I spent the last hour of my work day dodging wooden blocks and Legos. They were being hurled at me and any other adult in the room by a small child with surprisingly good aim. He was dressed neatly, dark hair in place, mouth opened slightly to show his snaggle-teeth growing in place where his baby teeth had just been. He’s been through a lot in his short life – major traumas back-to-back that most adults haven’t even experienced. Watching, all I could think of was how angry, hurt, and unsafe he must feel to go to these lengths to keep people away and (in his eyes) protect himself.
The irony was that I, too, had just had my own moment of anger and attempts to release my rage. Ducking the block thrown at me, I realized that I was watching this child physically act out my own inner struggle.
I’ve been experiencing some pretty intense emotions for the past six months. Most recently, anger has been a frequent guest. Most emotions come and go, and I expected that these feelings would fade away too. But anger kept returning in one form or another….I’m angry about my mom being sick, angry about the things she may not be able to experience in the future, angry at this person, angry at another person, angry about different situations at work. Each time I would turn to what I preach: Feel the emotion and release it. But…I couldn’t release it. It kept popping back up and getting worse and worse.
As often happens, the information I needed just so happened to pop up….I read something that said before the behavior there came an emotion; before the emotion there came a need. I learned a very valuable lesson with this tidbit: it’s not always enough to simply feel an emotion and release it. Our emotions are messengers of a bigger problem. If something keeps popping up, there is a need behind it. Only when I asked myself what I was needing did I realize why I’ve been angry: I don’t feel in control of my life anymore. All these things are happening that I don’t like and that I don’t want and I’m powerless to stop it. That little boy was a mirror for me. Two human beings feeling angry about the things going on in their lives they have no control over.
Most of the time we allow our emotions to stop us from moving forward – we feel their intensity and physiological effects and stop there. Image if you were to simply allow yourself to feel the emotion…to allow the “wave” to pass through your body until calm returns. You can then move forward into analyzing and problem solving. What freedom to know that emotions are simply trying to tell us something instead of stopping us entirely!
While it’s easy to slap the label “angry” or “sad” (or whatever) on any given situation, there’s a lot more complex emotions going on than simply being one emotion. Anger, sadness, happiness, etc. are all what are called umbrella emotions – there’s hundreds of feelings that we experience under them, and hundreds of words to describe them. To really know what’s going on with us, we have to be able to name them, work out what they’re trying to tell us, and get to the core of what we need. Next time you have an emotion that keeps popping up, ask yourself the following questions:
- What am I feeling?
- Why am I feeling ____________?
- What is this emotion trying to tell me?
- Is this an umbrella emotion? If so, what other words can I use to describe how I’m feeling?
- What do I need in order to release this emotion?
- What is the core need behind what I’m feeling?
- What steps can I take to resolve this need?
To sum it all up: The emotions we feel are trying to tell us messages. Once we learn how to read and understand what those messages are, the quicker and more able we are to heal and move on. Allow the physical and psychological respond to the emotion fade…just sit with it…breathe through it, and when it passes ask what the emotions are trying to tell you.
Unbound Light 