Own your emotions doesn’t let them own you. What does it mean to own your emotions? #ecoTrain QOTW
The non-seen bustards…
No-one can see them or touch them. Yet, we all can FEEL them if and only, of course, they are not deeply buried by the layers of our own protection….
I am talking about essential part of every human life - our emotions. They are an always present in our everyday life. Whether we are looking at a baby or watching a horror film, receive a text message we have been long waiting for - we all experience something we tend to call emotions. We all have our hights and lows in our experience and sometimes they can significantly affect the state of our mind and general well-being.
So in this article, I want to explore more deeply what are they - this unseen, untouched feelings we tend to have?, and answer the question: “What does it mean to own your emotions?”
As always I want to express my gratitude to @eco-alex, a bespoke driver of #ecoTrain and the efforts he puts in questions of the week (QOTW)posted #qqtw - a weekly write-ups we do to explore new dimensions of our self and this world. I post this post quite late as was being busy with my preparation to be a mum but I still wanted to present my vision of the answer to it.
If you are interested in uncovering few more layers of your life and possibly find something for you, let's dive into the world of emotions.
The 50 shades of YOUR EMOTIONS
We can’t really fully understand emotions, can we? It is really hard to tell if seeing a horror movie I am experiencing only fear, or it is fear and excitement or it is a mix of my anxiety, horror, and excitement.
We, humans, always try to systematize the information we see around. Thus the first efforts to identify and classify human emotions have been done long ago. "The Chinese Book of Rites" identifies seven ‘feelings of men’: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking. Aristotle in his "Rhetoric" mentioned 9 emotions such as anger, friendship, fear, shame, kindness, pity, indignation, envy/ jealous, love [2] In XX centuries Robert Plutchik created a most well-known theory of 8 basic emotions. His Wheel of Emotions includes fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, trust, anticipation.[3] At the same time, there are more and more theories appear as humans try to understand better what are they, things we call "emotions"?
Information Source - [1] - What Are Basic Emotions?;[2]&[3]-Wikipedia
Researchers Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner , PhD from the University of California, Berkeley have studied human emotions by showing volunteers 2,185 emotionally evocative short videos. The result of this study was published in 2017 and claimed that human beings have around 27 fully distinguishing emotions. It includes: aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathetic pain, entrancement, envy, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, sympathy, triumph
Yet, it misses some of the well-known emotions as fear, hate, and resentment. According to the scientist, these are the outcomes of other different feelings we have beneath. Thus some people would experience anger when asked a question they can’t answer just because they do not want to look stupid. Or you would experience fear when losing your job just because you are not sure what your future would look like.
The researches created an interactive map to show how many different emotional reactions were recorded on different
provocative short videos and to show the complexity of our emotions.
With all said above, can we say that humans do understand emotions? Can we agree that there is a certain set of emotions or are there something in between? Maybe more we would explore on the emotion topic, the more we would find? Maybe if more answers are found, more questions would be raised?
Maybe there are more than 50, 100 or even 1000 shades of our emotions?
Let's dive even deeper in a search of the answer or at least a more complex understanding?
Are some emotions are hardwired into us?
There are certain situations in life that trigger emotions without smilingly our control - they just appear and you have to face them. Thus, if one is walking home alone and at night and hears the soft, cracking sound of someone or something stepping on the dry leaves nearby their hurt start to race and all of their senses are immediately put on the alert. It just happens and you can barely understand why.
Smilingly to it, there are lots of studies showing that certain images like snakes and spiders trigger negative or alert emotions in people. Scientists propose that these reactions are our basic instincts for survival and dates from the age when our ancestors lived in the cages and took lots of efforts to stay alive. It became part of us, the mechanism used for our protection. And the one we could hardly control even though sometimes it is no longer useful for us.
Emotions you carry around might be not yours at all
I remember my first shock in Asia when I saw several people spitting just where they were staying and they did it so openly almost enjoying themselves. I was confused, I did not know how to react on that until a friend of mine have explained that this is the part of their culture and it is considered normal! It was not normal for me though and let me discover that apart from confusion I experience a feeling of disgust, fear, and envy. It was allowed to them but not to me. Yet, there was no visible force that would stop me if I wanted to do it. The force stopping me was set up in my mind - within my cultural background, within my parent’s ideas what is good what is wrong and my own past experience of rejection from the others if I did something which was not a norm.
So if we think deeper, some of the emotions appear in different situations are results either the social paradigm we grew up or someones’ point of view or our own experiences what lead us to react in a certain way for self- protection or any other reason our mind considered logical.
No-one to blame, It is us who causes the way we feel
When we talk about emotions I believe there is one very important aspect we should mention as well. It is people habit to blame someone or something else rather than us in the situations. We tend to think:
- “ I am angry because you are late”
- “I am sad because I have told you to do X and you did Y”
- “My boss is a stupid arsehole and I hate him as he is not seeing how much I do...”
- etc
The irony is that it is us who feel in a certain way. It is us to gives excuses or trying to hide what is really going on. It is much easy to put blame on someone/something than to deal with something which really causes you to feel in a certain way.
There is no blame at all, I guess we have never been taught to pay attention to ourselves, to what is really happening with us so in a certain way we are like a new-borns when it comes to really understand ourselves and furthermore what causes us to feel a certain way.
At the same time our emotions hide a real power to transform our lives and if we learn to understand, to own them, we might get an absolutely new way of experience our life.
I believe that we all already have all the answers we will ever need inside of us and it happens that our emotions are often turn up to be the easiest way for those answers. So if you do learn the way to own your own feelings you will have the keys to your own life.
Every emotion has a message
This saying I first heard then I went to a psychologist. She was a good one and it happened to be the start of the self-exploration quest I have been since. I was long long ago but perhaps that was one of the greatest lessons I learned during my life.
It seems to be simple yet it has a huge complexity if you try to see beyond what it appears to be. And I believe it hides one of the greatest keys to own your emotions and your life.
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Have you ever paid attention to your emotions? I bet most of the people's answer would be: "not really". There are many reasons for it and most common is the way how we have been educated. Emotions are usually considered as a part of being weak, or not able to control your life so we tend very much to suppress them until they accumulate and will blow up in the most unpredictable way.
At the same time, there is a big secret hiding in your emotions as they are your road maps, they can show you the way … if you will be paying attention and allow yourself 1) to experience them 2) to understand what are they telling you.
Own your emotions doesn’t let them own you
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. Oscar Wilde
I guess no one wants to be at the mercy of their emotions yet sometimes we all are. So how we can really change it? To become the owners rather than slaves?
I believe it all begins with self-awareness. If we give ourselves a right to experience different emotions and find healthy ways to express them, we would be much more in harmony first with ourselves and with the world at large.
Though it is much easy to say than done. There are so many barriers we have created through our life to not notice them or suppress that sometimes it is really hard to even admit that they are there. At the same time, you always have a free will to try something different.
I remember that one of the simple techniques I learned with my psychologies was asking myself "Why" questions. It was so simple that I could do it whenever I needed and gave a lot of inner awareness to what was happening at that time in my life. I tend to have quite tight deadlines and it always put me under stress. So when I started asking myself why am I stressed, why I feel that it all depends solely on me, why I feel emotionally down if something goes wrong?? There were 100 questions I could ask myself about one particular situation and it turned out that more I asked more I became aware of what is really going on. I believe it is a great way to start to notice your own emotions and understand the reasons beings them that in their turn lay down a path to being able to work with them as the next step.
Apart from self-awareness, a sense of responsibility is the next key.
If I accept and take full responsibility for the way I feel there are no more excuses that it is someone’s else fault or it is not fare. That’s only me who can change it. That’s me who can turn something bad into something neutral or even find good outcomes.
More you do this first steps more you notice that in fact there is nothing that you wouldn’t be able to change. At least at the level of your emotions. There are multiple techniques how you can work with your emotions but the one I use most (or at least what works for me) is the re-living the situation in my imagination. I just simply erase the situation as it happened and then re-create it the way I wanted it to be feeling fine and at ease. This simple shift allows me to quickly sort a major number of my emotions that overwise would be hidden somewhere in my subconscious.
To sum up the answer to the question: “What does it mean to own your emotions” in my opinion we should consider the following:
- being self-aware
- being able to analyze the core reason of you having a certain emotion
- being able to take responsibility for your emotional response (it is not a case, I am feeling X because you did Y, it is more - I feel X because I made a choice(conscious or unconscious) to feel this way) and more importantly
- being able to re-adjust the emotion if it doesn’t serve you.
I hope you enjoyed this article and found something for you here. As always I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this post.
I wish you to live in a conscious harmony with your emotions, dive into them in the loving and healthy way.
Well done ..
basically . We face the problem of corruption and moral decay
Great post from you
Thanks for sharing..
Wow, you put a lot into this post. I really enjoyed it @sashagenji
Your artwork is beautiful. The one that really appealed to my heart was the underwater one that says stay close to me. So beautiful.
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