Live your emotions

There are endless texts, research, and stances on managing emotions. However, in this small article, I do not want to go into technical details, but rather offer an attitude, a strategy that I find particularly useful regarding this topic.

When I experience something pleasurable, I wish it would never end! Whether it is enjoying my favorite pistachio cream or laughing out loud with friends, I enjoy the moment, trying to imprint every second in my memory. When, on the other hand, I perceive some sensation for which I feel some discomfort, ehhh, it is not like eating pistachios! Whether it was a twinge of jealousy rather than an excruciating pain, my tendency in the past was to play dumb, and start metaphorically kicking the emotion in question, as if to shake off something sticky and annoying. The result? The discomfort grew, and grew, and grew.

NLP has saved me on more than a few occasions. There have been times when 15 minutes of pure application has transformed emotions that seemed impossible to handle. In any case, over time I began to wonder if there were ways to further enrich my relationship with emotions. The first answers were not long in coming, but it took me a very strong experience to mature them, namely the end of a very important love story. I had no problem accepting the pain originating from that event, I considered it normal, yet I desperately wanted it to go away. It was like having an unwelcome guest, a tenant you put up with out of politeness, while you hope he will leave soon. I thought acceptance was enough, but living in that spirit was not working. Until, a couple of months later, something unexpected happened. I was lying down, on the couch, when I felt it coming: one of those usual waves of pain was knocking at my door, pawing to knock it down. Without thinking, without having premeditated it, inside I said: “Hey, hello pain, come on, come and keep me company”, and I opened myself totally to the sensations of that moment, letting them flow throughout my body. At the same instant I did so, a rush of happiness swept over me and I cried, happy, stunned. “Thank you, pain” I added, “and know that you can visit me anytime you want!”

Since that episode, this is what I try to do with my emotions, big or small. Ignoring them, denying them, isolating them, and pushing them away creates, in my opinion, a kind of fracture, a distance between us and them. I think it is not the emotion itself, but rather the rupture we create that gives impetus to our discomfort. The role of emotions thus seems to be to flow. Furthermore, they are a product of our body: we produce them, we create them, they are part of us, parts that would like to be heard and welcomed. Accepting them, welcoming them, inviting them with sincerity and courage (because sometimes it takes it, and a lot) to pervade us, and then spurring them to return gives an unparalleled sense of wholeness and integrity.

I am fully aware that I have not invented anything new. I later discovered that some of what I recounted above is part of established philosophical and therapeutic currents, but I still want to report my personal experience, selecting key passages.

Here, then, is a summary of my personal strategy to manage, live and love an emotion:

1. AWARENESS: Recognizing the presence of an emotion is the initial and straightforward step, coupled with an awareness of our attitude toward it: how are we behaving in relation to it? Are we dismissing it? Are we embracing it? Perhaps a bit of both?
2. LISTENING: Let us give ourselves a few minutes to understand where in our body the emotion in question is, what form it takes, whether it moves, how it moves, whether it has weight, temperature, texture, colors, even sounds.
3. ACCEPTANCE: Let us take a deep breath and say: “Okay, it’s there, I’m looking at it, and you know what? It’s okay!”.
4. WELCOMING: When ready, we say to ourselves: “All right, let’s go meet this emotion!” and, focusing on that physical sensation that is emotion, we approach it by addressing words like: “Hey, I know you’re there. I want you to know that you’re perfect exactly the way you are”. At this point we relax our muscles, letting go of any kind of resistance. “Come on baby, come with me!” and taking the emotion by the hand, we allow ourselves to experience it, letting it expand into the rest of our body.
5. EXPANSION: After welcoming and embracing an emotion, I personally like to speak to it using the following words: “More, come on, grow, even more, even more!” (I notice that the more I encourage the emotion to grow in intensity, the more it transforms, resetting my discomfort).
6. INVITATION: When we are satisfied, we thank the emotion, inviting it to come back whenever it wants (here, as in the previous points, I prefer to make it concrete by speaking directly to the emotion, using a soft, gentle tone to tell it, inside our head or out loud: “Thank you, really. I am aware that your purpose is to protect me and make me feel alive. I want you to know that in my presence you are truly at home, where you are safe. Thank you, and please remember that the door is always open for you.”).

A small note on point 4: when we give the go-ahead to an emotion, we may have different reactions, such as crying, screaming, laughing. We may be tempted to resist these impulses or perform them mildly, but the greatest benefits come from letting go completely (and perhaps exaggerating a bit). So if we feel like crying, we cry 110%; if we feel like screaming, we scream 110%; if we feel like laughing, we laugh 110%. It might be more comfortable, then, to find a sufficiently intimate place and time to give full vent to any impulse (without hurting anyone, of course), from the living room to the shower at home, from a meadow in the middle of the fields to one’s car in a secluded parking lot.

In conclusion, it is not so much what happens outside as what happens inside that determines our emotional state. The beauty of it is that what happens inside is created and shaped by us, and that is where we have room to maneuver, that is where we have a wide range of choices. Sometimes we choose to put a distance between us and our emotions, thinking we are safe, but now we know that, if we want to, we can take them in our arms, talk to them, reassure them, and invite them back, for example, to enjoy some good pistachio together.

Emanuele