Flower Mound Trauma Therapist Talks – “Bad” Emotions

Emotions can get a bad rap, especially the emotions we term “bad.” In this video Flower Mound Trauma Therapist Victoria Ellis tells us about them and how to address them. Watch the video or read the transcript below!

Transcript:

Hello, my name is Victoria Ellis and I am a Flower Mound trauma therapist working at the Journey and The Process. Today, I wanted to talk about negative emotions and why they are important and beneficial for us, and at the end I’m going to talk a little bit about what to do with them. So it is not uncommon for us to desire to move away from negative emotions, stuff them in a box, tell ourselves to just get over something and move on. Maybe we’ve been told that negative emotions like shame, anger, disappointment, sadness, grief, bitterness are emotions that are bad or wrong or evil and should be discarded or moved on from, or just don’t think about it, which is unfortunate because these emotions are playing a very important role of telling us what we find important, what we believe about the world around us, how we are interpreting people’s actions, and give us insight into the lens by which we see and interpret the world.

If we want to change our response, one of the first things we need to do is change our thoughts and our feelings. And the only way we can do that is by understanding what we are thinking and what we are feeling, and ultimately what we are believing. When I have a negative emotion like sadness, and I don’t want to feel it, and I decide to just stuff it down and distract myself by work or by investing in family or by thinking about positive things without ever stopping to ask questions about why I’m sad, that emotion doesn’t go away. In fact, it gets more firmly embedded into my heart and my soul. That emotion is telling me something important about what I value.

Secondly, the emotion doesn’t go away. So what does it do? Well, emotions are a lot like toddlers. If you’ve ever had a toddler who wants your attention or they want to show you something that they find exciting and they come up to you and they’re like, “Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, look. Look, mom, mom, look.” And you decide to ignore that toddler and just look away. Does that toddler get louder or quieter? Well, if your toddler is a normal, healthy toddler, then that toddler is going to increase in volume and become more loud. They might start actually crying or yelling or shouting or getting into your face, shoving the piece of paper into your face because it’s something that they think is important and valuable and they want you to see it and pay attention to it and them.

Now, if I also look at a toddler, let’s say a toddler who’s having a fit, and I decide to just indulge and be like, “Yes, you are so sad.” And I am not trying to soothe that toddler, I’m just actually poking at that toddler and indulging that toddler. That toddler is also going to start screaming more and more and more. So with this example, we don’t want to ignore an emotion because it will get louder and it will start seeping into other areas of our life. But we also don’t want to marinate in an emotion and stay in that emotion without trying to resolve it or understand it or help the emotion clear out. T,here is a middle ground here.

So when I have an emotion that is painful for me, that is uncomfortable, and I sit with it at first, that emotion is going to feel stronger because it’s being heard. I’m actually listening to it, and that emotion is going to tell me things about what it believes about the world, what it thinks about events that have happened, where it believes that my rights have been violated, or maybe it’s just expressing that something terrible happened. As I listen to that emotion, I’m going to get an idea of what I value, what I believe, and an interpretation of events.

After I have sat with the emotion and listened to it, then I can begin to respond. Maybe the emotion is bitter that my mom got sick on Christmas and couldn’t make it, and maybe what that emotion needs is for me to listen to it and then speak truth, which is, that wasn’t mom’s fault. I get why we’re upset, we had a lot of plans, but mom couldn’t help being sick, and I get that it’s not fair for us to feel this way, but I know we do, but we need to forgive her and we need to forgive God. Or maybe if you’re not religious, maybe we need to forgive the universe and accept that hard things do happen, but that joy and suffering coexist, and we can move through this.

As I address the emotion, I can address the value or the belief directly. If I never sit with the emotion, I don’t actually know the words to say to comfort myself. So this comes back to a very common saying in America today, which is all emotions are valid, to which I also have a second clause to that, which is that doesn’t make all emotions true. So all emotions are valid, in that they are real, they’re present, they’re affecting us. They are affecting how we move through the world. They have an internal logic, but just because an emotion has validity, as in, it needs to be addressed, it needs to be taken seriously, it needs to be given serious consideration and be given a voice to, does not mean that that emotion is telling the truth. And I can both validate an emotion, hear it out, and then also come back and correct the narrative to offer feedback to myself and push back.

As I do so, I’ll often find that these negative emotions that were so strong and powerful can be soothed and changed and even moved towards the positive emotions that all of us find much more comfortable. And honestly, we oftentimes learn more about ourselves by our negative emotions than we do our positive. And for some people, maybe the response is, “Well, I don’t need to necessarily learn about myself. I know everything I need to,” but it’s through learning about ourselves and learning about our beliefs that we’re able to have influence on ourselves and move ourselves towards the positive change and self-actualization that we want in our lives.

I hope that this has been helpful for those of us who struggle with sitting with negative emotion or even seeing the point in feeling bad when we could just pull ourselves up from our bootstraps and move on. Emotion is one of God’s gifts to us. It really helps us see where our heart is and where our beliefs are. And I hope as you give yourself permission to sit with and explore your negative emotions, you can experience the deep healing that comes from listening to our hearts and speaking back truth.

This has been Victoria Ellis Flower Mound Trauma Therapist from The Journey and The Process. If you have enjoyed this video, check it out and other content like it at our website, thejourneyandtheprocess.com.

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