Why Managing Your Emotions may be more than just saying how you feel
It's Transformational Tuesday and today I want to talk about the art of managing your emotions.
Listen if I had to spend some time on this topic, it would be every day and every minute of your day, but since we only have a few words and a few reads let me get straight into it.
On most difficult days of losing my husband and parenting a new born child, managing my emotions was something I had to practice and I'm so grateful that I had the skills to maneuver through that experience.
But let's get real, managing your emotions aren't easy and they sure aren't easy when you have to deal with other people who are also unskilled at managing theirs.
So, it becomes important to understand how you control and navigate your emotions and how you relate to your emotions with other people.
Today I want to share a few concepts on how to successfully navigate managing your emotions for successful life transformation.
Being honest with yourself and how your body is feeling inside.
Learning to identify emotions, through the use of descriptive words connected to the 6 base emotions.
Accepting your emotions and are a part of your biopsychosocial and spiritual human make up. They live within your being, so how long you hold on to them, or discard them matters.
Managing the internal and external expression of the emotion. If you can’t share them with self, then you don’t know how to share them with others.
Let’s take a deeper dive into these concepts to better understand what we need to start paying attention to and doing in order to have a Transformative lived experience.
HONESTY WITH SELF First you must be honest with yourself, by realizing that you are indeed feeling something within your body, whether it's a discomfort or a light feeling within your body. You might not be able to name it as yet, but acknowledge it's there.
IDENTIFYING THE EMOTION Next you have to identify the emotion. Now at this stage is where you have to increase your skill level. You need feelings language, feelings words, and validation of the feeling.
You cannot identify what you do not have a vocabulary for.
Most of us are never given the adequate descriptive words to share how we feel, nor are we given the ability to feel and identify the feeling when we are younger, we are classed up as having tantrums, being ungrateful, being disobedient, when really, it’s an opportunity to teach young children how to navigate something they will have to navigate all their lives.
Words Matter in Managing our emotions, IF you do not have words, your body will do all the expression of the emotions, and while everyone loves to see a smiling face, no one loves to see an angered or enraged one being acted out. So, it’s important that we not only show but use words to effectively communicate what’s going on inside of our bodies.
When I am teaching people with poor emotional management, we spend lots of time on the concepts of if you don't know the word to say how you feel, you will always have to use your body to show people what's going on. So that means a smile, can also turn into fist. So we use fun tools to engage people with words.
Here’s my favorite tool to teach in managing emotions. A simple glance at the emotional wheel, which was created by Psychologist Robert Plutchik in1980.
He developed one of the most popular emotion wheels, known as the Plutchik wheel which started to identify emotions under 8 specific areas to be explored, expanded and intensified.
Along with having the words, how your experience of these words are validated is so important in our socialization of emotions.
Along with having the words, how your experience of these words are validated is so important in our socialization of emotions.
The validation at this stage is the most important part, because the validation is a social and cultural experience, we can only validate what others around us see as important. So, for me how I validate the experience of losing my husband looks different for many who were in similar position to me. I understand the expression of grief way different than most.
ACCEPTING YOUR EMOTIONS EXIST
Thirdly you must accept that these emotions live within you and are apart of your biopsychosocial and spiritual experience. Accepting your emotions means that every time you hold an emotion, or experience an emotion it can impact, your social world, your psychological space your brain, your biological chemistry and functioning and your spiritual connectivity with others and the environment.
ADEQUATELY EXPRESSING YOUR EMOTION
Last part Managing the emotion, which is deeply rooted in the expression of the emotion energy internally (within body) and externally (outside of body) For me and my grief recovery experience I did the expression of my emotions daily.
In the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Amelia Nagoski and Emily Nagoski, they describe the going through emotions, as part of a tunnel experience. When our emotions are not expressed properly, they can become stuck in the tunnel, which then leads to emotional and physical burnout.
Internally emotional expression is rooted in the words you say to yourself and the actions you take to honour the expression of those feelings. Feelings of sadness and despair, have just as much value of happiness and joy, when we internally talk to ourselves, no pedestal is needed for either, just timely management of the experience you may have endure to talk about those emotions.
Externally the way we share our emotions with others is a direct correlation with how we will be perceived by others of whether we are doing well or not so well (in society's mind). However, I want to challenge this a bit, and introduce the concept of managing emotions with others, with the understanding that an outward expression is a first step to regulating the nervous system and then returning to proper rest and restoration to continue engaging with other people.
The way we learn to manage our emotion starts in our womb experience. It really peaks around the age of 2 to 7 years of age. So, for the most part, most of us are underserved and under skilled in this area of our lives.
We will do better as humans to invest in learning and executing the subject matter about adequately managing emotions, to relate to our intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships on a daily basis.
Always Dr Jay
