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A Radically Simple New Way to Deal with Your Emotions

by Meghan McChesney Gilroy

WHAAAAaaaaaa! We’ve all experienced it – a wailing child (perhaps your own) at the supermarket, on an airplane, or at a restaurant. Quick, what’s your first response?

a. There, there, don’t cry… it can’t be that bad.
b. What’s wrong with that child? Someone make that stop!
c. Please get me out of here.
d. Oh, poor thing…
e. How wonderful! Let all that emotion out!

So what does this situation have to do with you?

Let’s start at the beginning. Your parents, teachers, and authority figures did the best they could to teach you how to survive in this world. In the process, they shared their beliefs with you, their rules for navigating the world – including their beliefs about emotion. Of course few, if any, of us received a clearly thought-out, let alone enlightened approach to dealing with emotion.

Let’s face it, most of the people who raised us were just not that comfortable dealing with messy, loud, or big feelings (or small subtle ones either for that matter). This means that at a core level, you probably don’t have many tools for dealing with your emotions or the emotions of the people around you either. And why does this matter?

Your body is designed to perceive sensation and your mind is designed to interpret this information, creating an emotional reaction in the process. It’s what we humans do - we manufacture emotions all the time. These emotions affect all aspects of your life - your health, your wealth, your personal and business relationships. They determine whether you are feeling on top of the world with hope, happiness, and joy or in the lowest depths of despair, anger, or jealousy.

Ultimately emotions relay messages from your Integrity, letting you know when you are out of balance, signaling when you have an erroneous belief in your programmed mind, and pointing out when you are out of alignment with Life itself. In short, emotions are the key to the quality of life you experience on a daily basis. Understanding them is vital to your journey of self-discovery.

So as an adult, how do you deal with your own emotions and with the emotions of the people around you? From what I’ve been observing, most adults use one of five strategies with young children. When I investigated a little further, I noticed that most adults use these same strategies with their partners, colleagues, and other adults. From experience, I know that I once used them on myself.

The five typical strategies for dealing with emotion are:

Deny: “You don’t really mean that…”
Rationalize: “That must be because…”
Fix: “Why don’t you try to…”
Run from: “I can’t deal with this right now, I need to…”
Victimize: “That’s terrible! Poor you…”

Sound familiar? Take a second to think of the last time you were emotional. Now imagine if a close friend or your partner responded to your distress with each one of the five typical strategies. How does each make you feel? Unheard? Angry? More Confused? Frustrated? Unloved? What about when you respond to yourself (within the confines of your own mind) in these ways?

I will now make the assumption that if you are reading this article, then you desire to have a loving, supportive relationship with yourself and the people around you. If the five typical strategies are not achieving this objective, then what will?

First, let’s start with a commitment. My husband, Jamie, and I made this commitment first to ourselves, then to each other, and now with our son Bodhi. Try it on for yourself:
I pledge to fully support my unique expression of all I feel and wish to do as I explore the world.

Now how do you do this on a practical basis? Here’s a radically simple idea. Instead of denying, rationalizing, fixing, running, victimizing… how about accepting your emotions? Simply allow yourself to feel them. Doesn’t this possibility allow you to breathe a little?

Since this method probably hasn’t been modeled to you, I’ll break it down a little further. When you or someone you know is experiencing emotion:

Listen: Listen carefully without the need to respond. Truly hear what is being “said” in your body, in your mind, or by the person who is confiding in you.
Acknowledge: Acknowledge that you have heard your/their problem, desires, or emotions with a simple “Hmmm… I see… Uh-huh.”
Describe: Describe the feeling simply. “That sounds…” For yourself, you can name how it feels in your body (i.e. My shoulders are tense) and notice what thoughts are going through your mind (i.e. I can’t believe I did that again).

Finally, after the emotion has passed through you, take the time to explore what triggered the emotion in the first place. Have awareness about the preceding thoughts in your mind. Explore whether these beliefs, stories, and agreements are part of a pattern from your past. Just observing these underlying causes of your emotional reactions will cause them to shift.

The results? We often fear that if we give ourselves permission to recognize emotions that this will just increase their intensity, get bigger, or more out of control. In reality the opposite is true. When you acknowledge and allow a feeling, you give it permission to pass through you (or another). If there is no resistance, then there is nothing to push against. What a radical idea.

So what would this world be like if we began cheering for all emotions, both within ourselves and with others? Yeah anger! Yeah sadness! Yeah for joy! Come on out! (Of course, as adults, we can also indulge in our emotions so have awareness if this is your pattern.) From what I’ve observed, when you start engaging your emotions in this innovative way, you support your body, clean your mind, and give Life an opportunity to flow through you in surprising ways. Plus, you just feel better. Try it out for yourself, your partner, or your children and get back to me with the results of your own field research.

Since the arrival of her son, Bodhi, Meghan McChesney Gilroy has been dispatched to do field research on how parents respond to emotion in young children and how this creates our response to our own emotion as adults.

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