Managing Your Feelings

Okay. Youre sitting there. Youre experiencing this pervasive sense of insecurity, or fear, or sadness. Its right there. Right in front of you. What do you do now?

You probably already know that you cant just suppress your feelings. They keep coming back. Unfortunately, the desire to suppress them comes from the same place where they are generated: the meta-level of consciousness. The effort to say to yourself, ˜˜I hereby push these feelings away, falls on deaf ears. The pusher is the pushee, if you know what I mean. As youll see, only when the feelings are experienced at the object-level can we move past them.

Sometimes we can buy ourselves some time when feelings rise to the surface. For example, we can change the subject, go for a walk, listen to music, talk with friends . But eventually were left where we started. Feelings do tend to want to be processed. In fact, some of your current vulnerability to strong, undesirable feelings may stem from previous emotional responses that were not fully processed . Thats why people go into psychoanalysis: They have decided to process unresolved feelings usually from some time in their distant past.

There are several ways to process feelings. Sometimes we need to understand intellectually the various perspectives that lead to our emotional reaction. For this we can talk to a friend, therapist, or coach. We can also write in a journal or diary. In this sense, processing is a matter of getting our thinking brain to sort out what led to our emotional centers responses. Or, in other words, we attempt to get an object-level understanding of the meta-level judgments we made.

Another step you can take to help you process your feelings is to experience the emotion more fully. For example, if youre feeling sadness, perhaps a good cry will alleviate some of the pressure. This will not erase historical emotional baggage, but it can lighten the pressure until you are triggered again.

I believe the ideal way of processing feelings is to gain the intellectual understanding of the chain of events and thoughts that led to the emotional response at the same time as you allow yourself to go with the feelings. For example, if someone at the office said or did something that has you feeling empty or angry or hurt, it would be good to explore the feeling by talking about it with someone and by allowing yourself to feel the emotion fully.