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 not lacking, it doesn’t guarantee emotional bliss. 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 become familiar with them, and their power in us, takes time. Life teaches us if we learn, if we do the work, to get closer to ourselves, our Gdly core.  

Communing, giving opportunity and taking the time to connect with ourselves, is essential to health. It's part of cheshbon hanefesh except it's not just ‘what's there to correct’, it's also 'what happened to me today' and 'how did I feel about that '? 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. 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. If someone is angry about something, for example, but doesn't really know it, it's still there and has power. Loved ones may feel an undertone of conflict or irritation in casual conversation, or even in personal presence; 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.

Hashem'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 accept it with self-compassion and try to understand its message. When we do this, we enhance our personal power, becoming unafraid of feelings and better enabled to decide our response.

Because really, all feelings help us process our experiences. Sometimes its through challenging them, but often, it’s the feelings that aren’t understood that may be distorted and then impulsively expressed that make us emotion-phobic. When we find the untouched and pure place in ourselves that can receive our intensity, our lives become more stable and joyous, even with all the deficits.  Processing feelings through thinking and speaking helps us be observant where we can fulfill mitzvos with that joy. Emotional process is part and parcel of observance, it's what it's meant to be.  

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The yomim noraim were approaching. As a first-year student in yeshiva, observing the high holidays as a frum Jew, I asked the Rosh what I should do tshuva on, on Yom Kippur. His reply was whatever comes to mind. That is exactly right: tshuva means return, to ourselves, and it's things that come to mind that teach us what is unfinished business, either for the good or the grey. If I remember an exciting or proud moment, it's ripe for indulgence, for me to revel and bask in it by finding the words to recapture my experience more fully, if only to myself, to truly live; 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 Hashem wants me to look for, again, with the proper words, to enable to fully make amends. 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 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 otherwise silver linings.

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

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Emotion regulation