Ascent Healing

This is a continuation of last week’s post on feelings. There are 5 basic feeling areas: Happy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust according to most ‘feeling wheel’ handouts. I usually mostly talk about happiness, sadness, anger and fear. People mostly call sadness, anger and fear the undesirable emotions. We strive to be happy all the time and think that the goal of life is to figure out how to be happy all the time. When we feel sad, angry or scared, we try to push those feelings away and think they are even bad. But the truth is, we NEED these feelings to survive! Let’s talk about each one individually.

SADNESS

I call this the connection emotion. When we are sad, we want to reach out to people. (Of course if the sadness is extreme- the tendency is to withdraw). A good example of this is in the movie, “Inside Out” by Pixar. The main character wants to run away and she doesn’t have access to her sadness because of being cut off from happiness and sadness in the plot of the movie. When sadness returns and she is able to feel sad, she runs back home.

Sadness is important information for us. It helps us grieve a loss of a friendship, relationship or death. It helps us process disappointment. It lets us know that something important has happened and that we need to attend to it with self-care in order to heal. Without this- we are numb and uncompassionate with ourself and others. Sadness teaches us empathy which is an important skill to connect with others. A lack of empathy causes us to be uncaring and even to break the law with no care to the consequences of our behavior.

ANXIETY/FEAR

This emotion basically stops us from doing stupid stuff! We feel a little anxious when approaching an intersection reminding us to look both ways. We feel anxious when next to a drop off like a cliff to remember to be careful. Fear warns us of danger and tells us to be more alert. Anxiety before a test tells us to study for it. If there is no worry of failing, we won’t try. This of course is a healthy amount of anxiety. Too much anxiety can make it difficult to concentrate but the purpose of this topic today is to talk about the healthy amount of these emotions. Sometimes fear comes out of the blue because it is triggered by something but we will talk about those situations a different blog day. Suffice it to say, anxiety protects us and gives us the message to “be careful.”

ANGER

Anger is the protection emotion. We get angry when someone comes into our personal space metaphorically or literally. This can mean they say hurtful words, they cause physical harm to us or loved ones, or steal or otherwise misuse us. Anger gives us the message that something is happening that we don’t like and prompts us to do something about it. We should choose a healthy response to having anger rather than punching someone in the face, of course. Without anger, we simply allow people to continue to misuse and harm us. Without anger, we would not protect our children, pets or property.

It is common for adults to send the message to children that anger is bad. We may have ourselves been given this message growing up. But anger is healthy! Pushing down and ignoring anger can lead to physical symptoms and depression as the anger turns inward towards ourselves. In cases that we feel unsafe, it may feel safer to be mad or blame ourselves rather than hold other people accountable for their actions. In other cases, anger turns into fierce resentment when not expressed in healthy ways and we become negative or passive aggressive towards others.

IN HEALTHY AMOUNTS

All feelings can be overwhelming at times. Sometimes we may struggle with depression or anxiety or difficulties with too much anger. In these cases, we may need professional help to regulate the strong emotions. In other blogs, we will talk about how to acknowledge and validate these feelings in ourselves instead of running away from them. Hopefully, this blog has helped you begin to realize that these emotions do serve an important purpose and you can begin to think of these feelings as allies instead of enemies.