THE ART OF MANAGING

YOUR EMOTIONS -I

 

When it comes to managing emotions, Aristotle said it best when he wrote:

"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."

 

We can take the idea expressed here by Aristotle and apply it to every
emotion- to feel it and to experience the emotion is easy in comparison to
being able to manage it.  The wisdom here is that there's nothing wrong with
the emotion itself, it is just an emotion.  The challenge is feeling it in
relation to the right person, at the right degree, at the right time, for
the right purpose, and in the right way.  Ah yes, that's what we all find
tough.  Yet, it can be done.

 

You can effectively manage your emotions so that you have your emotions,
rather than they having you, by getting back to the source of your
emotions-your mind and your body.  Ultimately, when you learn emotional
management, you will have achieved what we call emotional intelligence-an
intelligent use and relationship to your emotions.  Given that, how does
this work?  How do you learn to effectively manage your emotions?

 

1) Start with acceptance.

The beginning place is acceptance of your emotions.  Why?  Because you
cannot control anything that you don't accept.  When you do not accept, and
when you reject your emotions-you thereby set up a fight, a fight that can
become a war.  Now instead of treating your emotions as symptoms of your
mind and your body, you treat them as some kind of enemy-and yet because
every emotion is your emotion, your rejection is a rejection of yourself.
That's why rejection (dislike, contempt, hatred, worry, fear, anger, etc.)
toward your emotions puts you in an un-win-able conflict.

 

To reject your emotions, or any one specific emotion such as fear or anger,
is to put yourself in self-attack.  Then all of the energy that you
experience in that rejection (your anger, fear, worry, anxiety, sadness,
etc.) becomes aimed at you.  And that means that all of that energy is going
to go against your mind and your body.  Think about that!

 

Then in that self-attack, your mind and your body will pay the price.
That's why you'll get migraines, aches in your back, neck, stomach problems,
ulcers, and all sorts of psycho-somatic illnesses.  The energy of your
emotions that are attacking you has no where else to go.  From a meta-state
perspective, the problem is the second emotion and response you are making
to your first emotion and response.  You are rejecting your fear; you are
hating your anger; you are depressing with sadness your worry, etc.  In the
book, Dragon Slaying and Taming (1995) this is the very structure of
self-attack as a pathology and why it is so disastrous to your well-being.

 

In Meta-States Training, we use the pattern Meta-Stating Troubling Emotions
to counter-act this "dragon" creating process.  If you use negative emotions
to reject an emotion or experience, then by turning that around and use your
positive emotions to accept, welcome, and embrace an emotion or
experience-you tame any emotional dragon.  Instead of hating, fear, or
angering at your emotion, you accept it and you permit it.

 

When you refuse to accept an emotion, you not only fight it and start a war
on your insides, you prevent your own awareness of your emotions.  You blind
yourself to what you are feeling.  As you then expel the emotion from your
awareness, you have less and less influence over it.  That's one reason,
rejecting the emotion and trying to make it go away, does not work.
Conversely, the paradox of acceptance is that by accepting the emotion,
giving yourself permission to experience the emotion, you thereby empower
yourself to be able to manage the emotion.

 

The pattern of Meta-Stating Troubling Emotions centers primarily in the
permission process.  Nor does it matter who took permission away from you-
whether it was a parent, a teacher, a theology, a philosophy.  What matters
is that now, as an adult, you take control and give yourself permission to
experience and embrace your emotions.  When you do that-you will gave a new
level of freedom and control.

 

With the acceptance of permission then you are able to do your "emotional
work."  You are able to let the emotion "move" (e-motion) through your body,
giving you the energy to take whatever actions you need to take.
Metaphorically, you let your emotions breathe and when your emotions
breathe, they become more healthy, and more responsible to your guidance.
Conversely, when you reject and fight an emotion, when you try to make it go
away, it gets stuck inside of your and becomes toxic-sick.  And then it
makes you sick.  Now you know why acceptance is step #1.




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 KINDS & DIMENSIONS

OF EMOTIONS         

 

In the four previous articles, I began offering some basic definitions of
what an "emotion" is.  In those articles, I made numerous distinctions so as
to create some more precision regarding the emotional life that we are
referring to.  One thing that is obvious from all of that is this: All
emotions are not the same.  Emotions come in many different sizes and
shapes.  We have already noted that there are many different levels of
emotions (#3) from primary emotions to multiple levels of meta-emotions.
There are also different kinds of emotions as well as emotions in different
dimensions.  Here are some more distinctions that we can make about
emotions.

 

The go/ no-go emotions.  Many emotions create a go energy.  They are
excitatory, positive, and energetic emotions that activate us to move
forward to our values, our goals, and our desires.  And conversely, there
are many emotions which function with a no-go energy.  They are inhibitory,
negative, and constraining emotions.  We commonly call these the "positive"
and the "negative" emotions although that description is not very accurate.

 

Sympathetic emotions.  As already noted, there are the sympathetic nervous
system emotions of the General Arousal Syndrome: stress, excitement, fear,
anger, lust, and excitement.  These are all primary emotions and when you
feel them, you can point to the place in your body where you experience
them.  You encode them somatically.

 

Parasympathetic emotions.  The parasympathetic nervous system also activates
a certain set of emotions such as relaxation, calmness, peaceful, feeling
centered, etc.  These restful emotions enable us to turn down the bodily
activation, allowing us to feel apathetic, sleepy, bored, etc.

 

Social emotions.  Because the social emotions actually make up the largest
number of our emotions, they suggests that one of the primary functions of
emotions involve how we relate to each other.  These include: kindness,
care, love, hate, compassion, apathy, forgiveness, jealousy, respect,
disrespect, empathy, sympathy, and the list goes on and on.  For this
reason, there's a very close connection between emotional intelligence and
social intelligence. 

 

Conscience emotions.  Some emotions arise from our sense of right and wrong,
our sense of the ethics that we want to live by in relating to others.
These conscience emotions start with empathy and sympathy, how we connect to
others and feel responsibility to others and sometimes for others.
Conscience emotions leads us to feel conscientious about our behavior, how
we relate, our integrity in living up to our values, our congruency or
incongruency.  Those with little conscience will feel very little in terms
of others.  A person who is sociopathetic may be unable or unwilling to
"take second perceptual position" and at least, try on what another person
may be feeling in order to understand them.

 

Cathecting emotions.  To cathect is to reach out with your caring energy to
identify with and connect with a person, thing, place, etc.  By cathecting,
we "bring the world into our sense of self" and with that, our sense of self
expands.  Our inner world expands.  The cathecting emotions include: love,
desire, attachment, bonding, etc.  When we de-cathect we withdraw our
identity, care, sympathy, sense of connection with the person or thing.  We
experience this as loss, as grief, as sadness.

 

Self emotions.  Because there are so many aspects of "self," there are a
great many self emotions: sense of self, self-confidence, self-doubt,
self-efficacy, self-identity, temporal self (past self, future self), role
self, gender self (masculine self, feminine self), etc.

 

Meta emotions.  Anyone with a self-reflexive mind inevitably applies
feelings to feelings and this generates the meta emotions.  These are
layered and complex emotions.  So in fear about fear, one experiences
paranoia and if you fear the paranoia, you may create a fearful mood, a
fearful attitude about life.  If you anger at your fear-of-your-fear, that
generates another multilayered emotion.  Generally bringing any "negative"
emotion and applying it to a previous emotion-you are attacking yourself,
your emotions and the energy from that construct has nowhere to go except
against your mind and against your body.  In Neuro-Semantics we call those
highly toxic emotions- "dragon states."

 

Pseudo-emotions.  Just as you can bring an emotion against an emotion, you
can bring emotions against thoughts, against concepts, and you can bring
concepts against emotions.  It is in this way that we create
pseudo-emotions.  They seem like emotions but they are not really.  While
"fearing failure" is an emotion, an emotion about a concept, "shame about
failure" may be a concept about a concept.  That's because the 'shame' here
may not be so much of an emotion as an idea- "You shouldn't be that way,
feel that way, talk that way. Shame on you!"  Actually you can create all
sorts of pseudo-emotions by saying, "I feel..." and then add a judgment.  "I
feel weird," "I feel like I'm going to be fired."  "I feel under the
weather."  "I feel judged."  These are not emotions.  They are judgments
masquerading as emotions.

 

Time emotions.  There are a wide range of temporal emotions.  Some are about
the past and some are about the future; very few are about the present
moment: nostalgia, hope, regret, worry, anxiety, anticipation, expectation.

 

Vestibular emotions.  The sense of balance that's generated by the inner ear
generates the vestibular emotions: dizziness, disoriented, balance, joy,
playful, etc.

 

So many kinds of emotions!  What this means is that when you begin talking
about emotions, don't assume that everybody is using that word in the same
way as you are.  They probably are not!  That's why it is always good to
check.  "How are you using the word emotions?"  "What kind or level of
emotion are you referring to?"

 FEELINGS ARE NOT EMOTIONS

 

While all of us use the terms feelings and emotions interchangeably as if
they were equivalent, they are not the same.  Nor are they synonyms of each
other. The truth is that they are two very different phenomena.

Feelings are, at their essence, kinesthetics.  That is, physical sensations
of the body.  If they are inside the body, we call them propriception and if
they are accessed from outside of the body, then we call them sensations or
feelings.

Emotions always entails and involves feelings, but are more than feelings.
To have an emotion, you also have to have a cognitive thought as noted in
the previous articles.

 

Kinesthetic sensations consist of a large range of bodily sensations-
pressure (soft, hard), oscillation of the pressure, temperature (cool, warm,
hot), moisture (wet, dry), movement (quick, slow), intensity (low, medium,
high), frequency (often, some, few), rhythm (rocking, up-and-down, etc.),
pain (biting, dull, constant, etc.), extent (local, general), duration
(short to long).  Further, the kinesthetics can be at many different
locations in the body.  They can have texture, shape, etc.

 

When we ask, "What do you feel?" if we are using the word 'feeling'
accurately and properly, we are asking for the kinesthetic sensations of the
emotion.  We can call attention to the beating of the heart, the pumping of
the lungs, and the muscle tension in the legs, arms, face, neck, back, etc.
We can invite a person to notice sensations within various parts of the
body.

 

For the General Arousal Syndrome that is commonly referred to as both "the
stress response" or the "fight, flight, freeze" response, the kinesthetics
of these emotions are pretty much the same.  Heart and lungs are highly
activated so that there is a definite shift in breathing-sometimes even
hyperventilating.  Eyes dilate, skin sweats, blood is withdraw from brain
and stomach and sent to the larger muscle groups preparing the body for
fighting or running.  Adrenalin is sent to provide more energy to the body.
And the body is overall highly activated.  But what do you feel in the
general arousal?

 

The amazing thing is-it all depends.  If you think, reason, and interpret
things in your environment as threatening, then you will feel fear or anger.
Fear if you think it is too much or that you don't want to get into a fight.
Anger if you think you can handle the threat and/or if you have a habit of
getting into fights.  If it is too overwhelming, you might just freeze.  But
if you think, reason, and interpret things in that same environment as fun,
exciting, a challenge, desirable, etc., then you might feel excited or
lustful.  Excited if the situation is positive for you (public speaking,
bungee jumping, etc.) and fits your values.  Lustful if the situation
involves sexual stimulus or arousal.

 

Four emotions- fear, anger, excitement, and lust-and they all have the same
feelings at the kinesthetic level!  The difference goes to one's cognitions.
The bodily activation is the same, a state of heightened arousal so that you
are ready to respond.  But at the cognitive level, the semantics (meanings)
are completely different. 

 

Actually, this explains why these four emotions can get mixed up, why fear
and anger are so intimately connected.  That's why underneath fear is
usually anger and why underneath anger is usually fear.  This explains why
the fearful move-away from person when he reaches a threshold, and cannot
take any more, can become extremely aggressive.  It's why sexual stimulation
can become quite perverted-a person cannot get aroused unless chocked or
abused in some way.  It's why the violence of rape is not as much about sex
as it is about anger.

 

Emotions have within them feelings (kinesthetics).  Feelings, however, may
be just that-a feeling, a sensation, and not connected to any emotion.  In
experiments, people have been chemically stimulated by having epinorphein or
adrinalin shot into their arms, and then asked, "What do you feel?"  Again,
it always depends.  In these experiments it depended on what they were
primed to expect.  If they were primed to expect to feel fear-they felt
fear.  If anger, then anger; if lust, then lust.  The determining factor was
not in the sensation itself, but in the interpretation-the semantics that
readied them to respond as they did.

 

"Feelings" and "Emotions"-not the same.  Shall we try to pass a law to
prevent people from using 'feeling' for 'emotion?"  I don't think so.  Nor
would it really make that much of a difference.  It's sufficient to simply
know that these are two very different phenomena and that you can understand
your own emotions better when you know that they have a bodily or somatic
base- a base of kinesthetic feelings.