Dealing with emotions

We’ve all heard people telling us: "Do not cry ... Don’t get angry ... Don’t complain ..." or "no more" to any kind of emotional state, therefore we shut up and repress our emotions. We keep whatever we felt in our bodies at that moment.

This creates an inability to deal with emotions. Most people don’t know what to do with them because they were told that it was wrong to express them. They end up suppressing their feelings and this gets bottled in their bodies, until they explode with anger or excessive sadness harming themselves and others. They end up screaming to their neighbor, remain in constant sadness, or in the worst case, hurting themselves or a loved one. The fact is that they didn't know how to respond to what they were feeling.

In other cases they don’t measure their emotional reactions, and create drama because they feel something and "have to" express regardless of the consequences. In both cases this actions can be disastrous for interpersonal relationships. There are ways to communicate what we feel, without hurting and without guarding ourselves.

How different would it be to feel the emotion, to breathe, and to express without hurting anyone? Embrace this emotion, let it move through your body freely, and then communicate what you feel. "This makes me angry, I do not agree with it.., it makes me sad to see this." This would be like letting the air out of a balloon slowly, instead of accumulating it inside or exploding it.

There is a long way to go in terms of emotional intelligence, and a first step may be to simply talk about what we feel with compassion and without aggression.