Feeling, Dealing, and Healing Our Emotions
Sometimes, to help people understand your point, you need to get down from the stage.
It’s not as if people could not see you on this huge stage.
You wear bright clothes daily, which signifies you are the leader.
It’s easy to spot you from the other side of a city, let alone an auditorium.
However, you thought you would walk around, looking people directly in the eye as you made your point.
The choices we make in life define our journey.
Most things are out of our control, but how we react is always in our control.
The mark of intelligence is the ability to explain complex subjects simply.
That should always be your mission:
Make the life-changing themes easy to digest and entertaining.
Most people live such intense lives that they just want some relief.
They want to have a good time before they can even dream of self-improvement.
That is why you need to tell jokes.
Although everything you say has serious connotations and can help people if implemented in their day-to-day lives.
It’s through humour and storytelling that you find you can reach their hearts first and make the most impact.
In life, we are sometimes trained to respond only in a certain way.
This is called social conditioning, where an individual responds to a situation in a manner generally approved of by society in general.
This is fantastic as this conditioning keeps society working in an orderly way.
Imagine a society where people were not civil to each other there would be chaos.
However, when social conditioning leads us to become like humanoids and not understand how to process feelings, that’s when issues arise.
No one can cheat death, and no one can suppress their emotions.
Unlike humanoids, we are sentient beings.
We can take in billions of sensory inputs in a second and turn them into an intangible, unique emotion deep within.
Humanoids have artificial intelligence and no emotions.
We have real intelligence and real emotions.
Robots are static, humans are dynamic.
We go through phases of happiness and sadness in our lives something unique to sentient beings.
In all spheres of life, we have to understand how to control our emotions.
If we can learn to master our emotions, not repressing or succumbing to them, we can achieve things we can only dream of individually and as a society.
As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Now that we have learned to fly in the air like birds, swim under water like fish, we lack one thing to learn to live on earth as human beings.’
We are humans that;
- cry when we lose a loved one,
- smile when we achieve an accomplishment,
- laugh when someone tells us a joke,
- blush when we are embarrassed,
- burn when we are infuriated
- and even jump when we are surprised.
However, the first step is that we must understand and accept what we are feeling.
The first step to dealing effectively with our emotions is to understand what they are.
Psychologists call this labelling, which is the process of identifying what we are feeling.
However, this is not as easy as it seems.
One of the main reasons for this is the societal pressure to not express them or lack of education in how to talk about them.
I know, that in many cultures, having a ‘stiff upper lip’ is preferred to being open about how one feels.
If someone has a problem, it’s usually accompanied by feelings of sadness, anger, or stress.
However, these feelings can be expressed in more nuanced ways to help us deal with them better.
The ability to label our emotions correctly is called emotional agility.
People with high levels of emotional agility cannot only decipher how they are feeling but also understand how others are feeling.
Emotions can have an overarching title; for example, ‘I am feeling frustrated’, but this can be broken down further into separate feelings that we can address.
Studies show that people who do not know how to express their emotions exhibit lower levels of well-being.
Therefore, it is important to correctly categorize our emotions.
However, if we can vocalize our emotions, it brings clarity to our problem and gives us the ability to implement the correct solutions.
Dealing with our emotions after we have correctly identified them is important.
We must first correctly identify the cause of our problems and secondly, come up with a solution.
Identifying our emotions is the first step; dealing with them appropriately is the second step.
Once we have labelled our emotions, we should also rate them on a scale of 1 to 10.
This helps us understand how deeply we are feeling that emotion and if actionable steps need to be taken about it.
In many circumstances, simply labelling an emotion and observing it patiently can be the solution to helping it pass.
In other circumstances, we may need help from others to deal with how we are feeling or deal with the causes of how we are feeling.
In rare circumstances, the cause of our emotions may be outside our control, meaning we have to ride out the storm and come to the conclusion that nothing actionable will help the situation.
However, that does not mean we cannot employ strategies to help ourselves.
How to heal from a negative emotion
Many times, we may leave a situation understanding our feelings and thinking we have dealt with them appropriately, only to realize that there are some long-term effects.
Just as physical injuries to our skin can leave scars, emotional injuries to our mind, trauma, regret, grudges, and resentment can also leave scars that need to heal.
Why healing can take time.
There was once a teenager who had a bad temper.
He worked at his father’s wood workshop when his father noticed him becoming irritated with irrelevant things.
His father gave him a bag of nails and told him,
‘Every time you lose your temper and become angry; you must hammer a nail into our garden fence.’
The son agreed.
The first day the boy hit twenty nails into the fence, the second day, seventeen and then on the third day, fourteen.
Soon the boy learnt that it was easier to control his anger than to exert energy in hitting a nail into a fence.
His anger dwindled gradually.
After a few weeks, elated, the boy told his father that he had not lost his temper once that day.
The father congratulated him and gave him a new challenge:
Every time that he did not lose his temper, he should now pull out one nail.
A few months passed and the young boy rushed up to his father and told him that all the nails in the fence were now gone.
The father was overjoyed and congratulated him again.
However, the father then held his hand and took him back to the fence.
He explained,
‘You have taken all the nails out but look at all the holes in the fence.
The fence will never be the same again.
Understanding how to accept and deal with your emotions is important.
If under the sway of those emotions, we hurt other people with our words or actions, it becomes very difficult to mend that situation.
They will feel the nail of our words and be left with a wound even if we retract our words.’
Forgiveness can heal, but it takes time for that to happen.
If we have the emotional agility and intelligence to avoid hurting others, that is the ideal situation.
As the famous quote goes, ‘Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed.
It means the damage no longer controls our lives.’
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