Category: Other Emotions

This seems like an easy question.

And, in one sense, it is.  The easy answer is …

“YES, it is okay to feel whatever emotion you experience.”

This is true whether:

1.  You grew up being taught (or learned as an adult) that feelings should be avoided because they are bad, “unladylike”, messy, impure, or dangerous

• • The correctional staff I worked with viewed all emotions as both messy and to be avoided as unnecessary because they “got in the way of” their doing their jobs.
  • The incarcerated young women I worked with viewed emotions as hurtful and  dangerous because they “caused” these young women to hurt others or themselves.
  • The professional women who interacted with me on LinkedIn noted that they were demeaned when they attempted to express their anger in a work setting.

2. You were never taught how to master your feelings so avoiding them was the easiest way to cope.

• • This was my experience.

3.  You tend to do dumb or hurtful things when you experience strong feelings, you blamed the feelings, and you chose to avoid them if you could

4. and so forth.

But, if you are attempting to master your feelings as tools, as I recommend you do in  my two Amazon Best selling books (Emotions as Tools and Beyond Anger Management, there is more to this question.

Indeed, the question has two underlying assumptions that are not obvious..

1. The first assumption is that there are some emotions you might choose to experience and some emotions that you might choose not to experience.

There are two parts to this assumption.

The first part is that there are good and bad feeling and you might want to eliminate the bad ones

The second part is that there are emotions which feel good and others which feel bad and you might want to eliminate the ones that feel bad.

2.  The second assumption is that you have a choice whether you experience some emotions and not others.

Let me address these two underlying assumptions.

The first assumption above is based on the emotional myth that the emotions that feel “good” are the ones you want to keep and the ones that feel “bad”, or hurt, you might want to eliminate.

This myth, while sometimes upheld in articles, is incorrect.

The truth is that all emotions are just tools that provide you with information that you can adaptively utilize to improve your life and your relationships.

There are no “good” or “bad” emotions. There are only emotional tools.

While it is true that some emotions such as happy, enthusiastic, and pride which “feel” good in that they are uplifting and lead to you engaging in an activity with renewed energy and interest and some emotions such as anxiety, sadness, guilt and jealousy which “feel” bad in that  they might lead you to withdraw from an activity or from other people or result in a sense that you or what you have done are inferior and worthy of contempt, how you experience the emotion does not reflect at all on the value of that emotion as a tool.

A car can be used as a life-saving tool to get you to the hospital for needed medical care or, as  we have seen in the news, it  can be used as a murder weapon when it driven into a crowd of people.

We don’t label the car as good or bad although we clearly could put a label on how it was deployed.

As all emotions are a source of valuable information about how you perceive your surroundings and a source of motivation to deal with your surroundings, I  suggest that you welcome all your emotions and learn how to master them as tools so that the information they provide to you can guide you to make better decisions.

So, even if you could eliminate an emotion, which you can’t as I’ll show below, you would not want to.

Let me give you another example.

No one really likes to experience pain and we have a variety of ways to minimize our pain.  But, pain, serves an important purpose in that it alerts us to a situation which requires our attention whether it is stopping what we are doing, getting help and first aid or more rest, and so forth.  My nephew has no sensation below his waist from a congenital condition.  Should there be a “threat” to his lower extremities which was not immediately obvious, he would not know about it.

Emotions provide us with important information and prepare us to deal with that information.  You do, in fact, want all the emotions you can get.

The second assumption shows a lack of understanding how the emotional process works.

The emotional process, which includes the unconscious scanning of your surroundings and the initial emotional reaction, occurs out of your awareness and, therefore, is not controllable by you.

By the way, if you ever need your emotions to alert you to a life-threatening situation which is not  obvious but from which you need to escape NOW, you would want this part of the emotional process to be beyond your control.

As you can see if you download the free PDF of the anger mastery cycle by clicking on the link which will take you to another page on this site, the cycle contains an unconscious and a conscious set of actions.

Once you become aware of your emotion, you can inhibit your initial reaction but you cannot eliminate it.

Controlling your emotional reaction is the basis of anger management courses. It is useful but often inadequate.

The conscious part of the emotional process which includes validating the initial emotional reaction, assessing the match between your initial perception and the situation, and choosing an appropriate response is in your control and constitutes emotional mastery.

The same is true whether you are mastering anger or mastering an emotion such as envy, anxiety, or jealousy.

In my books, I recommend going beyond managing your emotions and learning to master your emotions by choosing an appropriate response.

You can access prior posts on mastering anger and anxiety as well as jealousy and envy by clicking on the index tab above.

If you are registered, I welcome your comments.

Emotions are tools that you can learn to master.

A friend of mine who worked in construction once told me, “You know, you can’t have too many tools.  With the right tools, you can do any job.”

The same is true for emotions as tools.  The more familiar you are with your emotions and the more adept you are at mastering those emotions, the more flexible you are in dealing with any situation you encounter.

In other words, the world should be more emotional (master more emotions) not less (restricting or controlling emotions).

To be clear, emotional mastery includes managing or controlling your arousal level so that you can assess what it going on around you.

The issue, for me, is that controlling one’s emotions is presented as the endpoint not the starting point. And, if the emotion is strong enough, control won’t be considered as an option.

In the absence of emotional mastery, you may only experience anger, assume that there is a threat (see below), and act as if that threat is real.  It may not occur to you that what really is going on is that you are disappointed, hurt, frustrated, or misinformed.  In any of these cases, it will not be anger that is appropriate.

A physical analogy is that, if you only have a hammer, you need to hang a picture and you can only find a screw, you pound the screw into the wall. Yes, it works.  But, a screw driver would be both more efficient and more effective.

Let’s introduce you to your emotional tools.

Emotions and Evolution

Our emotions have evolved over the millennia to both inform us about how we perceive our surroundings and motivate us to take effective action.

These are two independent functions of emotions: inform and motivate.

Emotions as Information

Each emotion provides you with useful (although not always accurate) information about how you perceive the world around you.  This is the message of the emotion.

The message of positive emotions such as glad (or happy) is that you perceive what you are doing as a situation in which you want to stay.

The message of negative emotions is that you perceive some sort of “threat” that could harm you.

Anxiety is an example of a (so-called) negative emotion because it doesn’t feel good when we are anxious.

I got anxious when my wife went into labor with our first child.

Anxiety is a future based emotion, the message of which is that there may be a threat out there which could be harmful.

For me, the message was that my wife needed to be in a hospital before the baby arrived just in case.

Understanding the emotion.

Anxiety is an interesting emotion in that it has two faces and a flip side.

The two faces of anxiety are eustress and distress.

Distress is the most common form of anxiety.  The message of distress is that the possible threat is real, it will harm me, and I must avoid it.

There is always the possibility that the perceived threat isn’t as disastrous as it appears.

Have you ever anticipated a response from another person about some subject only to be surprised when that individual either didn’t react the way you expected or wasn’t even aware that a problem existed.

There is a commercial for Discover credit card in which the customer practices refusing to pay any fees and anticipates a negative response from the credit card “operator”only to find out, when he contacts Discover Cards, that no fees are ever charged.  In other words, the customer in the ad was nervous about, and over-prepared himself to handle, a situation that never existed.

Or, think about the time you may have gotten all nervous about asking someone out on a date, or your boss for a raise, and prepared yourself for all the things that could go wrong only to be surprised when she said “yes”.

Eustress is the other face of anxiety. The message of eustress is that the possible threat is real and that action must be taken to prepare for the threat so that it can be eliminated.

Eustress motivates you to prepare for possible “threats” that do exist.  An example is studying for an upcoming exam so you don’t “fail” it.

In the language of positive and negative emotions, anxiety would be a negative emotion because it feels uncomfortable and anticipation would be a positive emotion because it feels great. Both anxiety and anticipation are adaptive in that they help us improve our lives.

The emotion of anger can be understood in the same way.

As an emotion, anger is very powerful.  It is a tool just like a car that you can learn to master.  The message of anger is that you perceive a threat you believe you can eliminate if you throw enough force at it.

Rage looks like anger on steroids but is more like travelling too fast on an icy road.

Anger can help you make better decisions.  Rage is out of control.

Different, and often less potent, faces of anger include irritation, annoyance, frustration, resentment, exasperated, indignation.

So, let’s go back to construction tools.  If you see a screw  with a “slot” in it, you know you need a Flathead screwdriver.  If  the screw has a “+” on it, you need a Phillips head screw driver.

Similarly, if you are angry, you know that you perceive a threat that you believe you can eliminate if you throw enough force at it.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the threat actually exists, only that you perceive it to exist.

What you do with the anger depends on how familiar you are with anger as a tool. Is it anger or one of anger’s cousins such as annoyance, resentment, etc?

The more emotional tools you have, the more specific you can be in how you use your tools to interact with your surroundings.

Positive and Negative Emotions ( a clarification)

I’ve referred to positive and negative emotions above because that is how most people view emotions. However, I don’t like to label emotions as positive or negative because these labels imply that some emotions (the negative ones) should be eliminated (think negative evaluation at work) and others (the positive ones) should be pursued.

In fact, there are no positive or negative emotions as all emotions are adaptive (useful when understood) as sources of information and motivation. There are, however, emotions that feel good (the  so-called “positive” ones) and  emotions that do not feel good (the so-called “negative” ones).

The labels of positive and negative describe the hedonic quality of the emotion not its value or importance.

Emotions as Motivation

Anxiety, as distress, motivates us to avoid public speaking, leads us to avoid asking someone out on a date, keeps us in situations we don’t like because we might not do any better, and can lead us to procrastinate.

Anxiety as eustress motivated me to take my wife to the hospital and gives my students the motivation they need to study for their exams.

Anger prepares you for battle.

Positive emotions motivate us to continue doing what we are doing.

The main point here is that emotions alert us to our surroundings and motivate us to take action.

Motivation is not the same as coercion.

While our emotions move or lead us in a certain direction, we have a choice about what action we will take.

It is at the intersection between emotions and logic that all the benefits of emotions come out.

Learning to master this interaction could be very useful and is the basis for my recommendation that we need more (well mastered) emotions.

Think about any important decision you’ve recently made.  If the decision required background information to help you draw a conclusion, the more accurate information you had, the better would be the resultant decision.

Two words are important here: more and accurate.

Your emotions give you a lot of information about how you perceive your surroundings.  You may perceive a threat you want to eliminate or prepare for.  Or, you  perceive a situation you want to experience more of.

Emotions inform and motivate.

They do not choose.

The more information you have about a situation in which you find yourself, the more opportunities you have to evaluate and assess the information and choose how you want to respond.

Emotions inform logic.

It is logic that evaluates and chooses a response.

Think about the above discussion regarding anxiety.

My anxiety informed me about a possible future event that needed my attention.  Had my wife been experiencing some mild discomfort, I would not have been anxious. I got anxious and I was motivated to take some action. The action I took was to (safely) run a red light.  When I did this, a cop pulled me over. I informed him about my wife and told him that he could follow me to the hospital (about 3 blocks away) and, once my wife was taken care of, I would comply with whatever decision he chose to make.  By the way, he followed me to the hospital, checked my licence, registration and insurance and wished me good luck.   I would not have gone through the red light or put off the cop without my anxiety.

An alternative approach could have involved my getting angry with the cop for pulling me over and “preventing” me from getting to the hospital.

Had I been angry, my interaction with the cop would have been very different.

With people facing an upcoming interview, a test, or a project about which they have some concern, their anxiety may motivate them to procrastinate and avoid the future event.

Whether we choose to avoid the event or prepare to effectively deal with it is always a choice.

So, given my belief that more relevant information is better than less, I am recommending a world in which we both validate and acknowledge all of our emotions so that we are open to the information they provide us about our surroundings.

More emotions lead to more involvement and possibly more effective interactions with others.

In addition, I am recommending that we more effectively use our logic or intellect to help us choose the best course of action to improve our lives and our relationships.

Using my emotions and my intellect together allows me to inform you that I don’t like what you are doing and to interact with you so that we, together, can come up with a way to resolve whatever issue has come up between us.

I am not saying that more emotions and logical evaluations will end the types of behaviors we have recently witnessed. If a perpetrator of an undeniably bad event is “perfectly sane”and has chosen to both give in to his emotion and use his logic to justify what he is feeling, emotion is not the issue.  His belief systems and  model of the world need to be explored.

For others, however, using their emotions as a source of information to be logically evaluated could lead to better decisions and less negative behavior.  It is these people that I believe would benefit from more emotions.

I welcome your comments.

The words “lonely” and “alone” sound like they are the same but they are different.

Being “alone” refers to your physical status relevant to other people

Feeling “lonely” refers to your psychological status relative to others or to yourself.

You are “alone” when there are no other people around you.

You are “lonely” when you feel disconnected, unsupported, or separated, from the world around you. You are present, psychologically, in the moment but your experience is that something (or someone) is missing.

Please note that I am not talking about  being “dissociated” from the world.  Dissociation is a clinical symptom which implies that you have lost contact with the real world.  You may be in the world physically but you are not there psychologically.

You may have noticed that there are times when you just want to be left alone.  You need the solitude to recharge your psychological batteries, you need time to think about or process something that has happened to you, or you just want to enjoy some quiet solitude. For example, you might want to be left alone with your thoughts to contemplate a beautiful sunset or the quiet solitude of a forest.

You aren’t necessarily being antisocial although those around you may interpret what you are doing as antisocial.  You may, however, be choosing to be anti-social.

To be “antisocial” is to reject the idea that interacting with others is either necessary or important. Unless it is expedient, you have no desire to spend time with, and you choose to avoid being around, other people.

To be “anti-social” is to say that you want to be away from others for the moment.  You are choosing to be with yourself and not with others.

In other words, you want to be alone, for now.

When you are “alone”, you are very comfortable with your own company.  You are okay with being you in your own skin.

Being lonely is a different state of being.

You can be lonely in a crowd of people.

There are two different elements to being lonely.

1. You can be lonely if you are in a situation in which you do not feel a connection to the people around you.  You miss being around someone you feel close to or supported by.  You are lacking a specific connection and feel isolated or lonely.
2.  You may feel lonely when you are not comfortable with yourself, your inner thoughts or your sense of who you are psychologically. In this case, being lonely can be thought of as being without yourself. If this is the case, you will find that you must constantly be around someone in order to feel that every thing is okay.

If description #1 applies to you, my suggestion is to accept (validate) your feeling but do not give in to it and get through the situation in which you find yourself.  When you do this, you will notice that the feeling becomes less important and relevant.  This is what you want.  Once you have left environment in which you were feeling lonely, you can move on if the feeling subsides or reconnect with that special someone.

If description#2 applies to you, then you might want to get some professional help in order to explore your self-image, your self-worth, and your self-esteem.  The danger of #2 is that you can become too dependent on others or be seen as too needy.  Should this happen, others might push you away.

I welcome your comments.

This is a question that I was asked on Quora.com.  I thought  some of you might be interested in the issues this question raises.

Most of the answers that were given by others on Quora tended to focus on the reality that we all make mistakes and need to learn to accept that.

While this is a good response to this question, I, as an expert on emotions with two Amazon bestselling books, Emotions as Tools and Beyond Anger Management, would offer a bit different perspective.

The above question uses the word “fear” as it is commonly used i.e. “fear of being wrong” and “fear of failure”.

Unfortunately, both of these uses are incorrect because the emotion the writer is really referring to is anxiety.

I should mention that, for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t really matter which word you use. However, when you understand the difference between anxiety and fear, you enable yourself to master both emotions and the suggestions I make below will make more sense to you.

Fear is an in-the-moment emotion, the message of which is that you are perceiving a threat that will “kill” you unless you get out of that situation. Fear is the hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck raising up. The best response to fear is to get out of the situation. Too often, women, and sometimes men, experience fear but ignore it to their own peril. An example is when your feelings tell you the guy standing in the elevator is bad news eventhough he looks fine and has done nothing wrong. While you might be wrong about him, trust your feelings and take the next elevator.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is a future based emotion the message of which is that there might be a threat that might hurt me.

Notice in the question that the writer is concerned about what might happen if, at some future date, he (or she) is wrong or experiences “failure”. Both are future possibilities. If the writer were wrong or had failed when they were writing the question, they would have asked a different question.

So, let’s address the question.

The antidote to anxiety (fear of being wrong) is to ask two basic questions about what might happen in the future.

The first and most important question is this: If the worst possible outcome happens to me (however you define “worst” and “being wrong”), can I survive (however you choose to define “survive”) it?

If the answer is “I won’t like it but I could survive it”, then you no longer have to dwell on the issue and can move on to the second question.

By the way, there are very few situations in which you would not “survive” if you made a mistake. So, the answer to question #1 will usually be yes. Now, if you are talking about being wrong about whether or not the mushroom you are about to eat is poisonous or not, or whether you have chosen the right rope to repel down the side of a mountain, well it will be in your best interest to get more information before you make a decision.

Whether you could survive the future or not, question #2 becomes your next focus.

Question #2 is: What do I need to do, learn, or make happen in order to reduce the possibility of “being wrong” or “failing”.

I need to explain that there are two types of anxiety. The first is called distress and the second is called eustress.

The emotions of guilt and shame are often confused and I devoted an entire chapter to these emotions in my first Amazon Best Seller Emotions as Tools: Control Your Life not Your Feelings.

While different from each other as we discuss below, both of these feelings are elicited when an action is taken that is viewed as

• wrong,
• violating some value, or
• hurting another person.

The Emotions as Tools Model notes that all emotions are tools which help us understand how we perceive what is happening to us and which can, with practice, be mastered to help us interact with our surroundings in a more adaptive manner.

A quick overview

The message of guilt is that “I have done something wrong.”

The message of shame is that “There is something wrong with me.”

The bigger picture

Guilt

As a tool, the emotion of guilt informs us that we have violated a standard of behavior.  This standard can be internal and based on our own values or an external standard of behavior.

In other words, you feel guilty when you realize you have done something wrong. This is an error of commission.

You might also experience guilt if you failed to take some action you reasonably could have been expected to do.  This is an error of omission.

Both of these two cases are included in the message of guilt.

This is what a court is saying when you are found “guilty”of an offense. Because you did something or you were negligent and failed to take action, you will be punished.

As a motivator, the emotion of guilt moves us in the direction of taking responsibility for and taking action to correct the “wrong” that we have done.

In this sense, guilt is an adaptive emotion which facilitates social interaction.

Let’s look at the phrase… “You are making me feel guilty.”.

You might say this if someone is talking to you about something you have done, or something you might not have done, that they might view as inappropriate.

While no one can make you feel anything, the point of what they are saying to you is that you need to take a look at what you did, take personal responsibility for it, do what you need to do to make it right, and learn from your actions so that you do not do it again.

Shame

While all emotions are adaptive in that we can learn from them, master them and develop psychologically, shame is an emotion that…

• can lead to destructive outcomes,
• is often unwittingly elicited, and
• should probably be avoided or replaced by other feelings under most circumstances

Shame implies self-repudiation.  The message of shame is: “There is something wrong with me.”

We know from history that if an individual violated cultural norms, he (or she) might be publicly shamed, branded, or even excommunicated.  The message was that not only was the behavior unacceptable but the individual was tainted.

I will give you two examples of shame.

Many of the young women I worked with in the Department of Corrections-Juvenile Division had committed some heinous crimes.  Based on their crimes, they experienced intense shame.  They had concluded that, based on their crimes, they were damaged beyond repair.  For most of these young women, this was not true.  While horrific, their crimes could often be understood in terms of situational conditions which led to the crime.  They were still responsible for their actions and were punished for what they did. But, and this is critical, I had to help them realize that while their actions were “monstrous” they were not monsters.  I had to help them move past shame or they would not grow psychologically.

A second, and more common example that you might hear in a park, in a restaurant, or, possibly, your own home is a parent saying to their child in reacting to some undesirable behavior, “You are a bad boy (or girl). What is wrong with you?”

While I am not suggesting that if you have ever said this to your child, you done irreparable damage.  No, you have not.  I even have said it, in anger, once or twice.  Well, maybe it just slipped out?

What I am saying is that you should carefully think about what your child is hearing you say.  This is not always the same as the words you are using.

As a humorous example, think about the next time you see an acquaintance and ask, “How’s it going?” The intent of your words is usually to acknowledge the other person and maybe, or maybe not, start a conversation.  The typical expected response is, “Fine, and you?”

But, let’s suppose the response you get is, “I’m glad you asked.”  And they proceed to tell you everything that has happened to them. TMI.  They have heard you asking them to fill you in on all the intimate details of their life.  Same words on your part but the message they received is very different.

If you react to your child’s inappropriate behavior by focusing on the child, you may be communicating to them that they are somehow damaged.  The emotion they may begin to embrace is shame.

If your goal is to eliminate the unwanted behavior, then that needs to be the focus of your interaction with the child.

When someone has done something wrong, guilt is an appropriate and adaptive emotion which can, and does, motivate that person to correct the injustice they have committed.

Shame, on the other hand, is an emotion that is difficult to justify, often hard to overcome if it is deeply embraced, and insidious in its potential effects on the self-image of the person who feels damaged,or irreparably flawed.

I welcome your comments.