Making Friends With Your Emotions (Part 1)

Do you love your emotions? 

Do you look forward to days on which depression visits? Do you eagerly await the arrival of anxiety? And do you enjoy moments of anger, jealousy or shame? 

Perhaps these questions strike you as absurd? Who on Earth looks forward to feeling such emotions? Rumi may have. But maybe you prefer the ‘positive’ ones: happiness, joy, contentment? 

Like me, I bet you’ve come across dozens of articles on how to deal with anxiety or anger, but not one on how to manage happiness. Why is that? Why is there this lopsided preference for some emotions over others? 

How do I get better at managing emotions? 

And what is the single most important thing you can do to become better with emotions? 

These are questions I’ve been interested in for many years. Like most people, I received no formal education related to managing emotions — and in all my years of schooling, the subject was never even mentioned. 

I’ve since read dozens of books on the subject. Some of them were too academic and offered nothing practical. Others instructed me to focus all my energies on cultivating gratitude, compassion and happiness, as though they were the only emotions that counted. 

I’ve since cobbled together an understanding of emotions that helps me to navigate them a little more intelligently, and I’d like to share a few of the key points here. 

Of course, none of these ideas are my own. If you’d like to explore them first hand, check out the following books. 

• The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren. 

• How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. 

Anyway, there are a number of things you can do to become better acquainted with — and more skillful at managing — emotions (which I’ll discuss below). But if there was just one thing that you could do right now it would be to STOP valencing them. In other words, stop regarding some emotions as negative and others as positive. 

Although many scientists, psychologists, much of the media and most of your friends are probably guilty of dividing them into two camps (positive or negative, good or bad, pro or anti-social), emotions can only be valenced according to the context in with they arise or the attitude with which they are regarded. 

They are not intrinsically positive and negative. 

Emotions have a purpose. 

Nor are emotions random things visited upon us. Each of them has a very specific purpose. As Antonio Damasio asserts: emotions are action-requiring neurological programs. By this, he means that emotions are a function of the nervous system. As such, they evolved over millions of years as a means of interpreting environmental cues and communicating to you the information needed in order to survive and to behave appropriately in the social milieu. 

A shameless person can’t do this (behave in socially appropriate ways). And someone who doesn’t listen to their guilt might find themselves even worse off — perhaps without friends at all. Similarly, a fearless person won’t necessarily earn your respect. Instead, they may not even make it through their teens. These so-called negative emotions are extremely important. You might even call them life-saving, or, dare I say it, positive! 

Considered in this light, emotions work much like your body’s other neurological programs: hunger and thirst. Consider hunger. That’s your body’s fuel gauge — a little warning signal telling you to eat. You can ignore hunger for a while, but if you do the feeling will come back later, probably with greater intensity. Hunger won’t go away until you’ve eaten. Similarly, emotions surface when required, communicate some need — and suggest some course of action. If you ignore them, they may temporarily ‘disappear’. Eventually though, they’ll resurface. And they’ll continue to resurface — with increasing urgency — until you’ve responded appropriately. 

For example, imagine that you ask your son to put his socks in the laundry (instead of leaving them scattered on the lounge floor). He says ‘Yeah’ but two hours later he’s still got his face buried in his iPhone. You probably felt some irritation just at seeing the socks (and you took an appropriate action by asking your son to put them away) but now you might be tempted to bury your growing annoyance (perhaps thinking it inappropriate to get cranky over such a small thing). If you do that though, the original irritation is likely to be compounded. By failing to address your son’s transgression the ‘neurological program’ intensifies, manifesting as aggravation, exasperation, and eventually hostility or rage. 

This emotional escalation may seem absurd or shameful. It was just a sock. But you can’t blame the emotion. You were the one who didn’t respond appropriately. 

Change the lens you see emotions through 

Viewing the emotion as negative (or destructive) makes as much sense as calling hunger negative. And just as it would be crazy to wish your hunger away, it’s madness to dismiss an emotion — because no one emotion can do the job of another. 

As Karla McLaren says: “Happiness won’t tell you when you’re in a dangerous situation. Only fear can do that.  Anger won’t tell you when something in your life is not working. Only sadness can do that. Contentment won’t let you know when you’re underprepared. Only anxiety will do that.” 

From this perspective, dividing your emotions up into positive and negative makes no sense. It would be like a handyman insisting that there are only two or three good tools and that the rest should be kept locked away. And this is exactly what happens when you view an emotion as negative. After all, why would you listen to an emotion that’s ‘bad’, or seemingly without purpose? 

Vital for survival. 

Emotions, despite what you may have heard, are as necessary as hunger and thirst to survival. They provide you with information about what’s happening in the world, and they help you to maintain your safety and wellbeing. 

This is why it’s so important to stop regarding emotions as positive and negative. It’s far more helpful to regard them simply as messengers — for then you can begin to hear your emotions — and to respond to the messages they’re trying to communicate. 

In other words, ALL emotions have their place. They’re a natural, normal part of being human. Without fear, for example, you’d probably drive like a maniac, choose Iraq or Syria for a holiday destination and generally neglect your health and safety. Fear might arise when you’re confronted with a spider or a speaking engagement too. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means it’s uncomfortable, as it’s meant to be. 

A little discomfort is a good thing. 

We call emotions negative when they make us feel uncomfortable. But feeling uncomfortable is not necessarily a negative thing. Without the discomfort of hunger, you’d starve. Without the pain of injury, you’d bleed to death or destroy your body. Being uncomfortable keeps you alive. Why not consider your unwanted emotions in the same light? If you’re feeling overwhelmed by an emotion, remember that it’s just a messenger, and likely a helpful one. You can attend to the emotion without telling yourself that it’s bad, or that you’re bad for feeling it. 

This article is the first in a short series on making friends with your emotions. Check out the Spirit section of next month’s Blue Gaia website for the next instalment.

Article by Matthew Young
https://melbournemeditationcentre.com.au/