Changing Lives: How Do We Change Our State?
Elena V. Amber
Emotional Capital for sustainable future. Founder, doctoral researcher (sustainability transformations), award-winning author
Read on my website / Reading time 5 min.
Amid life’s intensity, there are moments when we must forge ahead without the resources (time, strength, ability) to pause and reflect within ourselves.
For these situations, we need quick fixes.
When feeling down, we seek simple solutions like spending time with others, exercising, or focusing on pleasant activities. These are magic pills. They work because we switch our attention, disconnected from unpleasant situations.
Overwhelmed with emotions and not knowing what to do with them, most simply block emotions out and become emotionally stultified.
Emotional suppression (intentional avoidance) works under cultural influence, which is used to dictate socio-cultural norms of not being vulnerable, especially for males.
What’s wrong with vulnerability?
I’ve observed that, nowadays, vulnerability is often equated with authenticity. Vulnerability is a state that has nothing wrong with it, yet your story better end differently.
About 20% of people on earth are highly sensitive people (HSP) and vulnerable because of that. Each would serve as a living advocate, saying that nothing fancy is to live in a vulnerable zone daily.
This is a cause we find a sunny side of life as soon as possible and disconnect from unpleasant emotional states.
Consequently, individuals may struggle to access their emotions. For instance, unpacking anger proves challenging as it can be linked to deeper emotions like guilt or shame, leading individuals to deny experiencing these feelings and potentially face social judgment.
Another sample of social influence is personal detachment from bad moods instead of their transformation due to the positivity movement. This is a backyard of positivity, which could also become toxic being overdosed.
Switching attention to positive things on rainy days can have a short-term benefit.
Still, without profound psychological transformation, emotional episodes could come back, so switching to positivity could work as a temporary band-aid and need to be mixed with long-term solutions.
There is nothing wrong with pills unless the day X they won’t work or you would suffer without pills available to you.
Quick fixes often lead to situations when emotional baggage is left unaddressed, resulting in unresolved accumulation.
People think trauma is something big, an extraordinary event in our lives.
However, it is not so.
If you consider trauma as a situation where you lack the energy to process emotions, engaging in emotional work would become more understandable.
Based on my experiences and 8-year personal journey, as detailed in The Gift of Sensitivity , I firmly advocate the transformative potential of altering our emotional state to change our lives.
Change your emotional state if you feel bored, lonely, lost, unsuccessful, betrayed, or abandoned, and life will become a miracle again.
What is crucial if you want such emotional breakthroughs?
Understanding that self-control is a short-term emotional solution.
Any trauma therapists will tell you we need to process emotions.
However, you have a long way to go before reaching that therapist’s armchair. Typically, this emotional baggage already significantly drains individuals. Thus, short-term and long-term solutions should be mixed.
Will emotional intelligence save me?
Let’s see what is available for laypeople to understand emotional intelligence.
Salovey and Mayer , authors of emotional intelligence, called their Emotional Intelligence model an ‘‘ability’’ model. Using a deductive approach, they identified four ‘‘branches’’ that are related in a hierarchical way: (a) the ability to perceive emotions accurately, (b) the ability to use emotions to facilitate thought, ? the ability to understand emotions and (d) the ability to manage emotions.
The very first and foundational quality, such as the ability to perceive emotions accurately or emotional perception, is a highly intricate and complex process. It involves accurately identifying and understanding our own and others’ feelings.
However, it is often not as straightforward as “I feel angry” or “I am guilty,” as you may think, due to emotional disconnections and avoidance.
According to HR Management in the Forensic Science Laboratory book, Emotional intelligence may be defined as awareness and understanding of people’s feelings, including one’s own, and how to use this knowledge to engage effectively in interpersonal relationships in a wide variety of contexts and situations.
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However, Harvard Business Review has no sign of emotions in the description of self-awareness already in 2015: “Put simply, self-awareness is understanding who we are and how we are similar to or different from others. One key facet is self-knowledge — how we see our various personality traits, values, attitudes, and behaviors. But another aspect is being aware of how consistent (or inconsistent) our self-view is compared to an external appraisal — how other people see us or against objective data. The latter is essential for transforming self-knowledge beyond mere personal introspection into accurate self-awareness.”
Forbes offers this: “To develop self-awareness, learn stress management techniques, note down your feelings and reactions at work towards the end of a work day or long work week, and practice mindfulness exercises.”
According to the Encyclopedia of Mental Health book (which has a price of more than 2000 USD on Amazon), there are two different ways of thinking about emotional intelligence — the ‘ability’ approach and the ‘trait’ approach. Both approaches positively affect mental health and social adjustment in adults and children.
To summarize, we have been told by emotional intelligence that we need:
To manage emotions, we have been taught two popular mechanisms people use to regulate emotions: suppressing and disconnecting from them.
Emotional intelligence doesn’t even mention that we need to process emotions.
Yet, emotional baggage depletes your energy, and being depleted, we face significant downsides in the quality of our lives.
Unprocessed emotions lie dormant until triggered again.
Therefore, the first step would be understanding that unprocessed emotions don’t serve you.
We need to process emotions and do it every day.
Emotional cleaning is the same way you do any other daily routine, such as showering or having breakfast, to boost your body’s energy level.
We need daily emotional detoxification as if our body needs a daily workout with inflammation.
The quality of processing emotions makes emotion outbursts irreversible.
We have no emotional processing culture in our society. Therefore, accumulated emotional baggage is exposed so intensively once triggered by something that could become “a last drop.”
The benefit of daily emotional processing is that you cannot stay at the lower emotional energy level once you work out to a higher level.
This is the target of daily wrap-ups and summaries finalized with a sense of gratitude, which is an uplifted emotional state.
However, gratitude should not be at your mental level where you think, “I should be grateful for what I have as many have not even a piece of it, so I am grateful.”
Gratitude, like any other emotion in emotional work, should be at the emotional level: feel it, not think about it!
After processing, you will mentally remember and even feel emotions connected to the episode you have been working with. Still, you will not feel them with an intensive traumatic effect, and your body will not record them.
Emotional processing should become our daily habit because we face many emotional triggers daily. Changing our states, we change our lives.
Why not try sitting with your emotions tonight to set the stage for a different tomorrow morning?
That’s all for today.
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