If you don’t quite know what to do with yourself when you get emotional, this post is for you. There is so much information out there about how to respond to your emotions that I thought it would be good to give you a framework, based on my personal experience, that you can use for any emotion.
Every Emotion Has a Function
The first thing I want you to know about emotions is that every one of them has a function. If an emotion didn’t have a function, it wouldn’t have survived through generations and generations of humans that have come before us. So rest assured that nothing you’re feeling is maladaptive. Everything is there for a reason.
The other thing to know is that sometimes we are simply unaware of what we are feeling. An emotion emerges that is so unacceptable to us that, before we can allow ourselves to feel it or even register it, we step in and offer a secondary emotion in response to the primary one. Then we try to figure out what to do with the secondary emotion, and we often can’t find good answers because that was never at the heart of what we were feeling in the first place.
Is This the Real Thing?
So when you find yourself getting emotional, the first thing to do is ask yourself, “Is this the real thing, or is this masking the real thing?” You can do this in many ways. Sometimes talking out loud with a friend or journaling by yourself will show you, and sometimes even taking a few minutes to get quieter is enough to reveal the real emotion underneath.
Once you get to that true primary emotion, you can decide what to do with it, and this is where I want to throw in a warning. Do not just try to relieve it. There is a lot of information out there about what to do when you feel anxiety or sadness, and much of it amounts to giving yourself a pep talk, cheering yourself up, or doing something to feel better. All of that is useful only if you really cannot tolerate the emotion. If your anger, your sadness, or your hopelessness is too much for you to bear, by all means, do those things.
When I Escaped
I recently did exactly that myself. I recently moved to a new place, and here I am living alone with my kids, solo parenting while doing some clinical training, with my husband in another state quite far away. When he came for a short visit and it was time for him to leave, I was understandably sad, since I wouldn’t be able to see him for quite a while. Instead of letting myself feel that sadness, because it felt too disruptive, I asked myself who would take care of the kids if I allowed myself to get that sad. Who would grocery shop? Who would meal prep? I had so much to do that day.
So what I did instead was call a friend right after dropping him at the airport and talk to her all the way back. As soon as I got to the library, where I was taking the kids, I opened my laptop and started looking at tickets for his next visit. Once I booked one, I told myself he would be back before I knew it, and I did not let myself feel the emotion. Surprise, it didn’t go away, as emotions never do. If we find a way to suppress them, they lie in our unconscious, gather energy, and might morph into an eruption, a body symptom we can’t explain, or just some random illness.
When I Stayed
I managed to push it down that time, but a couple of weeks later it was my birthday, and toward the end of the day I felt a looming sadness come on. I was so homesick. I had spent my birthday away from everyone I hold dear, and it hit me how far away I am from where I grew up in India and from where my husband lives. This time I did not let myself escape. That feeling of homesickness, which is really a combination of grief, nostalgia, sadness, and longing, lasted for a good week, and I did not interrupt the process or engage in a relieving behavior. I let myself feel it, because I was in a position to and because it was tolerable. Don’t get me wrong, I did not enjoy it. I had simply been fighting these feelings for a while in order to be functional and productive, take care of my kids, and settle into a new place, and this time I let myself feel them.
What happens when you let yourself feel an emotion is that you are able to alchemize it. As I sat with mine over a period of time, it showed me that I was missing the feeling of being cared for, and I began to incorporate that into my life in my own ways. I realized I hadn’t made many new friends where I was, so I reached out to some people I do my clinical training with and asked if they would like to meet outside of work. I started attending a mindfulness group at work. In small ways here and there, I tried to bring this feeling of being loved, cared for, and tended to from myself to myself. I don’t think I would have come in contact with that tender part of me had I found ways out of my homesickness.
I will admit that I did a little bit of relieving this time too. I sent voice notes to friends back in India and tried to get some Indian food. Barring that, I let myself feel it, and as much as it did not feel good in the moment, it is proof that when we sit with our emotions, we expand our ego, our conscious mind’s capacity, to hold a new version of ourselves that can contain that emotion. It helped me find the inner strength to make this very new kind of life work in this very new kind of place. I hope this example gave you a sense of both what not to do and what to do instead.
Holding the Tension of the Opposites
So, coming back to emotions: all of them are functional, and there is a reason they exist. Before you hang on to an emotion, ask yourself whether this is the real thing. Once you get to the real emotion, tap into its function and what it is trying to tell you. You don’t have to do this in an intellectual way, telling yourself that you’re experiencing anger and it must be about setting boundaries or standing up to some form of injustice. Just let yourself feel what you’re feeling.
This is what Jung calls holding the tension of the opposites. One part of you is not feeling good and another part of you wants relief, and the more you hold that tension, the more a third way emerges. This is the transcendent function, and it aligns very well with our capacity as a witness in Vedic philosophy, because we are able to rise above the push and pull and access something bigger, better, and greater. One of Jung’s close associates said that when we see no human way out of the tension of the opposites, we have to rise above it and connect to God. God in this case can mean your own divinity, your own higher self, your own ability to rise above the workings of your conscious and unconscious mind.
What You Can Do While You Sit With It
Sometimes it is very hard to alchemize an emotion if we are not going to engage with it at all. In my case, as I was homesick, I let myself cry a lot. In fact, when people at my training site asked how I was doing or how my birthday was, I couldn’t help but get a little teary, and that is a way of working an emotion through the body. I also used that time to write, which I hadn’t done since I moved, and that gave me insight into how I was feeling. And as I mentioned earlier, I sought closeness with some people, which reminded me what it feels like to be tended to so that I could give that to myself.
None of that would have been possible if, at the first sign of homesickness, I had booked a ticket to India to relieve myself of the feeling. It is because I allowed it to linger that it naturally transformed and showed me what I needed to know.
When emotions come upon us, they are essentially complexes. They were in the unconscious, and something happened in the world (in my case, my birthday) that became the trigger for that part of us to come to the fore. As this autonomous entity emerges, our conscious mind, the ego, looks at it and struggles. Sometimes the ego gets totally overpowered, and that is when it is important to relieve the emotion to the extent that the ego can interact with it. But sometimes the emotion is simply existing while the ego watches, wanting to get over it while the emotion wants to linger. That is when the waiting and the holding of the tension give rise to the third way, and the capacity of the ego to hold this function within it expands.
An Invitation
So my invitation to you is to not hate your emotions, to stay with them, and to let them create a change in you that expands your capacity as a person. I also invite you to stop holding yourself to the impossible standard of never having emotional ups and downs. That is not possible, and it would not be good for our growth anyway.
