What are emotions and why do we have them?
Emotions are chemical reactions that happen in response to specific events or situations. Feelings are what we experience as a result of our emotions. Emotions compel you to take action and they influence the decisions you make about your life.
(The Latin root of the word means “move.”) Emotions motivates our behaviour such as approach, avoid, or attack.
What is the Purpose of Our Emotions?
Emotions motivate our behaviour. For example, if you are crossing the street and you see a car run a red light in your direction, you will likely perceive danger, get anxious, and run to get out of the way.
Emotions help us communicate with people. If you feel a boundary is being violated, your feeling of anger may prompt you to say no.
Emotions also help us to recognize what others are feeling.
Emotions communicate to us what we like and dont like, such as hobbies, people, work, interests, food, how we prefer to be treated, our values, etc.
In order to regain control over your feelings, don’t judge your emotions. Emotions aren’t “good” or “bad”, just pleasant or unpleasant.
Most of us learnt at a very young age that to express negative emotions such as anger, sadness and fear was bad. You might remember being told to “get over it” or “big boys don’t cry” or “man up ” or “it’s not ladylike to be angry or aggressive” So is it any wonder that we grew up thinking that these emotions are bad and not to be expressed?
We were given the message that to feel negative feelings will threaten our societies image of normality and at odds with who we would like to be. So what did most of us do? We pushed these emotions down so they became repressed emotions and some of us resorted to negative ways of numbing these emotions like self-harm, alcohol, drugs, gambling, overspending or overworking. Pushing away difficult emotions such as sadness and fear and not being able to recognize them can make someone more at risk of harming their mental health. We might stay in unhealthy relationships or jobs since we don’t know how we really feel, which can be damaging to our mental health over time.
People may develop anxiety issues or depression after years of burying their true emotions, hoping they will go away without being addressed. If you look at the word depressed, what does it mean to de-press something? It means push it down, so were pushing down our emotions and in the long term that can lead to depression Other mental health conditions may develop as a result of being unable to work with our emotions.
How to Understand and Process Your Emotions
1. The first step to process an emotion is identifying that it even exists. Recognizing that you’re upset, angry, or grieving is necessary to be able to process what you’re really feeling.
2. Once you’ve identified your emotion, you need to be able to sit with it. Getting comfortable with uncomfortable emotions isn’t easy, but it’s a crucial step to understanding your feelings.
3. Next you’ll want to try and pin-point why you might be experiencing this emotion. Once we identify what we are feeling, we can identify what we need. Meeting our needs on a consistent basis leads to greater satisfaction and fulfilment. It also helps to avoid compulsive behaviours, which can simply be attempts at meeting an unexpressed need.
Some common reasons people experience negative emotions include old triggers, unmet needs, boundary violations, old behaviour patterns, self-judgement, or all of the above! Ask yourself ……What is this emotion trying to tell me?
Ask yourself how can you use that information to make a decision, meet a need or take action?
Check in throughout your day and ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now and what do I need?”
For myself, I used to instantly feel anxiety anytime I’m in a group situation… The reason I can now work with groups is because I dug deep to identify that I feel this emotion because of old triggers and self-judgement from my school days. When you have that lightbulb moment, you know you’re on the right track to finally processing those repressed emotions. An important thing for us to remember is we fear what we don’t understand so if we can understand why were feeling an emotion it lessons its hold over us to the point where we can deal with it and get on with what we were doing or what we would like to do.
4. Now comes the hard part: Addressing the emotion. This means we have to act in a healthy way based on the information we uncovered from the emotion. Maybe we need to create a stronger boundary, or maybe we need to work toward meeting our unmet needs or goals. Maybe we need to show ourselves more compassion for difficult experiences we’ve had in life.
Addressing an emotion sometimes means going against what your mind or body urges you to do. So, if you feel like you want to go hide away and not interact with anyone, go for a walk instead! It’s all about acting in a healthy way that aligns with our values and how we want to live.
You can also use the feelings wheel below to identify what you are feeling and what you might need.
To help explain how to use the wheel, in the centre of the wheel are our 6 primary emotions and radiating outwards from each primary emotions are feeling words to describe how you may you feel when you experience each emotion.
Once you gain some practice in understanding emotions, you can begin to take action to meet your needs.
Below you will find 6 steps to deal with your emotions:
Working with a therapist can help you to explore and understand your emotions, learning how to process them, so that they do not feel so overwhelming. This will result in you feeling more in control of your emotions instead of them controlling how you feel.
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