Yesterday I spoke about the first part of how to recognise underlying emotions. The second part to recognising underlying emotions is to understand that what comes out of you starts from a place inside. What do I mean? Think about the following scenario:
It’s 5pm and you are on your way home after a long day of work. As you leave work you slide effortlessly into traffic. The more you drive the slower things go until finally you hit a solid stop two minutes drive into your journey. Up ahead all you see is a long row of cars, banked up for miles, with no real hope of escape. How does that make you feel? To be honest it makes me feel mad. I have waited for a long time to get here and now I am basically stuck because everybody leaves work at the same time. No matter when I leave work I ALWAYS encounter traffic. Now I am getting angry.
Is it really the traffic making me angry or is it something else? I think it’s something else. When we are faced with a situation in which things aren’t going our way we often display outwardly emotions that are reflections of our inner thoughts. What ever we are displaying on the outside is what we have built on the inside. As you recognise patterns in your life, like anger, worry and so on. You will begin to notice that these things are deep down in you and that they build themselves into perspectives in your mind. How do you feel when you have been picked on for something you didn’t do? Has anyone ever forgotten your birthday? How did you react? Those reactions come from the inner needs that are usually expressed as emotions, thoughts, ideas or deep down suggestions.
The key to recognising underlying emotions
The key lies in watching how you behave. For children we might use a behaviour diary to check on what our kids are doing wrong. I think for some of us we need to reflect on how we act. For instance when you are sitting in traffic, ask yourself why traffic bothers you so much. Try this:
1. Recognise the feeling
Notice the style or quality of the feeling as it arises. Then:
2. Question why
Reflection begins with asking why? Why do I feel this way? What makes me angry when I am stuck in traffic? Why do I feel this way? One of the key things I suffer from is setting silly goals for myself. These ‘benchmarks’ are things like: ‘when I have enough money I will be happy’ or something like, ‘unless I do this or that I am not cutting it’. The only place that goal exists is in my head. For me it’s like I need to be something special in order to feel pleased with myself. These benchmarks are total fantasies that are basically connected to my brain in someway that I can’t really explain. What I am learning at the moment is to shift these perspectives I have set by creating new things to believe in. That doesn’t mean that I live with my faults… but it does mean I reduce the expectation I have on myself to over perform. Why do we strive for so much anyway? I mean what’s the bloody point?
When I see people speeding in traffic and running red lights I wonder… what’s the rush? What thing in them tells them that they have to perform. What set of ideas floating around in their brain says, ‘you have to be there on time so get there now as fast as you can.’ This is madness. One day all this rushing will come to end … along with your life. So why worry about it? If you are always rushing ask yourself why? If you are always late… why are you always late? There’s a reason. Maybe you just like people looking at you. Who knows?
3. Begin to understand the underlying tensions that create the emotions
As you ask why, you should be able to identify what emotion is coming out of you at that time (I will discuss this is more detail in the next post). There are things that create in us tensions that force us to act in certain ways. The western society is filled with pressure to perform. We have a huge crisis of materialism at the moment that is driving people to work harder, faster and longer without seriously thinking about the consequences. We all know stress is a killer yet we continue to work more and more and more until we explode. Why? What tensions are in us that make us do this? Why are they there?
In the next post in this series I am going to talk about some techniques I find helpful for recognising underlying emotions. The key thing to remember from this post is you are human and you will have outburst of emotions. It’s a part of life and you need to be aware of this as you travel along life’s road. Remember, you have them whether you acknowledge it or not.
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October 14th, 2007 at 10:55 am
[...] a previous post I have been dealing with underlying emotions. In this third part I want to talk about 5 ways that [...]