The Emotional Jug is a way to think about emotions/feelings. Imagine pouring all of your feelings into a big jug. The feelings would settle in different layers. At the very top may be a ‘cork’ that tries to keep upsetting emotions from leaking out. The feelings that rise to the top are the more intense emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness. It’s not easy to think clearly when painful feelings get jumbled up together, let alone to feel happiness, love, tenderness, or desire. Guilt, jealousy, and shame are also feelings that can fill the jug. Painful feelings may eventually implode or explode. On the way, they often leak through dirty fighting.

It’s really important to know that positive, uplifting feelings have different energy than upsetting feelings like anger, fear, sadness. Those feelings have different energy than feelings like relief, happiness, pleasure, desire, and love, and if for whatever reason we are holding on to those upsetting feelings in our emotional jug that is in each of us, they will start to smother and bury the other feelings. It’s really important to know. It’s not that they destroy the other feelings. It’s not that they replace the other feelings. They just bury them.

That lid of indifference tends to mean we don’t feel anything at all. What happens as those upsetting feelings bury, increasingly bury the uplifting feelings, is as human beings, we generally start to leak.

By leaking, we really mean ways that we weren’t born to be, ways we become that are a reaction to upset. When we come into the world and laying there under the blue or pink blanket, we’re not made to be sarcastic.

Those ways of leaking are what we call throwing fuel on the fire. If you imagine that you’re trying to put a fire out or calm a fire, those are all ways of bringing even more fuel to the fire, and we call them dirty fighting. Dirty Fighting can be unbelievably damaging to human relationships.