Understanding Emotions and Their Power

We live in a generation of needed emotional healing. There are unprecedented challenges to our mental health and the struggle to find peace is parallel with survival. We have the freedom to focus on quality of life where people can spend time on doing more enjoyable things, but so many still suffer from malaise. 

People should have more money and sustenance, it does alleviate many tensions, but even where money is plentiful, emotional bliss is sometimes absent. Divorce and discord happen amidst bounty.  We have many complex and subtle experiences and so our relationships and lives follow in their complexity. Often, we don't have the vocabulary to process the accompanying feelings and so they go ignored or even unnoticed. Innately, we feel- babies feel without being taught- but to be masters of feeling, and the power it has in us, takes time. Life can teach us as long we learn, if we do the work, to get closer to ourSelves, our real core.  

Communing, giving opportunity and taking the time to connect with ourselves, is essential to health. It's part of the life long task of self-improvement except it's not done by just asking 'what is there in me to correct’, it's also 'what happened to me today' and 'how did I feel about that '? Processing and being aware of our experience is the first step towards improvement. We can do this daily, or even more often, with pauses when we notice something is a bit overwhelming or confusing. The more we do this, the better we get at identifying feelings, so even quick and subtle feelings will become more familiar, enabling us to make decisions about them and maintain congruence quicker than the last time. We can express our inside on the outside when we're not confused above how we feel and how we want to respond to a situation.

There is no way to stop feeling, but if the emotion is ignored, we stand to be controlled by its undercurrent. Awareness empowers and informs our conscious choices. We can be angry, for example, but not really know it.  The emotion will still have presence and power. Loved ones may feel an undertone of conflict or irritation in casual conversation, or even in simply being in shared space which sure makes it hard to have spontaneous and open chats when living with others. But when we learn to feel feelings and resolve them, we stop being controlled by them or making choices because of them, and the decision-making process returns back to our minds and our free choice.

The Creator's Will is directing the world and as He created our whole character, He wants us to be emotionally attuned and has put us in the midst of an explosion in emotional self-awareness and self-help literature.  Emotional attunement doesn’t mean that I never feel sad, angry, ashamed, or depressed; it means that I know those feelings and can allow them to go through me with grace. Even if the feeling disturbs me, I acknowledge it with self-compassion and try to understand its message. When we do this, we enhance our personal power, becoming unafraid of our feelings and better equipped to decide our response.

The beautiful and the perceived ugly, all feelings help us process our experiences. Sometimes its initially through direct challenge to the emotion, like controlling an urge to harm ourselves, but we make great progress when we then speak softly and attempt to make room for the underlying protection the feeling is obscurely intending.  Feelings that we misintepret the message of, that then get impulsively expressed are what leans us towards being emotion-phobic. Then we further demonize those same misinterpreted feelings.  But we don't have to repeat this cycle endlessly. When we find the untouched and pure place in ourselves (The Self) that can receive our peripheral intensity, creating inner safety,  we can integrate all of that power and our lives become more stable and joyous, even with all the deficits.

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Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur were approaching. As a first-year student in yeshiva, observing the high holidays as a religious Jew, I asked the head Rabbi how I should work on myself, during the services of Yom Kippur. His reply was consider whatever comes to mind. That is exactly right.  Self-refinement is all about returning to our pristine state and it's things that come to mind that the soul is telling us is unfinished business, either for the good or the grey. If I remember an exciting or proud moment, that indicates it's ripe for indulgence, for me to revel in it and further internalize the positivity into all of my psychological and physical parts by finding the words to recapture my experience more fully.  If it’s an embarrassing mistake I made, I search for self-empathy and self-forgiveness with the same process, for connection; and if it’s hurt I've caused to another, it's remorse that I am meant to look for, again, with the proper words, to enable to fully make amends and shed myself of guilty attachments. Whatever comes to mind, and how to address each memory, in its intensity or subtlety, requires finesse. It requires real skill to navigate those memories and find the language to resolve them.  

Aaron Silverman, is a licensed NY, MI, and VA  social worker with more than 20 years of experience, teaching and serving a wide range of clients, helping them find emotional regulation, career passions and silver linings.

He can be reached at 848-328-0832 or [email protected]

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Emotion regulation