In my last post, I noted the 5 steps of mastering emotions…
Mastering your emotions involves five steps.
- self-awareness
- manage your own arousal
- understand the message of each emotion
- assess the match between your emotion and the situation in which you find yourself
- choose an adaptive response
In a recent article in the February 2024 issue of Psychology Today entitled To Manage Overload, Think More Flexibly by Ellie Xu and Darby Saxbe, Ph.D., the authors discussed the concept of emotion regulation flexibility.
Prior to this article, I had not encountered the concept although the idea of emotion regulation flexibility is very consistent with the emotional mastery process as you will see.
The concept of flexibility (in the context of mastering your emotions) adds additional understanding to steps 4 and 5 of the emotional mastery process.
Being flexible in mastering your emotions means that you are..
- open to the possibility that you might be misinterpreting what is going on in your situation. This is Step #4 and involves perception and self-awareness.
and
- open to and able to implement a variety of strategies which will adaptively deal with and manage the situation in which you find yourself. This is Step #5 and involves both knowledge and capability.
So, Step #4, which calls upon you to assess the match between the emotion you are experiencing and your situation, gives you the opportunity to determine the appropriateness of the emotion.
An emotion is appropriate when it accurately reflects what is actually happening in your situation.
An emotion is inappropriate to the extent that it reflects what you are experiencing but not what is happening. In other words, you have misperceived the other person, their actions, or the situation.
Notice that I did not say validity.
The reason for this is that I believe ALL emotions are valid in that they …
a. are representative of how you are perceiving your situation
b .they communicate to you information you can use to decide how you want to act
c. they can be assessed to determine the extent to which they accurately match what is happening to you and your initial perception of your situation.
In my last post, I listed the questions you need to ask in order to make as assessment of the appropriateness of the emotion. In order for you to even ask these questions, you have to accept the possibility that you might be wrong.
It is important to note that the focus of assessment also includes the possibility that you are correct in your assessment.
That being said, viewing yourself as wrong is often difficult especially if you are emotionally aroused and your ego is invested in the situation.
This is why Step #2 is so critical and why you have to practice the emotional mastery process before you find yourself in an emotionally aroused, high intensity, potentially precarious situation.
It is why you rehearse your very important speech before you get up in front of your influential audience. Master the skill sets before you need to implement them.
Again, I am focussing here on remaining flexible in mastering your emotions so that you have access to and can implement the strategies your emotions are communicating to you that may be necessary to adaptively deal with the situation in which you find yourself.
Once you have successfully completed Step #4 and assessed the appropriateness of the emotion you initially experienced, you will move on to Step#5 which involves choosing an adaptive response.
In my last post, I noted that if your emotion did not match your situation, you could seek out new information which would allow you to change your perception and, subsequently, your emotion. This involves reappraising the the situation.
Reappraisal is an emotion-focussed strategy and, can be very effective.
Another emotion-focussed strategy which I did not mention in my last post but have discussed in other posts is suppression.
Suppression involves purposefully minimizing the outward display of the emotion. Hence, you are still experiencing the emotion but only you know it.
When I wrote my second book Beyond Anger Management I included a chapter on Professional Women and Anger and addressed the issue, which existed then and exists now, that women, when they express appropriate anger, are often maligned, negatively labelled or punished. I suggested a passive approach in which they did not express their anger but used the energy of the anger to develop an intervention which would correct the situation but not subject them to unwanted negative consequences. I did not label it as such at the time but I was describing the process of emotional suppression. In this situation, suppression is adaptive.
If, however, you are suppressing an emotion because you do not understand the emotion or are attempting to avoid it, this may involve repression or denial and could be maladaptive.
Being flexible in mastering your emotions might involve a somewhat different approach: a strategy aimed at the situation.
In this case, you decide that your emotion is appropriate, you are in a situation which is a “threat” and that change is needed. You continue to honor the situation and the emotion which drew your attention to that situation and you seek to change the situation to eliminate the threat.
Examples of actions you might take include avoidance in which you do not put yourself in the threatening situation (You turn down the date or offer.), you escape the situation (You leave.), or you alter the situation (You compromise or make a deal and, thereby, change the nature of the situation.).
Setting a personal goal of Maintaining your emotional flexibility means…
- that you are aware of, and preemptively practice the 5 steps of emotional mastery and
- that you are sufficiently self-aware and self-secure so that you are open to the possibility that you might be wrong in your assessment of your situation and also that you can accept the possibility that you might be correct in your assessment despite input from others to the contrary.
- that you have a toolbox of available for dealing with different situations so that you can use the correct tool to master the situation and facilitate an adaptive resolution of the conflict, stressor, or threat that your emotions have alerted you to and prepared you to deal with.