Healing Your Emotional Self (16 page)

There are also words that are closely related to the emotion of sad- ness, although they mean more than what we commonly identify as sadness. These include: alienation, defeat, dejection, disappointment, discontent, displeasure, distress, insecurity, isolation, neglect, pity, and rejection.

You’ll notice that these words add an additional tone, judgment value, or meaning to the word
sadness
. Once again, while these words can help to describe a specific reason for your feeling of sadness, they still describe the primary emotion of sadness.

Exercise: The Words and Feelings of Sadness

1. Study the list of words describing the emotion of sadness. Notice how often you use these descriptive words and remind yourself that no matter what words you use, you are still feeling the primary emotion of sadness.
   

2. Write about the associations you have with the feeling of sadness. For example, is it okay for you to feel sadness, or do you feel it is socially unacceptable? Was it acceptable to feel sadness in your home when you were growing up?
   

Who do you remember feeling sad when you were growing up?

How Do You Know When You Are Feeling a Particular Emotion?

The best way to discover how you are feeling is to begin by asking yourself which of the eight or nine primary feelings you are experienc- ing (anger, sorrow, joy, surprise, fear, disgust, guilt/shame, interest, or love). It is safe to say that at any given time we are all experiencing at least one or more of the primary emotions.

Just asking yourself the question won’t necessarily help if you aren’t in touch with your body. Your body is your best barometer to tell you which emotion you are feeling at any given time. Emotions involve body changes, such as fluctuations in heart rate and skin tem- perature and the tensing or relaxing of muscles. The most important changes are in the facial muscles. Researchers now think that changes in these muscles play an important role in actually causing emotions. We tend to feel sadness all over our bodies in the following ways: frowning, mouth down, and eyes drooping; a slumped posture; speak- ing in a low, quiet, slow, or monotonous voice; heaviness in the chest, tightness in the throat, or difficulty swallowing (from holding back tears); moist eyes or tears, whimpering, crying, feeling as if you can’t stop crying, or feeling that if you ever start crying you will never stop; feeling tired, run-down, or low in energy; feeling lethargic and listless, wanting to stay in bed all day; feeling as if nothing is pleasurable any more; feeling a pain or hollowness in your chest or gut; feeling empty.

Conversely, joy is usually manifested in the body in the following ways: smiling; feeling excited; feeling physically energetic, active, and “alive”, feeling like laughing or giggling; having a warm glow about you; feeling “open-hearted” and loving.

You can also determine what particular emotion you are feeling by observing your behavior. The following behaviors are all indicative of someone who is feeling sad: talking about sad things; sitting or lying around; being inactive; making slow, shuffling movements; giving up and no longer trying to improve; moping, brooding, or acting moody; withdrawing from social contact; talking little or not at all.

Someone who is feeling joyous may exhibit any of the following behaviors: smiling, grinning, laughing, being bouncy or bubbly, being affectionate toward others, jumping up and down, using an enthusias- tic or excited voice, talking a lot.

Emotions also involve action urges. An important function of emo- tions is to prompt behavior (fight in anger, flight in fear). Although the action itself is usually not considered part of the emotion, the urge to act is.

No Negative Emotions

Many people consider emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, guilt, and shame as negative. But there are no negative emotions if you view all emotions as signals or messengers telling us that something important is occurring.

What makes an emotion negative is the way we deal with it and the interpretation we give to it. For example, most people deal with these emotions in one of four negative ways:

1. They try to avoid feeling the emotion entirely (suppression).
   

2. They try to deny the feeling by pretending that it is not that bad (minimizing).
   

3. They blame someone else for making them feel as they do.
   

4. They deny their feeling by projecting them onto someone else.
   

All four of these methods prevent you from heeding the signal that the emotion is sending, from learning from the emotion, and from uti- lizing that knowledge to your best advantage. Even more important,

when we try to avoid feeling an emotion, we deny an important part of ourselves and we risk losing touch with who we are.

Learning about Yourself through Your Emotions

The key to learning about yourself through your emotions is to expe- rience them without inhibiting, judging, or avoiding them by distract- ing yourself. This is called being mindful. Instead of fighting our emotions or walling them off, being mindful of them can help us dis- cover more about who we are. The following steps will help you to experience your emotions in a mindful way:

• Begin by simply observing your emotion. Notice how it makes you feel. Notice what happens in your body as you feel the emotion.
  

• Do not judge the emotion as good or bad.
  

• Fully experience your emotion. Allow yourself to feel it as a wave, coming and going. Try not to suppress the feelings or push the emotion away. On the other hand, don’t hold onto the emotion or amplify it. Just let it pass through you like a wave.
  

  Why It Is Important Not to Judge Our Emotions
  

  Whenever we judge our emotions as being bad, the natural conse- quence is to feel guilt, shame, anxiety, and/or anger. The addition of these secondary feelings simply makes the distress more intense and intolerable. Often you will find that you can tolerate a distressing situ- ation or painful feeling a lot better if you refrain from feeling guilty or anxious about feeling the painful emotion in the first place. Think of some occasions when you have had a secondary emotional reaction to a primary emotion, such as getting angry or feeling ashamed for getting angry, or getting depressed about being depressed. Which causes you more pain or trouble—the primary or the secondary emotion?
  

  The following list explains how to observe an emotion nonjudg- mentally:
  

  1. Simply observe the emotion—where you feel it in your body, what sensations it elicits—without any kind of judgment or evaluation whatsoever. Refrain from labeling it “good” or “bad,” “pleasant,” or “painful.”
     

  2. Notice the thoughts that go through your mind as you feel this emotion, and the associations you have with it. Acknowledge the helpful, or healthy, but do not judge it. Acknowledge the harmful, or unhealthy, but do not judge it.
     

  3. Notice the opinions you have about this feeling and about the fact that you are feeling it. Let go of your opinions and simply feel.
     

  4. When you find yourself judging, don’t judge your judging. Just stop and move on.
     

  Being Aware of Your Emotions Can Help You to Change Them
  

  Although there is a distinction between being aware of your feelings and acting to change them, you will find that the two actually go hand- in-hand; when you begin to recognize what you are feeling at any given time, you will be more willing and able to change that feeling.
  

  John Mayer, a University of New Hampshire psychologist and coformulator of the theory of emotional intelligence, found that peo- ple tend to fall into distinctive styles for attending to and dealing with their emotions:
  

• Self-aware.
  These people are aware of their moods as they are having them. Their clarity of emotions may, in fact, be the under- pinning of other personality traits they possess such as autonomy, a sureness of their own boundaries, good psychological health, and a tendency to have a positive outlook on life. When they get into a bad mood, they do not ruminate and obsess about it, and they are able to get out of it sooner than other types. In short, their mindfulness helps them manage their emotions.
  

• Engulfed.
  These people are often overwhelmed by their emo- tions and feel helpless to escape them. It is as if their moods have taken charge of them. They are not very aware of their feel- ings, and at the same time they tend to be rather mercurial (up and down). They become lost in their feelings rather than hav- ing some perspective. Because they feel they have no control over their emotions, they do little to try to escape bad moods.
  

• Accepting.
  While these people are often clear about what they are feeling, they also tend to be accepting of their moods—they don’t try to change them. There are two variations of the accepting type: people who are usually in good moods and therefore have little motivation to change them, and people who are susceptible to bad moods but accept them anyway and have clarity about them. They do nothing to change their mood, no matter how negative or distressful. This pattern of behavior is often found in depressed people who are resigned to their despair.
  

  Fill Up Your Emptiness with Your Own Feelings
  

  Because of your low self-esteem, you, like many other survivors of emotional abuse or deprivation, have probably searched for some- thing outside yourself for a sense of completion and a sense of being worthwhile. You may have looked to romantic love as a solution for your feelings of incompleteness and inadequacy. But no one but your- self can complete you, fill up your emptiness, or give you a sense of meaning.
  

  If you give yourself the time and space to get to know yourself and your feelings, you will find that you can fill up the emptiness, a layer at a time. Each time you allow yourself to feel a feeling, each time you allow yourself to express an emotion, you are filling up another empty space inside.
  

  Discover Your Essence
  

  In addition to discovering who you are on a physical, emotional level, you need to discover that there is another aspect of you that is not related to your physical characteristics and not defined by your emo- tional qualities or personality type. It is the experience of who you are that is not a result of your history and conditioning and is not affected by your beliefs or opinions. This aspect of you is sometimes referred to as your
  true nature
  , your
  being
  , or your
  essence,
  because it is the ultimate nature of who you are.
  Essence
  also refers to the part of you that is most permanent and unchanging—the part of you that is cen- tral in defining who you are.
  

  Generally speaking, we consider our bodies, our personal histo- ries, and our emotional makeups to be the most distinctive and unchanging aspects of ourselves, the ones that define us and distin- guish us from others. But in reality, they are only part of who we are. They only define our outer layer.
  

  The negative messages you received from your parents (spoken and unspoken) became an
  overlay
  on top of your essence, often hiding it from your awareness. In order to reconnect with your essence, you may need to go beneath the negative parental messages you received, beneath the inner critic, and beneath your own self- judgment.
  

  This is how Byron Brown, the author of the wonderful book
  Soul without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within
  , defines essence:
  

  The soul’s true nature exists most fundamentally as a nowness; it is a nature that does not depend on the past or the future, nor does it depend on the experience of being a physical body. The more you have a sense of yourself as soul, the more you are aware that who you truly are is not really defined by your body. Neither is it defined by what you have learned or known in the past. Who you are is something much more intimate and imme- diate and something much more mysterious and harder to define. To be aware of this is to begin to open to the true nature of the soul, your own beingness
  now
  in your life.
  

  According to Brown, essence (or true nature) manifests itself uniquely in every person, and that uniqueness is inherent in who you are at birth. It is not achieved, nor can it be destroyed. It is not dependent on your appearance or anything you do or accomplish. You can, however, lose touch with your true nature—or even forget that it exists. Unfortunately, this is true for many of you reading this book.
  

  The belief in the existence of essence means you believe you have qualities or capabilities beyond those learned or instilled in you by your parents and other caretakers. As Brown states in his book, although many spiritual teachings espouse the concept of the soul’s essence—that as human beings we do not begin life as a blank slate or a lump of clay ready to be shaped by our upbringing—you do not need to believe in the concept in order to benefit from this information and from connecting with your essence.
  

  Your essence or true nature is made up of what are called
  essential qualities
  —attributes essential to what is most true in the experience of being human. These qualities include honesty, joy, compassion, will, strength, awareness, and peace, to name a few. Essential qualities lie deeper than habit, preference, and early conditioning, and they always exist as potentials buried in the unconscious depths of each person.
  

  The ultimate value of who you are is based not on your attributes— your physical appearance, your IQ, your talents, or your financial success—but on the miraculous fact that you exist and that at your core you are essentially good, wise, and strong.
  

  Exercise: Honoring Your Essential Self
  

  1. Find a space inside yourself that symbolizes your internal goodness, wisdom, and strength. Using your internal voice, say your own name. Fill up the whole space with your name. Pronounce your name boldly and lovingly, and imagine that your name signifies the importance of your existence. Know that there is only one you, that there is no one else like you, that you are unique.
     

  2. Fill your chest with your name so that you begin to feel alive inside. Remind yourself that you are a precious person, as everyone is precious.
     

  Although we all need validation from others, the true source of your self-esteem and your power comes from within. In order to access your power, you need to stay connected with yourself. You need to develop the habit of going inside and connecting to your inherent strength, goodness, and wisdom. Doing this throughout the day, every day, will not only help you raise your self-esteem but will also help you to feel more inner strength and security.
  ‌
  

  Shedding Your Idealized Self-Image and Embracing Who You Really Are
  

  As a child we learned what was required from us in order to be liked and accepted by our parents. The result was that we become fixated on an ideal but distorted sense of ourselves. This “ideal self” becomes an internal image of how we believe we should be so that everything will turn out all right and we will be loved, accepted, and appreciated. This ideal self-image includes personal standards for action, thought, feeling, behavior, appearance, and accomplishment.
  

  The biggest difficulty with pursuing our ideal self-image is that it doesn’t work. Although striving for the ideal as a child may have brought you parental approval, it did little to give you inner peace. The strain of constantly comparing yourself to the ideal is anxiety pro- voking and exhausting. Because it is impossible to reach an ideal, we are bound to fail and we always find ourselves lacking, deficient, or not good enough. This sets us up for more shame and guilt. Even though the ideal may be worthy, at some point we need to question just how good it is when we use it as a way to continually reject ourselves.
  

  Psychological Truths of the Week
  

• Those who were emotionally abused or neglected as children often do not develop a clear, undistorted image of themselves. By creating a Mirror Journal and a self-portrait, and by completing