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Why Vilification of Your Emotions Is Counterproductive
People are sick and tired of being sick in tired. There is so much going on in the United States right now and it is distressing. Between the fears over COVID19 and the protester all over the country due to police brutality, there is a lot to process and a lot to unpack on a daily basis.
When faced with the burden of so many issues, as humans, we can end up on emotional overload. I myself have even experienced this in the past and even recently. Being emotionally intelligent starts with you being self-aware and many simply don’t feel comfortable enough to lean into their emotions to figure out what those emotions are telling them. In no way shape or form does it mean that you have control over your emotions at all times or that you have somehow become an expert at discarding useless emotions. We are often programmed to believe that we must somehow judge our emotions and in most cases, we do so negatively.
Having emotions are normal. Feelings are real. Let me say that again….having emotions are normal…..feelings are real. Though they may be fleeting you can’t simply wish them away and expect them to never show up again. Anger comes and goes. Fear, happiness, joy, frustration, and more come and go. What we do with them matters.
We can be tempted to judge our emotions. We can think we should or shouldn’t feel certain ways because we have been conditioned to only be ok with allowable emotions while others have negative attachments to them.
Let’s be clear. You feel how you feel period. If you feel angry, you feel angry! If you feel sad, you feel sad. If you feel lost, overwhelmed, afraid, or even outraged, you simply feel those things. Something or some things caused you to feel this way. What you do with it is the difference between being self-aware and self-managing and those who are out of control. Saying things like “feeling angry about this is dumb” does not take away the anger. It adds shame on top of it which can intensify the anger.
Learn to identify and deal with how you feel! That’s the solution. Vilifying your feelings is counterproductive. Sometimes our feelings come from lack of information. Ask yourself if your feelings are coming from the way you were raised and when something challenges your beliefs whether or not feelings cause barriers to positivity thoughts appear? Feelings can also come from misinformation. Say you have a situation where you say say “well I shouldn’t have felt angry because what I learned something else later.” The fact is you WERE angry right? As said before, it’s what you do with it that matters! Investigate it. Find out why you feel the way you do. What is the trigger? This is the key to taking the sting out of your feelings and dealing with them instead. It may be a while before you can do this without effort but if you commit yourself to do this as a regular practice before you know it the negative critic in your head will be less of a problem and you will begin to increase your own emotional intelligence and increase your overall happiness.
