How to make sense of Emotions

Do you invalidate your emotions when they don’t feel good?  Try to suppress, critically judge or simply ignore, in the hope you can get rid of them?

When we do this, it can have the opposite effect. No one has ever felt calmer or been cheered by being told to “cheer up” or “calm down”.

To make matters worse, the intensity, recovery time and overall ability to self-regulate diminishes.

Emotions love themselves and will do anything to be expressed.

The antidote is to work on practising observing your emotions without judgement. Try to accept your current state whether your mind tells you to or not. Anchor onto describing what you notice in your body.

Early conditioning tells us automatically whether your emotional reaction is good or bad. Although our feelings can be overwhelming at times, in their rawest form they are simply body sensations, set off by a situation either internal or externally happening around us.

 Marsha Lineham (2015) developed a model of emotion to help explain what contributes to our reactions.

First there is a prompting event (trigger) that we automatically interpret. From here, there is a whole-body response. First brain chemicals are released, which changes how our face and body feels.

From here we go on to act in a certain way through postures, facial expression, gestures or words to express our emotion.

Make time each day to describe what you feel in your body and name your emotion. try to track it back to a trigger, this help you understand what is happening and process it.

If you are not always able to do this, don’t worry, refocus on something else and review later. During times of stress our interpretations are not always accurate.

Next week we will look at what you can do to reduce vulnerability to feeling overly sensitive and learn how to prevent unwanted emotions from occurring in the first place.