Developing a Healthy Relationship with Emotions

Imagine repressing your breath because you consider the air around you, "bad." It may work in the short term, but will eventually lead to you gasping for air taking in more than you needed originally. A similar experience happens with our emotions.

Additionally, the most common symptom of excessive breathing, Oxygen toxicity, is difficulty breathing or maintaining healthy breathing patterns without focused effort. People who overly identify with specific emotions, experience great difficulty in regulating those emotions.

Very few people are able to find a perfect balance of repression and experiencing their emotions. It is often a tedious process of trial and error to find a state of equilibrium. Even once found it can be even harder to maintain that balance. Give yourself grace for not having balance and plan forgiveness for the times you are unable to keep it in the future.

Emotions are not yours. They do not belong to you, nor are they a part of you. You are not the air in your lungs. You breath it in and release it. In Narrative Therapy a common intervention is guiding clients to externalize their emotions. An example, is writing letters to an emotion as it was an individual who would actually read and respond. Doing this also means changing our language from, "I am anxious" or "I am just an angry person" to "I am experiencing anxiety" or "I am full of anger." This leads to an increased ability to interact with and understand emotional experiences.

Judgement is a cancer in any relationship, however it is especially detrimental in the relationship with emotions. This is because our judgements often amplify emotions. An example of this is panic attacks, which occur when an individual experiences anxiety around becoming anxious. By reminding ourselves we are not the emotions we experience, and treating emotions with curiosity we are able to appreciate them through understanding.

All emotions serve a purpose whether to teach, motivate, or reorient. However, it is not always best to act soley on the interests of emotions. Wisdom is where emotions overlap with rational thought. Most children act as though they are driven by emotions. Parenting is then the act of adding rational thought, to support the development of a wise mind. However, this leads to a repression of what emotions provide, and an absentence of wisdom. By pausing to reflect on what we can gain from emotions, we better our relationship with them.