Photo by Taylor Smith on Unsplash
Inside Out
We are emotional beings, and there is no getting past the fact that our emotions can control the way we show up in conversations, conflicts, and relationships in general. And as we learned in The What and Why of Emotional Pain in Women and Girls, stress from conflict runs more deeply and more intuitively in female brains. This includes conflict between me and someone else, or internal conflict between what I feel and what I tell myself I should feel.
The first step in resolving any conflict is recognizing it exists and identifying the issues involved. When it comes to your internal conflicts, you need to start with identifying your emotions.
The Disney/Pixar movie “Inside Out” is a great tool to help you understand emotions and how they work. It does a pretty good job of identifying our basic primary emotions – Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Joy – and how they shape who we are and how we react in any given moment. Notice that 4 out of the 5 primary feelings identified in the movie could be put under the “negative” heading. That doesn’t mean Joy is the only “positive.” I suggest watching this film if you’ve never seen it, or watching it again. It helps you understand that emotions don’t have to be an “either/or” situation. You don’t have to feel Joy or Sadness, Anger or Fear, Disgust or Anything But Disgust. You can feel many emotions at the same time, and figuring out which ones you’re feeling is key to understanding that negative emotions are actually not negative at all. They are necessary. And feeling them can actually be positive.
For example, if I feel disgust when I find mold on the leftovers I planned to eat for lunch, that’s because it’s unsafe for me to eat it. That bodily response of disgust is helpful, otherwise I might decide to ignore the warning signs and potentially fall ill. It’s the same with fear, or anger. I’ll talk more about anger in another post coming out next week called “Why Anger Matters.”
The important part to remember is that there is a difference between Identifying your feeling(s) and Labeling yourself as the feeling itself. Identifying is about saying “I feel…” and Labeling is about saying “I am…”
Identifying vs. Labeling
Think of a shirt with a logo. On the outside of the shirt is a brand name. Brand names inspire loyalty and are instantly recognizable. You see the Nike swoosh on your friend’s shirt, you like your friend and her shirt, so you buy a Nike swoosh shirt too. You feel comfortable, you feel like you fit in, and you get attention when you wear the shirt. So you start buying only Nike apparel and become loyal to the swoosh, to the brand label.
Somewhere inside that shirt is another label with instructions on how to care for it– dry clean only, wash in cold water, lay flat to dry, etc. You follow the instructions so you can keep the shirt looking nice as you wear it.
The same goes for our emotions and moods. If we label ourselves as the emotion or mood by saying “I’m depressed” or “I’m angry” or “I’m scared” we begin to wear them like a brand, and we tend to follow their directions and remain loyal to them. A better way is to work on identifying our emotions by naming what we are feeling and switching up the words to say things like “I feel depressed” or “I feel angry” or “I’m feeling kind of scared right now.” When we stop labeling and saying “I am” and start identifying and saying “I feel” we’re doing something very powerful and important in that one change-up: We’re becoming aware of our feelings, accepting them, and reflecting on maybe why we feel them, instead of always reacting out of them and labeling ourselves as “bad” because of our reactions. When we become aware of our feelings and feel them without the reactions, we’re learning to care for our feelings in a healthy way instead of what the label tells us to do.
In the next blog post coming out on June 2nd, we’ll talk about Responding vs. Reacting and the 5 steps you can take to stop “overreacting.”
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