“I want help controlling my emotions.”

Therapist: “What have you been experiencing that makes you feel that way?”

“Frustration. Overwhelming anxiety. I don’t want to get out of bed. I’m struggling to keep my life together.”

This is an extremely common conversation in the therapy office. After all, it is a therapy office. One would hope that someone could come in to get treatment for mental health issues such as these. And they can.

But not by controlling emotions.

I’m sure we’ve all tried controlling our emotions before– I know I have. And it may be successful in the short run. We can ignore and distract until we get through what we have to get through. This may be a useful and needed strategy for short-term survival. However, there are long-term consequences to repetitive short-term “control” over our emotions.

It was Freud who said, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”

Sounds morbid, but largely preventable.

What Even Are Emotions?

This is actually an extremely complicated question, debated by scientists and philosophers alike, but here is an over-simplified explanation. What we know about emotions is that they create energy and pleasant or unpleasant sensations that give the world around us meaning. To not have emotion would be to be perfectly neutral to everything, without motivation or interest. Some emotions are more basic, like fear. Others are more complex, like shame. We know that fear comes directly from a certain part of the brain- the amygdala– and that other animals can feel this feeling as well. Shame, on the other hand, is a more complex feeling that most likely uses a combination of different parts of the brain, some fear-based, and some based on social instinct (memory and learning) and the narratives we tell ourselves with our logical part of the brain.

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Because different emotions either originate from or are triggered by different parts of the brain, it can take multiple strategies to learn how to understand them and respond to them appropriately. Ever thought about the difference between fear and anxiety? Fear is the feeling we get when we are in real or perceived danger. Anxiety is the feeling we get when we expect to feel fear. Managing fear involves getting out of danger or telling yourself you aren’t actually in danger– managing anxiety involves that, PLUS changing our narratives we created with our reasoning, and reconstructing expectations. It’s complex! Luckily, there are researched strategies proven to help us cope with all types of feelings, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (prefrontal cortex-focused), dialectical behavioral therapy (amygdala-focused), and many others.

The Purpose of Painful Emotions

So, why aren’t we trying to simply delete negative emotions and leave the positive ones? Negative emotions are like a “check engine” light on a car. If we ignore the light, we may be able to drive for a while, but eventually something is going to break down. If we cover the light, we may not be bothered by it anymore but the consequence will still be the same in the end.

By wanting to control our unwanted emotions, we are saying we want to become blind to the signals that we need change.

It can become a vicious cycle. We feel an unwanted feeling come up, such as sadness, anger, or anxiety, and then we begin to feel frustrated and resentful of those emotions because we view them as roadblocks to our happiness! We spend so much time hating the messenger, we don’t even look to see what the message is about.

And we don’t realize that the messenger wants us to be happy, too.

We can’t change everything, so of course we want to learn how to reduce pain while we go through hard things (known as coping), especially if they are temporary and we are doing our best to make the necessary changes. We just don’t want to permanently disconnect ourselves from our own measure of wellbeing.

Managing and Processing, not Controlling

Since negative emotions are a message, the first step to reducing the pain of them is to understand what they are telling us. If we break an ankle and feel pain, we stop walking on it and that reduces the pain. This instinctual reaction allows the body to heal. Emotional pain, when functioning correctly, is also alerting us to something that is preventing us from healing.

Negative emotions are useful and adaptive, but sometimes they can get stuck. Sometimes we can feel sad even when happy things happen to us, or we can feel anxious even when we know we’re safe. The problem with mental illness and diagnoses are not that the negative emotions exist, but that they aren’t ebbing and flowing in response to life. They may be stuck in a loop that makes us feel separated from others and out of touch with what’s going on around us.

There can be physical/biological reasons for this, which may require medication, but more often than not it is a result of ignoring and not respecting what the emotions are telling us, to the point where they never stop yelling at us. We may feel that we are in a place where we can’t listen to our emotions, or it’s not safe to. In some cases, you may be right. But that’s a sign to seek out a new environment if you want these feelings to move on.

The Messages of Emotions

Our emotions, in their natural state, are an evolutionary tool that motivates us to seek well-being physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially. No matter how stuck or dissociated you may feel, the original intent of the emotion you are feeling is GOOD. It can be a task to put a name to the emotions and their purpose for being there, but that is the first step to emotional processing. Here are a few examples of emotions and their messages:

In general, our pain is telling us that something needs to change. Your emotions want you to thrive and seek something better.

Practical Steps for Managing Emotions

The difference between controlling emotion and managing emotion is that management requires acceptance. Acceptance means that you act in the knowledge that this emotion is present and WILL influence you in one way or another. It requires a compromise between what your emotion is trying to do and what your logic is trying to do. According to Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), this compromise is known as “wise mind”.

In the example above, Wise Mind accepts that applying for jobs is emotionally very difficult. It involves vulnerability as people judge your value to their company. That’s hard! It also accepts that it needs to be done. By compromising on logic and emotion, applying for jobs may not feel like an insurmountable task.

Usually, people swing back and forth from rational to emotional. Sometimes we can be on-point, motivated and ambitious, and we don’t need to make compromises because what we are doing is emotionally sustainable. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes we lay in bed and don’t get up, because it is emotionally safer than the alternative. But taking sides either way means we are constantly at war with ourselves and creating a gridlock. Acceptance that emotions will influence us, and acceptance that things do need to get done, both need to happen so we can move forward. Allowing space for the emotion to get a win without taking over is a method of managing it.

Find the “emotional wins” that work for you

What does an emotional win look like for you? What creates a glimmer of happiness in your life? Finding emotional wins will help calm down the amygdala, allowing room for the prefrontal cortex to think clearly. Here are some possible examples of emotional wins:

• walking in nature
• reading
• art
• music
• candles
• friends/supportive people
• exercise
• movies/tv shows
• favorite snacks
• hugging your pet
• exploring a new place
• add your own!

This list is an example of what may add at least a tiny spark to your life. Maybe your logical brain is telling you that snacking makes you fat, avoidance doesn’t fix the problem, watching shows doesn’t make the pain go away when they end… true. All true. This is why the logical brain is important. So you can do these things in balance with what needs to be done. Would it be faster to reach your goals if you only used logic and pushed through? Theoretically, yes. Has it happened yet? Are you stuck? Are you low on motivation? Then it’s time to accept that you can’t do things through will-power alone. You need a spark of energy returned to you, or you’re just running on empty. This is why compromise is important. This is the wisdom of the body, and the wisdom of research on the body through DBT.

TL;DR

The bottom line is, we can’t suppress or avoid our emotions in the long-run without consequence. We have to process an emotion by identifying what it is trying to tell us, and using a combination of acceptance and action to process the emotion so it can do its job and finish it. In order for that to happen we need to recognize that the emotion is carrying a message about our well-being and what we need. Maybe our pre-frontal brain denies we need it, but if our emotional brain is telling us we do then we can either argue about it for the rest of our lives or accept that a compromise needs to be had. When the amygdala is able to calm down, we will be able to access our problem-solving mode in the prefrontal cortex. It takes consistent practice to make these changes, but eventually it will become more natural to read your emotions and respond to them without resentment or frustration, because they are working for your good!