Managing your emotions can be tricky particularly when you have never been taught how best to do this. If you cannot manage or understand your own emotions it stands to reason that it’s going to be a challenge trying to manage the emotions of others. Try managing a resistant teenager, a two year olds meltdown, your mother in laws unkind remarks or your boss’s criticisms without seeing them as being about you. When you try to manage the emotions of others without understanding our own you open yourself up to feeling wounded, challenged or judged in the process.
If your emotions become ‘triggered’ by someone else you would typically fall into one the these 4 categories in order to cope with the situation. They are neither good nor bad, they are merely coping strategies.
- Repression
This is when you push your feelings down or put them to one side. You deny or ignore them hoping they’ll go away or miraculously resolve themselves. Instead they become stored which creates emotional pressure. When you deny or ignore your feelings you dishonour yourself. Maybe you feel it’s better to dishonour yourself than to upset someone else by sharing your feelings thereby making yourself responsible for managing their emotions because they can’t. If you get good at managing your emotions it’s easier to manage the emotions of others.
- Suppression
This happens when something so painful or terrifying happens it’s beyond your ability to handle it. The overwhelm causes you to subconsciously bury it deep within so you never have to face it again. It is stored emotions that you’re not consciously aware of. Even though the memory in your mind has been blocked it’s still recorded in the body as a felt experience. At some point in the future you may experience an event which will trigger the body to respond with a panic attack. This will appear to come out of the blue and it would be difficult to connect this experience with the suppressed feelings of the initial sensitising event.
- Distraction
When you do not feel safe to express your feelings an easy way to help you feel better is to distract yourself. This could be with drugs, alcohol, gambling or any number of other addictive or unhelpful ways you may use for managing your emotions. It is often the case that the addiction becomes more of a problem for you than the reason you are engaging in the addictive behaviour.
It’s also worth noting that some addictions are more socially acceptable than others. Working long hours is often seen as the job of a hero, buying the 100th pair of shoes is often seen as amusing, while drugs, smoking, gambling and alcohol are frowned upon. You make a good or bad judgement against the person for the particular addiction they have. In the end all addictions, whatever they may be are attempting to soothe a wound or two , a way of managing your emotions.
- Expression
Feelings that are under pressure, that you cannot control often come out in verbal or physical attacks as you project them on to other people or things. Other times you internalise this pressure and harm your own self. If you can hold in mind that all behaviour whether deemed good or bad, is simply feedback. When emotions get the better of you they can cause untold damage. Projecting your out of control feelings and emotions on to others is a sure way to break down any relationship and healthy relationships are your way of connecting, belonging and fulfilling many of your needs and wants. If you don’t have a healthy relationship with yourself you will be highly prone to believing the toxic voices in your head, having low self-worth and you’ll be more likely to physically harm yourself too.
The accumulation of unprocessed feelings causes a pressure within you and this pressure causes you to have certain thoughts. Each feeling can cause many, many thoughts and it’s the meaning which you attach to the thoughts which is the problem. So, the feeling you get causes a thought which you attach a meaning to and from there you step into one of the above ways to managing the emotions which come up.
Remember also, that you are the creator of your thoughts.
It’s really interesting to note how things start to positively shift in your life when you start learning how and why you operate the way you do. It’s empowering and often quite life changing.
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