THE WORK OF EMOTIONS WITHIN YOU

In the delightful art of managing your emotions we have covered steps one and two. First, accept the emotion as an emotion and second, fully embrace the emotion to understand it. Now for the third step.

3) Let Your Emotions Do Their Work in You. As emotions work inside you, moving you with their energy (e-motion), they enable you to do whatever emotional work they require. This emotional work depends on the kind and quality of the energy that the emotion triggers.

For example, the energy of anger (if it is true) is to feel that something is violating your values and to take action to see if you can change things and reduce that threat. However, feeling that is not a pleasant feeling. Most of us feel it as stressful and unpleasant. But sometimes there’s nothing to actually do, no action to take. That’s when we have to use symbolic actions to displace all of the physical energy that we feel within our bodies. So, for example, I may speak my anger out, I may write my anger out, I may even walk or run my anger out, etc.

The energy of fear is different. When I feel it, I want to move away from the threat. Sometimes if it is too much, I freeze in place and feel so confused I don’t know what to do. The energy of fear warns me of danger and threat, and my unthinking response is to get away from it. If I do my emotional work, I feel this tendency so that I can then ask, “Should I or should I not?” “If I do, what precautions do I need to take?” The feeling of fear does not always require that we move away from the trigger; sometimes we have to face it, move forward and act anyway.

Then there’s the energy of sadness, the sense of loss and the emotion of grief. I have lost something— money, a job, an opportunity, a friend, a loved one, a child, etc. Here the emotional work is that of feeling the loss, registering it, and owning it. In that way, I say to myself (and others), “X was very important to me; I feel less now because of the loss.” It’s through doing the emotional work of registering the loss and owning it, that you are freed to ask, “How can I replace what I lost?” The end goal of grief—the recognition of value and the willingness to risk loss again by replacing it.

In each of these instances, the emotion urges us to go inside and own the emotional experience so that we develop, grow, and become more human. The emotional work is the work of developing our humanity. Consider that as you re-read the quotation from Aristotle.

“Anybody can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.”

When a person does his emotional work, he becomes a better person for it. It’s only the person who has lost, and through embracing her grief that she now knows the true joy of love and connection. She now can be a fully loving person. It’s only the person who has feared and has embraced that fear, and learned to take proper precautions and moved forward to face life as a vulnerable human being who knows the wonders and joys of tackling big goals with courage. It’s only the person who has faced his angers and refined his values and who now can transform that anger into fighting for justice for those who cannot fight for themselves who knows the transformative power of respectful anger.

Emotions have work to do inside of us. What we know and understand about things (cognitively), such as dangers, treats, values, losses, etc., our emotions integrate that knowledge into our neurology and physiology. Then, as a result, with emotions we feel the danger or loss or joy or love or whatever. What we ‘know’ activates our whole mind-body system so that we are more ready and resourceful to take effective action.

Just as knowledge changes us, so do our emotions. As the word indicates, now we are moved on the inside and more ready and capable of moving on the outside. In this way, your emotions create your states so you can be increasingly resourceful in speech and behavior. These states are mind-body states which allow you to put your knowledge into action. They enable you to feel competent, confident, resilient, persistent, joyful, hopeful, loving, creative, etc.

Conversely, if you don’t allow your emotions to do their work within you, their messages go unheeded and you are the worse for it. Typically the emotion’s energy gets misdirected on the inside, often misdirected against you—your mind and/or your body. So we ask, “Have you done your emotional work?”

As you explore your emotions for their message, you can now let the energy work in you to make you more human. Emotions are to be felt, owned, and learned from. Doing so makes you stronger and more resilient. The caveat is to make sure you submit the emotional energy to your best thinking. If you reverse the order, and submit your thinking to your emotions, you make yourself an emotional dependent and lose the ability regulate your emotions.