Negative Emotions and Positive Emotions
By Victoria Gallagher, C.M.Ht.
Our feelings can add a great deal to the stress we have in our lives. On this page you are going to learn about emotions, the various kinds of emotions, and about accepting and expressing emotions.
You will receive an enormous amount of beneficial guidance in learning about and exploring your emotions. If you are suffering from an emotional disorder such as severe depression, having suicidal thoughts, getting out of control or acting irrationally, I strongly suggest seeking professional counseling. If you want to begin working with your emotions at a deeper level, you may call my office and I would be happy to either refer some excellent books to you, consult with you myself, or refer you to someone else if your problem is outside of my realm of expertise.
There are many schools of thought and various philosophies on emotions. Based on all the information I have gathered in my own study of emotions, I have outlined what makes sense to me.
What is an emotion?
An emotion is simply a feeling or sensation caused by a person’s perception about something or someone. Emotions are our thoughts felt physically. Emotions are energy. Emotions can transform into other emotions.
What causes an emotion?
Emotions are simply energy in motion. When you feel an emotion it is because that energy has been triggered by a thought and it sends it in motion, which creates feelings felt in various locations in your body. Emotions can travel. They can travel from one part of the body to another. They can become headaches, stomachaches, pain in other parts of the body, or wonderful tingly sensations throughout your body.
Happiness or sadness/(hurt)
There are only two basic emotions. One is happiness the other is sadness. There is quite a wide array of these emotions and what usually causes our feelings to change is into what time period we are projecting them. For example, sadness reflected into the future is experienced as fear. On the other hand, reflecting sadness into the past is experienced as anger. These feelings can be experienced in other ways too depending on whom we are projecting them toward. For example, when we point anger inward, anger becomes guilt.
Duality
Let’s discuss duality for a moment. In order for a thing to be a thing, there has to be a lack of a thing, which is its opposite counterpart. For example, you cannot think about light, without ‘no light’ which is the opposite of light. We call ‘no light’ darkness. In order to fully be able to appreciate light, you must know and experience darkness. Likewise, in order to fully be able to appreciate being happy, you must know and experience it’s equal and opposite counterpart, lack of happiness, which is sadness. Think of our emotions like a pendulum swinging from side to side. The further the pendulum swing to one side, the further it will swing to the other. So, the extent one feels, happiness, one will ultimately feel the greatest sadness and visa versa.
One of the problems with experiencing emotions is that many people who experience great happiness followed by great sadness decide that the sadness is too much to handle, so the first thing they do is look for ways to avoid having that feeling and they will stop feeling the negative emotion by turning their attention to other things. But the emotion has likely not yet to run it’s full course. It doesn’t just go away though. It just lies dormant somewhere in you. The next thing that usually happens is that the next time moments of happiness are available; the old negative emotion is still anchored to that experience, reminding you, “Hey! Don’t forget, this will eventually end and you’re just going to feel sad again.” So, you unconsciously throw up the guard gates and you don’t feel as happy because you feel suspicious about the good feelings you are having. So, now what’s happening is that pendulum has slowed down. It doesn’t swing quite as far in either direction anymore.
Experiencing your emotions this way may seem safe. However, it’s metaphorically no different than an agoraphobic who becomes trapped in their house because of their horrible anxiety about going outside. First, they don’t get to go anywhere. Then they may occasionally glance outside the window and see what’s out there. But eventually, they just keep the drapes closed because the danger seems that severe. This may sound extreme, however, I believe that to that same extreme if you get your heart broken one too many times, eventually you will find that it’s just easier to keep the window to your soul shut down. And your emotions are stuck at a standstill; numbness.
In life everything has a beginning and an end. Our emotions have energy. Since our mind, body, spirit, and emotions are all connected, our emotions, if not dealt with do eventually find a way to be
Why does it seem like our sad feelings hang around so much longer than our happy feelings? The easiest way to explain this is to think about the way a child acts. A child experiences all of their feelings right there on the spot at the moment it happens. When a child feels joy, it laughs and plays and moves it’s body around and fully embraces the feeling of joy. When a child feels sad, it doesn’t look around and say, oh I better not show my emotions in front of these people. No, it cries and makes noises and moves it’s body around and releases the emotion of sadness.
Since our emotions are in our subconscious, all of our experiences stay with us as long as we live. Therefore, all of our non-experienced emotions stay with us too. They get trapped in our bodies, adding of course to our stress. Think about how many times you thought something was funny and you laughed immediately about it. Joy gets trapped sometimes too because there are times when we feel it may be inappropriate to express our feelings of joy. However, most of our pleasurable feelings do get expressed right away and fully. It’s the negative feelings, our hurt, which usually gets held back basically because of our conditioning to avoid feeling pain. It hurts. And we don’t want to hurt. We tend to carry a belief that we shouldn’t ever feel hurt and we should feel happy all the time. If we could eliminate that thinking, it would be a definite step in the right direction.
Have you ever noticed a person that seems happy all the time? There are people who do appear that way. However, think about that person for a moment. Have you ever really noticed any moments where they feel total Elation? Euphoria? Exhilaration? Ebullience? I would imagine not. Feelings like that require feeling that depth of their pain as well. And quite normally, they aren’t really quite as happy as they would like to make you think they are. These people are usually pushing down their painful emotions.
Now, getting back to the types of emotions that there are. Of course we know that there are an assortment of feelings other than hurt and joy. Hurt just happens to be the true essence of painful feelings. How we experience our hurt, depend on our thoughts and can subsequently take on many forms. When we experience our hurt and think about the future, we transform that hurt into fear. Emotions are energy. Energy cannot be created, nor can it dissolve, it can only transform. So, hurt transforms into fear as we project our thoughts about the future. Likewise, hurt transforms into anger as we project our thoughts into the past. If we project that anger inward, then it becomes guilt. As you can see, there is an array of emotions than our born out of hurt, simply by changing our perception of the situation. When we expend too much energy redirecting our anger, we then become depressed. All depression is is a depletion of energy. It can be emotional energy, physical energy, mental energy, or spiritual energy, or all of the above.
Positive and negative emotions cannot exist within you at the same time. You cannot feel pain and pleasure at the exact same time. You can however, feel pain one moment and pleasure the very next. You can switch back and fourth making you think that it is experienced simultaneously. However, it’s not. You can experience an array of negative emotions all at the same time, or an array of positive emotions.
What is important to realize here is that at the root of all our negative feelings is hurt. In order to get to a point where we can feel truly happy inside, the way a child feels it in it’s purest form, most of us will usually have an emotional debt to pay on the negative feelings side that needs to come up to be experienced. Basically because we have been conditioned that it’s not O.K. to express these feelings, and yet it’s perfectly fine to express our happy feelings, so they get released and we still continued to bare the burden of all the pain inside.
What’s also important is that since our emotions are alive within us, we apply our existing emotions to all of our new experiences. In essence, our non-experienced emotions from childhood just travel to the next event and the next event after that. Therefore, our perception about a situation is based on all of our experiences since we were little kids leading up to the feeling you had about your very last experience. No two people view the same situation the exact same way. They don’t feel the same way about it and they don’t think the same way about it. This is good news however. Since our emotions travel with us to each of our experiences, it’s not necessarily important to regress back to when you were 3 years old to heal your emotions. You can do that if it is meaningful for you in some way. However, those same old three-year old child emotions are still with you today. This explains why we sometimes over-react to certain situations.
If you allow yourself to feel the hurt, the way a three-year old does, without thinking about it and analyzing it you will get relief from your situation and you will heal yourself. As you are doing your healing, you may trigger old thoughts to come up and it is fine to allow the thought to guide you into feeling more about the experience…as long as you are using it as a tool to guide you to feel, rather than to analyze which we use to avoid feeling.
Self-expression - finding the truth
Dealing with our emotions is not only about healing our past emotions; it is about true expression of oneself in the moment. At the heart of all emotional problems is a lack of total self-expression. It takes energy to push down emotions. It causes the emotion to become locked somewhere inside your body. And it creates depression.
We all need to express our feelings our good feelings and our bad feelings. Much of the time many of our good feelings our shared quite genuinely and openly because society makes it O.K. to feel happy. There are so many wonderful outlets to express your good feelings. You can express it through genuinely telling someone that you love them and feeling the emotion as you are saying it or gazing lovingly into someone’s eyes, through making love, by hugging, by singing, dancing, being artistic, squeezing someone’s hands, laughing, smiling, skipping. It is as important to express yourself in a positive way and not to hold back when you feel good, let that little child out to play and feel the joy.
Even though it is perfectly acceptable to express our joy, I would say that out of fear of what others might think of us, we still don’t fully express these feelings. Some people wish that they could just dance or sing or paint to fully feel their joy, but because they are afraid to be ridiculed which would be painful, they withhold expressing themselves fully. So, while not to the same extreme as our negative emotions, we do avoid feeling the positive emotions to a certain extent as well. I strongly suggest taking the time to do things you feel like doing, no matter how uncomfortable it might be at first. It is a completely liberating feeling to express you in a positive way. When you do this, you can either be by yourself or surround yourself with people who accept you. To be accepted while expressing yourself is even more liberating. Because you get a sense that, “Wow, people like me even when I’m just being me.” True self-love is born out of continuing to tell the truth about who you are and liking and accepting exactly for who you are.
Our negative emotions are not as easily accepted. We think we’re bad for expressing anger. We think we are weak for expressing our hurt or fears. However, once again, like expressing our positive emotions, it is necessary to express the negative emotions. The only way to truly get relief from these emotions is to express them. It takes energy to push the emotions down. And the more we push them down the more we are drawn to attract painful events in our lives in order to bring about the pain that so longs to be felt and expressed and let go. Not expressing this hurt has attached you to more painful events, while you may not even be experiencing the pain because you have felt numbness for so long.
A few of our programs are designed to help you to release these painful emotions that you have been carrying around. You can allow yourself to feel it and experience your emotions. Give yourself permission open your heart go so that you can feel happy and free. As you work with your emotions, you may feel them the first time you do a meditation cycle and you may not experience anything at all. Each time you work with your emotions, you begin to feel. Commit to setting aside an hour or two a week for several weeks.
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