielding we are able to enter into an environment and cut out the input from somebody else. Not only then are we having less to react to but we’re not wasting time and energy reacting within our own life to somebody else’s emotions. It can be very helpful when entering into a new situation to start to shield. It can also be helpful halfway through a situation when you’re looking to audit what you’re feeling to make sure it is your own. In the beginning I will always recommend more shielding over less, it’s a much softer approach when dealing with our emotions.