Handling Emotions

Most of us struggle with our emotions let alone regulate them. They are often a mystery, surprising, can color our perspective on things and even dictate our decisions. There are many ideas about where emotions come from but most agree it’s a mixture of brain, nervous system, past experiences and body feeling sensations.

So is it even possible to regulate our emotions? Yes, it’s possible because our emotions are influenced by our body sensations and nervous system. Most of our initial responses are defined by our nervous system’s protective scanning. These can change how we feel and respond to situations. For instance we can be excited about going to a social event then upon arrival we get a strong sense of being uncomfortable, not knowing exactly why, creating caution while we interact with people. So you can think of emotions as a feedback system between our body and the environment. Feelings and emotions give us a wider experience and understanding than thoughts. Imagine how different it would be if we only had thoughts and no emotions. Some of us would say that would make life easier but then we would lose our ability to create and experience the many shades of life and people. We would lose our spontaneity, our ability to love and experience the depths of connection and interaction that’s possible as human beings.

Emotions help us understand our everyday needs and our deeper more complex needs.

It can feel like emotions have a lot of power. It can feel as though they drive our thoughts and actions. There’s this idea in the realm of working with emotions that the less tolerant we are of our emotions the more they will overwhelm us. An example of this is the journey we undergo when experiencing grief. For the first year or two we feel mostly overwhelmed by our grief but as the years go by we learn how to live with it and in essence become more tolerant of its presence in our life. So emotions can take us on a journey, learning how we are with that emotion and building our understanding and tolerance so they no longer overwhelms us. In the same way we help our children learn to understand and tolerate emotions. 

We can befriend our emotions by understanding that they are part of our biofeedback system, providing us with essential information, they don’t necessarily need to define us. We could think of our emotions like the weather. Some days we are feeling sad and unmotivated, like a rainy day, so maybe it’s time to do some comforting things like watch a movie or talk to a friend. Other days we feel irritated and impatient, like a hot humid day. Maybe it’s better to slow down, do less and find some relief with things like hobbies, listening to music or being in nature.

Emotions can be very changeable, this can give us some control if we are able to allow them to subside or inform us of our needs. Emotions also provide us with many insights that can help us understand and manage our everyday needs and our more complex deeper needs. Emotions also alert us to when our nervous system is responding or reacting to things that need our attention and care. Emotions are vast, raw, beautiful and make us uniquely human.

Giselle Lamberth

Embodiment Institute Somatic Healing Programs

Clinical Social Worker, Somatic Psychotherapist