Happiness Principle #7:
Happiness Requires Learning to Cope with Intense or Difficult Emotions
Emotions, especially intense or “negative” emotions, often feel bad and scary. Sometimes it seems as if those big emotions carrying all that intense energy could destroy us.
Emotions aren’t “negative” or “wrong” and they can’t really harm us. After all, they are just energy. But if they are just energy, why are certain emotions so difficult to experience? With some emotions, we are emotionally immature. This simply means that certain emotions have never been allowed to resolve themselves to completion. Fearing the unknown and the unexpected, each time these types of emotions are triggered or as they begin to surface, we resort to old strategies of and push them back down while they are in an unresolved state.
However, escaping, avoiding, ignoring, or repressing emotions is only a temporary fix. After awhile, that energy becomes pressurized and wants to burst loose. Like a pressurized volcano that energy builds up wanting to erupt and resolve itself into completion.
Repressing emotions limits our happiness because we end up fearing the explosion of energy. Having no prior successful experience under our belt of knowing how to deal with these emotions, we resort to our repression coping strategies. It becomes a habit to push down strong emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and shame, with the help of food, anorexia, bulimia, alcohol, smoking, drugs, chronic shopping, or excessive busyness. These coping strategies make our life more difficult and limit our happiness as they create long-term negative consequences.
One way to increase happiness is to pay attention to your so called negative emotions. This doesn’t mean wallowing in them, or being consumed by them, but finding a way to express them. Write them down, speak them out, explore them, and be open to the wisdom within them.
This may require a bit of courage and practice because negative emotions often contain the pain of who you are now and the limitations you believe to be true about yourself. However, by consciously exploring these beliefs and ideas, you prepare yourself to evolve into a stronger, more balanced, happier person. Letting emotional pain express itself gets things out into the open, where old beliefs can heal, and new more self-supportive beliefs can be incorporated.
The next time you are experiencing an intense emotion, let it out by conscious breathing, crying, signing, writing in your journal, or sharing the experience by expressing it aloud. The key is let the emotional energy resolve itself through expression in a way that doesn’t hurt yourself or others.
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Wow, I just discovered your Divine Self Blog & love it. I look forward to exploring after just a brief yet delicious taste. I am also a positive spiritual psychologist type who loves to add happiness to the world. I expect you’ll be hearing more from me as I explore. In the mean time thanks for the gift you are and the ones you give. t