All About Emotions

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‘Emotion’ comes from the Latin term emovere meaning “moving”.

The term is a combination of the words “energy” and “motion”, which captures the often fleeting nature of human emotions.

Emotions are a gift. Through our feelings at any point in time, they enable us to recognise if we are in a healthy, life enhancing situation or an unhealthy situation.

There is much wisdom to be gained by becoming aware of and connecting into the feelings of our emotions. Taking the opportunity to understand what this emotion is helping us to recognise or is teaching us.

‘Emotional Intelligence is the capacity to be aware of and express our emotions’

Emotions are energy. You may have noticed that a child’s emotion is intense. They can suddenly get very upset or angry. If they are able to express this and be comforted appropriately it moves on quickly. Being able to feel our emotions and allow them to flow through us is healthy and essential to our well-being.

The energy required to hold challenging emotions in, is exhausting and can create severe fatigue as well as illness. ‘Bottling up’ feelings can have a detrimental effect on our health.

Emotion comes in like a wave and moves through us. It really is ‘OK not to feel OK’ and to express our emotions safely, with respect to ourselves and others with us at the time.

We can create distinct coping strategies or emotional styles. Are any of these styles familiar to you?

Emotional Styles

  • Avoidance: We create busy lives and keep ourselves too busy to feel.
  • State changing: We use food, alcohol, other substances or gamble etc to change how we feel.
  • Analysis: Crooked thinking, over thinking, intellectualising our feelings.
  • Blaming others: e.g. ‘It’s everyone else’s fault that I feel this way’.
  • Empath: feeling the emotions of others (not feeling our own).
  • Somatising: feeling emotions physically i.e. migraines or back ache)

These emotional styles are influenced by those of our parents or influential adults in our childhood and created by us in our younger years to keep us safe and protect us.

‘The way we grow up with emotion, shows how we deal with emotion.’

Developing our Emotional Intelligence can really help and improve our personal and professional life experience. One of the key elements of this is ‘Self -awareness’.

‘Awareness is everything’

By becoming aware of our emotional styles, connecting to our feelings and emotions and observing our behaviours, we can determine if these are helpful or harmful to us and take action to do more/ spend more time with people that makes us feel resourceful. Or, take action to change situations, relationships etc that make us feel unresourceful.

Healthy Ways to Express Emotions

  1. Stop for a minute. Take a deep breath and connect with yourself. Just as you ask others ‘How are you’?….. You ask yourself, ‘How am I’? ‘How am I feeling’? ‘ What do I need to do to help me feel better or who can help me’?
  2. Identify the emotion: there are lots of emotions, however, you most likely will be able to reduce it to one, or a combination of these three basic emotions – anger, sadness and fear.
  3. Accept and embrace your emotion. Give yourself permission to feel it and embrace it.
  4. Express emotions in a healthy way:

a. Writing is a super therapeutic way of releasing emotions. Write without thinking. No-one has to read it and you can always shred it afterwards.
b. Physical exercise is a great way to get rid of anger – just remember not to hurt yourself or anyone else. If physical exercise isn’t your thing, try twisting an old cloth while you talk or rant.
c. Crying is great for sadness. It isn’t appealing; however, it is necessary if we don’t want the sadness to stay inside us and keep hurting us.
d. Or, may-be you just need to be alone, in silence, in nature just resting.
e. Listen to your body and respond to its needs.
f. Talk to someone about your fears. Write your fears down and consider various solutions. Tell yourself you have the necessary resources to deal with this and you will overcome it.

Recognise, that however you might feel now, your emotional state will change. If you find however, that you are in an unresourceful state that you just can’t seem to shake off, do reach out for help and support.

No man is an island. It is a strength to reach out and ask for help and support to a friend, your GP, a coach, or a counsellor if you feel you haven’t got the strength to work through the level of emotions you are experiencing.

Often making this decision takes the most courage and is the hardest part. You will soon discover that you have the strength and resourcefulness within you to release and shift your emotional energy blocks to flow towards happiness, joy and freedom.

This is the gift of taking the opportunity and the time to ‘honour our emotions’.

‘What you resist persists. What you can recognise and feel, you can heal.’

What do you think? Leave a comment below…

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