Emotion 2.0: An Emotional Do-Over

Pretty much everything the typical human knows about emotions is wrong.

Perhaps there has never been such a crucial part of our humanity that is so misunderstood.

Even if you agree so far, how, you might ask me, do I pretend to understand something that even the experts can’t agree on?

The answer is that I don’t understand. I don’t even try. Experts are the reason for the confusion, and their analysis is the death of humanity. You are the only expert that ever has been, and ever will be, on the subject of your emotions.

What I do claim is that a different attitude about emotions will dramatically improve the way you feel about yourself, other people, and the world around you, in addition to improving the results of your life so that they are more in keeping with your vision for it.

The main obstacle to a good understanding of emotions is that we insist on turning the subject into an intellectual exercise. This only confuses the matter further because emotions live outside of our intellect, and each is, in fact, mutually exclusive of the other.

Here are 2 of the most important emotional game-changers:

1) Regardless of what you may have heard, fear is not an emotion. Fear is the opposite of emotion. Fear limits, emotions expand.

2) If someone refers to any emotion as being bad, hold onto your wallet and back slowly out of the room.

Chances are very good that you have been told one or both of the above. Perhaps often, with great conviction, and from the mouths of experts.

Fear as an emotion, and making emotions available for judgment (as in, some good, some bad), are the common-think about emotions that permeate every conversation on the subject. But when we stop trying to understand emotions as a theory, and start understanding them as an experience, here’s what we find:

Dysfunction, struggle, limitation, and much of what we know of as poor “mental health” always result from being separated from our emotions. Only always. Not just emotions thought to be good, but all emotion.

To shun your emotional life is to ask your brain to take on the role of being you. That’s a sort of heavy-lifting that your brain was never designed to do.

Being detached from emotion actually has a valid purpose: to bring us into a logical state that is useful in dealing with threatening situations. The problem most of us have is that we find all of life to be a threatening situation. That is a cruel and unnecessary lesson of childhood.

Mostly, we modeled this from our parents who also saw the world as a threatening situation. That keeps us in a perpetual state of emotionlessness (is that a word?!), which is no life at all. Detaching can serve a purpose, but it will always feel bad, and the results will be destructive as a general practice.

Think of it this way: is sadness a “bad” emotion or a “good” one? Would you want to suppress the grief you feel over the death of a loved one? Grief is a valuable process that is undesirable as a choice, but always results in greater depth of understanding and overall experience in those who go through it. In that way, it is a gift to us all.

Remember that suppression is always practice for repression. One is a conscious detachment from emotion while the other is subconscious. Neither ends well.

So, our struggle is always the yearning to find more emotion in life, not less. That can’t happen when we continue to believe that emotions are the source of our discontent instead of the solution to it.

Emotions are the stuff of being human; both the ones you choose and the ones you don’t. Without emotion, there is no “you”. And, emotions all are a net gain for your life regardless of your preferences in the moment.

So, from here on out, you get to choose: do you want to believe that some of your emotions are bad and need to be controlled (euphemism for repressed), or do you want to live an authentic life with a greater level of abundance than you ever dreamed possible.

These are opposing and mutually exclusive goals. And, a choice must be made. In fact, a choice between the 2 is always being made whether we’re aware of it or not. The choice is mostly a matter of habit, not wisdom.

Here’s what emotions are when fully expressed: a perfect representation of who you are in the moment. All of them. All the time.

That’s not good or bad because, in the world of your emotions, there is no such thing as good and bad. They are simply “what is” about you; the real you, not the artificial one you put on each morning when you get ready to face the world.

Have you ever heard the phrase “a good cry”? Better still, have you ever experienced a good cry; one that ultimately leaves you cleansed of stress and confusion? This is always the constructive outcome of allowing yourself to be moved by emotion, regardless of the emotion.

In that way, and a thousand others, emotions occur in support of your humanity. There are no exceptions. They are the only thing that give you any uniqueness and individuality in the world.

Yet, to believe that there are bad emotions would logically lead you to conclude that any and all sadness is bad, and is something to be shunned and rejected. This is the choice to be an inauthentic person.

So, the truth about emotions is that their purpose is to reveal who you really are, to yourself and the world. You can create emotions on command (this is what actors do), but the way that emotion is expressed is always unique to you.

The bottom line is that emotions are never available for judgment, i.e., good and bad. They are ‘what is’. And, they are not to be feared because who you really are is a great thing.

To loathe our emotions is to loathe ourselves. Because the two are inextricable. The emotional version of you is also the authentic version of you. Experts are just other people that also don’t know how you feel.

Emotions will cause you to act in unexpected ways. Is that a bad thing? Unexpected has become synonymous with “bad” in modern culture, but is it really? Unexpected is also what makes you laugh out loud.

So, unexpected is only bad to our logical brains. Conversely, to our humanity, unexpected is what makes you “you”. Unexpected, unpredictable, unreasonable, unacceptable, and unfamiliar all describe the chief characteristic of emotions.

And they all describe the chief characteristics of being you.