The following list contains positive emotions and a common
opposite negative emotion:
Calmness/Anger,
Carefree/Insecurity, Courage/Fearfulness, Exuberance/Depression, Safety/Anxiety, Connectedness/Loneliness,
Clarity/Confusion, Love/Apathy, Joy/Sadness, Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction,
Excitement/Boredom, Innocence/Guilt, Bliss/Pain
Reviewing the “opposites” list above, most of us have
felt many if not all of these negative emotions at one time or another. Feeling negative emotions is unpleasant and
can be painful. We don’t want to feel the pain, or we may tell ourselves that we shouldn’t be feeling those
negative emotions.
When we feel physical pain, we view it as a feedback
mechanism that informs us that something is harming us and such a situation should
be avoided or modified. However, we
respond quite differently when we feel emotional pain. We do not think something is wrong, but
rather, we think that something is wrong with us. But we can choose to view emotional pain
similarly to the way we view physical pain: as a feedback mechanism that
informs us that our heart or spirit is being harmed and that something in our lives
needs to be changed.
For example, when you once felt anger, could it be that you have been emotionally violated in some
way, and your heart or spirit has been harmed to your detriment?
When you once felt fear,
could it be that you perceived danger and that something or somebody might hurt
you?
When you once felt depressed
and your heart or spirit was shutting down from emotional pain, could it be
that you might have needed to make some changes in the way you thought or framed
the event?
When you once felt guilt,
could it be that a choice you may have made emotionally hurt yourself or someone
else and that it was not a wise choice?
When you once felt despair,
could it be that you had lost hope that tomorrow was another day and that things
would likely get better?
Negative emotions can serve a purpose. We may not want or like to feel them, but it
is not a matter of whether we should or shouldn’t feel them. Feelings aren’t facts, they’re just feelings. What matters is what we do with them. We can go three ways with them, and it can be tempting to default to two of them: surrendering our will to them, or shutting them down completely.
TWO DEFAULT OPTIONS
Heather‘s three kids had been noisy and she heard
constant crying. They just appeared to
run around and scream. Her nerves were
frayed. She barely got them down for a nap
and was relishing a much needed quiet time when she heard a crash down the
hall. Upon arriving in one of the kid’s
rooms, she realized that her almost three year old had pulled on a cord and
toppled a vase which had shattered. What
was she feeling? Perhaps negative emotions like
anger, even perhaps rage. Does she
surrender her will to the moment and scream at the child, telling him how
clumsy and stupid his is? It will make her feel good—temporarily. Is this her
“default” response?
Mark had just found out from the doctor that the hearing
loss he had experienced in one ear was not going to get better and that
he would likely have to deal with it the rest of his life. When his brother David asked him how he was
handling the disturbing news, he remarked that it could have been both
ears. When David pressed him a little
more as to how difficult it might be and that it was too bad that Mark would
have to deal with it long term, Mark became a little upset and wondered if
David was just trying to make him feel bad.
Does Mark just “put a happy face” on the situation and stuff the feelings,
shutting them down as he usually does and supposedly hiding them away?
What are the consequences of these two approaches? The first one is that you can surrender completely to your emotions,
losing control to the tsunami of emotion and perhaps physically or emotionally hurt others. Inappropriate words can be as hurtful as
inappropriate actions. Our surrendering
to hurtful words, and sometimes even actions, usually leads to deep regret afterwards.
The second one is you can always shut down or stuff these negative
feelings, pretending that they are not there, and be emotionally flat. This may seem a more level-headed thing to
do, except unresolved feelings do not go away.
They just remain in the dark, festering and mildly churning like bad food in one's stomach, until some
provocative event occurs. In that
moment, all of the unresolved emotions come quickly to the surface and we "vomit" or explode on people, often those with whom we have strong emotional connections
like family or friends.
Jose’s wife was routinely getting on him for not paying
more attention to, and spending more time with, the children. He would listen to her passively and then
walk away. He kept doing this until one
day, his daughter Angela spoke to him in what he considered a disrespectful
manner. Even though she said it in a
non-provocative way, he exploded emotionally, walked up to her with fists
clenched, getting about six inches from her face, and started yelling at her about how disrespectful she was. She burst
into tears and ran away, afraid and hurt, even though he hadn’t touched
her. Jose immediately felt terrible.
A THIRD OPTION
The more healthy approach is to feel what you are
feeling, but realizing that feelings indeed are not facts. Such negative feelings can certainly serve
that purpose and indicate to us and inform us that something is in fact wrong. And it is not a matter of whether we should or
shouldn’t feel them. We can manage them
by saying to ourselves that they are not us.
We can be in control of them. We
can think about why we are feeling a certain way and try to determine what that
negative emotion is communicating to us about ourselves.
How can feelings be felt in a constructive way? We can remove ourselves from a triggering
event or situation and give ourselves a “time out,” and be alone for
awhile. We can talk to our spouse, a
relative, or a friend, and vent. Alone,
we can cuss. We can scream into a
pillow or punch it a few times. We can
go for a walk and isolate ourselves for awhile and try to get perspective on
what just happened. We can write about
it, and emotionally dump our feelings onto paper, and as such, out of us. In fact, feeling the feeling and then getting
it out of our system is very healthy.
Sometimes a situation arises in which there are negative
feelings and emotions between two emotionally attached individuals, such as in
a spousal relationship. As we process
why we are feeling a certain way or what is to be learned from the
disagreement, this time of “sitting” with our negative emotions can be very
instructive. It is fine to not have
everything resolved in a relationship at any particular time. We must not think that we must try to repair the disharmony
immediately.
Returning to the earlier story of Heather and the broken
vase, exercising the Third Option, perhaps she could have pushed the vase behind a
dresser where it would be out of the way, and then excused herself to a quiet place in the house—to cool down. Later
in the day, when the emotion had subsided, she could reflect on what changes
need to be made in her life. What could this negative experience and negative
emotions teach her. Is she getting
enough support in parenting? Is she
getting enough sleep? Is it time to
change the naptime dynamic? Or is
something deeper going on? Maybe she is treating others about as well as she subconsciously believes she should be
treated. Or is it that she feels out of
control and disrespected which implies that she secretly fears that she does
not deserve to be respected? Could it be that her anger
came when she felt threatened in some deep way?
Negative feelings and emotions are a feedback mechanism
that can inform us that some aspect of our lives needs to be changed. They are the way the Universe or God helps us
to get to our “whole place.” And there
is always a Third Option to get us to that “whole place” rather than
surrendering ourselves to the tsunami of those feelings or stuffing them.
