Emotions
Emotions are acute learning experiences. Because the feeling that comes with an emotion is so acute and often unpleasant and because of the negative messaging around emotion from society we often don’t learn from them. When we don’t learn from them the emotion is repeated and repeated and repeated until we do learn. The repetition of the emotion internalises it and begins to define our character. We stop experiencing emotion, and instead become the emotion. We become fearful, envious, angry, anxious people (or maybe that’s just the people I hang around with).
Society says it’s bad to be envious and so we don’t want to recognise the emotion of envy. It’s bad to be angry so we supress it. Envy and anger rear up and we push them away. We try to convince ourselves that we are not actually envious and that we are not actually angry.
A more beneficial way to process the emotion is to 1) recognise/acknowledge it 2) express it 3) consider what you can learn from it.
Because emotion is internalised and becomes a part of us it’s hard to recognise it as something apart from us. We don’t see it for the message it is. For me the easiest way to recognise emotion is 1) to practice mindfulness, and 2) to view emotion positively – if we view it negatively, we will not want to acknowledge it.
Mindfulness
For me the twin pillars of Mindfulness are meditation and journalling. I feel that meditation helps me ‘catch’ the emotion – sort of in the way that the BFG catches dreams, and journalling helps me process the emotion. Another benefit I find from Mindfulness is that it takes the edge off emotions, they feel a little less raw, so that I can view them in a slightly different, tempered light.
Viewing Emotion Positively
Human Beings are designed to experience emotion, so to experience emotion is to be human. We should welcome emotion whether it be what is typically deemed positive emotion or negative emotion. Viewing an emotion as negative is like viewing the sense of sight as negative when you see something unpleasant. Our emotions are there to help us make improved decisions about our lives, in the same way that our senses are. Our emotions are not us; they are a link between us and the world.
Paradoxically I find that when we welcome emotions, they become less emotional.
Unprocessed Emotion
A shopkeeper receives his stock but rather than properly acknowledging it and processing it, he simply shoves it into the Storeroom. He has kept no records to tell him what stock he has. He may have some vague recollection of the stock he is holding but he’s not sure so the next time he comes to do his ordering he ends up ordering more of the same. This happens on repeat until the storeroom is overflowing. When a customer comes into the shop, he’s unsure if he has the product they want, he has a bit of a look in the overflowing storeroom but he can’t find it, so he sends the customer away empty handed.
The storeroom is your mind when you don’t properly process emotions, it’s cluttered, inefficient and overloaded. The feeling of calm you experience when you sort out the storeroom, or tidy your desk is the calm you feel when you process your emotions.
Emotion on a loop
Remember when you have had one of those terrible embarrassing cringe-making moments and over the next couple of days you continually replay it, experiencing the embarrassment in your very soul just as much, if not more than during the initial happening. I have some moments in my memory banks that still cause me to cringe decades on from the original event.
Fear is designed to keep us safe from threats. The last thing an arachnophobe wants to do is forget they are an arachnophobe and wander blindly into a cluster of black widow spiders. Fearful people want to be fearful because it is that state that keeps them safe. They don’t want to process the fear because to rid themselves of it is to expose themselves to that danger.
But experiencing emotion on a loop can be draining. Experiencing fear at the point of danger is evidently useful, but to experience the physiological effects of the perceived danger again and again even when out of harm’s way, can in itself be harmful.
Emotion Examples
1) Envy
There is something a bit embarrassing about being envious of others and to be frank admitting to envy is not really something I want to do. It’s one thing to admit it to myself and my journal and quite another to admit it to others.
Today as I walked to the gym at 7am envy fleetingly passed through me. I shivered. The feeling was so fleeting that I’m amazed I caught it at all. I felt envy towards a friend of mine. There I said it. I guess one of the issues with envy is that it speaks to something we are lacking and have not been able to remediate.
My friend has a lifestyle that is better than mine. His house, his car, his holidays are better than mine. I know that he earns less than me, but he achieves his better lifestyle thanks to parental and state handouts.
Normally I tell myself that I shouldn’t be envious because I gain the self-respect from working and standing on my own two feet. Or maybe I tell myself that I’m not materialistic anyway. In other words, I try to push the envy away. But I’m still envious. Write it down. I am envious of my friend. What is the envy trying to tell me? The envy is trying to tell me to keep working hard, to keep trying to design the best life I can, to not get complacent. It’s guiding me to recognise the value of self-respect. It’s telling me I should expect more for my greater efforts and therefore not to suppress my materialism but loudly exclaim it. I want lots of money. I want a beautiful house. I want to be free to travel wherever and whenever I want. Maybe the envy is telling me to ask for a pay rise or to look for better paid work.
The truth is I want to be better than him. I feel that for all I bring and all I do I should be absolutely burying him, but I look across and we’re neck and neck.
2) Shame
I love the summer months when here in the UK we can finally go outside, when we can finally shed the 23 layers of clothing, when we can finally experience that feeling of sun on skin. There’s usually a day each year when I notice it, the first hot day of the year and I’m out in my car with the Summer tunes blasting, what a feeling! Summer’s here, I’m in my t-shirt and shorts, I’m walking past parked cars and I feel the dread, the shame rear up as I notice my man boobs reflected in the car windows. As a side note, I’m sure that car windows make your man boobs look bigger, something about the slight curvature of the glass accentuates my curves. So, what can I learn from the shame I feel when seeing my man boobs reflected back at me. I can learn to wear a certain fit of t-shirt that least reveals my man boobs. Good. And I can learn to build an internal wall against the judgement of others. Nobody should judge me for my physical form. Seriously? Those aren’t the fucking lessons dude! Take some pride in your appearance, start exercising, eat healthy. These are the lessons. Burying the shame under a man boob revealing ‘Only God Can Judge Me’ t-shirt is not going to ameliorate the shame.
Defined By Emotion
Often, we are so defined by our emotional state that we don’t want to change. It almost feels like to change is to kill ourselves off. I have always been a shy person. I could say I have a tendency towards shyness or that I experience shyness, but in my mind and possibly the minds of others, I am shy. I don’t particularly want to be shy, but if I imagine myself meeting an old schoolfriend and I’m not shy in that meeting I can feel their disconcertion. In my mind I see their uncertainty, they do a kind of double-take. This happens even if I have no intention of ever meeting this person again. It’s almost like I’m not playing my role properly if I shed my shyness, that it’s not in the spirit of the game. Many people experience something similar with the parent – child dynamic, whereby they can’t stop feeling like a child in the company of their parents, even when they are adult. A period of rebellion is often seen as a solution to this.
Imagine you were the jealous type and as a result of your jealousy you liked to get involved in bitchy gossip. Over the years you refine your acerbic wit, and become popular amongst a group of similarly minded people. In this case would you really want to ‘process’ your jealousy? Possibly not. Imagine meeting up with your crowd and saying that you don’t want to get involved in the gossip anymore.
The Fear of Emotion
For reasons discussed previously in this blog many of us are afraid of our emotions. Maybe I am even fearful of positive emotions because joy foreshadows pain. For years my emotions have lain interred beneath a façade of phlegmatism. I don’t consciously hide from my emotions. It seems it’s just a technique I adopted from young. Now I am trying to unpick that trait. I truly believe I am benefiting from savouring emotions, thinking and journalling about them, and learning from them.