Tag Archives: documenting emotions

22

Learning About Your Emotions

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How one deals with trauma, disappointment, anger, and frustration is a part of everyone’s life experience. The emotions that naturally arrive with each of these events in life are often the cause of many problems we carry throughout our lives. Learning to express our emotional pain and distress positively and healthily can lead to everyone’s further enjoyment of life. The inability to process emotions we feel healthily may lead to a lifetime of trauma, disappointment, and confusion.

Learning to express our emotional pain and distress positively and healthily can lead to robust life enjoyment. The inability to process emotions we feel healthily may lead to a lifetime of trauma, unhappiness, and poor health. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Emotions As Enemies

In my youth, I learned that feelings were enemies. Not overtly, but subtly through my life experience. My male role models taught me that you should keep your

Our feelings can hurt us more than any foe if we don’t know how to deal with them.

Emotions in and not shown to the world. Since I never spoke of what I felt, I was left to guess for a reason, but as a young person, I believed it was because anger, sadness, shame, and frustration were terrible things that showed a person’s weakness. So I learned to put on a smile and keep my disappointments in life to myself. I was an expert at putting the uncomfortable things in a place where they couldn’t reach me, but I didn’t realize that they would always be a part of me until I learned to deal with them constructively.

Emotions are a natural result of life and work to help us determine what behaviors we resonate with through our actions. Painful emotions tell us something is wrong, but that “thing” was never us, just what happened to us. The lack of communication around our negative emotions and the events or thoughts that cause them leads to most of our problems in life.

Embracing all parts of ourselves, including the uncomfortable parts of emotions, is essential for health. Nobody lives without having a negative thought.

Learning to Deal with Emotions

Too often, it seems like people choose to either obsess over emotions or numb themselves through alcohol or drugs. The problem with these techniques is that the negative feeling is still.

Learning to deal with emotions and talk about them is one of the healthiest things we can do.

Waiting to be dealt with becomes a destructive part of your life. Being happy is hard when you carry so much anger, frustration, or shame.

There are many resources out there that can help you deal with your emotional baggage healthily, and links at the end of this article to help you. Here are a few that I think are effective for me.

  1. Journaling or creating something artistic to help you express what is happening inside. Emotions can be difficult to communicate, and images or other artistic creations can allow for a healthy expression of things that bother us.
  2. Learning to recognize unhealthy or harmful thought patterns or practices, accept them, and learn how to let them go gently out of your life, relieves emotional pain.
  3. Understand the role that pain has in a healthy life. It can be a catalyst for growth and teaches resilience. Minor health issues provide the experience to deal with more significant difficulties later in life.
  4. Seek the help of others. Find someone who can guide your emotional health if you don’t know how to deal with what you are experiencing. Speak about your pain to someone, which will help you release it. A professional counselor or therapist is a great option. Never be afraid to ask for help; it isn’t a sign of weakness; it is a tool to allow you to live a fulfilling life.
  5. Practice forgiveness- learn to forgive yourself and forgive others for anything they did that hurt you. Carrying around pain and anger will only weigh you down and, from my experience, stop you from becoming happy in life.
  6. Talk about it. Tell someone you trust how you are feeling. It is a simple but effective way of dealing with things.

Suppose our challenges today stem from some emotional issues that haven’t been dealt with appropriately. Shouldn’t our educational system teach kids how to manage youth’s emotional roller coaster rides?

Learning to accept emotions and deal with emotional issues more healthily allows for many of the blocks in life to be eliminated, allowing a healthy expression of yourself and providing your gift to the world. That is a good thing.

21

Emotional

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Through this human experience, we are inundated daily with all sorts of emotions.  Emotions are defined as: “a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.” They are our feelings, and unless you learn how to deal with them, they will deal with you.

These are things we face every moment of every day, but very few people look at what their emotions mean or, more importantly, what they are trying to communicate to us.  Emotions control much of what we do and how we relate to others in our lives. Take a moment and investigate how your feelings are affecting your daily existence.  Why are they so important? Where do they come from? How can we deal with them more helpfully? These answers will help you function more truly and honestly in your life.  You will cease to be at the mercy of the seemingly random appearance of your emotions because you will know where they come from.   You are not your emotions of love or anger or fear; how you react to them makes you who you are.

Why Emotions Are Important

Our emotions come from our thoughts, and most often, our thoughts are a reaction to the experience we are having or, more often, to experiences we had in the past. As we experience our daily lives, situations arise which stimulate thoughts. We have a complete memory bank of skills. When something happening now reminds us of something from the past, emotions are triggered, like a warning about suffering or pleasure from history that we might repeat shortly.  Anger, for example, is the face of fear. We get angry when thoughts that might not meet our needs are front and center in our minds. Many people get into the habit of using anger as a default to getting what they want, getting mad any time anyone challenges them, or not going exactly the way they want. These emotional responses are not healthy because, over time, anger takes its toll on your body, and more significantly, your relationships. Nobody wants to spend quality time with a ticking time bomb.

Our emotions tell us things that words can’t articulate, and learning to decipher these feelings rather than react mindlessly to them gives us a chance to be better and create healthier relationships. Start to look at your emotions pragmatically, from the perspective of, where did this come from? What is it you are feeling, and why do you feel this way right now? Every thought comes complete with a corresponding emotional response. Emotions are important because they are away. We communicate with the world and ourselves.  To ignore or suppress your feelings is a good recipe for poor mental and physical health. What is inside of you and how you feel will eventually come to the surface. You can decide if it is through a gentle investigation of how you think or an explosion of emotional steam after weeks, months, or years of psychological repression. Take care of your emotions, and they will take care of you. Listen to them, and they will provide you with a direction of where you need to go.

Watching Emotions

Rather than let your emotions dictate your words, actions, and life experience, the moment you feel them, take a minute and allow yourself to feel what you are feeling. Our bodies are excellent because they think the stimulus from outside is like hot and cold, but also feel an incentive that comes from inside, like happy or sad. Rather than being controlled by your emotions, take a second and let it be there. The sentiment is a feeling or response, and you can sit back and observe it. What is causing it? What is the stimulus of this thing? It could be a link to some experience from your childhood, which is irrelevant today. When you can observe the emotion, you are no longer part of that response. You are separate from it.

Doing this successfully will allow you to investigate what is going on inside of you at that moment.  Watch the thoughts you are thinking, which have the emotion attached.  Watch your inner world unfold and ask questions about the genesis of your emotional responses. Doing this will allow you to understand yourself better and relate to the world and those in it.  Being effective at this will allow you the chance to become more in charge of your emotional health. Although you will never be able to control your emotions, you can understand how to work with them healthily and use the information they are sending you. Rather than just reacting in a mindless, subconscious way.  It takes time and effort to do this, but it will give you a better understanding of yourself and others when you become better at this.

Documenting Your Emotions

To start to practice this, you need to take some simple action. Start by documenting your emotions. Look back at your day and write down when you had an intense emotional response. Notice these feelings and how they affected you. Then follow it to its roots. What was the situation? What was said? Who was there? What were you thinking? Which of your thoughts are tied to which emotional response? All of this information is available to you every day and in all situations. You have to be willing to investigate, document, and get to know yourself in the emotional realm.  Each time you put your emotions down on paper, you will build a more reliable connection with yourself, where you came from, and what it is that you need to deal with. Negative emotions are dangerous to your health, and of course, your relationships, and to be at their mercy makes you a reactor to life.

When you know which situations or thoughts lead you to love, fear, sadness, happiness, or any other emotion, then you are in control of things. Isn’t anxiety a response to thoughts that create fear? Look for the ideas that put you in a negative emotional state and shine a light on them. Explore them. Understand them. Like a monster under the bed, a little light will reveal that you are spending your time entertaining unnecessary thoughts of fear. There is a freedom that comes from understanding yourself in all facets because understanding and knowledge are always the keys to power, and in this case, it is your power.

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”-Horace Walpole.

“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”-Elizabeth Gilbert.

“We all live at the mercy of our emotions. Our emotions influence and shape our desires, thoughts, and behaviors and above all our destiny.”-Dr. T.P.Chia