10 Myths About Emotions That Cause Us To Suffer
These misconceptions are frankly downright dangerous to us as individuals and as a society.
As a society, emotions are pretty far down the priority list.
Yet, emotion is the foundation of our cognition and behaviour. It is the PRIME MOVER.
That means that emotions are the most important aspect of your being.
They are what gives rise to your thinking, your rationality, how you behave and are the core lens through which you perceive and experience yourself, others and the world.
When we are disconnected from them, we feel disconnected from ourselves, from life, from our instincts, our truth, our knowing, our lifeforce.
What could be more important than that?
Yet, emotions are trivialised, avoided, repressed, criticised and maligned.
If we don’t clear up these emotional misconceptions, we will continue to be fundamentally disconnected from ourselves and the world will create will be a harsh mirror of that anguished disconnection.
Myth #1: Negative emotions are ‘bad’ and mean that something is ‘wrong’
Reality: There’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ emotion; all emotions exist to help give us a helping hand navigating the maze called life.
The default position on painful emotions is that they are bad.
When someone starts crying people get uncomfortable and start trying to ‘fix’ the person, ‘cheer them up’ or even straight up panic.
You may have memories of your parents telling you “Oh, it’s OK there’s no need to cry” or in some cases when you got angry being sent to your room or shut down.
And so as a result, people tend to try to fix, resist and repress their feelings of sadness, fear, anger and so on.
But just because they are uncomfortable doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Our negative emotions are incredibly important.
Anger is our power and lifeforce, moving us to create in the world and enabling us to set boundaries.
Sadness signals we need help, communicating our hurt and drawing others to support us.
Shame exists to remind us of our limits and to help us fit in socially (holding us back from acting in ways that will get us kicked out of the tribe!).
Fear keeps us alive by warning us of threats and dangers, either to the physical body or to the relationships and resources we need to survive.
And this doesn’t mean we have to feel them forever (see next point!).
Myth #2: There’s no point or value in feeling negative emotions
Reality: If we don’t feel our negative emotions we end up having to carry them with us in the unconscious our whole lives, we will struggle to know who we are and will instead project these emotions out onto others, who will appear triggering, threatening, dangerous etc.
A big misconception is that there couldn’t possibly be any reason to want to feel negative emotions! I mean, they’re painful, right?!
But if we continuously repress and push away these emotions there are surprisingly drastic consequences.
Firstly, when we do so they don’t just disappear; they are stored in the body where they will keep being triggered up by life. Over the years we build up accumulated stores of rage, shame, sadness and fear if we don’t allow them.
Secondly, we then experience life through the lens of these repressed emotions. If we are full of rage, people and events irritates us; when we are carrying a lot of sadness, the world can feel hopeless; when we are burdened with shame we feel unworthy and live in smallness.
People and the world aren’t this way fundamentally, we are just experiencing them that way due to our backlog of undigested emotion. If we felt the emotions, our sense of ourselves, others and the world would shift dramatically.
Thirdly, these emotions are important messengers that are trying to signal something to us. They represent our TRUTH. Perhaps that our relationship or job isn’t right for us, that some aspect of our being needs tending. They are necessary for moving authentically through the world.
If we don’t feel our negative emotions we end up carrying them with us our whole lives. We will struggle to know who we are (our Truth) and will instead project these emotions out onto others, who will appear triggering, threatening, dangerous etc.
Have you ever noticed how—when you meet older people—some have become bitter and angry while others seem to have just got more joyful and open? That’s the difference between feeling and not feeling your negative emotions over a lifetime.
Myth #3: Emotions are always about the situation in front of you
Reality: The immediate trigger is only ever the tip of the iceberg. Deep down, we are almost always responding to a threat to our need for approval, safety and control. It’s never about washing the dishes! It’s about not being listened to and therefore not being safe or in control.
We have a sense that if we have an emotional reaction to a given situation then the emotion is only about what’s right in front of us.
So, say, if your partner doesn’t do the dishes when you asked them to then you’re angry and upset because they didn’t do the dishes. And that’s all there is to it.
Yet, the immediate trigger is only ever the tip of the iceberg.
Deep down, we are really responding to a threat to our need for approval, safety and control. This is the Holy Triumvirate of Ego Needs.
In the case above, our partner not doing the dishes could be interpreted as meaning that “they don’t listen to me”, which means that “they don’t care about me”, which ultimately means that “I’m not worth caring about: I’m worthless”.
So what appears to be a fierce domestic debate about whether you should wash off soap suds or not is actually our attempt to defend a deep childhood wound about feeling worthless.
98% of the emotional reactions that you have are dredging up old emotions from the past (largely from childhood) related to old wounds and triggers that are seeking to protect your need for approval, safety and control.
Myth #4: Emotions disappear without a trace
Reality: This is simply not so. An emotion that arises will only ever ‘disappear’ (i.e. integrate back into you) when it is fully acknowledged, allowed and felt.
We think that when we ‘calm down’, distract ourselves or successfully repress an emotion—that it just disappears without a trace and we are left as we were before.
This is not so. An emotion that arises will only ever ‘disappear’ (I prefer the term ‘integrate’, which indicates how the emotion is reabsorbed back into your being) when it is fully acknowledged, allowed and felt.
Then that particular emotional trigger will cease.
If not, then emotions will eventually ‘disappear’ but only because they have retreated to the unconscious body-mind where they will continue looping in the background of your experience, waiting to be triggered up again by a similar circumstance.
Emotions are never fully ‘gone’ unless you’ve acknowledged, allowed and felt them all the way through.
Misconception #5: Emotions are ‘irrational’
Reality: an inability to allow and embody emotions actually limits our cognitive possibilities and makes us more irrational.
There’s a DEEP cultural trope about emotions (and also emotional people [especially ‘hysterical’ women]) being ‘irrational’.
The subtext is that coming from a place of emotion is inappropriate and will result in making the wrong decisions, that they delude and deceive us, leading us astray.
And many people in positions of power and authority (e.g. business leaders) pride themselves on not being emotional: “I don’t make emotional decisions! I’m cool, calm and rational!”.
This is bullshit.
Emotions are deeply implicated and completely necessary for cognitive reasoning and rationality.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied victims of brain trauma and found that damage that significantly reduced their ability to experience emotion profoundly diminished their capacity to reason and make decisions.
And an inability to allow and embody emotions actually limits our cognitive possibilities. As somatic psychotherapist Dr. Raja Selvam states: “other studies have shown that preventing the embodiment of emotions … interfered with the cognitive processing of the emotions and the situations involved” (The Practice of Embodying Emotions, p.129).
The dismissal of emotions as ‘irrational’ is an unconscious defence mechanism to protect that person from difficult emotional experiences.
Our fear of particular emotions/outcomes is what is REALLY driving our cognitive reasoning. As David Hume put it: “reason is the slave of the passions”.
For example, if I am in a toxic relationship, but I cannot tolerate the pain of leaving that person (due to an attachment wound), then any ‘rational thinking’ I do about my relationship will just be jumping through hopes to rationalise staying in the relationship.
Or if I am a business leader that is detached from their emotions it will be much easier to carry out ruthlessness (but profitable) business practices that harm people. Any ‘rational thinking’ will just be numbness and compulsive power-seeking channeled into business activities. Thinking about the people it affects would be too painful to confront.
Or as Upton Sinclair put it: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Our mind will literally unconsciously filter out any reasoning that might result in emotions we are unwilling to feel.
Now emotions can of course derail our cognitive and reasoning processes as well. It’s a two-way street. As when high anxiety makes us overly fearful or paranoid.
But—ironically—these overactive emotions are precisely the result of repressing and ignoring emotions over time. By processing our emotions as they arise, we maintain a much more balanced emotional system that makes critical contributions to our decision-making.
Myth #6: Emotions are created by our thoughts
Reality: In fact, is it the other way around.
We are generally taught that emotions are a byproduct of our thoughts.
So if I think that my nose is a funny shape, then that will trigger a feeling of shame and fear of going out and being seen by others (say).
I think “my nose is a funny shape” then the feeling of shame comes.
In fact, is it the other way around.
In short: story follows state.
Which is to say that the ‘story’ (i.e. the thoughts, the cognitive narrative) that we tell ourselves are a reaction to the emotions we are feeling. As Raja Selvam states: “[Cognition, emotion and behaviour] influence each other, often simultaneously; but emotion appears to be primary, as it is a strong mediator of both cognition and behaviour” (ibid. p.134).
As we have seen already, we are full of undigested emotions from the past that are filtering how we view reality.
If we carry a lot of shame in our system, then that shame will project itself onto whatever it can in an attempt to be acknowledged and felt.
(In this case, the architecture of your sniffer).
If you get plastic surgery and get the ‘perfect’ nose…your shame will just project itself onto something else. And you’ll be worrying about your non-Vogue-friendly thigh gap or your nonexistent hairline or whatever else.
It’s never-ending. You will keep thinking shameful thoughts about this and that…until the emotion itself (which is the prime mover) is resolved.
Misconception #7: Emotions have nothing to do with physical health
Reality: An inability to tolerate and embody emotions increases the level of stress and dysregulation in the organism that can cause all kinds of ‘psychophysiological’ (previously known as psychosomatic) issues such as chronic pain, migraines, asthma, fatigue, autoimmune disorders, cancer and so on.
When we experience chronic pains and gut issues, we normally assume there is a physical cause and look no further.
While this is sometimes the case, more often that you would think the aetiology of such physical symptoms is actually emotional in nature.
When any given emotion surpasses your own personal ‘emotional threshold’ the resultant dysregulation in the system causes physical symptoms.
As these are caused by emotional dysregulation, they must be resolved through emotional regulation!
I have personally experienced incredible relief from symptoms such as chronic fatigue, muscle tightness, nosebleeds, eczema through emotional healing.
There are interesting case studies in The Practice of Embodying Emotions by Raja Selvam.
Myth #8: You are aware of all of your emotions
Reality: We are unaware of the vast majority of our emotions, which live in our unconscious until they are triggered up. Some never come to the surface as we have been taught to repress many of our emotions: not to cry, not to feel anger, to resist our shame and our fear.
Repression is unconscious. That means you aren’t aware of it. Because if you were aware of it…it wouldn’t work! Assume there is more than meets the eye to your emotional world.
Within us there are vast reservoirs of all the unfelt emotions from throughout our entire lives, their energy packed down into the muscles and fascia. Unless we do a lot of work to open up our nervous system these remain locked up in basement of our being with a ‘DO NOT ENTER’ sign across the front.
It takes work, but if you put a few hundred hours into diving deep into your emotional world I promise that you will be amazed at what’s down there should
Myth #9: You fully allow all positive emotions
Reality: We actually often repress our positive emotions because it’s actually quite scary to fully step into our happiness, joy and love because we can feel exposed, vulnerable, guilty or like we don’t deserve it.
You might think that it’s possible that you repress negative emotions. But there’s no way that you would repress positive emotions like happiness, joy and love.
Yet we do. Often powerfully.
This is because it’s actually quite scary to fully step into our happiness, joy and love.
At other times it because our negativity actually keeps us safe in subtle, unconscious ways (see the next point!).
Many of us learn to repress our positive emotions in order to maintain our attachment to our parents who find our natural joy irritating or too noisy.
Love, in particular, is dangerous. It’s scary to love fully, because we might get hurt or lose something.
Myth #10: You don’t want your negative emotions and suffering
Reality: There’s a lot of juice in our negative emotions. Although we complain about them, we get a lot out of them.
You think you don’t want your misery. Your sadness and anger.
You might be surprised. We keep our negativity around for a reason. It keeps us safe in very subtle and unconscious ways.
On the one hand, this could be because (like in #9) our parents abusively shut down our positivity. This literally keeps us physically safe (not being noticed by staying depressed, for example).
But notice as well some of the benefits negativity gives us: we get attention, we get to validate our victim identity, we get to complain and judge others, we get to feel hard-done-by, we get to give up, we get to wallow in self-centredness, we get to throw tantrums, we get to demand special treatment.
I mean, oooh how juicy! :) Who doesn’t love a good old-fashioned wallow every now and again. A good grump and a strop to let everyone know you’re there :).
Sometimes it means we get to be small, quiet, not take risks, not do hard things,
Or if I feel worthless I won’t attempt to start that business or ask that person on a date…keeping me safe from the painful feelings of failure or rejection.
And there’s NOTHING wrong with any of that. It’s just helpful to notice that that’s what we’re doing! Normally we deny the ways we hold onto our suffering.
We don’t do this on purpose. It’s deeply unconscious.
Letting go of these could be scary! Because if you let go of your misery, you might start have to take responsibility for yourself (instead of blaming others), you might have to realise that there’s nothing wrong with you (rather than leaning on some idea that you feel bad because you’re ‘broken’), you might have to admit that it’s not entirely ‘other people’ that are the issue.
These are all innocent behaviours. And I’m not saying that all suffering is a result of this. But you’d be surprised how addicted and attached we are to our misery.
Conclusion
The upshot of all of this is that:
a) emotions are important
b) feeling emotions is important
c) we feel emotions through the body
If you want some ideas for how to do this check out my YouTube or my FREE massive nervous system regulation toolkit, which has loads of ideas for emotional processing.
