This is a continuation of the previous article on Intelligent Emotions. In it, I briefly outline the core ideas from David Viscott’s book The Language of Feelings about the crucial importance of being in contact with our emotions and being able to express them in an appropriate way.
According to Viscott, if you want to be in good contact with your feelings, it is helpful first to understand how they are interconnected.
“Anxiety arises when we fear injury or loss—real or imagined, not yet suffered, or, if suffered, not yet fully accepted.
When a person suffers injury or loss, pain is experienced. Pain upsets balance and demands an expenditure of energy. This reaction must be directed outward toward the source of pain. The expression of this energy is called anger.
If this energy cannot be expressed outwardly as anger and is instead turned inward toward the self, it is experienced as guilt.
If guilt is not quickly relieved by accepting that the original anger was a reasonable response to the original injury, it turns against the person who feels it. Guilt deepens and becomes depression.
Such depression can destroy the personality and drain it of all energy.
In short:
Anxiety is fear of injury or loss.
Injury or loss leads to anger.
Suppressed anger leads to guilt.
Unresolved guilt leads to depression.
To stop the spiral of negative emotional energy in time, the first thing to do is to face your experiences and, instead of denying them, learn to express them in an adequate way. Accept that neither you nor the world will collapse if you allow your feelings to be expressed — appropriate emotional expression rarely leads to loss of control. Anyone who does not want to accept you because you express your feelings does not want you to be real — you can safely live without such a person.
The positive effect of releasing burdensome emotions is that you become more truthful. To be truthful, you need to understand what you feel, know where the feeling comes from, and be able to express it to the right person. Then, when dealing with problems, you can trust that your feelings will point you in the right direction. Reason and its tool, logic, can be deceived — feelings tell the truth. The deepest truthfulness goes beyond human distortions — there are no illusions in it.
The language of feelings is the means by which you connect with yourself; and if you cannot communicate with yourself, you cannot communicate with others either. When you open your awareness to the messages of your feelings, you release anxiety and begin to recognize your intuition more clearly. You will start perceiving more in others, because you will be able to receive the information they emit without it being distorted by your defenses.
And when you learn to sense what is happening in the souls of others, you will learn to sense more of what is happening deep within yourself. Feelings you were not even aware of before will reveal themselves. When you reach the point where intellect and feeling overlap, you will begin to perceive the constant flow between the two — and it will become easier to discern what is real.
And when you are in contact with reality, you can influence it and change it.”
–David Viscott
This is the principle: if you want to take care of how you feel, take care of your mind. And the first thing the mind needs to know is how important it is to notice emotions without judging them, but with the intention to understand them.
This is the metaphor: the relationship between mind and emotions is the same as that between a parent and a child. Emotions, even the most hostile ones, are innocent like children. They are what they are; we cannot force them to feel differently. But we can understand and soothe them. The whole effort of developing emotional intelligence lies in developing a mind that becomes the strong and reliable parent we always wished we had. This is the only condition under which the inner child (our emotional body) can feel safe and loved. It knows that this inner parent is always there, accepts it as it is, and can be relied upon to say when something is appropriate and when it is not.
This is the neurophysiology of emotional reactions: in transforming intense emotions, the decisive role belongs to the neocortex (the cerebral cortex, the most recently evolved part of the human brain). It processes the primary reactions that arise in the emotional brain (the older part of the brain associated with the limbic system and the amygdala), so that they can be calmed, understood, and regulated.
This is emotional intelligence in action — it is called wisdom.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
*Translation from Bulgarian
