Recovery and Restoration

This begins the process of restoring our balance, reducing the impact of all those stresses on us, getting us centered into our deep-heart values, and enlisting the positive power of our emotions so we can move forward toward making constructive change in the world without betraying our own identity.

Redeeming our Emotional Resources

Emotions: Are They Friend or Foe?

In the face of a lot of stress-management writings, Eastern ideas about non-attachment and New Age dogmas, I need to address the power and value of our emotions. Plus, I’ve implied that our emotional reactions might be problems. They can be – if not allowed to do their job. Our emotions have been betrayed by some of the things we’ve been taught. One of these betrayals is that some emotions are blessed as being positive and others are judged to be negative. We’ve even been told by one writer that there are only two emotions – love and fear – regardless of the wide spectrum of emotional responses that we all experience.

Another potential pitfall is the teaching that we should only attend to positive, elevated emotions, and not give attention where we don’t want energy to flow. Sometimes this works, but it is only a partial truth. Of course, we have a choice whether to feed an emotion by fixating on it and replaying the memories that created it, but it is fruitless to deny what is already there. We must distinguish between suppressing an existing emotion, on the one hand, and re-generating emotions we don’t want on the other.

Our emotional system is just not as simple as some would like us to believe, and I’d like to present what I think is a more useful perspective.

So, what are they for?

We have, I think, four primary emotions, each with its own functional purpose in our lives.

• Each is a form of perception of our relationship with some aspect of the world.
• Each is an agent of valuing things, people and events.
• And, each is an attempt to resolve some issue with which we are faced.

In short, our emotional system is a form of perception, evaluation, response and problem-solving – if we allow it. There is a difference, of course, between naturally-occurring emotions and those we generate ourselves or contaminate with judgment, intent or attachment. Also, they can be incorrect, inappropriate, misplaced, mislabeled or based on false realities; but they each serve a purpose that, if recognized, helps us to know who we are and what we are being called to do. If not recognized, however, they create distress in the system.

Again, please note that I’m talking about the primary emotions not contaminated with judgments, or incorrect labels. These basic emotions are sadness, fear, anger and joy. Anger, for example, is an honest emotion, while hatred is not. Hatred includes a judgment, and a target marked for aggression – one whom we have decided no longer deserves the respect we say we value. As another example, feelings of betrayal are usually a mixture of disappointment, sadness and anger.

The specific functions and value of emotions should be clearer if we look at my “Emotional Toolkit.”

The Emotional Toolkit

We have four primary emotional tools.

• Anger is a response to a perceived violation. It helps us maintain personal boundaries and to get our needs met.
• Anxiety is an instinctive response to protect us from a perceived threat.
• Sadness makes us aware of the absence of something (or someone) we value.
• Joy shows us what our lives need for renewal. (My hypnosis instructor many years ago told me, “Everything necessary for the preservation of life, the Creator made pleasurable.”)

Of course, what I’ve put forward here is the ideal. In real life, our emotional systems can get distorted by inadequate or misguided parenting, needs for approval, gender expectations and emotional wounds. But that’s not the fault of the emotional system itself. Rather, it’s our failure to understand and nurture the proper development of these tools of living.

When beset by an emotion, we might ask:

• What does my anger want me to change? What boundary has been crossed? What or who has held something from me (or someone else) due me?
• What does my sadness show me I’ve lost? What does my sadness show me I value?
• From what is my fear trying to protect me? Does it really need to? Is there a deeper fear under what I’m feeling?
• What does my joy ask me to make more time for in my life?
• What do I want? What do I really want?

That last question is one of desire, more than emotion. Desire is another often-misunderstood human function. Desires are often dismissed as transitory and shallow, which they can certainly be. The desires we should pay attention to, however, are those that seem to come from deep within us – usually desires related to our core values for they tell us who we are.

When the work of the emotion is complete, it leaves us of its own accord – unless, of course, we feed it, or we have mislabeled it. This means we need to recognize it, find some way to express it honestly, and then let it go.

So, each emotion and desire are signals about who we are and our perceived relationship with some event, person or idea in our environment. In addition, they carry the energy to realize and express our identity and maintain our sovereignty. To reject, disown, degrade, or dismiss our basic emotions are all forms of willful soul loss, self-abandonment, and self-suppression.

Further self-reflection can help us evaluate the appropriateness of our emotional states and make better use of them. We are not trying to analyze them away, but to embrace the meaning of each one and its relevance to our lives. Here are some considerations to test the validity of the basis of an emotion. (Note that we are evaluating the validity of the basis of the emotion, not the emotion itself.)

• First, how much of the emotion actually belongs to me? Is there some portion of it that I absorbed from those around me or when I was a child under the influence of adults? (Whether you consider this a transfer of actual emotional energy, or a kind of sympathetic response is not as important as being able to distinguish what is ours and what really belongs to someone else.)
• How much of what I feel is manipulated or generated by what I’m reading or seeing? And how much by what I’m replaying in my head?
• How much of what I feel might I have absorbed from a social wave of emotion?
• Does this emotion cover some deeper or rejected emotion?
• How much of this is an emotional memory from my past?
• How does the emotion relate to its purpose as noted in the Emotional Toolkit?
• To what degree does it relate to my core values?
• How can I use its information and energy to support and express my core values related to this?

Note that this self-assessment is in no way intended to invalidate or immobilize the emotion. Rather it is to give it its true place, to honor your perspective and allow you to take the appropriate action based on current external realities, internal needs, and your core values.

Speaking of core values, we’ll next look at their place in our health, stress-management and as a moral compass as we address the stressors of our time.