The Myth Of "negative" Emotions

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

After the eleventh time, when I heard the phrase “… I feel negative emotions” from my colleague, a practical psychologist, and the day before from a teacher with almost twenty years of experience in teaching, my heart could not stand it and my hand trembled. As a consequence, this article was born. So.

The myth about "negative" emotions

The very word "emotion" (from Lat. Emoveo - shock, excite) means a subjective evaluative attitude to situations that have happened or may happen. Thus, emotions signal to us whether our needs are being met here and now. Every second, a person can have a variety of needs. How often do we feel annoyance, disappointment, anger or shame (and sometimes all together) if our (brilliant!)) Proposal does not meet with approval. Conversely, if our decision is taken up by everyone and accepted, we are more likely to feel pride and satisfaction. “This is how our need for acceptance is finally realized.

Emotions are a complex concept, they are accompanied, or rather, determine the processes occurring in the nervous, endocrine, respiratory, digestive and other systems of the body.

Emotions and feelings immediately appear on the face with a grimace of resentment or joy, anger or admiration as indicators of our state of mind at a given moment in time. And since people immediately "grasp" non-verbal signals such as facial expressions and gestures, it is safe to say that emotions are the easiest way for people to communicate with each other. By reading the information, we can guess with great confidence what exactly our interlocutor is experiencing and act accordingly.

Emotions are a kind of energy that the body needs to realize what it needs right here and now. And energy has no plus or minus sign. Therefore, it is wrong to talk about "positive" or "negative" emotions. It is important to listen to yourself: what am I experiencing now ?, adding to this the signals coming from the senses (and there are much more than five senses, not in the way we were once taught). - It's about sensations - the body never deceives. And then, listening to the feelings and sensations (what am I experiencing and feeling now?), It is easy to understand what I really want, what I need right now. However, in society there is still a kind of unspoken prohibition on the expression of emotions. It is believed that anger, rage, resentment can harm others. - It's a delusion. The manifested emotions themselves are only signals of an unmet need. Only an act of aggression can harm, when a person does not know how or does not want to cope with his feelings that have burst out. I know people who are so afraid of strong manifestations of feelings in themselves that they wished to "turn off" such "alarm". Avoiding worry and pain. But you have to pay for everything.

It is impossible to “turn off” some emotions and leave others “on” without consequences for the psyche. I also note that emotional dullness or a state of "frozenness" is one of the signs of a traumatic situation experienced. When emotions are dulled and the threshold of bodily sensations is lowered, a person simply becomes “blind”, losing contact with himself - with his needs, with life, with all its manifestations.

How does a person come to this emotional frozenness? Often parental prescriptions clearly regulate the behavior of children: I mean the notorious "Boys don't cry" or "How dare you be offended by your mother?"

By denying children their feelings, aren't parents denying them the right to be themselves and simply live their own lives?

Can such people be happy, growing up into alexithymic (not understanding their feelings, and therefore their essence and their "I") adults?

But the task of regulating the manifestation of one's feelings is easier to solve. You can always explain to the child, firstly, what kind of feeling he is experiencing now, calling him ("you are now angry"), and secondly, that it is normal to experience this feeling, like everyone else; moreover, more often it is anger that a person experiences when he violates his boundaries.

Thirdly, it is important to expand the child's behavioral menu, demonstrating what you can do if you feel anger: do not take it out in public or on yourself, transferring, for example, swinging the child's hand to an inanimate object, slapping his hand on the table, for example, without extinguishing the nervous impulse. At the same time, withstanding the strong emotions of the child, without turning to cry.

So we make it clear that strong emotions do not destroy, do not overwhelm and draw the line between "I" and "my emotions".

This is how we show that they are not the same thing.

Namely, the fear of being absorbed by a strong emotion scares children. Games aimed at channeling aggression - such as pillow fights - or legalizing complex emotions, are very useful, since feelings cannot be destructive - only behavior can be destructive.

One of these games is Edible Names. During the fear reaction, for example, a lot of energy is released, solely in order to run away faster, jump further or hit harder - these are entirely physiological processes, and physiological processes cannot be called "bad" or even evaluated at all. (Meanwhile, the emotion of fear is still considered harmful and they want to get rid of fear.)

Everything that is natural is necessary and has the right to be. Therefore, it is important not to hold back tears, for example. - This is how the nerve impulse is released, so the emotion does not "get stuck" in the body. Otherwise, anger (resentment, anger, fear …) as an unacceptable emotion will be suppressed, and irritation will unconsciously accumulate. Unreleased emotions, accumulating, can subsequently lead to somatoform disorders (wandering pains in different parts of the body) and even to psychosomatics: the spectrum is wide - from neurodermatitis to bronchial asthma. As a result, people can suffer from anxiety spectrum diseases - from panic attacks, phobias to PTSD or dissociative disorders.

Because the anxiety - nothing more than stopped arousal … How long will the dam withstand under the raging pressure of water? (remember that emotions are energy). Someday she will break through. Therefore, it is important to teach children to talk about their difficult feelings at once, only noticing them, at least to themselves, releasing the accumulated immediately. In diaries, in conversations with the closest people, in letters.

There are more than 100 trillion nerve cells in the brain that form neural connections among themselves - our established habits. Each of us has our own map of the world, which corresponds to information received from parents and from the outside - and then the nerve impulse quickly passes along the "trodden path". Unused pathways disappear over time - synaptic connections die off.

The brain is a self-adjusting and plastic system that reacts to experience and forms new neural connections along a different route. Because connections are created either through repeated repetition, or instantly under the influence of a strong emotion. Therefore, it is so important to lay other neural pathways, showing children new patterns of behavior, because children imitate their parents - this is how any learning happens in childhood. In society, there are still many attitudes and myths that regulate behavior and associated with this, so it is so important to "raise" myths to the "surface", directly and openly speaking about important things.