Learn to love your emotions and what they can do for you
THERE are many myths about our emotions but two in particular that bother me.
Firstly, the idea that emotions are either good (eg. love, happiness) or bad (eg. anger, sadness and guilt). Secondly, the idea that it is better to be more rational than emotional.
I can understand how these myths have come about. It’s not surprising that painful emotions are labelled bad, for example, or that reason is more highly valued by people who find emotions confusing or harmful.
However, these myths can perpetuate the idea that we should avoid aspects of our emotional experience, suppress them or ignore them completely. In my experience, these are rarely effective strategies and they can cause more harm than good.
Learning to love our emotions is the key to understanding and managing our emotions effectively.
By love, I mean being curious about our emotions, accepting of our emotions when they arise and respectful of the many important functions that they serve.
Ultimately, we need our emotions to survive. If we didn’t experience fear, then we wouldn’t bother getting out of harm’s way.
If we didn’t experience love, then we wouldn’t bother taking care of our children.
We also need our emotions in order to thrive. Envy can spur us on to better ourselves, guilt to repair our relationships and anger to fight injustice.
A first step to loving your emotions is to be curious about them.
See if you can take a step back and observe your emotion as it ebbs and flows.
What is the emotion telling you? What messages is it communicating to other people (through your body language, for example)?
What urges are you experiencing with this emotion?
It can be helpful to notice the physical sensations that come with your emotions.
Where can you feel the emotion in your body? How intense are the sensations? Are they changing? If so, how?
See if you can be genuinely curious about your emotion without trying to change it in any way.
Learning to love our emotions isn’t easy and often takes time and practice, especially if you’re someone who has learnt not to trust your emotions or if your emotions get you into difficulty with unhelpful or destructive behaviours.
If this is the case, it’s worth finding out whether a talking therapy can help you learn to manage your emotions more effectively.
In any case, our emotions are here to stay. We may as well drop the struggle and learn to love them.
Dr Ellie Milby is a counselling psychologist