3 Most Common Mistakes When Dealing With Emotions

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

Recently, my colleagues and I have been actively discussing mindfulness on the site. For some, the understanding of mindfulness comes in the guise of meditation, while others consider mindfulness as a section of cognitive-behavioral therapy. There are people who pass the technique of awareness through the prism of psychoanalysis and personal development.

In this article, I propose to analyze the most common mistakes that lie in wait for a person on the way to work with their emotions. All these mistakes have a destructive effect on the personality and, with repeated use, can cripple the psyche more than heal.

1. Denial of emotions. When we persuade ourselves NOT to feel this or that, mental dialogue is involved in the process of denial. Sometimes there is an excessive rationalization of the desired emotion: they say, I feel disappointment in a man, but no, no, no, this man has always behaved meanly, so he is not worthy of my love, and it makes no sense to feel disappointment.

The difficulty lies in the fact that disappointment does take place. During denial, a person does not know or forgets that emotion manifests itself not only in the form of a “head rattle”, but also as a physiological response, clearly localized in our body. The basics of biopsychology say that manifestations of emotions are concentrated in specific areas of our body - hence in yoga there are attachments of a certain kind of emotions to chakras located in a vertical line in the human body.

2. Excessive analysis. If you are familiar with psychology and have worked on problems by identifying the source of trauma (“we all come from childhood”), it’s natural for you to track emotional states up to the moment when the emotion first visited you. The paradox is that emotions are an ancient mechanism that has evolved in humans to ensure quality survival.

Tracking an emotion to its eventual source in a person's life history DOES NOT PREVENT the emergence of this emotion in the future!

Very often, understanding the trauma does not mean getting rid of the unpleasant emotion. A person can continue to feel it throughout his life for a number of reasons and try to run an analysis in his thoughts every time.

The downside is that mental analysis of a situation takes a lot of energy from a person. You've probably heard that in Buddhist monasteries monks sleep only four hours a day? This is not due to the fact that they are woken up by force, and then they are sleepy and rumpled to walk to douche and jog. The reason is that monks spend most of their lives in a state of thoughtlessness. They learn to turn their mind on only for the necessary tasks and do not waste their mental energy in anxiety and worry.

Residents of a metropolis feel an acute lack of sleep because the lion's share of our vital energy is tied up in order to crush water in a mortar: in other words, an unproductive, scattered, unconcentrated thought process exhausts us no worse than hauling bricks at a construction site. Excessive analysis only adds fuel to the fire of our inner voice, forcing it to spill, chat and waste creative energy.

3. An attempt to replace a negative emotion with a positive one. This is the most insidious mistake of the three. With the development of positive psychology, we learn more and more about the benefits of positive emotions, about their role in our creative impulses, about their incredible contributions in the process of making good decisions. Without understanding the mechanism of work and the manifestation of human emotions, we decide that the easiest way to get rid of anxiety, irritation, jealousy, anxiety and their negative companions is to make ourselves feel a good emotion while the mind and body dictate otherwise.

The way is painful to those that negative emotion does not disappear, but is deposited in the closet. Sitting in a closet for many years, she pumps up her muscles, gathers her courage, builds up her strength to attack and bombards us at the moment when we are most vulnerable.

A good method of working with negative emotions was invented by NLP scholars: a person devotes 20 minutes a day to listening to a certain music or watching a certain scene, deliberately fostering a state of comfort and joy that he ties to music or a stage. After a few months, a person practicing such a technique gains the ability to enter a state of comfort by listening to this track or imagining a scene with which he has been working all this time. Thus, a person learns to evoke certain emotions in himself through a volitional effort, avoiding energy-consuming rationalization or an analyzing dialogue that leads to a dead end.

Write in the comments what mistakes you have noticed when working with emotions in working with clients. If you want to cope with your own emotions, write what is difficult for you. Let's support each other and sort it all out together!

With love and care, Lilia Cardenas