What Are/Aren't Emotions?
Emotions are your instant psychosomatic (mind-body) evaluations of stressors. Some of these are universally agreed upon, such as the reaction to an object landing in your eye, or someone yelling at you (except in a New York deli where you expect it). Others are learned and are not so universal, such as your reaction to certain foods or someone staring at you.
Most of us believe that there is little we can do about our emotional reactions, meaning they seem to be a "truth that cannot be changed." Indeed, they do feel that irreversible because they have become automatized. This means that they have been learned so well and usually at such an early age that they have been ingrained as habit. This does not mean you are stuck with the learned emotional responses (anymore than you are stuck with your learned bad spending habits) if you choose to change them.
Why bother changing emotional responses? Because we are often victimized by them — meaning that we have programmed responses to emotions such as:
- fear: fly or fight
- sadness: feel pain or go into denial & shock
- anger: aggression or repression.
These on-off reactions are not real choices. They are reflexes. Reflexes are choiceless. Living stress free is all about freedom and that means having a choice (or two or three or four, or more).
If you wish to have more control over your emotional responses it is necessary to internalize the following truths about emotions.
You must own your emotions in order to control them. (Yes, here we are back to that passionate possession first step of Primary Domino Thinking again!)
Stop blaming others for your emotional responses; it is your expectations that set you up for your emotional responses anyway. Empowering yourself means owning your emotional responses in order to have healthy control over them. Emotions are not verdicts about you.
Genetics or early instruction programmed your emotional responses into you. Everybody has emotions, whether they exhibit them or not or whether they like them or not. A particular emotion can never declare you a "bad" person. Emotions are not evil or animalistic. Emotions can be felt without being acted upon.
Just because you feel an emotion does not mandate that you have to automatically express it. It can be a conscious choice if and how you express a felt emotion. Resisting the experiencing of your emotions guarantees they will persist in running your life.
Suppressed feelings do not go away. Energy cannot be created or destroyed — neither can emotions since they are definitely a form of energy! Resisted emotions will either explode into action after a period of time and/or they will come out "sideways," e.g., sarcasm is sideways anger; whining is anger coming through a smaller hole; sobbing is refusing to cry (crying is done with the eyes, not the throat); boredom is refraining from feeling your feelings altogether.
Another way emotions come out sideways is through psychosomatic illnesses as mentioned in the section on distress in Chapter One. How this works is that if you eat your feelings by consciously suppressing them, or unconsciously repressing or denying them, you store them not only in your mind but also in your body somewhere. To lock emotions into your tissues does not feel good. Ever have a stiff neck? Headaches? Lower back ache? Leg cramps? That's just physical phraseology for unresolved emotional business stored in body tissues. In other words, "You can run, but you can't hide" from your emotions.
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