👁️‍🗨️ Are You an Emotional Non-Emotional Being?

Hello YOU!

What if I told you that you might not have emotions? Sounds a bit loony, right?

In Part 1 last week I talked about the 50% of humanity that is Emotionally defined and generating emotional energy through their Emotional Wave. Today we’ll look at the other half of us who are receiving all that energy.

Non-emotional beings have an undefined Solar Plexus. In centers that are undefined in our BodyGraph we are not only receptive to the energy of others, the energy is amplified.

Don’t know if you’re Emotional or Non-emotional? Find out here.

I spent the first 32ish years of my life being pretty much a textbook Non-emotional being. I was very even keel on my own, but could find myself completely upset, irritated or overly intense around others. I never thought much of it, I just assumed that other people annoyed me.

When I had my first child, whatever even keel I’d felt before completely evaporated. For a long time I assumed it was just the stress and overwhelm of being new to a really important job. After the first couple of years I started thinking that I just wasn’t particularly good at the mom thing. As the years went on, I cycled through all sorts of possible explanations for why we were struggling so much.

Life moved forward this way for years. Me trying to understand why my son was so all over the place. Me trying to find and stay in some sort of regulated state, only to be thrown off kilter yet again by some seemingly innocuous interaction. Me reading every possible parenting and self-help book that seemed relevant. I trust you get the picture.

It wasn’t until I met Human Design and learned about our shared mechanics that I was able to find any real peace. Learning about his Emotional Wave and seeing how my receptive design was constantly receiving and AMPLIFYING his emotions, literally transformed my understanding of who my son was and what was going on in our relationship.

I was able to run the experiment of watching his Wave and FEELING this welling of sensation in my own body. The same sensations I had been experiencing for years, but with this new lens I was able to recognize the energy for what it was—just energy flowing through the atmosphere and through me and my own receptivity.

Being able to see this energy as NOT MINE helped awaken in me the realization that I was not responsible for his emotions. I was receiving the energy, but I wasn’t the cause. I didn’t have to ‘fix’ anything because he was not broken and there was nothing to fix. He is an Emotional being and I am not.

Learning to step away, leave the room, go to my studio and accept that he was at a point in his Wave that was overwhelming me, was the next experiment. When I recognized that I could leave that emotional energy in the moment, helped me to physically recalibrate by letting the energy dissipate from my system.

It also did another completely unexpected thing. I soon realized his emotions shifted back to a more neutral state more quickly as well. If I wasn’t there reflecting back my amplification of his energy, his nervous system was more able to recalibrate as well.

Why am I telling you about my multi-decade struggle with this amazing human that I love and respect so much? Because it’s very likely you too have a similar dynamic going on with someone in your life.

It’s counter to everything we think we know about emotions, but if you’re the Emotionally defined person, you may not feel like—or be seen as—the emotional one in the relationship.

Very often it’s us Non-emotional people who get labeled as too emotional, too intense, too dramatic, just too much. Because of the exact mechanics I just described. We’re going along on our own even keel and then we step into aura with an Emotional being who is either at a high or low point on their Wave. We pick up that energy, amplify it and then start reflecting that amped up energy back out into the world. This makes the Non-emotional person seem like they are all in the feels, but really they are NOT the source of the emotion, just the amplified reflection.

You can see how these mechanics make for a completely dysregulated populous. No one knows what’s theirs and what’s not and everyone has ample ‘evidence’ proving it’s definitely not them. We are just ping-ponging amplified emotional energy between us all the time.

But I now that it can be different. Now that I’m aware of my receptivity to other’s emotions I have several options.

1. I can now have conversations with my son about his emotions and my receptivity to them. He is now clearer that he carries this Wave energy with him everywhere and his moods impact others. Period. There’s no judgement. It’s a fact that his mood hits me deeply and it’s a fact that he has distinct moods that are generated inside of him mechanically. We both have access to what is without any more stories or need to ‘fix’ something in the other.

2. I am learning to recognize this energy as it enters my body. Even this simple awareness allows me to allow the embodied sensation without attaching meaning or identifying with it. I will also say, my experiments make it very clear that this energy exists through Zoom as well. I can’t explain the physics of it, but I know it’s real.

3. I am much quicker to give myself permission to leave emotional energy that is ramping me up. If the conversation is intense, I can let the other person know that I’m not exiting the conversation, that I want to have it, but I need to dissipate some of the energy first. In the past I would get caught in that cycle of amplification and reflection that just escalated everything. Leaving the energy temporarily is not perfect, but it has helped to have shorter and more effective ‘hard’ conversations.

Experimenting with this specific aspect of my design has done one other thing as well. It has given me much more acceptance of the range of intense emotions humans have and display. In the past my own Non-emotional nature made me very judgemental about all the feelings, moodiness, drama and expressiveness I saw all around me.

Judgement is a form of resistance and I was very resistant to everything that seemed like so much excess emotion. In part because I actually didn’t understand it because it was so different from my own lived experience, and in part because I was LITERALLY trying to resist the energy entering my own being. Now I see that resistance is futile, I’m strangely much more at peace with all of it. 🙂

Does it still feel lousy when your kid feels lousy? 100%. I hate seeing them struggle. I definitely dislike FEELING their struggle, but I’m also now clear that NOT feeling it isn’t possible. It’s also actually a regular opportunity to sit with the feeling and let it flow through. A chance to learn to discern what bit of emotionality is actually mine, (Pro tip: Almost none, but we’ll save that for another day.) and what is here for me to learn from and become wise about.

That’s all our open centers in our design are doing. Giving us vast and endless opportunities to become wise.

As I will attempt to repeat in all of my correspondences, don’t trust me. Run your own experiments. Only you can know what it’s like to be YOU and only you can observe how you impact others. I offer up my experiments as some practical inspiration for your own explorations.

Do you have some stories or questions about sending or receiving emotional energy? I’d love to hear them. Maybe there’s some Human Design insights to help you navigate the endless emotional energy that binds us together.

Go be the YOUest!

PS: I’m thinking about creating a monthly Human Design coffee chat. Just a casual space where we can meet up for an hour to talk about what’s going on for us and to see if your Human Design has any insights, helpful clues or possible experiments. The world is going to continue to be whacky for a while and the two things you can never have too much of in whacky times are tools and people in your corner. Let me know if you are interested.