THE ART OF MANAGING
YOUR EMOTIONS -II
In the art of managing your emotions for your own emotional intelligence,
the first step is acceptance. Without acceptance, there will be and can be
no control. Why? Because you cannot control what you don't accept. By not
accepting, you reject it and what you reject, you put outside of your
control. It's a vicious circle.
2) Explore to Understand.
If you want to know why it's important to accept your emotion, this is the
reason. You need to understand what, if anything, your emotion is trying to
say to you. As I noted in the earlier posts, mind and emotion are not two
radically distinct phenomena, they are actually two parts of a singular
process-your mind-body system. That's why every thought involves an emotion
and why every emotion involves thoughts. This is obvious with the primary
emotions: to have anger you have to have angry thoughts; for fear, there has
to be fearful thoughts; where there is sadness, sad thoughts, etc. "As you
think, so you feel." While that's the basic principle, it is not the only
principle. There are many more.
The cognitive aspect of any and every emotion informs you about its message.
So far example, anger always tells you that something feels as if it is
violating your values. Fear always tells you that something feels as if you
are in danger or that something is threatening to you. Sadness always tells
you that something feels as if you have loss something. Guilt always tells
you that it feels as if you've done something wrong.
But notice that while the emotion is sending you a message, the message is
indeterminate. It is not absolute. It is telling you that "something feels
as if..." Now whether your anger, fear, sadness, guilt, etc. is true
depends on your thinking, your relating to someone or something, and the
context. If there is a true threat, danger, loss, or wrong-then your
emotion is true and appropriate. And you need to listen to it. In that
case your emotion's message is critical for your well-being. Listen to it
and take appropriate actions.
But if it is not true, if it is wrong-and it often is (!), then listening to
your emotion is not in your best interest. In fact, it may be disastrous
for you to listen to it or to heed it. And that's why the first thing you
have to do is explore the emotion to understand it. That's why you start
with acceptance of the emotion. By embracing the emotion, you can register
it, notice it, and then ask it, "What are you trying to tell me?" At this
point, check out three key factors of the emotion.
A) Your thinking. What are you thinking that's generating the emotion?
"I'm angry because John said I wasn't using my head." If it were true, what
value does that violate? "My honor." So your honor is at stake when John
says those words? Your honor is that fragile that those words disturb your
sense of honor? "Well, he shouldn't say that!" Because ...? Because I
don't want him to say those words? You mean he doesn't have the right to
think that, n a given context, you didn't use your head? "Well, no ... but
I don't like him saying that?" Did you use your head in that context?
Thinking generates emotions. If the thinking is inaccurate, if it is
childish, if it is peevish to begin with, then the emotion will also be
inaccurate or childish or distorted. So check it out. How grown-up and
adult is your thinking? What distortions, biases, or fallacies may your
thinking contain? Is it current thinking or is it old dated thinking from
your childhood?
B) Your Body. When any of us have not been feeling well, not sleeping well,
eating well, etc., our emotions can be on the edge and ready to over-react
to the most benign trigger. You know this if you have a cold or the flu, if
you are sleep deprived, if you have been drinking too much. Because an
emotion is a somatic (body) response, if "the hardware" of your emotions is
under stress and strain-your emotions can be overly sensitive,
over-reactive, and therefore highly inaccurate. You probably need a nap or
a bowl of hot soup or a walk in the sunshine!
Set your goal to have a "healthy mind in a healthy body" and then you will
find that your emotions will work more optimally. Years ago I heard a
famous therapist say, "At the bottom of a lot of depression is a lazy butt."
For your body to be healthy you need to exercise your muscles for skeleton
strength, your heart and lungs for cardio-vascular strength, and to stretch
for flexibility strength. That's why with many negative emotions, the first
thing to do is breathe deeply for a period of time. It will dissipate a lot
of the emotional energy and change the bio-chemistry in your brain and body.
C) Your context. Emotions are highly sensitive to where. Because most
emotions are social in nature and have to do with our relationships to
others, to experiences, and to situations, where you are strongly conditions
how you experience your emotions. There's several reasons for this. One
goes back to meaning- meaning is entirely context-dependent. What anything
means depends on where it is said. "How are you?" becomes a very different
question when asked by a friend, a doctor, a therapist, your mother, etc.
And if the meaning is dependent on the context, so will the resulting
emotion.
Another reason goes to the fact that most people constrain their emotions
much more in public than they do in private. What they would never consider
thinking or feeling in public, they would easily do if at home. Sometimes
the transformative results in therapy, and even coaching, are delayed for
this reason-the person doesn't yet feel safe enough or comfortable enough to
disclose his thoughts and feelings. Sometimes all of the negative emotions
that show up as frustration, stress, embarrassment, anger, fear, insecurity,
anxiety, and on and on that get activated at work ... and having a way of
expressing or releasing the emotional energy gets displaced improperly at
home onto one's partner or children. Of course, that then creates all sorts
of emotional problems at home! Second #2 in emotional manage: explore to
understand the emotion.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
