Processing Emotions: Know What You Feel and Feel It

Emotions are something we don't often understand. They are triggered by events, memories, and sometimes for no reason, seemingly.

We often struggle with emotion. We bury our feelings so we can get through work, avoid a fight, survive to the next day. I think we actually get so good at avoiding our emotions that we often can't even describe them when we do admit to their existence. We, "feel some type of way," about circumstances but can't accurately describe how we feel. 

I've been this way in the past and I think that was a mistake for two reasons.

The first mistake of burying emotions, refusing to process them, is that we forget how to define the emotions we're feeling. We lose site of the subtle differences in disliking, loathing, or hating. We don't know the difference between being frustrated and being angry. We act, without understanding what we're actually reacting too.

I argue that without understanding the emotions we feel, and acting on them despite our lack of understanding, we often find ourselves reacting based on the wrong emotion.

The other potential problem with ignoring our emotions, shutting them down, is they don't go away. Refusing to understand and process emotions is like putting all our problems into a closet. Eventually, the closet gets full and our problems burst through, potentially burying us in the process.

I can't say definitively, and I may be wrong, but I think it's often men who suffer in this way. We tell each other all the time to "man up" or "drive on." We lose friends in war and go back out the next day. 

In the epic movie Top Gun, when Goose dies, the instructors keep sending Maverick up so he has something to focus on other than his emotions. Later in the movie, Maverick almost loses control and that loss of control almost cost others their lives. Maverick never processed his emotions when he lost his best friend and because of that he was unable to handle the stress when those emotions came boiling up during a stressful situation.

When you feel emotions, feel them. Define them, so you know what they are. Process them so they can't control you, so they can't bury you.