3 Steps To Achieve Emotional Wisdom
What do we do when an emotion that we consider negative surfaces in us? Feeling anger, tension, or anger provokes in us an instinctive reaction of wanting to control what we feel. However, it is not uncommon for us to achieve the opposite. Thus, being aware of this and other emotional gears will allow us to enter a joyful path of emotional wisdom.
Thanks to emotional wisdom we will be able to better manage our emotions, avoiding unnecessarily exploding at inappropriate times and preventing, at times, we feel drowned by all those sensations that swarm inside us. What butterflies for the one who falls in love.
1. Don’t encapsulate your emotions
What did they tell you when you were little? Surely you recognize phrases like these: “stop crying”, “a child your age would not have those tantrums”, “look what an ugly face you have when you get angry” … All these comments, apparently innocent by parents, have done that you have educated yourself to repress your emotions.
In addition to all this, you have grown up under different influences that have instilled in you that men do not cry or that women are too sensitive. These types of beliefs, among many others, have caused you to unintentionally dissociate your expression from the emotions you feel.
It is important to know when to unleash what you feel. For example, if you find yourself in the middle of a very important negotiation, venting your anger or crying out of control will not be the best thing for the future of the agreement. However, this does not imply that you cannot vent later or that you can express your anger without jeopardizing the negotiation.
You can express your emotions appropriately. If you find something annoying, violent, you have gotten angry or you disagree about something, you can say it! With phrases such as “what you told me has hurt”, you can release a little of that emotion that has invaded you and provide valuable information to the other, who will understand: “I should not go that way”.
2. Don’t always keep the same control
Sometimes, it’s not just that you don’t express your emotions with others, but that you try to control them yourself when there’s nothing wrong with them rushing. I mean, have you ever tried to hold back crying, even when you were home alone? If so, you are trying to curb an emotion that would be better off free.
All that repression of emotions that we have talked about in the previous point has given rise to what can be called “swallowing emotions”, something that emotional wisdom does not conceive. The more you swallow, the more they accumulate and sooner or later they will end up coming out. The result of that digestion, moreover, is usually a great disaster.
Surely you know someone, perhaps it is yourself, who at certain times explodes (out of himself) in inappropriate situations and who does not deserve that level of excessive aggressiveness, anger or sadness that the person presents. This occurs because you have been storing and swallowing many emotions that have now overflowed the glass.
A single trigger can cause an overflow of all this that you were trying to control inside yourself, but which ironically is uncontrollable. You are hurting yourself, you suffer by becoming a storage of emotions that do not make you feel good. It is the moment to release them at the moment they require.
3. No matter how human emotions are, you also have to learn to deal with them
Emotional wisdom not only proposes that you stop imprisoning your emotions, but it puts the focus on something that is very important: learning how to do it. Every emotion brings something, a teaching that you need to know how to interpret well before it goes away. In fact, once we have listened to them and made ourselves ready to act, emotions often dissolve to energize our performances.
Thus, it is not about treating them as enemies or placing them on the other side of the ring. If we conceive them in this way, the most logical thing is that they play this role. But not because they have it, but because we have given it to them. Ultimately, they will do what we expect of them. If we expect anger to ruin a party for us, rest assured it will.
On the other hand, an ignored emotion may lower its intensity, but by not having been the result we run the risk of it reappearing at any moment . Stronger, more invasive and when we are less weak… and what is more important, without having learned anything.
When we are years trying to control and imprison what we feel, in the end our body begins to give warning signals that something is not right, that is, it somatizes the emotions. Let’s not do this harm to ourselves, let’s stop suffering and start expressing what we feel when our emotions demand it. We will feel much better.
Images courtesy of Yassher Almajed
