The Gift of Choice
Chances are, if you tend to be emotionally avoidant or struggle to name what you are feeling, then you are hesitant when you read about all of the good of leaning into and embracing our emotions.
I’ve written a couple of posts encouraging you to lean into and embrace the emotional experiences you encounter (Feel It All and Riding the Wave of Emotions). These posts talk about how the quickest and most efficient way to work through our emotions is to lean into them and embrace them fully.
And this is something I fully believe in and will always encourage others to do. But if you tend to avoid emotions or struggle to name them, chances are you aren’t sold yet.
So, here’s another reason why I encourage increasing your emotional vocabulary and attunement: it gives you more say in what you do next.
How I want to ideally react to anger is different than how I want to react when I’m overwhelmed. With anger, I likely want to figure out what boundaries of mine were crossed and areas within my control where I can re-establish those boundaries. While with overwhelm, I want to break things down into smaller steps, prioritize, and work with what’s in my control to slowly chip away at what’s on my plate. How I react when I’m sad is different than how I react when I’m hurt. When I’m sad I often need to sit with it, no matter how far I want to run away from it. With hurt, I will need to process what led to the hurt and what potential conversations I need to have with others about how they hurt me. And I could keep giving more examples of emotions that can present rather similarly if I’m not attuned, but how I respond to each one can be quite different.
Being able to sit with our emotions and name what they are, allows us to get more say and have more control and choice in what we do with those emotions. If there have been times when you have looked back on a situation and have no idea why you reacted the way that you did, there is a chance that there were emotions present that you weren’t sitting with, so you weren’t getting as much say in your actions as you could.
As a recovering emotion avoider, I will do nothing but agree with you when you say that the thought of embracing emotions is scary and overwhelming. But, as a person who was well skilled in avoiding my emotions, I can say that it is a very freeing feeling to be able to name what I’m feeling and then have much more choice in how I move forward. So, take it slow and give yourself plenty of grace if emotions are not an area you are comfortable with. But, slowly, I encourage you to get more comfortable with emotion after emotion and you, too, will get to experience the gift of choice in accurately naming and sitting with what you are experiencing.
