Function of Emotions
THEY MOTIVATE ACTION TO MEET OUR NEEDS
Our feelings, drives and emotions provide nuanced directions critical for our survival and beyond…
While our emotions can feel overwhelming, at times deeply and unbearably painful, it’s incredibly important that we learn to work with our emotions. They are the best signals to where we need to focus our attention and care. This inspires our two takeaways from this section.
Grief is good
Grief means you lost something you valued. One of the most powerful things you can do is acknowledge and mourn losses: what you never had, what changed, what’s gone…Not mourning losses means that you’re still trying to live in the fantasy that something exists when it doesn’t. This cognitive dissonance can make you panicked, frantic, rigid, defensive, angry…in other words, not very effective at living in reality. We strongly support owning the sh*ttiness of reality, really grieving how sad it is, and then learning how to live with it anyway. We promise the sadness will diminish over time, but only if you grieve it properly.
Anger is a sign
Anger as an emotion means you aren’t getting what you want and need. Our goal in training is to help you get what you want and need, so anger helps us understand what exactly that might be.
We’ll work with anger to better understand you.
Alexithymia is a very common condition in which people have difficulty identifying and naming what emotion their feeling.
Hypersensitive individuals often receive many signals, feeling many emotions at once, which can make it challenging to pull apart the tangled ball of emotional yarn.
But as we pull apart each thread, understand what each emotion is, what it’s responding to, and what it’s telling us to do, we can become as discerningly expert in emotions as a food critic is at tasting the nuances in food. Ultimately, this sensitivity can become a power, not a prison. The chart below is just a small start to help you understand the basic emotions and their purposes.
Reflection Questions:
Which emotions do you feel most comfortable with, or do you feel most often?
Which emotions do you feel least comfortable with, or feel least often?