Emotions

Emotions are our body's way of communicating with us.

Therefore it's important for us to learn to accept them, validate them & understand them.

Because through emotions we learn about ourselves, about our needs, wants, boundries etc., therefore understanding them helps us to build healthy relationship with self, which is the key to mental and physical health as well as building a healthy relationships with others. 

So emotions and our ability to understand them or lack there of severely affects our life. 

Therefore it's really important to learn about our emotions & understand them / learn how to work with them. The inability to understand our emotions causes three self destructive ways of being:

A) Emotional indulgence
- In this case the individuals are being ruled by their emotions and lack the ability to think rationally, leading them to: 
a) making reckless and hasty decisions
b) the inability to overcome negative emotions 
which end up causing internal feelings of unsafety and distrust in one self. 

Because it´ s just like when:
a) Building a relationship with a person who has little to no ability to think rationally, they just go with whatever idea you or them come up with leading you both to many unwise choices with hurtful and often even dangerous outcomes, causing a self destructive way of being.
b) Building a relationship with a person who gets overwhelmed by any minor inconvenience in life.

 
In both cases it makes it hard / almost imposible to create a stable, healthy and secure relationship with such a person. You´ d be constantly on guard with them, since you´ d:

a) never know what to expect and for sure wouldn't be able to count on them or trust their judgement, or
b) wouldn't be able to rely on them due to their unstable / vulnerable state of being.

Therefore this relationship would stir up feelings of distrust and unsafety within you, just as it does when it comes to building the relationship with yourself. 

B) Emotional avoidance
- In some cases the inability to understand ones emotions leads to: 
a) surprising them
b) avoiding them
causing internal feelings of unsafety and distrust, since it´ s the equivalent of having a relationship with the only person who can help you and take care of you, yet whenever you´ d try to communicate with them you´ d get:
a) punihed / ignored 
b) avoided / ignored 
making you feel like you and your needs dont matter, triggering feeling of unsafety, panic and worry just as it does when it comes to choosing this approach when dealing with the relationship with self.  

C) The combination of both
- Some people switch between both states of being, causing an internal imbalance in which the individual tries to ignore & avoid their emotions, which then results in emotional overwhelm, causing them to emotionaly indulge leading back to the need to suppress the emotions (emotional avoidance) and so on and so forth. 

These states of being are the result of not understanding our emotions & not being able to work with them leading to internal feelings of unsafety as well as all kinds of self destructive coping mechanisms.

 It doesn't just negatively impact the relationship with self, but it has a negative impact on the relationships with others as well. 

Therefore it's important to learn about your emotions, understand them, accept them and learn to work with them as well as regulate them.

Because then you learn how to accept your emotions (your body's way of communicating it's needs, boundries, want's etc.) whilst thinking about the most rational and logical way of reacting to / working with them. 

To integrate and regulate our emotions its necessary to:

1.  Make room for them (accept them)
-  Many avoid their emotions because they think that they are shameful, a sign of weakness, embarrassing etc. and although theres a time and a place for feeling them through its important to do so. It gives our body the ability to relace them and self sooth.

2. Learn to understand them (validate them)
-  Validating the emotions is a necessary part thanks to which we feel seen and understood. This is the main reason the emotions surfaced in the first place. We needed to feel seen and understand that something that were doing isnt aligned with our bodys needs.
Us validating the emotions leads to the deescalation  of them, because the the validation serves as a self soothing mechanism, since the only reason the emotions surfaced was for us to notice that something isnt right for us to pay attention. Therefore the validation of them is a clear sinal of us paying attention to them, and therefore theres not such need for them. This helps us self regulate leading to the ability to bring to the for front rational thinking since rational thinking gets surprised when were in the heat of the emotions.

-  After weve regulated our emotions with the two previous steps, then comes the part where we use the whole situation to understand ourselves better and to therefore be able to build a more solid relationship with self, leading to a more solid emotional state of being. Therefore its important to analyse what  happend. What kind of needs weren't fulfilled. In what kind of way were our boundries violated and what can be done to prevent such escalation of emotions next time.    
 

They need to feel safe to express them, they need to feel seen & understood inorder to calm down and then need to learn how to work through them, inorder to build a healthy relationship with self. This is something most people weren't taught as children and the way many "professionals" would advise parents to deal with emotions led to a lifetime of internal trauma, which was usually passed down leading to generational trauma as well.