Part 2: 7 steps to connect to your emotions

Part 1 https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/7-steps-connect-your-emotions-menaca

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” Khalil Gibran

I’ve heard people say through difficult times, get on with it will be ok. I disagree, as the saying goes what we resist persists. Psychologists now say knowing and accepting our feelings, helps us to build our mental health and wellbeing. To deal with our emotions effectively, we first need to know they exist, understand the reason & accept they are there.

How Do I Know?

I used to wear my smile regardless of how I felt. I didn’t take time to connect with my feelings, and for sure didn’t stop to understand them. I was in denial of the negative feelings I was experiencing as we are often told and expected to live a life of positivity. We live in a time and culture of pro-positivity, particularly in social media. We are often encouraged, or we put pressure on ourselves to suppress or camouflage our emotions which are perceived to be negative.

As human beings, it’s reasonable to experience different emotions. It’s normal to feel elated, happy, at peaceful sometimes & feel sad, angry, and scared at other times. My point is, to deal with your emotions effectively first, we need to be aware of them and accept them without judgment fully.

Why do you ignore your emotions?

Connecting with feelings like sadness or anger or anxiety might be the last thing you want to do. Because they’re uncomfortable, you feel fragile, ridiculous, and even feel exposed. You are already feeling tired, frustrated and might even feel scared to unravel the unknown. Many of us don’t even know how to feel an emotion or where to start. We have hardly stopped to experience them or at least not done that for too long.

Following a process can help you to connect to your emotions, and expressing them.

These techniques give you a different perspective of what you feel, what you’re ready to explore at the time. 

The process allows you to be more objective

1.   Log your feeling: 

Write down what you are experiencing without evaluating. Whether you feel happy, peaceful, sad, angry, scared, note it down.

2.  Identify the effect: 

Try to pinpoint the specific feeling as much as you can. Take time and do something which helps you to connect with yourself. For some, it’s deep breathing, listening to music or something else. 

For example, you are feeling a lump in your throat, tightness in your chest, clammy hands.

3.   Scan your Body: 

Go through a process of body scanning from the top to the toes. Pay attention to exact locations; head, neck, shoulders, arms, fingers, chest, stomach, legs, feet.  “What am I feeling in my body?” 

Print out or draw an outline of your picture and mark the location where you experience the specific emotion (Mark ‘X’ on the exact spot where you experience the feeling).

4.  Paint your picture: 

Colour in the area on the diagram where you are exactly experiencing the feeling. You could use colour pencils, crayons, or any other medium to express the emotions in some way. You could represent them through shapes, colours or even intensity. You could use the colour yellow for happiness, black for sadness, red for anger, or green for peaceful.

5.   Comprehend your Character: 

Explore your drawing and understand the character you have painted. This character is representing you the complex, multidimensional emotions you are experiencing. Take a step back and study your character fully.

6.  Explain your Emotions: 

Describe your paintings in the most simplistic way representing your true feelings. Talking loudly in plain and straightforward language and asking basic questions will help you evaluate your emotions. The exercise will allow you to see how other related or non-related factors are playing a part in this emotion, what do you need to change this emotion, and what can help you deal with this emotion better.

7.   Record your Responses: 

Noting down the explanations will help you to understand your emotions at a deeper level. Try not to discredit any answers, for their simplicity or illogical nature. The answers will help you to come up with solutions, respond to them more objectively, and provide you with more options. 

You can take10-15 minute break to follow this process. You can use this technique by writing down the feelings that you feel, reflecting on the location of your sensations in your body, to explore what your emotion looks like with a different perspective.

In the short term, it often seems more comfortable to ignore how we feel and get on with life. After all, it brings us heartache, makes us experience undesired emotions such as anger, and at best, it can be described as discomfort. On the flip side, the more we try to ignore the faster they seem to leave an imprint on us. 

We begin to express this externally on people around us who hardly have anything to do with it in the first place. We often show our frustration internally, which harms us long-term, hinders our growth, and prevents us from achieving our dreams. Either way, the effects of not processing our emotions are detrimental to our health, happiness, relationships and even our careers.

Our emotions are our vital signals to make us realise what is important for us, what matters, where is your boundary, and what you are willing (or not) to compromise. When you learn to apply your emotions as a guide in your life, it helps you have a better balance and feel fulfillment.

Hence, we are helping ourselves by staying in touch with our emotions and taking them for what they are rather than only trying to change them. 

If you want to read the next article https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/resilience-survival-through-adversity-part-3-seven-menaca