Your Emotions Are Yelling Again
Emotions are like major characters in a favorite book or movie–they can be complex and everchanging. Emotions respond to events, mysteries, people, and memories around them. In fact, emotions are usually in dialogue with other, under-the-surface emotions. Often, we like to label them as “flat characters” or as having only maladaptive (not beneficial) or adaptive (beneficial) qualities. The commonly labeled “maladaptive” emotions–sadness, anxiety, or anger, to name a few–seem to get a bad reputation. In reality, emotions move on a spectrum from “helpful communication” to “debilitating yelling” on a day-to-day basis, depending on our ability to listen and feel them.
For one, sadness, on one end of the spectrum, can communicate a broken boundary, a disconnect, a loss, or an unmet need. For example, when I point to the sky while standing next to my partner, pointing out how a cloud looks like a squirrel, sadness enters when I look down to find their eyes glued to a phone screen. Sadness is communicating my desire for connection being denied. As an eight-year-old child, when I told my brother not to borrow my stuffed animal without asking first and to have him take it anyway and lose it when I wasn’t home, sadness entered to communicate a loss had happened due to a broken boundary. These types of sadness are simple road signs saying “detour” or “unmet needs ahead,” helping me to understand myself better, communicate my feelings with others, or set clearer boundaries.
If I do not listen to sadness’s soft but real communications when they show up daily, they can usually transform into louder, more intensified energies. For example, anger might eventually show up if I don’t softly communicate my sadness when my partner doesn’t turn toward me when I make a bid for connection. Instead of communicating with sadness, which would sound
like, “Hey, when I ask you to look at the squirrel cloud and you don’t look up but instead just continue looking at your phone, the story I create is you don’t care about what I find beautiful and interesting, and that makes me sad,” while anger will sound like: “you’re always on your phone, ugh!” said with eyes pinned at the back of my head. Both emotions are communicating. However, depending on the context, communicating with one emotion usually invites connection and others will invite disconnection. Notice how anger usually is the tip of the iceberg of a deeper, repressed sadness or fear hidden underneath.
In another instance, if I do not listen and allow the sadness to move through my body in one way or another (e.g., crying, communicating, feeling, breathing it in and out, etc.), what once would be considered a soft sadness can eventually feel like a dark cloud entering a bedroom, magnetizing me deeper into a mattress. In some instances, heavy depression can be the result
of unexamined or uncommunicated sadness.
The context of emotions is key to understanding them. They are complex. They are not always a math equation where 1 + 1 = 2, but they can show patterns of complexity. Examine each emotion when they show up. Notice what they may be communicating. Notice when they are protecting. Notice when they become extreme in their intensity, yelling at you to be heard. There is no hierarchy of emotions; none better than others. Permit yourself not to expect to be happy or joyful all the time. Normalize the existence of all emotions–for all emotions are here to communicate something about ourselves. They are trying to be heard. So, hear them.
If you want help better understanding what your emotions may be saying in the array of life’s contexts and learning how to communicate with them within yourself and outwardly to others, contact us today to schedule an appointment with one of our knowledgeable therapists on our team.
