The goal of emotional work is self-understanding. The Delphic Oracle taught the commandment of “Know thyself”, valuing it enough to inscribe on the wall of her temple. Self-understanding transcends mere curiosity; to know yourself is to know how to act. The better you understand yourself & your patterns, the easier it will be to create what you want to create in the world, and to manifest your desires.
Yet many people ignore the most fertile source of self-understanding. Many people view their negative emotions as mere obstacles. Given the choice, they’d prefer to be happy all the time, to bask in constant joy. Fear, sadness, anger… all of these are “in the way” of the true purpose of life. They try to “solve” or “get rid of” these negative emotions as quickly as possible, so they can get back to the business of being happy.
But our emotions are not mere distractions. Our emotions tell us what matters to us, what we truly care about. Our emotions reveal our desires & preferences. Without them, we’d be lost. Emotions orient us in the world.
If we want to know ourselves at a deep level, then we want to learn as much as possible from our emotions. The lucky coincidence is that learning from our negative emotions also tends to help them transform. As we learn to relate to ourselves with curiosity, we tend to become happier. My goal with this article is to give you a specific approach for doing so: a way to communicate with your emotions, so that you can acknowledge their teachings, and thus allow them to move on.
emotions as signals
The most productive way to view your emotions is to see them as signals.
They are a signal that your body is trying to get you to take a particular action. The easiest example here is the fight/flight response (or, more thoroughly, fight/flight/fawn/freeze). Your nervous system has a stress response, which then induces a certain action: fight or run away.
Most animals do what their emotions tell them to do. Sometimes, I suspect my cat is actually holding back her anger (and the corresponding desire to swat me in the face) but for the most part, animals do what they feel like doing. Humans are unique in having a conscious mind, a layer between instinct & action, where we can choose how we interpret those emotional signals.
Giving that conscious awareness, we have the luxury of three possible relationships with our emotions:
helplessness
repression
transformation
Helplessness is the least empowered relationship; transformation is the most empowered. Let’s talk about each one.
a helplessness relationship with our emotions
Though helplessness has a negative connotation, this mode aligns with the default mode most animals experience. There is a lack of conscious interference: the instinct arises, and we follow it.
If we get an anger signal, then we freak out. If we get a fatigue signal, then we lie down. If we get a scared signal, then we run away or we freeze.
Our emotions are running the show. This mode tends to lead to all sorts of difficulty in our work and our relationships. We find ourselves lashing out at others, or only doing work we find pleasurable, or oscillating rapidly between joy and misery.
Of course, since we’re animals at our core, we all end up in this mode at some time or the other. But it’s the least empowered position to be in, and our life improves the more we can transcend it.
a repressive relationship with our emotions
A slightly more empowered relationship to our emotions is repression. This mode is where we ignore or push down anything unpleasant that emerges within us. We start to adopt this mode when our childhood selves are told we’re “too much” or that we need to “just behave”, without enough positive encouragement to balance it out.
Emotional repression can easily become a habit, to the point that we don’t even feel our emotions. Our body might experience a stress response, but we just stay numb. We stay passive. We stay quiet. We shove it away.
This approach leads to two outcomes:
Most of the time, we lead a flat, numb life. We fall into passivity, settling for whatever we get.
At the same time, since we’re pushing more & more emotions down, we’re building up pressure within us, which eventually erupts in a violent & uncontrollable way.
What’s significant about this mode is that we are interfering with the energy of our emotions. In the helpless mode, the energy of the emotion just carries us along, like the current of a river. In the repression mode, we’re trying to dam that river, which means it oscillates between a trickle and a flood.
The missing piece here is the skillful management of the energy of our emotions… which is where we’ll turn to next, in the transformative mode.
a transformative relationship with our emotions
Imagine that your partner forgets to do the dishes, and this makes you really upset. Rationally, you know it’s not that big of a deal, but there’s a bubbling rage in your throat that won’t go away.
In the helpless mode, you would storm into the living room and hurl expletives at them. In the repression mode, you would push the rage down until it later erupts at your sister-in-law’s wedding. But in the transformative mode, the process is different.
When you’re in the transformative frame, you take a moment to connect with the anger, and get curious about what its concern is. In doing so, you discover that you’re not upset about the dishes themselves, but about how this situation signals that your partner isn’t thinking about you: how you’ll have to now do the dishes after you’ve had a particularly stressful day. The anger comes from a place of “this person doesn’t actually care about me”, which is really the voice of fear.
You recognize that this fear is irrational (your partner does care about you), but you don’t dismiss it. You sit with the anger/fear for a moment, acknowledging what it’s trying to tell you. Then you go and speak with your partner about how you would like to feel more cared for in the relationship, and that them doing the dishes more often would be a good way for them to help you feel that way. You extend an invitation for them to help create the experience you would like to have, and (ideally) they accept that invitation. The anger vanishes, and you’re able to feel connected to your partner once more.
In this model, you are both receiving the signal of the emotion, and channeling its energy into something creative. The emotion ends up creating more love & connection with the people around you. Anger turns into love. That’s emotional alchemy.
That’s what we’re after. So how do we master this process?
how to develop a transformative relationship with your emotions
Emotional alchemy is based on a two step process: understanding what your emotions are seeking, and then taking action to move closer to that.
What I want to note here is that this process is highly individual. Your approach to communicating with your emotions is going to be unique to you. But it comes down to two questions:
What are my emotions trying to move me towards?
How can I take aligned action in that direction?
With the first question, it’s important that you get to the core of what your emotions are trying to tell you. On the surface, your anger might be saying “Go scream at your boss.” That’s not the core. That’s the surface level. If we take that and run with it, we have a helpless relationship with our emotions.
Why does your anger want you to scream at your boss? What experience is it trying to create? I’ll give you a hint: our nervous systems are constantly trying to move us towards greater safety. So we can rephrase the first question as, “how is this emotion trying to help me access safety?”
Perhaps the answer is that screaming at your boss might convince them to treat you better (in the eyes of your anger), and thus allow you to stay at this job long-term, which will give you access to better financial stability, which will help you relax about your future. The anger is really attempting to move you in the direction of relaxed safety.
Once we’ve identified the core of that desire, we can move to the second question, and think about aligned action. If what we’re seeking is a sense of stability, and the relaxation that comes from it, how else would we create that? Maybe in the short-term, that means sitting for a bit of grounded meditation. In the long-term, it might mean having a (calm) discussion with your boss, or seeking other job opportunities. We act on the intent of our emotions, rather than submitting to their demands.
the skill of emotional attunement
Your job here is to find an approach that works for you, to find a way of communicating with your own inner world. That's going to be different for everyone. This is a creative pursuit.
If you want guidance in this process, I encourage you to apply here for one-on-one coaching with me. I'm happy to help you build the skill.
I also will be working on building more resources to support this. Subscribe to my email list below if you want to stay up to date with that. You can also follow me on Twitter or Instagram.
The main thing here: we want to cultivate a relationship with our inner world where we have as much access to information as possible. We want to know as much as possible about ourselves, so that we can better react to ourselves and to the world. A free & loving relationship with ourselves will allow us to take action that's aligned with who we really are. It will allow us to be much more effective, not just in attending to ourselves, but in creating all that we want to create in the world.
With love & appreciation,
Scott