Keeping your emotions checked

For different individuals, emotions mean different things. For some, the difference between emotions and feelings is that feelings are responses to emotions. Emotions on the other hand include the situation or experience, interpretation, perception and response related to the experience of a particular situation. Emotions connect your thoughts, feelings and actions as they affect a person. They affect you in many ways. There are physical aspects as well as the psychological aspects.

Regardless of how you define it, one thing is sure, emotions are an integral part of everyone’s life and should be kept in check at all times. Emotions operate at various levels and the fact that you control them does not mean you are ignoring them. It simply means being conscious of them and either acting on them or learning how to change them when the need arises for you to do so. Emotions control your actions, thinking and behavioural patterns. Just like they could have adverse effects on your feelings and thoughts, they could also affect your physical body in the same way.

Psychologists say that there are two basic emotions in life – love and fear.  All other emotions are variations of these two emotions. Thoughts and behaviour come from either a place of love or a place of fear. Anxiety, anger, sadness, depression, inadequacy, confusion, hurt, loneliness, guilt, shame are all components of fear. Emotions such as joy, happiness, caring, trust, compassion, truth, contentment, satisfaction are rooted in love.

There are varying degrees of intensity of both types of emotions, some being mild, others moderate and others strong in intensity.  For example, anger in a mild form can be felt as disgust or dismay, at a moderate level can be felt as offended or exasperated, and at an intense level can be felt as rage or hate. And the emotion that always underpins anger is fear.

Those who are prone to dismissing, repressing, ignoring or simply ventilating their emotions/feelings often times end up with physical illnesses.

Psychologist and vibration expert, Mary Kurus in her piece, ‘A Guide to Healthy Eating and Living’, expatiates thus: “Emotions that are not felt and released but buried within the body or in the aura can cause serious illness, including cancer, arthritis and many types of chronic illnesses. Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, negativity, frustration and depression cause chemical reactions in your body that are very different from the chemicals released when you feel positive emotions such as happiness, contentment, love and acceptance.”

There are so many factors which affect our emotions but the predominant is the way you perceive things – your belief system. Practically everything we do – decision-making, relationship with others, situation evaluation and other phases of our lives, depend on what we believe in. This affects how we perceive these issues.

Our beliefs affect our line of thinking towards the things we see, hear and feel. For instance, if a person has been raised in a hostile environment and sees the effects of such hostility, he is likely to have one of two perceptions; view people in the future with beliefs that hostility is bad and something to be avoided or he will see it as the acceptable way of life and anything different from this will be foreign to him. Also, someone whose brilliance and hard work has never been commended or encouraged is likely to lose self worth and confidence.

Typical of our Nigerian situation where men are raised in conservative homes, they usually grow into adulthood with the belief that women who work outside of the home are not as good as those who do not. It goes without saying that it is important for you to identify and screen beliefs which affect us negatively as this will give you a sound basis for emotional freedom.

In order to gain this freedom, Kurus conducted detailed vibration assessments that identify the physical, energetic and emotional areas, opines that emotions cannot be controlled. She says the best way to go about it is to learn to live peacefully with them. “You cannot change or control your emotions. You can learn how to be with them, living peacefully with them, transmuting them (which means releasing them) and you can manage them, but you cannot control them.

“Think of the people who go along day after day seeming to function normally, and all of a sudden, they will explode in anger at something that seems relatively trivial and harmless.  That is one sign of someone who is trying to control or repress their emotions but their repressed emotions are leaking out.”

She says, “The more anyone tries to control their emotions, the more they resist control and the more frightened people eventually become at what is seen to be a “loss of emotional control”.  It is a vicious circle.

“It’s important today to be politically correct. And that means not challenging or disagreeing with what the average person believes in. It means not expressing negative emotions in public. Showing emotion in public in certain societies represents being “out of control,” a great sign of weakness.  People feel uncomfortable with those who express strong emotions. We are a society that is taught to hide our emotions, to be ashamed of them or to be afraid of them. Regardless, we are born with them and must live with them. This means learning how to know them, be with them and release them.

Regardless of what Kurus has said, it is also possible to recognise that emotions don’t just appear mysteriously out of nowhere. Take stock of your day and ask yourself how you are feeling at the moment. If you can, record your response. When depression begins to set in, stop and observe the reason that is provoking it and then rate your mood on a 1 to 10 scale with 1 as the least intense and 10 being the most intense that you are able to feel. For instance, if you feel partially depressed, stop and analyse your thoughts until you find an answer or link what brought about the feeling. Put this down along with the reason why you shouldn’t be feeling depressed. This will give you a platform for a balanced criticism of yourself and emotions.

Ask yourself how else you could look at the situation that is more rational and more balanced than the way you were looking at it before. Taking your new findings into account will help you to come to a rational conclusion of issues that affect you. Rate yourself again on your scale and see how much progress you may have made. Going through this routine will over time help you to keep your emotions in check.