Was gonna keep this a tag rant but itâs lengthy and complicated enough that Iâll just type it out properly fuck it. This is less a formal psychology tool and more a personal interpretation and system based on those things, but this feels like the right place to pitch in a system I use both for myself and for supporting others with their emotional regulation that I think is really constructive.
I think itâs really important to approach how to handle your feelings from the starting foundation that our emotions are not the discrete, singular phenomena we call them. We say we feel sad, happy, relaxed, or angry, but these names are useful simplifications to communicate things that are much more complex. Our emotions are a continual vital function of our bodies and brains, just the same as our heart rate or blood sugar and such, what we speak about with individual names is breaking up the different relative experiences of our nonstop, dynamic chemical and psychological equilibrium. I make it a point to emphasize something complex like this bc it conveys a lot of important things about how to care for your needs and disrupts some harmful common ideas and norms all at once.
First, your feelings are as constant, dynamic, and involuntary as any other autonomic process of your body. You donât control them by force of will alone, and you canât just turn them off, nor should you. Feelings donât carry fault, you donât make them work the way that they do and no one can be blamed simply for having them, theyâre a part of how you work even when they hurt and thatâs not something anybody deserves to be judged or punished for. Theyâre also important tools adapted to help you, even the negative ones, bad emotions arenât bad for you to feel you need them for the same reason your body needs to feel physical pain, it indicates to you that something is wrong and you have a need that needs to be addressed. Trying too hard to make bad emotions just disappear can end up digging you into habits that only hurt you in the long run and donât ultimately make the issue better, unmet needs will still be there when youâre not looking, so you can instead learn to think of managing your emotions as learning to answer what theyâre asking for. I use the language of caring for your feelings rather than dealing with them for that reason, theyâre something you can respond to constructively and theyâre part of you, not a burden.
Second, feelings are indeed pretty unreliable a lot of the time, thatâs just the same as any other aspect of our organic and fallible bodies and minds. The different processes of our brains, be they emotions, recall of memories and information, conscious reasoning, unconscious biases, or executive functions, are all imperfect and will fail plenty of the time on their own, because they rely on one another to check and balance each others limitations. Your emotions are important, and dismissing them outright to excess can do you a lot of harm, but itâs also perfectly ok to conclude sometimes based on your understanding of a situation and your own and others needs that your feelings are telling you something you shouldnât listen to. We get angry at people over little things, we sometimes feel hurt by interpreting things in a way we know wasnât intended or isnât really being said, we judge quickly and harshly and have to correct for our own biases, none of that is a bad thing. âI donât need to listen to thisâ does not mean âI shouldnât have felt this way in the first placeâ, you canât really help that fact and nothing good comes of blame that doesnât help to change voluntary actions. Itâs ok to realize when your feelings are telling you one thing but coming from a very different place, youâre not doing anything wrong there and thatâs still a need that you can learn to address without acting on something thatâll hurt you or punishing yourself for what you feel, thereâs no such thing as a thought crime.
Finally, your feelings are astronomically more complex than can really be put into words, and are at no point ever static. Nothing in the human brain is ever static, we donât load things into memory or have a switch to turn on or off for our feelings, what happens inside us are staggeringly complex electrical and chemical processes with no start and no end, only changes in its workings, and that can be really good to keep in mind. Emotions arenât just staying the same no matter how much they may feel that way, even the suffocating constant ones that feel like they never end, because thatâs not just one single phenomena itâs a state that ebbs and flows and is always responding to whatâs happening around and inside you. That can be a really important answer to asking âwhatâs the point?â when things are bad, because how bad or what kind of bad always matters and little victories and ways to shift that state in a better direction still have value even if they donât fix everything at once. Be patient with yourself, the dynamic state of yourself doesnât reform completely in a day, but it IS always receptive to change. Itâs also good to bear this in mind when you struggle to communicate your emotions, feelings have a coastline effect, there is no degree of magnification where you no longer have new information to find. It can feel like overwhelming emotional states are just what they are and thereâs no way to encompass that in a sentence, but you donât need to get across everything all at once, you can start broad and simple and then dig deeper layer by layer. Whatâs brought up these emotions at this moment, what makes those influencing factors elicit the feelings they do, what other emotions and thoughts have this emotional state been bringing up for you, how does this emotional state shape how you behave and how you look at new things in the moment?
This isnât any sort of formally used system in therapeutic applications nor is it totally comprehensive, but this perspective has been in my experience w myself and others really helpful in a lot of ways, so I wanted to share it here for people to see. Your feelings are needs that deserve care at the end of the day, and you can learn how to approach that in the specific way that works for you, nurture and care for yourself and be kind. Everyone deserves that much, and everyone includes you whether thatâs easy to believe or not.
amandla
titsay
kianamaiart
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
