Every experience that excites feelings cements memories into your subconscious memory. Each of these feeling-packed experiences is an opportunity to learn a valuable lesson. Some lesson experiences are more dramatic than others, but they all are fodder for future function.

Once you experience an incident and acknowledge it as a "learning experience," you choose a response on the spot. Either you immediately suppress or internalize the feelings that accompany the lesson incident, or you immediately find some element of personal benefit in the incident -- see the good -- and learn from it.

Here's a scenario to help you understand.

Angie is intelligent, energetic, personable, creative, attractive, and a single mother. She has been in and out of countless jobs, a couple of marriages, multiple romantic and social relationships, and hospitals. Minor catastrophes continue to plague her. She never holds a job for more than a few months.

"It's not my fault," Angie rationalizes after yet another firing. "My boss was jealous of me." Or, "We had a personality conflict." Or, "They didn't live up to their end of the bargain." According to Angie, someone else always causes her job problems. The cause is always "out there." Angie sees herself as a powerless victim of the whims and caprices of others more powerful than she.

Maybe, just maybe, the outcomes of her many relationships and jobs are in some way related to her attitudes and actions. She freely expresses (invariably negative) feelings about the motives and actions of others while firmly refusing to examine her own motives and actions. Periodically, she lands in the hospital with an acute physical problem -- migraines, digestive distress, "nerves."

Angie hasn't yet recognized that she is being presented an array of learning opportunities. She continues to respond in ways that have proved unsuccessful in the past. Yet, each time, she hopes for a different outcome. She hasn't figured out that with every negative experience, the first thing to do is to step back, take a look at the situation as a whole, and find a positive lesson.

For Angie, the positive lesson might be to understand that her intelligence gets in the way of her common sense. Instead of judging employers, colleagues, former friends, and spouses according to the way she wants them to be and to behave, she would be better off physically, emotionally, and economically if she accepted them as fellow wayfarers who have their own lessons to learn on this journey of life.

If you choose to suppress feelings that accompany a lesson, not only will your body continue to respond physiologically to the suppressed feelings, you will repeat the lesson/opportunity through a similar experience. The key to avoiding long-lasting repercussions from negative responses to positive lessons is to address your feelings about the situation and/or people involved before you sleep.

Once you go to sleep with a heavy heart or turbulent mind, the physiological response patterns stored along with the precipitating event is embedded on your subconscious "hard-drive." Your body will continue to respond physiologically to those patterns until the memory is neutralized by positive feelings. But the feelings must be equally as intense as the feelings that accompanied the original data entry.

After you've slept on an intense negative incident, the only way to neutralize it is to learn the lesson and to appreciate the opportunity to learn. You do that by finding something good in the situation and appreciating that good with feelings equally as strong as the original.

So, what can poor, persecuted hypothetical Angie do about her series of job and relationship blunders?

The first thing she had better do is recognize that she hasn't yet passed one specific life-lesson "course," and that she will continue to recycle the same lesson over and over until she "gets it."

Angie is the only one who can identify the lesson. However, the longer she continues to respond in the same way to situations that set her up for migraines and malcontent, the longer the same types of incidents will happen over and over. And the longer she recycles that lesson, the longer it will take her to undo the physical damage she is doing to herself.