14 How Do I Handle Emotions?

Willa was realizing that she had slowly become an emotional wreck. Every little thing seemed to trigger for Willa a cascade of spiraling emotions until she could no longer think or act. The odd thing was that Willa couldn’t chalk up her mess to any single or dominant cause. She could at any one time point to several things that were bothering her, but none of them seemed to trouble her too badly. Willa instead suspected that her emotional decompensation had to do with deeper things, of which she had only spare clues. One thing was for sure, though: Willa needed to get ahold of her emotions. She knew that something had to change fast, or she was headed toward a full-on mental breakdown.

Emotions

Maintaining or recovering a sound psyche, soul, and spirit can require listening to, responding to, and managing your emotions. Emotions are a physiological response to some form of stimulus, whether an internal thought or an external event or encounter. We may not even be conscious of the stimuli, again anything from a chance encounter with another person, the occurrence of an event, or a wandering thought or fleeting memory. The physiological responses may begin with hormone and adrenaline release. Rising heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration, flushed face, ringing in the ears, dizziness, sweating, tensed muscles, and a roiled stomach may all follow. One can associate the physiological responses with basic fight or flight instincts useful to survival, although we interpret emotions into a very broad range of feelings well beyond basic instincts. Emotions are clearly signals, though, intended within the body’s systems to produce a behavioral response. Listen to your body. Listen to your emotional responses. They’re trying to tell you something. It’s up to you to figure out what.

Suppression

Ignore your emotions at your peril. Emotions are not an enemy to keep at bay. You can suppress your emotions to a degree. You may even need to do so for a time. Certainly, you need to control and manage your emotions in situations. Responding immediately, acting out your emotions as they occur and before appropriate investigation and deliberation, can lead to disruptive and damaging responses, harming reputation and relationships. But ignoring your emotions too often and for too long can numb your feelings to the point that you’re only going through the motions of life rather than living. Ignoring your emotions can make you unable to express yourself, unable to feel compassion, and unable to support close relationships. Ignoring your emotions can also affect your mood and mental health, making you irritable, anxious, and depressed. And ignoring your emotions over longer periods can affect your physical health, contributing to hypertension, heart disease, bowel syndromes, and headaches, and weakening your immune system. Don’t ignore your emotions. Instead, listen to them, and learn from them.

Feelings

You help yourself in understanding and managing your emotions if you first distinguish emotions from feelings. The distinction between emotions and feelings is a fine but significant line. Emotions are the physiological response, while feelings are the interpretation you give to the physiological response. You may, for instance, suddenly experience emotion without having any prompt and clear feeling about it until, after some brief consideration, you connect the emotion with a certain memory, thought, or subtle stimulus, from which you feel joy, fear, or contempt. On other occasions, you may encounter a situation that you instantly know frightens or angers you, and only then feel your emotions well up in their physiological response. Separating your feelings from your emotional response can remind you that feelings are more interpretive and thus can be both erring and controlled. You can’t do much about your emotional response. Your body will do what it will do. But you may be able to do a lot about your feelings. Feelings and emotions also reciprocate. While emotion can trigger feelings, feelings can also trigger emotion. Consider feelings to be your management response to emotion.

Value

Your emotions, while not necessarily reliable, can still be a weathervane for your psychological and spiritual state. Emotions that stimulate feelings fitting to your circumstances indicate a healthy state of the spirit, psyche, and soul. Picking up instinctually and intuitively on stimuli, emotion continually spurs thoughts that course through your mind in patterns resonant with reality. Well-managed emotion, integrated into your psyche through fitting thoughts and animating feelings, is a vital aspect of life. Emotion gives us the capacity to feel and experience as an embodied entity, not just an abstract mind. Emotion both warms us to circumstances and warns us from circumstances, thus guiding us through the very real. Emotion also reveals patterns and circumstances to us. Without emotion, we become blind to the intuited world. Reading our emotions is like reading an invisible scan of our world. Our emotions also reveal ourselves to us, giving us clues about how events and experiences have shaped our psyche. Value your emotions.

Disruptions

Emotions can indeed be wonderful. Experiencing and expressing emotion is an integral part of living. Yet expressing emotion without appropriate interpretation and intermediation can harm you and others. We often need to control our emotions. Emotions can be instant. The instinctual response can also be wrong. How many times have you felt a rush of fear from a sound or movement only to soon learn that it presented no cause at all for alarm? We can make similar errors with more-complex stimuli and situations. Misunderstanding circumstances and intentions may lead to instant offense and even rage, only to soon find out that the circumstances and intentions were entirely innocent of any cause for rage or offense. Far better to hold one’s tongue in such circumstances. Your instant, emotional reaction out of a misunderstood situation can indicate both your lack of self-control and your lack of trust in those whom you misunderstood. Beware the harm that can flow from ill-considered, emotional reactions.

Misconceptions

Common misconceptions exist about emotions. One misconception is that emotions are fleeting and insignificant, while to the contrary, emotions can endure and deeply influence cognition. We may be more emotional entities than cognitive entities. A related misconception is that once we get over the emotion, we can assess ourselves in the light of cold reason. To the contrary, emotion and reason tend to go hand in hand, with emotion deeply affecting reasoning. Another misconception is that positive interpretations of emotion elicit positive behavior, while negative interpretations of emotion elicit negative behavior. Yet it’s not that easy. Indeed, that’s how scammers work, manipulating positive interpretations into unwisely trusting actions, to the actor’s detriment. A positive interpretation shouldn’t necessarily trigger positive, trusting behavior. Accept a compliment as positive, but don’t let it fool you. Likewise, a negative interpretation with a negative behavioral response isn’t all bad. It may instead be discerning and protective. Don’t try to make yourself an excessively cheerful and optimistic pollyanna. Both positive and negative responses to emotions can be appropriate, depending on the situation.

Source

Understanding the source or generation of emotion may help you interpret your emotions usefully. While emotion is a physiological response, emotion arises from a mix of signals from the brain, body, and environment. What’s going on around you can matter to your emotions. To the extent that you can control your environment to manage your emotions, consider doing so. If you can’t avoid or minimize exposure to situations that you know will make you excessively emotional in a manner difficult to control, then anticipate your emotional response, and do your best to prepare a mental framework within which to cope. You may also be able to address your physical needs to mitigate an emotional situation, first by ensuring your safety and comfort, and then by providing yourself with physical support. You may find, for instance, that sitting, standing while holding onto a support, or standing in a certain posture may reduce the impact of your body’s emotional flags. Your experiences, soul, spirit, and psyche are also a source of emotion, as the next paragraph addresses.

Interaction

Your biggest challenge with emotions isn’t generally the external stimuli nor even the physiological reactions. You may be able to avoid or minimize the stimuli and should be able to manage the reactions. Your bigger challenge is with your experiences, persona, ego, and general psychological makeup that amplify the stimuli and physiological reactions. We tend naturally to project ourselves into the emotional stimuli and physiological reactions, where all three, the self, stimuli, and reaction, then resonate with one another to amplify the response. To be an emotional wreck is to allow that unfortunate resonance to build into a feedback loop’s cacophony. Lowering your emotional temperature involves interrupting the feedback loop on whichever measure you are able. Controlling your thoughts, directing them away from the subject until your physiology stabilizes, may help. So, too, can addressing your physiological response, such as by sitting down if lightheaded or taking a walk to loosen muscles and dissipate adrenaline. Removing the stimulus may also help, if it hasn’t already withdrawn. These initial steps may help you manage emotion.

Acknowledgment

You likely have deeper work to do if emotion is overwhelming, confusing, frustrating, depressing, or otherwise seriously affecting you. Begin by acknowledging the emotion. Trace its onset and repetition to particular sources if you can. Don’t seize, though, on sources. A harmless situation may have a component similar to the deeper triggering issue. The co-worker who repeatedly angers you, for instance, may simply be exhibiting a habit that triggers your insecurity or need for control, arising out of your family history or former situation. Once you identify the triggering situation, you must analyze the trigger against your experiences, persona, and other psychological and spiritual makeup. Give yourself the time and space to do so, and get the counsel and insight, before jumping to conclusions. Analyzing your emotional responses can be a lifelong process of inquiry and discovery. You are not necessarily looking for a single magic key to unlock your soul, relieve you of a disturbing or even disabling emotion, and restore your balanced psyche. Consider your emotions to instead be a partner in your journey of self-awareness.

Analysis

Once you discern a pattern in your emotional responses, including the triggering events or circumstances and the feelings with which you interpret them, analyzing that pattern involves a process of matching or equating. What aspect of the event or circumstance matches something in your persona or past to trigger your emotion? Think of the emotion as the spark produced when the flint of the stimulus strikes a hard part of your soul. What in your psyche is responding to the particular aspect of the stimulus? To finely discern the answer, you need to analyze both the stimulus and your psyche. You need both situational awareness surrounding the stimulus and personal awareness of your history, character, and tendencies. Take, for instance, a situation in which a stranger disagrees with your well-grounded factual assertion or well-informed opinion, to which you overreact indignantly. The stranger might not have known your basis for the factual assertion or your credentials supporting your opinion. The stranger may, in other words, have been entirely innocent of any intention to offend you. Yet if you examine your own psyche, you may recognize that you afford yourself a lower value in these situations than you should. You may, in other words, be overreacting to your own internal sense of inadequate standing, worth, and value, whether from a traumatic past event, longstanding family history, personality trait, or other constitutive cause. Analyze deliberately, thoughtfully, and with skilled help.

Integration

The goal of analysis is only in part to better manage your emotions. Another goal of analysis is to reorder your psyche, spirit, and soul. Whenever you discover something about yourself from your emotions, you have the opportunity to integrate that discovery into a greater whole. The hidden or suppressed part of yourself that you just discovered wanted to be a part of your whole. It thus produced the emotion as a demand that you acknowledge, respect, and integrate it. Consider your emotions as demands that you attend to your soul. Your emotions may be unruly, misguided, and erring. But they may also be telling you that you have internal work to do. Your key is to maintain your peace in social and personal relations, show both yourself and others your patient understanding, and exercise firm self-control, giving yourself time and space to undertake thoughtful analysis. Align your psyche, soul, and spirit with the transcendent creator’s intentions, including when dealing with your emotions.

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how emotional of a person are you? If you rated yourself below the midpoint on the scale, are you suppressing emotions? If you rated yourself above the midpoint on the scale, are you failing to acknowledge and address emotions? How quickly do you interpret your emotions into feelings, whether positive or negative? Do you err sometimes about the feelings that you generate around your emotions? Do you overreact or underreact to your emotions at times? How well do you manage your emotions? Are you skilled at reading and analyzing your emotions, in order to adjust your thinking and actions? Are your emotions typically generated from external events or internal thinking? Can you get yourself worked up over things purely from the inside? Or are you instead largely stable in emotions until something triggers you from outside? Can you quiet your mind when you need to do so, to minimize mistaken emotions? Or do you instead over-think situations until you’ve unnecessarily worked yourself up into an agitated state? Do you recognize some emotional situations as related not to their immediate cause but instead as triggering something else in your past or psyche? Have you discovered things about yourself by analyzing your emotions? Have you been able to integrate those discoveries into a refreshed and stabilized psyche?

Key Points

Emotions are a critically important physiological response to stimuli.
Suppressing your emotions can lead to mental and physical illness.
Distinguish physiological emotions from interpretive feelings.
Feelings fall into positive, neutral, and negative categories, all useful.
Value your emotions not only as signals but as experiences of life.
Control emotions so they do not harm reputation and relationship.
Emotions can be just as significant as reasoning, working together.
Emotions arise from internal and external stimuli and conditions.
Stimuli, responses, and your psyche all interact to produce emotion.
Acknowledge your emotions until you can discern their stimuli.
Analyze the stimuli against your experience and psyche for insight.
Integrate the hidden part of you that triggers unreasonable emotion.

Read Chapter 15.