What are Emotions?
Emotions are the responses that people have to things that happen or happen to them. The type of emotion a person experiences is determined by the circumstance that triggers the emotion. For example, a person might feel happy when they hear good news. People feel afraid when they feel like they are in danger.
Emotions have a big effect on how we live every day. We decide what to do based on how happy, angry, sad, bored, or frustrated we are. We choose our interests and activities based on how they make us feel. Knowing how we feel can help us get through life with more ease and stability.
The original etymology of emotion is actually very telling. What’s most obvious in the term is the idea of motion, something is moving. And when something is moving, it is moving out and away from something and simultaneously it is moving toward something. Accordingly, the word “emotion” once upon a time, coming from Latin, was spelled “ex-motion” and indicated even more clearly, a moving out of the energy within the living system.
When you have an emotion, you feel like something is coming out of you and going somewhere. But where does all that power go? It’s a push from the unusual, but that’s not all it is. It also shows the way to something. It gives something shape and makes it happen. In this way, emotions point to the future and the interpersonal field, or to relationships.
When you’re angry, you usually feel like someone has hurt a value you hold dear, and you put all your energy into trying to make things right.
When you are afraid, you feel like someone or something is threatening and dangerous, so your energy goes out to get you out of harm’s way.
This is true for every feeling. It gives you strength and a way to use that strength. Emotions don’t go around and around in circles, either clockwise or counterclockwise. This is a myth. You can make them accept that idea, but that’s not how they work. In NLP, you can make people believe that their emotions keep going around and around. At best, that’s a way to get someone to fall asleep, and as far as I can tell, it won’t get you anywhere useful.
Now, when I talk about emotions, I’m talking about a complicated mix of how I feel and what I think. The part about “feeling” is called “sensations” or “kinesthetics,” and they can be either internal or external. A feeling is not an emotion by itself. To have an emotion, you also need to be able to think, remember, or understand something.
Because of this, when you feel (or “emote”), you are talking to the important people in your life. You’re talking about what’s going on inside of you, and you’re reaching out to change how you relate to other people.
In this way, emotions mix the past with what will happen in the future. The past is in your emotions because you learned them in the past. You learned them from past events and experiences where you thought, reasoned, drew conclusions, and made meanings. With that history, they are now affecting your current situation and making you feel the way you do. But there is an issue. The problem is that most of what happened in the past, especially when you were a child, doesn’t matter anymore when you’re an adult.
Then, to make things even worse, you often try to figure out why you feel the way you do by saying that “the past caused it.” But that’s a bad way of thinking. Nothing happened because of the “past.” Instead, it was how and where you learned something that is still with you. But what was important to you in the past might not be important to you now.
Your feelings are also about the future. This is because feelings are chosen. When you feel something, you want to do something. What is the question? “What are you trying to do when you feel and show a certain emotion?” We now ask something different than “Why do I feel X?” Now we ask, “Why do we feel this way? What does it want to achieve?”
Real Value of Emotions
Emotions give us the drive to move forward toward our goals, ideals, and future possibilities. Now your mind starts to work, and you come up with possibilities that you try out emotionally as you play with it. It gets you going and gives you the energy to do something. Here, the way you feel sends you into the future, where you can see new options and possibilities for your life. Here, the reasons would send you back in time to try to figure out where you learned how to feel that way in the first place.
One way to think about your emotions is to picture them as waves. Waves move you away from where you are and toward a place where the meaning of the emotion would come true. If the feeling is healthy and right, you can ride it out and make your highest values come to life in your best performances. This is the real value of emotions: they give you the energy and power to bring your inner world, including your beliefs, intentions, understandings, etc., into the real world.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Neurons] 2022 Neurons #41 RIDING THE WAVES OF AN EMOTION by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
- https://www.verywellmind.com/what-are-emotions-2795178
