You Are Not Your Emotions: A Guide on How to Process Difficult Emotions in a Healthy Way
“You are only limited by your ability to say open.”
These are the words Michael A. Singer wrote in his book The Untethered Soul. What he’s referring to is our tendency to block the natural flow of energy within us, especially the unpleasant emotional energies we often experience, such as sadness, anger, jealousy, or shame.
The word emotion dates back to the 16th century, from Old French “emouvoir,” meaning "to stir up," and Latin “emovere,” meaning "move out, remove, agitate.” Emotion, then, represents “movement” and has since its origin been assigned the meaning of physical disturbance.
In other words, emotions are simply internal movements of energy that cause disruptions to your neutral physiological state.
But in the grand spectrum of evolution, the world of emotions is one we have only recently begun to explore. In fact, the term Emotional intelligence, which is your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and those of the people around you, was only introduced in 1990 by psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer.
Doesn’t it baffle you then how the emotions of fear, anxiety, envy, guilt, and stress are all central to your daily experiences as a human being, but you know so little about them and what they actually mean?
Consider this:
How often do you judge and loathe yourself when something goes wrong? How often do you crumble to unworthiness when someone you love does something that hurts you? How often do you experience anger and envy toward others, when you actually want to feel happy for them?
The project you recently launched did not meet expectations and now you’re hating yourself for being such a fool for thinking it would work. Your partner’s act of betrayal hurt you and now you’re slugging about your days feeling unworthy. Your friend is finally flourishing in their creative venture, and yet here you are bathing in envy and resenting their well-earned success.
Do you ever pause to ask yourself why am I reacting the way I am? Why is it that I’m clinging to failure? Why is it that I’m sabotaging my own well-being for someone else’s mistake? Why is it that I’m so envious of this person’s success?
Here’s the reality:
We haven’t been taught how to process our “negative” emotions—at least not in a healthy manner.
Why? Because we’ve grown accustomed to either suppressing them (for instance, as a kid, whenever you cried, you were instantly pushed to stop crying) or personifying them so intensely until we are consoled and comforted by others (when you fail at something and you take it to heart, you are usually comforted by those around you and encouraged to “just forget it and move on”).
But here’s the biggest culprit of all: Because we don’t know how to process our emotions, we fall into the trap of clinging to them, and so they become an integral extension of who we are. Hence, we mistake our emotions for our identity—we allow them to define us.
Emotions are an essential part of what you are, but they’re not who you are. Yes, they can be messy, complicated, and confusing, but they’re not there to control your life, they’re there to guide you forward on your path.
Emotions can be as unfamiliar to you as a foreign word on your tongue, but it’s only as you deepen your understanding of your emotions—especially the difficult or “negative” ones—that you begin to prevent yourself from dwelling in your emotional upset and plunging deeper into a depressive state.
Rule #1: There Are No “Good” or “Bad” Emotions, Only “Good” or “Bad” Reactions
The first thing we must both realize is that there are no “good” or “bad” emotions. We tend to label emotions such as anger, jealously, or sadness as “bad,” and emotions such as happiness, excitement, or inspiration as “good.”
But the truth is, both positive and negative emotions are essential to our wellbeing; we’d be doing ourselves an incredible injustice by not allowing ourselves to fully experience either end of the spectrum.
Emotions aren’t good or bad—they just are. Emotions are automatic reactions that manifest in our body as we’re triggered by external stimuli. So we have no control over them. But where our true power lies is in how we respond to them. It’s in how we behave after we feel what we feel. What we do have control over is how we allow our emotions to impact us.
Consider anger for a moment. It’s perfectly fine and normal to feel angry. Anger often helps us identify our boundaries: What we will and won’t accept in our relationships and situations. When we feel angry, it’s because someone’s crossed the line. So anger is neither good nor bad, but how we respond to it and the way in which we behave when we feel it is what can be considered as “good” or “bad.”
Are you becoming defensive? Are you yelling at everyone around you? Are you smashing glass on the floor? Is every little thing around soaking up your frustration? Or are you mindful of this behaviour and carving out the much-needed space and time to process what was said and done?
What of happiness, the “good” emotion?
Say you are promoted to Director at work. You’re going to feel so happy about it. But there are two ways you can respond: You can enjoy the moment, feel more fulfilled, motivated, and proud of your own accomplishment, and be grateful for the advancement in your career, or you can become very arrogant, boastful, and judgemental. You might start thinking you’re better than those around you, so you start putting people down and burning your previous relationships.
As you can see, there are no good or bad emotions, only good and bad reactions. All emotions, regardless of their intensity, are natural and okay, but it’s what we do next that matters most: How we process them and respond to them.
While many of us falsely label emotions as good or bad, there’s another great misconception we must also address: the difference between emotions and feelings. “Emotions” and “feelings” are two words you probably use interchangeably, but truth is, they’re two separate things.
What’s The Difference Between Emotions and Feelings?
Emotions are simply neurological reactions to external emotional stimuli. They’re considered to be unconscious and instinctive. When triggered, your brain releases certain chemicals which then surface in your nervous system as emotions.
Emotions are messengers. They are inner wisdom within us. They manifest physically and provide us with vital information about what we’re experiencing and what actions we need to take.
For example, envy and jealousy are two emotions telling you that you’re insecure about something inside yourself. Envy is experienced when you want something that others have and you think you lack. Jealousy is experienced when you feel threatened that someone else is trying to take away what you already have. Both prompt you to pry into your own self-belief, self-worth, and self-esteem.
As we discussed earlier, anger is an emotion telling you that you’re either not getting what you want because you're being blocked in some way or that you’re getting something that you don't want. It's telling you that your personal boundaries have been crossed.
On the contrary, feelings are our subjective expression of our emotions. They’re the conscious experience of your emotions. In other words, if your emotions are physical, your feelings are mental.
Feelings are how you perceive your emotions and assign meaning to the emotional experience you’re having.
They’re the stories you tell yourself about a specific emotion so you can make better sense of it. Hence, your feelings are heavily influenced by your memories, beliefs, and associations from the past.
And that’s exactly why different people react differently to the same situation. That’s why the same event of being suddenly called to make an urgent life-altering decision can cause one person to feel stressed, another to feel anxious, and a third to feel motivated and assured. All three people are being exposed to the same external trigger: Make a decision now. Likewise, all three people are experiencing the same emotion: Fear. Their hearts are racing, their palms are sweaty, and they feel the butterflies in their stomach.
But each one of them is feeling it differently.
Each one of them is responding to it differently.
Your feelings are thus sparked by emotions but they’re shaped by your previous personal experiences, beliefs, memories, and thoughts that you’ve associated with a particular emotion. And because they’re based on an emotional experience, feelings are subjective and vary from one person to another.
So, to recap, here are the three main takeaways so far:
Your emotions are objective messengers released by your brain in response to external stimuli.
Your feelings (which are influenced by your past experiences, memories, and beliefs) are the subjective expressions of these emotions. They’re how you attach meaning, create associations, and experience your emotions.
The neurons that fire together, wire together. Over time, as you become more exposed to a certain stimulus that triggers a certain emotion, and as you create a specific association between the initial stimulus, the emotion, your feelings, and the way you react or behave, these associations are encoded and wired in your brain. The more you repeat these behaviours, the more the neurons in your brain fire together and create stronger connection pathways between your feelings and specific situations, people, or places.
The 90-Second Rule: How You Suddenly Become Controlled by Your Emotions
Our ability to understand our emotions is one aspect of the equation, but what about our ability to regulate them? Too often it feels like we’re the ones being controlled by our emotions, doesn't it? Fear paralyzes us. Guilt easts us up alive. Anger blinds us. Why is that?
To better answer that question, we need to borrow a neuroscientist’s hat for a moment and dive into the area where emotions are regulated: The brain.
The amygdala is a pair of small almond-shaped regions deep in the ancient brain’s limbic system. It plays a primary role in how you process intense emotions like fear and pleasure.
Essentially, it has two jobs: to regulate emotion and encode memories.
Whenever you feel threatened and afraid, the amygdala automatically activates the fight-or-flight response by sending out signals to release stress hormones that prepare your body to fight or run away.
It’s this little amygdala that has allowed humans to survive and escape wildlife danger from the hunter-gatherer days. Even today, its automated response to physical or psychological danger is what compels you to react instantly and mindlessly, without thinking.
And according to Harvard neuroscientist Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, when we’re triggered by a threatening external stimulus, “there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”
As she explains:
“Something happens in the external world, and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body, it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological reaction, over and over again.”
The first 90-seconds after you’re exposed to an external stimulus, there’s a primitive automated response in your body. That’s your emotion of fear or anger being released and flushed through your body.
But after that time period, as you continue to remain engaged with that emotion, the same energy circuit will continue to flow. As you continue to cling to anger, you will continue to feel angry, furious and frustrated. As you continue to cling to your emotions, you will continue to feel them, and you will continue to be controlled by them.
More importantly, as you continue to cling to the same thoughts that flow from these emotions, so will you continue to feel the way you do. That’s because when we engage with specific thoughts, we begin to experience the emotions that are triggered by these thoughts. So we enter a disturbed emotional state which then influences how we act and behave.
The vibrational frequency of these emotions then feeds back into the original thought. And as we continue to give ample mental attention to the same thought pattern, it reaffirms the emotion, which then energizes the thought. And so we experience a continuous cycle of think, feel, think, feel, think, feel. This cycle then results in the prolonged emotional state you come to experience and soon, identify with.
And as you repeatedly engage in the same thought patterns of think, feel, do, these patterns encode as a blueprint in your subconscious mind. And what does our subconscious mind do? It runs 95% of our life on automation. (To learn more about the link between thoughts, emotions, and behaviour, read this article: How your thoughts create your reality).
We Repeat What We Don’t Repair Because It’s Familiar to Us
As humans, we naturally seek comfort in the familiar. Why? Because it’s always easier to keep doing what we’ve always done and behave in the way we always have than to change the way we do—even if these behaviours are harmful to us.
Whether positive or negative, we develop thinking and behavioural patterns over the years that become ingrained in our subconcious mind. In times of stress, worry, jealousy, or anger, our psyche automatically repeats what is familiar and what feels safe because we naturally seek what’s known over the unknown.
This very tendency to repeatedly self-sabotage ourselves is what Freud coined repetition compulsion—a psychological phenomenon in which a person keeps repeating the same distressing events and behaving in the same patterns simply because they know of no other way to cope with the underlying, suppressed, unmet need.
But until our emotional wounds and unmet needs are repaired and resolved, we will continue to act the way we do and claim “that’s just the way I am”. In fact, that’s precisely what Carl Jung meant when he wrote:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
So, since how you think and how you feel directly impact how your body reacts and all three influence how you behave, if you don’t learn how to separate yourself from the experience you’re having so that you can simply observe it and be objective with it, you’ll become a victim to your own emotions and thoughts.
In other words, as we continue to subconsciously hold on to what we know and consciously cling to what we’re experiencing, we will continue to struggle and give away our energy and power. That’s how we lose control. That’s how the line between emotion and feeling and thoughts are blurred and merged with identity.
Rule #2: You Are Not Your Emotions, You Are The One Experiencing Them
The most important thing to do when you’re processing difficult emotions is to remind yourself that you’re not your emotions, you’re the one who’s experiencing your emotions.
In other words, your emotions don’t define you:
You are not an angry person, you’re feeling anger.
You are not a sad person, you’ve just been feeling sad lately.
You are not a jealous person, you’re just feeling jealous right now.
You are not a failure, you’re experiencing a failure in your life.
Also:
You are not a weak person if you feel anxious.
You are not a coward if you feel fear.
When we become so consumed in the world of thought and emotion, we begin to attach our own identity to our experiences. And as we continue to feed it more energy, so do we lose ourselves in this new reality we’ve constructed in our heads. We begin telling ourselves these lies and then actually believe them.
In psychology, this is referred to as a cognitive distortion, which are faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking. Cognitive distortions are the mind's way of playing tricks on us and convincing us of something that just isn't true, hence they alter our sense of reality. In philosophy, this is what the ancient Toltecs called a ‘mitote’ and what in Sanskrit is known as ‘maya,’ an illusion.
We begin to think “this is who I am”—I am a failure, I am depressing. But you’re not; you’re just a human being having another of the many human experiences.
The only way out of that illusion is by remembering that you’re not your emotions, you’re the being underneath who’s experiencing them. You’re not your thoughts, you’re the being underneath who’s engaging with certain thoughts and giving more attention to them.
You’re not the mind, nor the emotion, nor the body. You’re not the thought, nor the feeling, nor the sensation. You’re the being underneath that observes and responds.
As the great and eloquent Rumi wrote sometime in the 12th century:
“Although you appear in earthly form
Your essence is pure Consciousness.
You are the fearless guardian of Divine Light.
So come, return to the root of the root of your own soul.
When you lose all sense of self
The bonds of a thousand chains will vanish.
Lose yourself completely,
Return to the root of the root of your own soul.”
When you lose your sense of worldly self, the bonds of the chains of thought and emotion will vanish. When you remind yourself that you are not your mind or your emotions or your body, but the being underneath, you begin to dissociate yourself from whatever you’re experiencing.
You raise your awareness and begin to create distance between the stimulus and yourself. You begin to observe and once you observe, only then do you have a chance at understanding why you feel the way you do. Only then do you have a chance at understanding why you think the way you do.
Only then can you crush the shell and find the inner pearl that is you.
And one way to that is through the practice of emotional regulation.
Emotional Regulation: How to Process Your Emotions in a Healthy Way
Emotional regulation is our ability to manage difficult emotions. It helps us reduce the experiential and physiological impact of negative emotions. And it’s tied to several positive outcomes: better mental health, improved moral decision making, and enhanced memory.
Generally, there are two major and commonly used emotion regulation strategies: Cognitive reappraisal (changing the way we think about emotion-eliciting events) and expressive suppression (changing the way we behaviorally respond to emotion-eliciting events).
Cognitive reappraisal involves reinterpreting an emotionally upsetting situation in a way that alters its meaning and changes its emotional impact, while expressive suppression can be defined as any attempt to hide, inhibit, or reduce ongoing emotion-expressive behaviour.
Put simply, when you engage in cognitive reappraisal, you seek the positive in the negative—you change the way you see things and the way you think about them. You look for the good in the bad. When you engage in expressive suppression, you close up, suppress your emotions, and bury them deep.
What’s healthier?
When it comes to memory, “cognitive reappraisal is associated with enhanced memory while expressive suppression is associated with impaired explicit memory of the emotional event.” And when it comes to general well-being, research claims that “increased use of cognitive reappraisal predicted increased levels of positive well-being outcomes, while increased use of expressive suppression predicted increased levels of negative well-being outcomes.”
In other words, when you suppress your emotions and don’t allow yourself to fully feel what you must, you hold onto the pain and taint your long-term memory. What once was a fleeting, passing moment now becomes a life-long, revolving self-sabotaging trigger.
If you don’t validate your emotions, allow yourself the time and space to sit with them, process what happened, and feel what you must, then you’d be resisting your emotions. And as per the universal law of life: Whatever you resist will continue to persist.
Validate it, Sit With it, Feel it, Process it, Learn From it
The challenge with negative emotions—especially when we experience them as intense painful emotions such as in trauma—is that as soon as we begin to feel those emotions, we tend to resist them. In other words, we block them.
Imagine the moment you find out that your partner has betrayed you, how do you feel? After he or she breaks your heart and you absorb the shock, you will start to experience waves of sadness and anger. You will try to rationalize everything: “Why did he do this to me?” or “How could she do this to me?”
All these thoughts will drain your energy and keep you in the same emotional circuit. You begin to feel weaker. Eventually, it exhausts you. Most of the time, you wash down the pain and do whatever you can to push it away: “I don’t want to feel this way anymore! I don’t want to deal with this anymore!”
So we swallow what happened, bury it deep inside us, and move on.
But what happens when we resist these emotions? What happens when we suppress them and push away these disturbances?
We begin to seek protection. We close up our heart and begin erecting inner walls within us. We pull ourselves into a restrictive space and hide in the darkness within us. We do this for one simple reason, so we can avoid feeling that pain ever again.
But there lies the problem.
What happens when you suppress your pain? What happens when you fail to create for yourself the space you deserve to sit with the pain of your emotions and fully feel them?
You block your inner flow of energy. You hold on to this pain without even realizing it. So it becomes a soft, sensitive spot for you—a weakness. It becomes an unmet need. A trigger point. A thorn. And anytime someone touches that spot or an event happens that triggers that memory, it’ll rise up instantly and we’ll feel the pain all over again.
So what’s the takeaway here?
It’s this: Don’t resist any emotion because whatever you resist simples continues to persist in your reality.
You can’t run away from fear or anger or guilt, they’ll chase you. When you run away from your emotions, you give more power to them—you ignite them. They become louder, clouding your sky and filling it with noise.
Remember—emotions are part of our survival mechanisms and they will persevere if we dismiss their importance. So instead of suppressing them, validate them. Instead of suppressing them, change their meaning to you. Don’t fear them. Accept them all judgement-free and allow yourself to feel them fully.
Here’s a 3-step process to help you better regulate your difficult emotions:
Validate it. How infuriating is it when you tell someone that you’re feeling down, sad, or angry but they totally deny and downplay what you say? You feel invalidated, don’t you? Well, it’s the same with your emotions. Validate your emotions by identifying them and fully expressing them. Give yourself the respect you deserve by first giving your emotions theirs.
Sit with it so you can fully feel it. As discussed earlier, any attempt to hide, inhibit, or reduce whatever you’re feeling will only hamper and impede your personal growth and progress. Suppression does you no good. Consider this: The emotions you suppress today are the ones you will have to heal tomorrow—because healing is simply the act of allowing yourself to freely feel today whatever you didn’t allow yourself to feel yesterday.
Process it and seek the lesson from it. Emotions are messengers and they’re trying to tell you something. So after that 90-second period (or however long an emotion might consume you), take a deep breath and begin asking yourself some questions. Try to understand why you’re feeling the way you do. Dig deeper. Is there a pattern emerging here? Have you been feeling jealous in all your previous relationships or is this something that’s been occurring with this specific partner? By processing our emotions, we learn and grow and make sure not to hold the grudge inside so that it doesn't become poison or a trigger point in the future. By processing our emotions, we find meaning in them and hence we see the good in them.
The truth is, while we consciously work to face the darkness and attempt to free ourselves of our inner emotional traumas and pains—and while we might completely dissolve their hold on us—their residue will stay with us forever.
And so we might feel their twinge once in a while, but that's okay. Scar tissue. Scars. They’ll always be there. But their stories are how we choose to write them.
Their residue is not there to hurt us or draw us back into the void. Rather, it serves to remind us of the progress and growth we’ve made. It serves to remind us of how far we’ve come. Of our own strength and transformation. It serves to remind us of the kind of person we are consciously choosing to become for ourselves and others.
The Bottom Line: Be Curious, Not Judgemental
In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer writes:
“When a problem is disturbing you, don’t ask “What should I do about it?” ask, “What part of me is being disturbed by this?”
For instance, if you’re feeling jealous, instead of trying to figure out how to protect yourself, just ask “what part of me is jealous?” By doing so, you shift your gaze inward instead of outward and you begin to chip away at why a part of you has a problem with jealousy in the first place.
Emotions are just signals trying to tell us that we need to be proactive because we may be in danger or in need of change. Anger may be trying to tell you that you need to protect yourself by setting some boundaries. Envy could be trying to hint that you need to work smarter and harder to reach the position you wish and attain the success you aspire to.
Learn to be curious and not judgemental with your emotions because judgement carries fear and fear carries hate. And where does hate lead you? Nowhere good.
So after you’ve allowed yourself to fully experience your emotions, come back to these questions:
What part of me is being disturbed by this?
Why do I feel this way? Why am I reacting so strongly?
Is there a pattern here? How often does this happen?
Is this related to a previous trauma?
What is this trying to tell me?
As Bessel A. van der Kolk writes in his book, The Body Keeps the Score:
“As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.”
And that’s what Michael Singer meant with these words: “You are only limited by your ability to say open.”
So stay open to whatever experiences and emotions flow your way. Because while your emotions do not define you, if you consciously suppress them, they will unconsciously direct your life and thus, totally limit you. They’ll crush your wings and you’ll wonder: Why can’t I fly?