Emotions

Have you ever thought about the purpose of your emotions? If you're like most people, you don't think much about emotions (yours or anyone else's) and you just move through them, hoping to experience more of the pleasant, energizing ones and steer clear of the deflating ones. When unpleasant emotions such as loneliness, hurt, disappointment or rejection surface, perhaps you try to distract yourself with food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, television, internet surfing, texting, reading, drama, sex, gambling, complaining, gossiping, etc.

You may find that you're more comfortable with certain emotions. Perhaps anger energizes you and venting and raging lets off the tension and frustration you've built up. Maybe hurt allows you to place responsibility for your pain on someone else's behavior and moves you away from the powerlessness you don't want to feel. Constantly comparing yourself to others and feeling jealous or envious may be a way to avoid a deep-seated sense of inadequacy. You may get stuck in particular emotions, like anger or sadness and not know how to "move through" emotional states and get back to balance.

The problem with distracting yourself regularly from your emotions or allowing only a limited repertoire of emotions is that you fail to learn from all of them. From glad to sad, ecstatic to desperate, they are our most precious teachers, here to signal us regarding the state of our internal and external worlds. They are like the "check engine" light on your car's dashboard--ignoring this signal will result in more trouble down the road.

Regularly disconnecting from your emotions or getting stuck in them is a sign that you are lacking self-care skills generally learned first. You have difficulty connecting to yourself, paying attention to all your emotional signals and/or responding appropriately to meet your needs. For a variety of reasons, you may have grown up in an environment where your basic emotional needs were inadequately met. Your caregivers may not have had their basic needs adequately met and may have been incapable of meeting yours. Even well-meaning, loving caregivers may be overly self-absorbed or needy and regularly distracted by their internal struggles.

When our emotions and needs are neglected, we lose touch with these important internal signals. When our caregivers are unable to consistently and predictably meet our emotional needs, we spend our youth years trying to cope with unpleasant emotional states, insecurity and low self-esteem. While we present a "false self" to the world, we have a hurt, sad, angry, anxious. It's easy to see how we can begin to "use" food and other distractions for comfort, pleasure and calming. And yet, all these activities disconnect us further from our authentic self.

It's never too late to learn to pay attention to your emotions and allow them to guide you in meeting your needs. Reconnecting to your authentic emotional self takes time and is a process. It will require some patience and practice. And it is worth the effort; you are worth the effort.

You can begin the process of getting to know your inner emotional landscape by asking yourself the question "What am I feeling in this situation? " throughout the day. During stressful or trying situations, take a few moments and ask yourself this question. When you want to numb out with food or some other distraction, pull out a piece of paper and write the answer to this question. Emotions are just one word, for example "I feel sad" or "I feel betrayed." Keep in mind that it's okay to feel any emotion. All emotions are valid; there are no right or wrong, good or bad emotions.

There isn't anything to do with your emotions except pay attention to them and let them inform you as to the state of your world. Before addressing your needs, it's best to see if you can really feel your emotions. Stay with them for a few minutes or longer and identify where you feel them in your body. How does anger feel in your body? How is it different from the feeling you get with shame? How long can you allow yourself to feel your emotions before you look for distraction? Do you remember feeling this same emotional state at earlier times in your life--what do these feelings remind you of? Taking the time to journal about this will help you connect more deeply to your emotions and release them.

The next step in getting to know your inner world is to follow-up with the question "What am I truly longing for in this situation? or "What do I need in this situation?" See if you can get clear on what exactly you're needing, whether or not you can easily obtain or create it. Try not to sabotage the process by quickly throwing out limiting beliefs like "I need a partner to help out, and that'll never happen!" Just stay with identifying your need for support or companionship. Taking quality time to be with yourself in this way is a very important first step in giving yourself the support you need. It will be much easier to find ways to meet your needs when you feel clear and centered.

Try on the above two steps the next time your "check engine" signal comes on, in the form of anger, hurt, sadness, despair, or the like. Remember to embrace all of your emotions, pleasant and unpleasant. Rather than resorting to ineffective soothing and calming behaviors like emotional eating or television watching, try connecting to yourself and identifying your emotions and needs. With practice, you'll be surprised at how quickly you can restore yourself to balance.

'I don't know what happened to me; I am feeling so crazy!'

'I wish you could be here to enjoy this occasion with me!'

'I just can't stand his face anywhere near me!'

These are the examples of sentences we utter when we are going through an 'emotional phase'. Emotions are the psycho-physiological states one gets to experience each day. It is not possible for one to going a day without feeling an emotion. To be more explicit, emotions are the forces that drive a man to action by empowering him with specific motives. In other words, emotions are the result of motives, the forces that push one toward something and vice versa. It is however possible to experience an emotion and suppress it by not acting it out. It happens when a man feels so angry on something but does not behave in an angry way and hide his emotion.

Emotions carry with them enormous power to disillusion one's rational thoughts. It is strange, but true, that man often commit serious blunders in anger or any other severe emotional state. Crimes are mostly the results of severe angry states or a condition when a man feels 'out of control'. These feelings are prompted by an emotion known as aggression. It is helpful to categorize aggression into two types; one is expressed and the other is suppressed. The aggression that is expressed is seen in the behavior such as a man slapping someone's face or hitting with a blow. Suppressed aggression, on the other hand, can be manifested in several instances in which a person avenges on someone after taking grudges in his heart for a long time.

It would not be wrong to say that emotions do make a man weak by forcing him into doing things that he would not do if he thought with rational mind. A father might not go against his son and publicly defame him even if he gets to know that his son is a thief! It is because of the emotional bond between father and son that makes them love each other and ultimately not oppose them publicly. However, strangely enough, emotions do make one strong as well. It is made possible by inspiring a person into doing great things by a hint of emotion, often exhibited by a close partner or a friend. In short, there are numerous colors of emotions and each one is an enigma for a man to understand!

On the differentiation between feeling and bodily reaction in emotions and the need to classify emotions

Emotions are probably the most fascinating of all mental processes and involve two phases of feeling and reaction. Are these two phases necessarily interwoven? Of course, they are. There could be overt or covert reactions to emotions but there is 'always' a reaction and an associated feeling. A lot has been written in psychology about emotions and there are now many theories and according to the most influential James Lange theory, emotion is a perception of bodily states. This means there is first a reaction in the body and when there is perception of this reaction, emotions are experienced. The body reacts and creates a feedback and only then we perceive the emotions according to this theory. This theory would suggest that emotion is a bodily reaction followed by the perception of such reactions.

There are many studies on the physiological or neurological aspects of emotion and most of these studies have suggested that the limbic system comprising of the hypothalamus, the hippocampus and other structures are responsible for expression and perception of emotions. There are many categorizations of emotions and one of these highlight emotions caused by internal body states such as pain or hunger and emotions caused by external stimuli as in the case of anger or fear. Emotions could be positive and negative as we know as the positive emotions are love and happiness, empathy, affection, curiosity, ecstasy and the negative emotions are jealousy, hatred, grief, anxiety, frustration etc.

The categorization of emotion could be

1. Internalized (based on internal stimuli) or Externalized (based on external stimuli)

2. Cognitive (based on cognitive activity such as judgment), Affective (based on explanations of feelings or emotional experiences) and Somatic (based on bodily experiences).

If emotions are based on a psychological aspect of feeling and a physical or physiological aspect of bodily reaction, it is usually a question of which comes first, the feeling or the reaction? I would suggest that emotions based on internal stimuli could first involve a feeling or a psychological condition and this would in turn cause a physical reaction. Depression for instance could cause sleeplessness and other physical reactions. Emotions based on external stimuli as in anger could first involve a bodily reaction as when there is a heated argument we feel a faster heart beat and other bodily reactions. These bodily changes then produce the psychological aspect of anger.

Thus in internalized emotions reactions are triggered by feelings and in externalized emotions, feelings are triggered by reactions. There could be further research in psychology to clearly demarcate internalized and externalized emotions. Feeling is thus a psychological component of emotion and the bodily reaction is a physical component of reaction. Emotions are thus more complex than feelings and have two distinct components. For example emotions such as romantic love would consist of a feeling component of overwhelming affection and a bodily need or reaction related to physical desire. Simple affections as consideration for a family member is more of a feeling and do not involve physical reactions. It is necessary in psychology to clearly distinguish between feelings and emotions and more research will be required to identify simple feelings from complex emotions. An emotion is always necessarily accompanied by significant bodily reactions.

The distinction between feelings and bodily reactions in comprising emotions could help us identify these two essential components for each emotion. For example anger is a complex emotion comprising of a feeling of irritability and a bodily reaction of rapid heartbeats, reddened face, etc. An emotion of anxiety has a fear component and a bodily reaction of sweat or trembling etc. Psychological studies have usually overlooked the feeling component in emotions and also emphasized on bodily reactions rather than identifying feeling as a separate and essential aspect of emotion. Recent studies in consciousness have tried to understand what feeling really is and it is essential to identify the emotions and also the associated feeling and reaction components.

I'll provide a short table here providing the feeling and bodily reaction components of emotions.

Anxiety - Fear (feeling component), rapid heartbeats (bodily reaction)

Love - Affection (feeling component), physical/sexual need (bodily reaction)

Anger - Irritability (feeling component), flushed face or deep breaths (bodily reaction)

Grief - Sorrow (feeling component), tears or other physical changes (bodily reaction)

Lust - Possessing (feeling component), physical/sexual need (bodily reaction)

Jealousy - Controlling (feeling component), physical needs/violence etc. (bodily reaction)

The list could be potentially quite long although it is necessary to distinguish the feeling and physical reaction components for the identified emotion. How does this distinction help psychology? I would suggest that such a distinction of feeling and bodily reaction enable psychologists to work towards identification of the main psychological problem based on whether the feelings have preceded or followed bodily reactions. Internalized emotions will thus always begin with a feeling and it is the feeling that has to be tackled first. This is of course a very challenging perspective and researchers could continue to argue on whether pain involves feeling first or a bodily reaction first. Internalized emotions are also long lasting and this is because the root or the foundation of such emotions is the feeling which can continue for a long time. Grief or love (internalized emotions) would last longer than anger or lust (externalized emotions). Bodily reactions are of course short lived as our body has limited resources with which to react.

Usually theories of emotions have been divided into the cognitive theories, affective theories and somatic theories and neurological theories of emotions are usually somatic and completely based on bodily reactions. Contemporary psychotherapy emphasizes on cognitive theories of emotion and highlights the central role of evaluation and judgments. Affective theories with an emphasis on feeling have not been developed extensively as the emphasis on bodily reactions and cognitive components has always been of greater importance in psychology. It is with the advent of consciousness studies, that the concept of feeling came back in the picture.

The broader picture on the psychology of emotions would include the real purpose of emotions. Emotions could have several functions.

1. Emotions release our excess internal energy - Just as creativity helps in releasing our excess energy in a positive way, love or anger helps releasing physical energy and could thus be good for health

2. Emotions help us to fulfil our needs through directed physical reactions - the emotion of curiosity for example fulfils our need for knowledge

3. Emotions add the codes and conscious and subconscious elements to our social interaction, communication and general life process. Emotions enrich our lives whether they are consciously expressed or unconsciously perceived.

The final part of the discussion is the expression of emotion which like communication could be covert and unconscious or overt and conscious or deliberate. Emotional expressions vary according to individuals and some are more expressive and dramatic than others. Usually highly creative individuals are also more emotionally expressive as creativity is a form of emotional expression and highly creative people simply express themselves through their creative work. Individuals given to more dramatic or extravagant emotions are well suited for the arts, drama and other forms of creative self expression. Such individuals should be encouraged to channel their energies towards creative output rather than using their dramatic emotional expressiveness in everyday situations which could be stressful for the less emotionally expressive people they interact with. So if you are given to extravagant emotional expression of anger or jealousy, this could be channelled towards competitiveness and active involvement in sports. Extreme need to express love or desire could be channelled towards the fine arts such as poetry or painting. Emotional expressions are not emotions per se but are like keys to your closet and without the expression (either covert or overt) there could be no identification of the emotions.

Finally emotions are complex and understanding emotions, emotional components and emotional expressions would require further study and it would be necessary to identify all possible emotions and associated feeling and bodily reactions as also accompanying types of emotional expressions. Maybe it would be appropriate to treat psychologically disturbed patients with a form of affective psychotherapy.