ambushed by emotions

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Question: I was hanging out with friends, everything was going great, suddenly I felt like crying. Sometimes I get ambushed by my emotions when there is no trigger. What the hell is going on with me.

Answer: Two possibilities, unfrozen computer or petrified of success:

Unfrozen Computer: When we go through an emotional trauma the chemical computer, which we call our brain, shuts down in order to save as many of it's circuits as possible. Like if your house got hit by lightening your computer would lose some stuff but it would try to shut down as many programs as possible to keep them from getting fried.

Over time we boot things back up and most of the programs are running fine but damage has been done. 6 months or a year later we are working on a spreadsheet and suddenly everything freezes. How could this be related to an Internet virus from the summer? Computers are weird things and the way one event connects to another is hard to explain. Sometimes after a nasty knock on the head a person might start smelling pears, why are they related? Ask a neurologist, I don't know, but I know it happens.

So if you are feeling nasty emotions with no external stimuli this could be part of your brain thawing from an older trauma. You are noticing now because your life has settled down enough that you can. This may also happen with positive emotions but we don't bother to complain when we are suddenly happy for no good reason.

Petrified of success. Have you ever known someone who freaked out when they were in a great relationship and sabotaged it because they were afraid they were going to get dumped. We don't just do this in relationships. If we have had more than our fair share of crappy things happen to us in our lives we might start to get real antsy when things are going too well.

When I tried to learn to snow board as soon as I started picking up speed I would purposefully fall down so that when I did crash it wouldn't hurt too much. Being clumsy by nature my past experiences led me to believe that I would fall and it would be painful. That attitude got me a lot of bruises and a fear of snowboarding, I never hung on long enough to simply enjoy the rush of the motion.

If you are ambushed by emotion the first step is to look for patterns. Is it truly random or is it every time you are having a wonderful day and... If there is a pattern we look for a fear that might be connected with it. If there is no pattern then it may be an emotional thaw going on and we look for a way to reverse our momentum and not let that bad feeling ruin the rest of our day.

Feelings don't always make sense, that is what keeps us from being robots and makes life so exciting. If, however you get ambushed by nasty emotions and you are sick of it, talk to a therapist and work it out together.