EXPLORING TO UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONS —II

In the art of managing your emotions for your own emotional intelligence, the first step is acceptance. Without acceptance, there will be and can be no control. Why? Because you cannot control what you don’t accept. By not accepting, you reject it and what you reject, you put outside of your control. It’s a vicious circle.

2) Explore to Understand. If you want to know why it’s important to accept your emotion, this is the reason. You need to understand what, if anything, your emotion is trying to say to you. As I noted in the earlier posts, mind and emotion are not two radically distinct phenomena, they are actually two parts of a singular process—your mind-body system. That’s why every thought involves an emotion and why every emotion involves thoughts. This is obvious with the primary emotions: to have anger you have to have angry thoughts; for fear, there has to be fearful thoughts; where there is sadness, sad thoughts, etc. “As you think, so you feel.” While that’s the basic principle, it is not the only principle. There are many more.

The cognitive aspect of any and every emotion informs you about its message. So far example, anger always tells you that something feels as if it is violating your values. Fear always tells you that something feels as if you are in danger or that something is threatening to you. Sadness always tells you that something feels as if you have loss something. Guilt always tells you that it feels as if you’ve done something wrong.

But notice that while the emotion is sending you a message, the message is indeterminate. It is not absolute. It is telling you that “something feels as if...” Now whether your anger, fear, sadness, guilt, etc. is true depends on your thinking, your relating to someone or something, and the context. If there is a true threat, danger, loss, or wrong—then your emotion is true and appropriate. And you need to listen to it. In that case your emotion’s message is critical for your well-being. Listen to it and take appropriate actions.

But if it is not true, if it is wrong—and it often is (!), then listening to your emotion is not in your best interest. In fact, it may be disastrous for you to listen to it or to heed it. And that’s why the first thing you have to do is explore the emotion to understand it. That’s why you start with acceptance of the emotion. By embracing the emotion, you can register it, notice it, and then ask it, “What are you trying to tell me?” At this point, check out three key factors of the emotion.

A) Your thinking. What are you thinking that’s generating the emotion? “I’m angry because John said I wasn’t using my head.” If it were true, what value does that violate? “My honor.” So your honor is at stake when John says those words? Your honor is that fragile that those words disturb your sense of honor? “Well, he shouldn’t say that!” Because ...? Because I don’t want him to say those words? You mean he doesn’t have the right to think that, n a given context, you didn’t use your head? “Well, no ... but I don’t like him saying that?” Did you use your head in that context?

Thinking generates emotions. If the thinking is inaccurate, if it is childish, if it is peevish to begin with, then the emotion will also be inaccurate or childish or distorted. So check it out. How grown-up and adult is your thinking? What distortions, biases, or fallacies may your thinking contain? Is it current thinking or is it old dated thinking from your childhood?

B) Your Body. When any of us have not been feeling well, not sleeping well, eating well, etc., our emotions can be on the edge and ready to over-react to the most benign trigger. You know this if you have a cold or the flu, if you are sleep deprived, if you have been drinking too much. Because an emotion is a somatic (body) response, if “the hardware” of your emotions is under stress and strain—your emotions can be overly sensitive, over-reactive, and therefore highly inaccurate. You probably need a nap or a bowl of hot soup or a walk in the sunshine!

Set your goal to have a “healthy mind in a healthy body” and then you will find that your emotions will work more optimally. Years ago I heard a famous therapist say, “At the bottom of a lot of depression is a lazy butt.” For your body to be healthy you need to exercise your muscles for skeleton strength, your heart and lungs for cardio-vascular strength, and to stretch for flexibility strength. That’s why with many negative emotions, the first thing to do is breathe deeply for a period of time. It will dissipate a lot of the emotional energy and change the bio- chemistry in your brain and body.

C) Your context. Emotions are highly sensitive to where. Because most emotions are social in nature and have to do with our relationships to others, to experiences, and to situations, where you are strongly conditions how you experience your emotions. There’s several reasons for this. One goes back to meaning— meaning is entirely context-dependent. What anything means depends on where it is said. “How are you?” becomes a very different question when asked by a friend, a doctor, a therapist, your mother, etc. And if the meaning is dependent on the context, so will the resulting emotion.

Another reason goes to the fact that most people constrain their emotions much more in public than they do in private. What they would never consider thinking or feeling in public, they would easily do if at home. Sometimes the transformative results in therapy, and even coaching, are delayed for this reason—the person doesn’t yet feel safe enough or comfortable enough to disclose his thoughts and feelings. Sometimes all of the negative emotions that show up as frustration, stress, embarrassment, anger, fear, insecurity, anxiety, and on and on that get activated at work ... and having a way of expressing or releasing the emotional energy gets displaced improperly at home onto one’s partner or children. Of course, that then creates all sorts