Navigating vs. Controlling Emotions

Written by Michelle Shelton

May 2, 2023

Our society has a tricky relationship with emotions. We label some as good and some as bad. We spend a lot of time, energy, and money chasing emotions like happiness and excitement, and a lot of time, energy, and money trying to avoid or numb others, like sadness, loneliness, anger, and anxiety. 

In most cases, it makes sense that we can’t be with our difficult emotions. If we didn’t have adults who could be with our emotions as kids, we never learned these skills. If we were punished or sent to our room when we got angry, we learned anger is bad. If we were given a cookie to make us happy when something felt sad, we learned to numb. And so our emotional growth became stunted, leading to under developed emotional intelligence. 

This leads many of us to try and control our emotions. To numb or to suppress what we are really feeling, projecting the emotions we think we should feel. We become disconnected from our true inner experience and stuck in a constant battle for control.

A better, healthier approach is to Navigate your emotions. You don’t push them away, nor do you let them in the driver seat. Rather, you welcome them in, listen to what they have to tell you, and then you let them go. And they will go once their message has been delivered and they’ve been understood. They never intended to stay. 

Navigating emotions can be accomplished in 5 steps:

1. Separate you from the emotion. You feel emotion. The emotion is not you. You feel anger, sadness, happiness, excitement, joy, jealousy, fear, anxiety. But you are not any one of these things. As a human being, you can expect to feel all of these emotions. Whatever you are feeling in any one moment, it doesn’t change or define your worth, your abilities, or your values. 

Similarly, you are not meant to attach to your feelings. They are meant to come go, like a breeze through a window. They only stay if they get trapped in by suppressing, ignoring, or holding on to them. Noticing how you feel them in your body - what sensations you experience and where - can help you create space between the emotion and yourself. 

2. Make peace with all your emotions. Some emotions get a bad wrap because they may influence us to do bad things. For example, anger sometimes influences us to hurt other people in retaliation. Hurting others is bad, anger is not. Separating the emotion from the action can help put the right boundaries in place while opening up welcoming space for whatever you are feeling

3. Get curious about what you are feeling. Building emotional intelligence requires broadening your emotional language. You might be able to identify your primary emotion - angry, sad, anxious, hurt, embarrassed, or happy. But breaking these down into more specific, secondary emotions can help pinpoint exactly what is happening inside. For example, your primary emotion may be anxious. As you break this down, you may consider if you are afraid, stressed, vulnerable, confused, worried, cautious, nervous, skeptical, or bewildered. Feeling confused is very different from feeling afraid. Understanding what you are really feeling can help you understand what action to take.

4. Check in on what the emotions are telling you. Emotions are not good or bad. They are only information. They come to teach us about something important. For example, carrying forward the previous example, you may feel anxious when starting a new class. As you dig deeper, you realize you are actually feeling confused about what is expected of you, which is coming out as anxiety that you will not be successful. Understanding this, you know you need to ask for clarification and extra help to understand. Or, on the other hand, you may realize you actually feel afraid. Maybe something in the class is making you feel uncomfortable or unsafe. This calls for a very different approach and solution. When we listen to what the emotion is telling us and take the appropriate action, we free the emotion to leave us and be on its way. Its job is done. 

5. Evaluate how your response to your emotions align with your values. This point brings us back to bullets 2 through 4. First, you recognize your anger. As you get curious, you realize you are really feeling impatient. You go deeper to explore what this impatience is telling you. Maybe you are impatient with your spouse for not putting away his shoes…for the past month. Your impulse might be to hide the shoes to teach him a lesson. He’ll never leave his shoes out again! Lesson taught, the emotion has done its work. This is where values come in. Checking your response against your values, you realize you value communication, relationship, and second chances. With this in mind, you put his shoes away and calmly let him know that you really appreciate it when he puts his own shoes away. Values are an important compass in navigating emotions. They help us avoid impulsive behaviors we will avoid later and ensure our relationships endure through the regular emotional flow of life. 

By following these 5 steps you can effectively navigate your emotions and strengthen your emotional intelligence. Emotions will then be able to flow freely -  to enter, deliver the information they carry, and move on.