Have you ever seen those spells that promise you can banish your anxiety or your depression? What about spells that promise to make you forget about your ex? Or spells designed to get rid of anger? Chances are if you’ve been involved in witchcraft for any length of time, you’ve come across quite a number of these spells. Hell, I get asked for a spell like this at least a couple of times a week! And I get it, we all encounter emotions that are painful, hard to process, or just downright uncomfortable. No one wants to feel bad!

These spells might seem well-meaning, or useful, or even benign, but they are nothing of the sort. You won’t find a single one of these spells on my website, and that is for a very good reason! These spells are flat-out dangerous. It might seem counterintuitive, but getting rid of your negative emotions will almost always create more problems than it solves, and for some people, this kind of magic can lead you down a very destructive road. In this series, we’re going to be taking a look at what these spells are actually doing, why they’re so dangerous, and what you can do instead if you want to use magic to help with uncomfortable or painful emotions.

What Are “Feeling Blocker” Spells?

Feeling blocker spells are essentially any kind of spell that is designed to get rid of a specific emotion that you do not want to feel. This can be anything from banishing depression to binding your anxiety, snuffing out your anger, getting rid of painful memories, eliminating feelings for someone who doesn’t reciprocate them, getting rid of painful desires, and so much more. These spells promise that if you simply throw a little magic at your emotions, they will simply disappear! It’s not hard to understand why this would appeal to so many people. These are all very uncomfortable or painful emotions. Obviously, when we’re feeling these emotions, we want them to stop!

The problem is that these spells don’t eliminate the emotions. They don’t dig them out at the root. They don’t remove them totally from your being. No matter what these spells promise, a spell cannot remove an emotion that you’re feeling. It’s simply not possible. So what is the spell doing? It’s blocking the emotion. It’s making it so you’re not aware of the emotion, so you can’t feel the emotion. And this is why these spells are so incredibly dangerous.

These Spells Are Dangerous!

A lot of people who are interested in these feeling blocker spells haven’t taken the time to dig into what emotions really are. And that’s ok! We live in a world that teaches us to ignore our emotions, to pretend we don’t have problems, to not burden others with our feelings, and to “put on a brave face”. We’re told to do anything but investigate our emotions by the world at large. And so, the average person doesn’t investigate their emotions. They simply have an emotion that’s painful and that they don’t want to experience and decide that the easiest way to get out of that experience is to use a spell to “remove” or block the emotion. But when you actually look at it, this is the equivalent of putting a piece of tape over the check engine light on your car.

Your emotions are a very complex, finely tuned alert system. They are your subconscious mind’s way of communicating with you and giving you guidance in any situation. Their only function is to tell you what you do and do not want to experience. Happiness tells you that you want more of that experience. Love tells you that you want a particular person. Anger tells you that you do not want to have a specific boundary crossed. Sadness tells you that you do not want to lose something. Loneliness tells you that you do not want to be alone. Anxiety tells you that you do not want some potential future misfortune to happen. Every single one of our emotions is simply a flashing light indicating that we either do want something or don’t want something. They tell you when something is right for you or when something is wrong for you.

When you boil it down, every emotion, whether painful or pleasant, has a very important role to play in the creation of our lives. Blocking even one of these vital alert systems is simply blinding yourself to the reality of your situation. Let’s say, for example, your partner throws away something of yours without realizing that it was important to you and this makes you angry. The anger is telling you that you do not want other people throwing away your things, that is a boundary that you do not want to have crossed. If you did a spell to get rid of that anger, you would not be able to tell if that boundary was being crossed in the future. Essentially, you are blinding yourself to your own need to have your possessions and your decision-making capacity respected. Does that sound like a positive solution?

It All Comes Down To Unworkability

Usually, when these spells begin to look particularly appealing, there’s some emotion that feels unresolvable. In the previous example, you could simply have a very frank conversation with your partner about not throwing away your things without asking you first, and as long as they’re a decent partner and agree to do so, you have resolution. The anger will subside and you will hopefully not have to encounter that particular boundary violation again. If you know how to find resolution with a particular negative emotion that you’re experiencing, you’re not likely to turn to a spell to try to get rid of it. You have an easier solution! If you don’t know how to create resolution, feeling blocker spells can seem like the only decent option.

If, for instance, you’re in our previous example and you either have a very hard time setting boundaries for yourself or perhaps you’re in a relationship where it isn’t safe to set boundaries, you will have no good way to create resolution to ensure that boundary is not crossed again. You will essentially be staring down a future where you can guarantee that boundary is going to be crossed repeatedly and you are going to have to experience that same anger repeatedly. Or, for a different example, if you’ve recently gone through a bad breakup but you are not able to let go of the relationship and the love you had for that person and it’s creating a significant amount of heartbreak, you may not be able to see a good resolution option. The only thing your heart wants is to get back into a relationship with that person, but if they are not open to that, it may feel like there’s no way to resolve that feeling of loneliness and heartbreak.

This is truly where the danger comes in. The people who are drawn to these spells are drawn to them because they feel like they are stuck in an emotional situation that they do not want to be in. They don’t have the knowledge or emotional resources to create the resolution that they need, so they feel like their only option is to turn off their emotions. All this does is keep them trapped in a situation that they do not want. It keeps them stuck in a situation that is making them unhappy, that is painful, and that is not serving their best interests. Covering up these emotions is trapping them in the very situation they desperately want to escape. I understand the desire to escape these seemingly unresolvable emotions, I do. But that does not mean that these spells are an effective or healthy way to do so.

In the long run, these spells usually have one of two results. The first common result is that the spell works for a time, it dampens or blocks the emotion so the person receives temporary relief but because they are not leaving the situation, the emotion is simply getting louder and more insistent until the spell can no longer effectively block it and the emotion comes back with a vengeance. The second common result is that the spell manages to block the emotion effectively, but the emotion takes a toll on the body and mind in the long run. Remember that these spells do not actually get rid of the emotion, they simply bottle it up way deep down inside where you can’t access it and that emotion is still having a very real effect on your physiological body and on your mental state even when you cannot feel it.

Long term, this can mean rapidly worsening mental health and the emergence of new physical health problems and diseases caused by repressed emotions. We’re not even talking about the potential metaphysical effects on the body here, this is straight up the chemical and hormonal effect that prolonged stress can have on the body. Something as simple as heightened cortisol, a stress hormone, over the long run can lead to your body struggling to produce enough sex hormones which can lead to an imbalance in your hormones which can then lead to hormonally driven cancers such as breast cancer or ovarian cancer. And that’s just one of many potential physical repercussions. These are no small consequences that we’re talking about here! These spells are incredibly dangerous both on a psychological and emotional level and on a physical level. We should never be using feeling blocker spells to handle our emotions. Period.

Do Not Throw Your Power Away

As witches, we come to the craft to take back power over our lives and to be able to create a life that we want for ourselves. That’s it. I hear from thousands of witches a month and when you dig down to the core of it, we all want to take back the power that it feels like society has stripped from us and create a better life for ourselves. That is the entire point of witchcraft! It reconnects you with your innate power, your innate capacity for creation, and the inner knowing that you are a spiritual being who is deeply connected to this world and able to shape it to your will.

In this endeavor, our only axis of power is in reality. Read that again. If you want to have power and create tangible change in your life, your only axis of power is reality. If you are not in reality, you cannot change anything because you don’t even know what needs to change. If you are not in reality, you don’t even know that anything needs to change in the first place! By blocking your emotions, you are blocking your access to reality and thus, you are forfeiting your power to create your life in both physical terms and magically. Yes, blocking your emotions can shut down the effectiveness of your magic!

If you are not in reality, if you have blocked your ability to see the truth of where you are, good, bad, and ugly, then you cannot do effective magic. Your spells will fail or they will work, but in a limited capacity that never really changes the situation. You’re essentially telling yourself and the energy of the entire universe that there’s nothing to change! Everything is fine, so there’s no reason for anything to be different, right? This is one of the main reasons why insistent “positive vibes only” people end up in increasingly worse situations. They’re not willing to admit it when they hate life! And if you’re telling yourself, your magic, and the whole universe that you’re totally fine being stuck in hell and dealing with a mountain of pain, then that is what you will continue to have in your life.

If you’re finding yourself in this situation and you’ve used one of these spells or you were considering using one, please don’t panic. There are so many ways that you can use your craft to find resolution with your emotions, you are not stuck in this situation! In next week’s post, we’re going to be discussing six ways that you can use your craft to find healthy, safe emotional resolution without resorting to spells that shut off your emotions.

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