The Two Ways in Which You Should Not Deal with Your Emotions
Most people are unaware that they handle their emotions in unhelpful ways.
Unpleasant as they may be to experience, and irrational as they may be in certain situations, no feeling is less valid, natural, or human than the next. Your emotions, like your thoughts, are not things you can actually control. On the other hand, the way you choose to approach your anger, sadness, fear, or shame is what matters for your health and improvement in life.
While it is not always easy — and certainly not intuitive — to know how you should in fact manage your emotions, this might get a bit clearer once you look at how you should not handle them.
I speak on the basis of what I have learned from a decade in therapy, as well as what I have learned from psychology textbooks (high school and university levels) and non-psychology authors like Stephen Covey and Beth Kempton.
1: Overwhelm
One way not to deal with your emotions is to let them overpower you.
I call this overwhelm*, and it can manifest in numerous ways, like:
- You feel angry, and you shake someone or raise your voice at them
- You feel jealous, and you obsess over the person or people involved
- You feel afraid, and you avoid what is actually an undangerous situation
In essence, overwhelm is about allowing your emotions to control your behavior. It involves being consumed by your feelings and letting them dictate how you live your life. This approach is highly counterproductive, because it essentially removes your agency and your ability to make the best out of any given situation.
The alternative is to acknowledge your emotions, listen to what they have to say, and proceed forward in a healthy way. For instance, instead of allowing your fear of confrontation to always keep you from having a certain serious talk with your friend, you can take note of the feeling, examine the situation at hand, and select a constructive course of action to move forward with. By not letting your emotions puppeteer your choices and actions, you can learn to make decisions that will work best for your future self and those around you, regardless of what your emotional state may be.
After all, your feelings course through you — but you are your own person.
* Not to be confused with anxiety attacks, panic attacks, or similar uncontrollable emotional experiences, which I am not covering here.
2: Suppression
Another way not to deal with your emotions is to try to overpower them.
Many call this suppression, and it can manifest in numerous ways, like:
- You try not to feel angry, but you resort to acts of passive-aggression
- You try not to feel jealous, but you treat the offending person coldly
- You try not to feel afraid, but you end up being uneasy and tense
All in all, suppression is about attempting to reduce or eliminate your emotions. Usually, this involves denying the presence of your feelings (example: “I’m not mad!”) or distracting yourself to evade the discomfort of confronting them (example: eating ice cream to quell your jealous feelings). Ironically, by seeking to silence or correct your emotions, you are causing them to grow even stronger — and when you continue on trying to suppress them, you are inadvertently giving them greater influence over your life.
Again, the better option is to acknowledge the presence of your emotions and make a conscious effort to manage them in ways that are constructive for you and the people around you. For instance, rather than attempting to interfere with the anger that your friend’s misconduct has caused, you can look that feeling in the eye and do what actually has to be done to properly ameliorate the situation. Feelings are bound to rise and fall naturally, and while you can never decide yourself when they do, you can work with your available options and select among those in order to improve your current circumstances that caused the feeling to arise in the first place (essentially what Stephen Covey calls proactivity in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).
At the end of the day, you have to actually feel your emotions to let them go.
What, then?
You may ask, “If not overwhelm and suppression, then what?”
Fortunately, I have created a guide that explains how you may cope with your emotions in a healthy, constructive manner: How to Properly Deal with Your Emotions (From Someone Who Went to Therapy for Ten Years).
Overwhelm and suppression are most definitely not recommended there.
