Did you know that your emotions can act as a gateway to personal development? The times that people feel greatest anger or sadness are also the times that provide the greatest opportunities for compassion and understanding to be developed.
It is not emotions themselves that make people known as being honest or understanding, for example, but is how those emotions are used that makes all the difference.
- Your strongest emotions can facilitate a great amount of personal growth and understanding.
- You can choose to respond in at least 3 different ways.
- And perhaps most importantly — your emotional awareness can bring you closer to others.
Understanding "Negative" Emotions
No emotion is "bad" in itself. Some emotions are perceived as negative based on the social values and experiences that are attached to them. Some of this social conditioning tends to suggest that emotions like the ones below should be avoided, ignored, and resisted.
Sadness. Fear. Desperation. Anger, and so forth.
Instead of resisting these feelings you can choose to respond to them with awareness. Become aware of what the core essence of "anger" feels like, for example. Don't just encompass the anger or become one with it — instead become aware of the effect it has on you. If you become attached to anger, for example, this can often lead to an endless spiral of other emotions such as guilt that never leads to any real meaning. By becoming aware of the effect the emotion has you gain meaning and understanding into what brought it out in the first place.
You Can Respond in at Least 3 Different Ways
Each emotion you have is not absolute — it is your habit of response that makes the effects of the emotion seem absolute. You have the choice to respond in more than one way, however. You can either reject and condemn the feeling, accept and own the feeling, or fail to acknowledge the feeling altogether.
It is one of these three responses that make up the most common attitudes that people have towards emotions.
A person who is experiencing intense fear might respond in one of the below ways:
- "This fear is bad, I shouldn't be afraid, I have to make it stop, if I'm afraid it means I am not courageous enough to face it…"
- "This fear is justified and others should also fear this, I believe it can be justified as frightening…"
- "I am not afraid, I'm just shaking because it's cold…"
However most of these responses tend to create a gap between the truth of the experience and the reaction to the emotion that attempts to escape that truth. The alternative is to ask yourself: where did this emotion come from… what caused it, and is it valid? Asking these questions helps to figure out what the emotion means rather than just responding to it.
Emotional Awareness
Common emotional responses are often most acceptable with social standards, but that does not mean that those responses provide insight into self-awareness and awareness of others. To explain, we often make the distinction of "Tom was angry" or "Tom is an angry person" instead of asking the question of where this source of that anger lies.
To get to the source is to get to the meaning that our emotions are attempting to make known. Most emotions are just signals pointing towards a certain truth or understanding, but when we misinterpret them and attempt to give them our justification or denial their original intention becomes lost in a sea of confusion and misinterpretation.
Emotional awareness bridges the gap between the truth of an experience and the response blocking the truth. Most "anger problems" are not an excess of anger, but a bad habit that a person has formed to respond to their anger as something horrible that possesses them to act out. The same can be said for a magnitude of other 'problomatic' emotions.
Our strongest emotions are some of our greatest learning tools. However, misunderstanding them can lead to negative consequences.
