EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE
Accepting emotions
Emotional regulation requires us being able to identify our feelings and accept them. Remember the goal is to be able to manage and respond to your emotions. Accepting intense emotions does not mean you need to act it out as intensely as you feel.
We often don’t know what to do with our emotions. We may fear them - that they may be overwhelming, or we might not be able to distinguish between different emotions - everything feels the same. If we keep ignoring our emotions, we might find our emotions "out of control" or we become so numb that we can't feel even when we want to.
Perhaps you have been told that there are right or wrong emotions but actually all emotions are acceptable. Just because one person responds in one way and another person responds differently, does not mean one emotion is the “right” one and the other is the “wrong one”. Your emotion responses are your own and are uniquely yours. No matter how bad the emotion makes you feel, there is no such thing as a “bad” or “good” emotions. Emotions are pieces of information that tell you something is happening to you. Understanding what the emotions are about will help you figure out what you need to feel better.
Managing emotions
1. What are you feeling?
The answer may be quite overwhelming. List down everything you are feeling (e.g. sad, frustrated, worried). While listing down, imagine that you are taking the feeling and putting it outside of you, just for a while. Keep doing this until you feel that inside is pretty peaceful and quiet. Feel free to refer to the list below to help you identify your feelings.
2. Look at the list you generated and identify which feelings are strongest or most important to you. Rate each one. Now think about what this feeling is about?
What is this sad feeling about?
What is the anger about?
3. Identify the need and resolve. What does this feeling need to feel better?
If your answer is: "I need to get rid of my feelings."...
Let's keep exploring.
Of course you don’t want to feel bad.. it’s unpleasant and may be stopping you from doing what you need to do. It may seem like this feeling is the barrier to your goals.
The feeling is there because you have an unmet need. To help yourself feel better, the need must be addressed. Focus on the feeling and ask again what that feeling needs to feel better? You can also ask what can you do to help yourself feel better?
“I need support”
“I need to rest”
“I need to be assured that it’s ok to feel this way”.
Identifying your need will help you meet what you need in a deeper way and help you to make friends with your feelings. Doing this also allows you to let more positive emotions in and feel happier.
Once you have identified your needs, you can think about how you want your needs to be met. For instance, you may feel anger and the need is to protect yourself. It does not mean you need to be aggressive or violent in protecting yourself. It may mean being calmly assertive.
In this process you may discover that your emotions do not match the situation. This mismatch may happen when we have old experiences that trigger these emotions even though they don’t fit the current situation, or that we have other emotions we are not aware of.
- Primary emotions are our immediate responses to the situation.
- Secondary emotions are our responses to our primary emotions.
John feels sad when his parents forgot his birthday but he also feels weak for feeling that way.
Shaun gets angry at his mom for not picking up her cell phone and yells at her for missing his call. His first response was worry when his mom did not answer, but he gets more and more angry the more worried he becomes.
Sometimes our emotions don’t match the immediate situation.
Adam felt scared when his girlfriend said “I love you” for the first time.
His emotion did not match the situation of connecting with a loved one and he is responding to the situation as if he was in danger. This mismatch is a sign that something else is going on.
It is normal if you are having difficulty identifying what your primary emotion is. As you create some distance between you and your emotions by putting them outside and then putting them inside one by one, it is likely that one of the feelings is your primary feeling. It is necessary to practice doing this regularly and it will be easier over time to identify what you feel, what the feeling is about and what you can do to feel better. It is also helpful to explore what is going on with someone who can guide our exploration in an empathetic, non-judgmental manner.
LEARN MORE ABOUT EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE : PARENTING PRACTICES
