Do you ever feel like your emotions have hijaked you and they are in control. Like they are in the drivers seat, and you're just along for the wild ride? It's like being caught in the fast lane freeway of feelings, and you're not sure how to navigate through it all.
Our view of and relationship with emotions is profoundly flawed. Due to factors like war, generational trauma, survival instincts, toxic masculinity, and societal judgments around perceived weakness, coupled with an unrealistic emphasis on happiness, we end up suppressing, denying, avoiding, medicating, and rejecting so-called 'negative' emotions at all costs.
As a result, we live in a world where fear dominates our approach to feeling, discussing, and processing tough emotions.
Society holds difficult emotions in contempt and shuns hard emotional experiences out of fear. We are perpetually seeking anything that can help us avoid discomfort.
It's understandable to seek escape. Painful, strong, overpowering, and scary emotions are incredibly challenging. Yet, despite their difficulty, they serve a crucial purpose.
We often label difficult emotions as bad or negative. In truth, feelings are neither good nor bad; they're simply feelings. Some are more uncomfortable than others, making them harder to manage.
Emotions are signals, much like physical pain. Just as pain indicates something is wrong with our body, uncomfortable emotions signal that something within us needs attention. They are 'painful' to draw our focus to issues requiring our care.
Unpleasant emotions act like alarms, alerting us that something needs our attention. Just as we don't judge hunger or thirst as bad, we need to see our emotions as signs indicating something needs tending to.
We should start relating to our emotions as indicators of what's happening within or around us, pointing to unmet needs. If we view emotions like signals, we can understand them as we do physical pain. Uncomfortable emotions are signaling that something within us needs addressing.
Every feeling we experience exists for a reason. Emotions serve a purpose, acting as wake-up calls, nudging us to examine our inner state.
Ignoring or rejecting our feelings tends to amplify them. As they get louder, they can overwhelm us, causing us to be consumed by the pain. Our emotions can begin to control us, pulling us into a quicksand of suffering.
When we get too caught up in our feelings, we risk becoming them. This is when things can derail. But we have a choice—we can learn to confront our feelings and work with our emotions, using them for growth and learning, or we can let them engulf us.
Both physical and emotional pain activate the same areas in the brain. When we experience uncomfortable emotions, our brain goes into overdrive, perceiving danger. This is why we do everything to avoid feeling the "bad stuff."
However, until we learn to manage our emotions, we risk being driven by them. In trying to avoid pain, we fall back on ineffective coping strategies, which can worsen our problems.
The silver lining is that our emotions are not our enemies; they are gifts. They act as messengers, guiding us toward greater self-awareness and wisdom. We need to learn to listen to them.
The key is to build a relationship with your emotions, becoming the observer rather than the passenger. By doing so, you can start using your emotions to deepen your connection with yourself and the world around you. It's about creating a framework where you can navigate your feelings from a place of strength and awareness, utilizing them as the resource they were always meant to be.
Here are way can explore our emotions to understand their message and find the unmet need, the action needed, the change require.
EMOTIONALPROCESSING ~ REFRAMING FEELINGS
By understanding and processing our emotions is an essential step toward emotional intelligence. By recognizing our emotions as signals to unmet needs, we become highly self-aware and gain the ability to evaluate our emotions objectively. This self-awareness allows us to manage our emotions effectively, observe our thoughts without judgment, and cultivate a curiosity about the root causes of our unpleasant feelings.
As we become more emotionally intimate with ourselves, we reduce our reactivity and susceptibility to emotional hijacking. Instead, we become the masters of our emotions and, ultimately, the masters of ourselves. This mastery empowers us to align our actions, conversations, and overall direction with our true needs and higher purposes, leading to a more fulfilling and balanced life.
Comments