Emotions are tricky, and if we all always handled them well I probably wouldn’t have a job. I’ve written about the plurality of emotions that can exist and how they don’t exist in neat little compartments, separated from our thoughts and bodies. There are ways I see people engage their emotional life in ways that are counterproductive at best and harmful at worst. Here are the three most common:

Ignore/supress them

Probably the most common error I see people make is just plain not dealing with them at all. Often, if we ourselves have been ‘jerked around by the heartstrings’ or have witnessed it happen to someone else, we’ve implicitly learned that emotions (especially strong ones) are not trustworthy; that they lie to us.

Another common way I see this go is that we are ‘too busy’ to stop and explore what’s going on inside. We have obligations to our work, family, social circle, and the cultural pressure to live as if we are of infinite capacity and in service to all these obligations, no time is left for stillness and reflection.

The problem with this is emotions are information. I’ll go into more detail further down but the bottom line is that undealt with emotions cause real problems in the here-and-now. Physical, psychological, and relational, the impacts of not addressing what our emotions are telling us are very often what send people into offices like mine.

Moralize them

Ask someone how they’re feeling and almost always they’ll pull from a two item menu: ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The way our language is set up around emotions, we naturally tend to moralize them. Oh, make no mistake, our emotional experiences can be pleasant or unpleasant, but that is not the same as the emotions themselves being ‘bad’ or ‘good’.

For example, take grief. Believe it or not, grief is the single healthiest response to the loss of something we love or value. To love at all it to risk grief and the degree of grief is proportional to the degree of the love. It’s more than unpleasant, to grieve is to suffer and yet it’s the emotionally healthiest response to the loss of what we love.

When we label some emotions as the ‘good’ ones and others ‘bad’, we tend to try and avoid the bad ones or at least avoid expressing them which tends to land us right back in misstep #1: ignoring or suppressing them. Our emotions (and I’ll give more detail further on) are information. In order for us to deal with them correctly, we have to know what that information is telling us.

Fix/control/correct them

There’s a problem that I’ve talked about in my previous post on the mental health of men in our culture that warrants revisiting here. We tend to talk about our emotions as if they are problems to be solved: “I need you to stop crying, David” was the refrain I would hear “I can’t fix the problem if I don’t know what it is”. Not so surprisingly, a great number of my male clients have a tendency to respond to their significant other’s emotions with ‘solutions’ instead of empathy. And why shouldn’t they, it’s exactly the message we’ve been sending them since they were boys.

The funny thing about trying to control emotions, is that we actually don’t. We control behavior. Think about it, when was the last time someone telling you that ‘everything happens for a reason’ actually changed your emotional state? Has anyone telling you not to feel something (sad, anxious, etc.) actually changed your emotional state in the moment?

Trying to just ‘control’ or will our emotions into submission tends to backfire and once again we end up in the ignore/suppress category. We don’t have to let them be in charge, but we do need to listen.

Your emotions are information

Training as a somatic therapist is tricky. You’re following not just the content of what the client is telling you, but also the story that their body is telling in the here-and-now as it revisits the trauma. When I first started the training there was a refrain that has become invaluable to me since:

“Everything is information”

Your emotions are information: about what’s going on in our bodies, what’s happening with our values, beliefs, and interpretations, about our whole inner world. That’s in the end all that they are, information. It’s what we do with that information that matters. But first, let me make one important distinction.

Real vs. True

During a seminary certificate that I was pursuing, one of the professors made a distinction that I loved: we need to understand and allow space for the difference between a real experience and a true one. My own example, consider someone having a panic attack. They feel like they can’t breathe, their heart feels like it’s going to explode. A panic attack can feel life threatening.

Now the truth is that they are not actually at risk of their heart exploding or their respiratory system failing in that moment. They are having a very real experience, even if that experience does not necessarily reflect truth in that moment. Emotions are information, and that information reflects something real. It may or may not reflect something true. We need to have at least this much room for nuance in any conversation about our emotions.

Emotional resilience

Presence. Like I’ve said in a previous post, it’s the foundation of resilience. To stay present to our ever-changing experience and to ourselves lays the foundation for so much of how we adapt and grow.

Staying present to our emotions (and acknowledging that there is often more than one) allows us to take in the information that they are conveying to us. What’s needed now? Comfort? A sense of security? Connection with someone we feel safe with?

Emotional resilience is staying present to our emotions, listening to what they are conveying, and then attending to that. Sometimes there might be a need for action, to ‘fix’ something. All the time, even just getting that far though is a huge help.