The Empath’s Guide to Emotions
Why Emotions Arise
THIS BOOK IS about empathy, which is honed in interactions with others. But your first interaction is intrapersonal—it’s between you and your own emotions. Your emotional awareness is a key aspect of your capacity to accurately identify and work with the emotions, thoughts, and intentions of others. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the emotional sphere is where many people lose their empathic abilities. Our emotional training is often insufficient and confusing (and even backward), and subsequently, our emotional understanding tends to be low. Often, when a troubling emotion appears, we may shut down our Emotion Contagion, our Concern for Others, and our Perspective Taking simply because we have no idea how to work with the emotion at hand. We might shut down because we’ve learned to valence the emotion as negative and unwanted, or we might shut down because we don’t have any emotional regulation skills for that emotion. If we haven’t learned how emotions work and why they arise, our reactions to them can lead us into the empathic badlands.
THE SIXTEEN CATEGORIES OF EMOTIONS
Now that we’ve looked at four problems that lead us into emotional confusion and empathic trouble, let’s bring emotions into the light of day and observe them empathically and intelligently. In this book, I organize emotions into sixteen categories,34 but this does not mean that I’m ignoring nuance. In the “Emotional Vocabulary List” in Appendix A, I provide vocabulary words for many different intensities35 of most of these sixteen emotions. So, if you’re looking at anger below, and you’re wondering about frustration, peevishness, rage, or other intensities of anger, know that I’m including those in the overall category of anger. When I look at emotions empathically, I look at what they do—how they behave and what their purpose is. Therefore, I include frustration, peevishness, and rage in the area of anger, which is the emotion that helps you set boundaries around your voice, standpoint, and sense of self.
I don’t mean to oversimplify emotions and get us into another area of trouble. I’m organizing emotions into sixteen distinct categories so that we can more easily get a handle on them and develop emotional awareness. Otherwise, we might focus too much of our attention on nuance and vocabulary and miss the big picture—which is that emotions are reliable, action-requiring neurological programs that form the foundation of our social, emotional, and empathic skills.
Emotions are your tools; they’re your empathic entrée into understanding yourself and others more deeply. These sixteen emotional categories will give you a working vocabulary and a working set of tools to begin understanding emotions empathically—as nuanced and reliable action-requiring responses to very specific stimuli. Emotions bring you multiple skills, abilities, gifts, and capacities. They motivate you, and they help you learn, decide, behave, interact, and relate to yourself and others.
ANGER: The Honorable Sentry
Gifts: Honor ~ Conviction ~ Healthy self-esteem ~ Proper boundaries ~ Healthy detachment ~ Protection of yourself and others
Action Required: Anger arises to address challenges to your voice, standpoint, position, interpersonal boundaries, or self-image. Your task is to restore your interpersonal boundaries without violating the boundaries of others. This is the sacred practice for anger, which I very intentionally call the Honorable Sentry.
The Internal Questions: What must be protected? What must be restored?
APATHY AND BOREDOM: The Mask for Anger
Gifts: Detachment ~ Boundary setting ~ Separation ~ Taking a time-out
Action Required: Apathy is a protective mask for anger, and it arises in situations when you cannot or probably should not express your anger openly. Apathy can give you an excellent time-out, as long as you don’t let it take you completely out of commission. The questions for apathy often unmask your legitimate anger (and other emotions), so be ready to work with those subsequent emotions as well.
The Internal Questions: What is being avoided? What must be made conscious?
GUILT AND SHAME: Restoring Integrity
Gifts: Atonement ~ Integrity ~ Self-respect ~ Behavioral change
Action Required: Shame arises to help you moderate your behavior and make sure that you don’t hurt, embarrass, destabilize, or dehumanize yourself or others. Shame is a tricky emotion, because most of us learned about shame by being shamed. The healing practice for shame is to root out inauthentic and applied shame and to encourage authentic, appropriate, and healthy shame (and remorse) in yourself and others.
The Internal Questions: Who has been hurt? What must be made right?
HATRED: The Profound Mirror
Gifts: Intense awareness ~ Piercing vision ~ Sudden evolution ~ Shadow work
Action Required: Hatred is a very powerful emotion that arises in the presence of shadow material (things you cannot accept in yourself and demonize in others). Shadow work helps you reintegrate and detoxify this material so that it no longer activates your hatred program. There are two shadow-work practices in the next chapter—Burning Contracts and Conscious Complaining—plus another shadow practice called Ethical Empathic Gossip in Chapter 10. I’ve also included a list of excellent books on shadow work in the Further Resources section.
The Internal Questions: What has fallen into my shadow? What must be reintegrated?
FEAR: Intuition and Action
Gifts: Intuition ~ Instinct ~ Focus ~ Clarity ~ Attentiveness ~ Vigor ~ Readiness
Action Required: Fear arises to orient you to change, novelty, or possible physical hazards. Fear focuses on the present moment and your immediate surroundings.
The Internal Question: What action should be taken?
WORRY AND ANXIETY: Focus and Completion
Gifts: Foresight ~ Focus ~ Conscience ~ Procrastination alert! ~ Task completion
Action Required: Worry and anxiety arise to help you organize, plan for, and complete your tasks. Both are related to fear, but they arise to help you orient to possible upcoming change, novelty, or hazard. Bonus: If you feel anxiety or worry, you’ll know that there is probably nothing to fear in the present moment.
The Internal Questions: What triggered this feeling? What really needs to get done?
CONFUSION: The Mask for Fear
Gifts: Diffused awareness ~ Innocence ~ Malleability ~ Taking a time-out
Action Required: Confusion is a mask for fear and anxiety, and it arises when you’re overwhelmed by change, novelty, or too many tasks. Confusion can be a lovely vacation from overwhelm.
The Internal Questions: What is my intention? What action should be taken?
JEALOUSY: Relational Radar
Gifts: Commitment ~ Security ~ Connection ~ Loyalty ~ Fairness
Action Required: Jealousy arises in response to challenges that may destabilize your connection to love, mate retention, or loyalty. These challenges may come from external sources, from an internal lack of self-worth, or both.
The Internal Questions: What has been betrayed? What must be healed and restored?
ENVY: Interactional Radar
Gifts: Fairness ~ Security ~ Access to resources ~ Proper recognition ~ Self-preservation
Action Required: Envy arises in response to challenges that may destabilize your connection to material security, resources, or recognition. These challenges may come from external sources, from an internal lack of self-regard, or both.
The Internal Questions: What has been betrayed? What must be made right?
PANIC AND TERROR: Frozen Fire
Gifts: Sudden energy ~ Fixed attention ~ Absolute stillness ~ Healing from trauma
Action Required: Panic and terror arise when your physical life is directly and immediately threatened. You have three choices: fight, flee, or freeze.
The Internal Questions: (for post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]): What has been frozen in time? What healing action must be taken? In cases of PTSD, the somatic work of Peter Levine (which is referenced in the Further Resources section) is invaluable.
SADNESS: The Water Bearer
Gifts: Release ~ Fluidity ~ Grounding ~ Relaxation ~ Rejuvenation
Action Required: Sadness arises when it’s time to let go of something that isn’t working anyway. If you can truly let go, relaxation and rejuvenation will surely follow.
The Internal Questions: What must be released? What must be rejuvenated?
GRIEF: The Deep River of the Soul
Gifts: Complete immersion in the river of life, death, and eternity
Action Required: Grief arises when something has been lost irretrievably or when someone has died. Grief and sadness are intimately related, but with sadness, you still have a choice about letting go. Grief arises when the loss is completely out of your hands, and you need to mourn.
The Internal Questions: What must be mourned? What must be released completely?
SITUATIONAL DEPRESSION: Ingenious Stagnation
Gifts: The Ingenious Stop Sign of the Soul
Action Required: Situational depression arises when some aspect of your life is already unworkable or dysfunctional; depression stops you for a vital reason.
The Internal Questions: Where has my energy gone? Why was it sent away?
Important note: Situational depression refers specifically to a low mood that tracks to something you can affect with changes to your lifestyle or behavior. There are many other forms of depression, many of which require therapeutic or medical intervention. If your depression is cyclical or if it doesn’t respond to healing changes you make, please seek counseling or therapeutic support.
HAPPINESS: Anticipation and Possibility
Gifts: Delight ~ Amusement ~ Hope ~ Wonder ~ Playfulness ~ Invigoration
Action Required: Happiness arises to help you look forward to the future with hope and delight.
The Internal Statement: Thank you for this lively celebration!
CONTENTMENT: Pleasure and Appreciation
Gifts: Enjoyment ~ Satisfaction ~ Self-respect ~ Pride ~ Confidence ~ Fulfillment
Action Required: Contentment arises to help you look toward yourself with pride and satisfaction.
The Internal Statement: Thank you for renewing my faith in myself!
JOY: Affinity and Communion
Gifts: Expansion ~ Communion ~ Inspiration ~ Splendor ~ Radiance ~ Bliss
Action Required: Joy arises to help you feel a blissful sense of expansiveness and connection to others, to ideas, or to experiences.
The Internal Statement: Thank you for this radiant moment!
Be aware: Extreme joy (exhilaration) is a state to approach with care, especially if it cycles with depression or sadness. Repetitive exhilaration or flights of giddy mania may be a sign of emotional dysregulation. Please take care of yourself and reach out for help if necessary.
Emotions form the basis of many of your cognitive and social abilities, yet, as we all know, emotions can also be very problematic. In the next section, which originated on my blog,36 we’ll take an empathic look at emotions that are out of kilter.
HOW MUCH EMOTION IS TOO MUCH?
All emotions are necessary, important, and valuable. Although some very intense emotions (such as hatred and panic) need to be handled with care, in most normal situations, you can understand and work with your emotions on your own. However, there are times when you’ll need assistance with your emotions. The way to know when you need help is simple: when your emotions repeat incessantly and do not resolve, or when they overwhelm you or the people in your life, it’s time to find out what’s going on.
When things are going well, all of your emotions (even very intense ones) will respond and resolve when you pay attention to them and perform whatever corrective actions they require. But sometimes emotions become destabilized, and this action-requiring construct will help you understand what’s going on: If you are dealing with an emotion that repeats continually and will not resolve itself, no matter how many times you try to perform the correct action for that emotion, that’s too much. It’s a clear sign that you could use some help. Let’s look at two specific emotions (fear and anger) so you’ll know what too much emotion actually looks like.
UNDERSTANDING THE PURPOSE OF FEAR
Your fear arises when you need to orient to change, novelty, or possible physical hazards. The actions that fear requires are uncountable, because fear is the emotion of instinct and intuition. When your fear signals you, you might need to hold your breath, freeze, run, laugh, recoil, move forward, orient yourself, strike out quickly to avoid an incoming hazard, leap sideways, be still, lower your head and studiously ignore something, or any of a hundred other actions. When you and your instincts choose the right action, you’ll complete the actions that your fear required, and your mood-state fear will recede naturally.
Your fear should never disappear completely, because fear brings you the gifts and instincts needed to prepare for any eventuality. However, you shouldn’t be in a fear mood state every minute of every day (this would be rough on your health). If everything in your environment knocks your fear from its flowing, nearly imperceptible, intuitive state into its full-on, adrenaline-pumping, action-requiring state, then something is going on. In this situation, you may have a physical condition or a past trauma that needs to be addressed. Cognitive behavioral therapy can be very helpful for hyperactivated fear conditions, as are certain antidepressants and beta blockers. Somatic therapy is also wonderful for resolving the residual activation that can be associated with traumas.
It’s really important to address hyperactivated fear, because fear’s job is to keep you aware and safe. If your fear is hyperactivated, you’ll orient to everything, whether or not you need to, and every change will feel like a threat or a physical hazard. You don’t want to be feeling that way all day long (unless you’re in a war, and then I take it back). But even for very competent warriors, feeling mood-state fear all the time is hard on the body. PTSD is a very real possibility when you live at the mood-state level of fear for long stretches of time.
The point with fear (and every other emotion) is that it has a very specific purpose. Fear needs you to take action—to orient to change, novelty, and possible hazards. When you properly identify the change or hazard and when you take an action to ensure your safety (or the safety of others, if your fear was evoked on their behalf), then fear’s work is done. When you complete the correct action, your fear will revert to its flowing state, and you won’t consciously feel afraid. Your fear will still be there, but it won’t be in a mood state, and it won’t require any overt actions from you. You will have completed the actions that your fear required. Excellent!
The problem with emotions is almost never about the emotion itself—even when the emotion is way out of kilter. The fact that people can get into trouble with repetitive fear doesn’t mean that fear is negative. Fear is irreplaceable—it brings you instincts and intuition, and it will literally save your life. You want fear! But you want fear to be in its proper place, doing its proper work, with the proper intensity.
For instance, if a child’s ball rolls into your field of vision, you want fear to help you notice it, orient to it, and then realize it’s not a threat. Excellent, fear, thank you! If a car suddenly swerves toward you, you want your fear to orient you, make a series of split-second decisions and maneuvers (that you don’t even have to think about, thanks to fear), and get your car out of harm’s way. Whew! Adrenaline rush! Excellent, fear, thank you!
UNDERSTANDING THE PURPOSE OF ANGER
From its healthy, flowing state (where it quietly maintains your self-image and your standpoint), your anger is evoked into its mood state when you sense threats to your self-image, your standpoint, your voice, or your position (I call these, collectively, your boundaries). When someone tries to disrespect you, your anger should come forward to protect your boundaries honorably. With that anger, you can set the person straight (or laugh, or raise your eyebrows, or deepen your voice, or any of a hundred nonviolent but self-strengthening, boundary-setting actions). Then your anger will recede, and your boundary will be reset. Bing. It’s done. No one gets hurt.
I call anger the Honorable Sentry because when you understand the importance of boundaries, you will honor those boundaries in other people. Your anger will not be a weapon; it will be a tool. In a healthy conflict, you both should be protected by healthy anger, and you both should be restored. Anger is the Honorable Sentry.
If you ignore or repress your anger, you’re teaching people that it’s totally okay to be unkind and insensitive, and you’re helping them become less skilled, less socially aware, and less valuable in the social world. You’re not doing them any favors; you’re actually dishonoring them. The healthy action for anger is to take hold of its strength so you can address any boundary violations honestly and without cruelty. This healthy action helps your relationships deepen and flourish; therefore, you shouldn’t repress your anger (in a pantomime of politeness) as a matter of course.
Now, let’s switch things around and say you feel anger all the time. Politics inflame you, advertising inflames you, other people’s behavior inflames you, and you wake up every morning with your fists raised, yelling, “Why, there oughtta be a law!” You also lash out at people regularly, sometimes without meaning to. In this situation, you have too much anger, and it’s being activated by absolutely everything in your environment. This is a very precarious situation for your social viability. If you ratchet up your anger every time it appears and you attack persistently, you’re teaching people that you are (1) not a safe person to be around, (2) not emotionally skilled, and (3) not empathically aware. You might think that your anger outbursts make you look strong, like some action figure. But if you’re using your anger to destroy the boundaries and the self-image of others, you haven’t learned the true strength and purpose of anger. Sorry. Learning how to channel your anger will help you create and define an honorable and healthy sense of self—for everyone.
Too much of any emotion—even joy—is not healthy for you, for your social viability, for your cognitive skills, or for your physical health. But with continual anger, there’s the possibility of damaging your cardiovascular system as well. There’s work you can do on your own, such as asking yourself why you’re so completely boundary impaired that absolutely everything gets to you. However, you might also need some help from a counselor or your doctor, because repetitive anger that never resolves is simply not good for you.
If your anger goes to DEFCON 1 every time it appears (or even every other time it appears), you may have a rage disorder. Repetitive rage can also be a sign of untreated major depression. So don’t fool around with repetitive rage; instead, reach out for help. But remember, it’s not the anger that isn’t good for you; you absolutely need your anger. (You can get into a repetitive state with any number of emotions, including depression, fear, joy, sadness, or shame, and each will destabilize you in its own particular way.) The problem in a rage disorder isn’t that the anger exists; the problem is that the anger is stuck in a feedback loop that needs to be resolved so the anger can get back to its regular job.
What I notice about raging people is that their boundaries are totally permeable—absolutely everything gets to them. Therefore, their anger, which exists to help them strengthen their boundaries, is continually required (remember that emotions are always true, though they’re not always right). The anger is responding appropriately to the actual circumstances in their lives. Their anger constantly, regularly, and dependably arises (this anger is true), but because they don’t understand how to complete the actions that anger requests of them, their anger becomes trapped in a feedback loop (this anger is not actually right). We all require healthy boundaries and healthy anger, but in the case of a rage disorder, this feedback problem must be dealt with first.
Emotions are very powerful, and their nature is to move quickly, address an issue succinctly, and then move on. All of your emotions have important jobs to do, and you need all of them. But if something behavioral, chemical, or neurological is impeding or inflating your emotions, you can easily tumble into confusion, exhaustion, and disorder. If this happens, your job as the partner of your emotions is to reach out for help—from a friend, a counselor, or your health provider—so that you can bring balance back to your emotional life.
If you have an emotion that’s hyperactivated, that appears in seemingly inappropriate situations, or that won’t resolve, then that emotion is out of kilter. Your job isn’t to crush or suppress the emotion, or breathe it out and pretend to be feeling something else. No, your job is to find out what’s going on so that your emotion can get back to its regular work!
THE ANSWER IS PRETTY SIMPLE, REALLY
So, the answer to the question How much emotion is too much? is the same for any of the emotions: If an emotion appears constantly or repetitively, and you can’t get it to resolve, then that’s too much. That emotion is out of balance, and you need to attend to it so it can get back to its regular work.
Emotions are very powerful, and a repetitive emotional state can throw your chemistry out of whack. Attending to a destabilized emotion may require therapy, mindfulness practices, antidepressants (in cases of repetitive rage, anxiety, or depression), antianxiety meds, or a change in your lifestyle so you can work your way back to health. You can also rely on your Einfühlung capacity to make a full-bodied empathic study of the emotion that got out of balance in you—and wow, this will tell you amazing things about yourself, your current home and work environments, your social life, your childhood emotional training, and your beliefs about the world.
Your emotional awareness is crucial to your ability to empathize with others, to take their perspective, and to have concern for them. Think about it: if you have a problem with one or more emotions, you probably won’t be able to be fully present when that emotion arises in others. For instance, if you have an unaddressed feedback loop in your own anger program and someone near you gets angry, your anger will probably start looping. Anger is an awesome emotion, but when it’s in a feedback loop, it’s too much—and it will probably impede your ability to perform Perspective Taking or do anything other than rant or shake internally with rage. That’s not helpful! You definitely want to have the capacity to use rage when you need to, but it should be a choice and not an involuntary, repetitive reflex. The situation is the same with fear, sadness, joy, envy, anxiety, or any other emotion: if you have a problem with your own emotions, your empathic capacities will be reduced when that emotion is present in others.
In our six aspects of empathy, Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation are the stepping-stones that help you make the journey from the fairly involuntary act of Emotion Contagion to the culminating and intentional act of Perceptive Engagement. So, if you have one or more emotions that are problematic for you, take care of yourself and get them back into balance within your entire emotional realm. Emotions are irreplaceable, necessary, and powerful aspects of your cognitive skills, but if they’re out of kilter, every single one of them can be too much!
IS IT A FEELING OR AN EMOTION?37
It’s important to understand the distinct difference between emotions and feelings. This understanding will help you become more empathically accurate and aware of your emotions.
Someone once asked me about the difference between an emotion and a feeling. My answer was that emotion is a thing, and feeling is an action. One’s a noun; the other’s a verb. Although I didn’t really understand why the distinction was important, I did think about it a great deal. I really wondered what the confusion was about—I mean, you have an emotion, you feel it, you identify it, and then, you know exactly how to work with it. Right?
Oh, yeah. It’s not that simple for many people.
So I went back to the books, and after rereading Damasio’s books (Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and Looking for Spinoza ), some books on the sociology of emotion (How Emotions Work, by Jack Katz), and some books on the neurology of emotion (The Emotional Brain, by Joseph LeDoux, and On Being Certain, by Robert Burton), I finally figured out what’s up.
IT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING AND KNOWING
An emotion is a physiological experience or neurological program that gives you information about the world, and a feeling is your conscious awareness of the emotion itself. I hadn’t really understood why the distinction was such a big deal, because I don’t experience a huge gap between emotion and feeling. I mean, if there’s an emotion going on, I feel it, and because I’ve organized emotions into sixteen distinct categories, it’s easy for me to identify which one it is. But this isn’t true for everyone. Many people are honestly unaware that they’re experiencing an emotion. For them, the emotion and the capacity to feel it are not strongly connected, and they don’t even realize that (for instance) they’re fearful or angry or depressed. They have the emotion, but they don’t know about it. The emotion is certainly there, and their behavior displays the emotion (to others at least), but they aren’t feeling it properly. Their emotional state has to become an obvious mood—or it has to become very persistent—before they can realize, “Oh, I guess I’ve been really sad about my dad, or afraid about money, or angry about work.” Their Empathic Accuracy is low and, therefore, so are their Emotion Regulation skills.
My hypothesis is that this detachment between emotions and feelings (in a neurologically intact person, that is) stems from the constant, repetitive, and relentlessly antiemotion training we get, most of which I wrote about when I described the four problems that ensure emotional confusion in the previous chapter. I think that people aren’t aware of their emotions because they’ve been trained since birth to valence, repress, suppress, ignore, or demonize them. Or they swing to the opposite pole and express their emotions explosively. As we’ve all seen, repression and expression can both be very troubling, because in many cases, they actually make you less able to understand your own emotions. Luckily, if you can stop repressing or exploding with your emotions—if you can instead learn to simply feel them—then you can develop better Empathic Accuracy and stronger Emotional Regulation skills. In turn, you’ll become more skillful in all aspects of empathy. Identifying and naming your emotions is an important first step in learning how to feel them skillfully.
FEELING, NAMING, AND KNOWING
Matthew Lieberman,38 a psychological researcher at the University of California–Los Angeles, has done some interesting work on the ways that verbal identification of emotions can help you address and alleviate emotional pain. In his and other studies, there’s a suggestion that simply naming your intense emotions can help your brain calm down so you can restore your resilience in the face of challenging situations.
I’ve found this to be true, especially for overwhelmed hyperempaths who have very permeable boundaries and problems with excessive Emotion Contagion. Naming emotions helps hyperempaths begin to articulate and organize emotions so that they can begin to feel more grounded and focused in the presence of strong emotions. On the other side of the equation, people with low emotional awareness and low empathy also benefit from learning to identify and name emotions. I’ve noticed in my four decades of practice and teaching that learning to identify emotions does three things:
1. It helps you learn to feel and identify your emotions, which helps you calm and focus yourself and develop Emotion Regulation skills.
2. It helps you understand when, why, and how your emotions arise so you can become more emotionally aware and increase your Empathic Accuracy.
3. It recruits your verbal skills to support and consult with your emotions so you can learn from them and take constructive, emotionally appropriate actions.
In my work, I don’t set up a hierarchy in which your verbal and rational intelligence is somehow smarter than your emotions. As I wrote earlier, emotions are millions of years older than language, and if there were a hierarchy, I would have to give the higher position to emotions. But I don’t do hierarchies. In my empathic work, we rely on your verbal and rational skills to support your emotional awareness. Emotions are neurological signalers of what’s going on in your world. Emotions are simply data; you are the interpreter of those data. How you interpret and work with your emotions determines whether your outcomes are healthy and workable. Research is continually showing how vital emotions are to your thought and decision-making processes, and if you can learn to feel emotions intelligently, then you’ll widen the boundaries of your intelligence to include your social, emotional, and empathic skills.
As you learn how to feel more intelligently, a few simple flowcharts may help you understand the pathway that emotions take and where the act of feeling occurs in the process.
THE PATHWAY FROM EMOTION TO FEELING
Let’s look at the simplest healthy pathway from emotion to action. (My flowcharts are simplified, and there’s clearly a great deal more complexity involved when emotional disorders are present. But these broad strokes are worth understanding.)
Emotion → Feeling → Naming → Acting on the information the emotion provides
Let’s put sadness into this flowchart. It would go like this: I have an emotion; I feel that it is sadness; I name the sadness; and I take the action my sadness requires (which might be sighing, slowing down, letting go of tension, or crying, among many other sadness-based actions).
But something is missing. I didn’t include the situations and stimuli that induce emotions; let’s not leave those out. Emotional stimuli can be anything that evokes an emotion, including your own thoughts. Emotions tell you that something requires an action; that something can include your own thoughts. Notice that I’m using the word evoke here.39 Emotions are not created out of thin air, and they’re not created by your thoughts; emotions have evolved over millions of years to help you understand and respond to the world. Emotions exist within you, and they are evoked, not created, by specific stimuli. So let’s include those stimuli:
Emotionally evocative stimulus → Emotion → Feeling → Naming → Acting on the information the emotion provides
But something is still missing—you may misperceive the stimulus! For instance, you may see a coiled-up rope and experience fear as if you were seeing a snake. Or, if your emotion is evoked by your thoughts about something (for instance, you might think that your neighbor is intentionally being noisy to annoy you), you can misperceive reality. Your thoughts might not be right, especially if you don’t regularly stop to question them. If you act on an emotion that was evoked by stimuli that aren’t valid, you might do something misguided or injurious (like race away from a coiled rope or yell at your neighbor). Remember that emotions are always true, because they’re always responding to emotionally evocative stimuli, but they’re not always right, because the stimuli may not be valid.
Stimuli can also be unrelated to emotion and yet evoke an emotion anyway. For instance, if your heart rate or your adrenaline rises, your body may respond as if a fearful stimulus were present. Similarly, if you’re smiling or frowning, your body may respond as if you were happy or angry. In some instances, it could be that your anger and depression are being evoked by the fact that you’re slumping and frowning, without being aware that you are! Emotions give you valuable information about something that’s going on, but it’s up to you to figure out what that something might be.
That’s why I created a process that allows you to turn toward your emotions and question them, to identify the stimulus, and (I hope) figure out what’s really going on. So here’s the complete process:
Emotionally evocative stimulus → Emotion → Feeling → Naming → Questioning the emotion → Acting on the information the emotion provides OR → Deciding not to act because the stimulus is invalid
I know this seems like a long pathway, but you can actually do it in a split second once you get your empathic skills under you. It’s not hard. It’s actually much harder in the long run to sleepwalk through your life, being pushed around by emotions that you can’t identify or understand.
In our examples above, we worked with some pretty simple emotions. Now, let’s put the intense emotion of rage into our flowchart to see how this process might work in a troubling real-life situation in which you might explode with rage (note that the stimulus and actions in these flowcharts are rage specific):
Something threatens your sense of self, standpoint, or voice → Anger is evoked → You don’t stop to name the anger; instead, you add assumptions and accusations on top of it → More anger is evoked (this time, by you), and the anger morphs into rage → You attack → The other person backs down or attacks back → Rinse and repeat → Welcome to Hell!
Okay, we all know that flowchart! It’s active on the Internet (and in the U.S. Senate and Congress) pretty much every day. But let’s look at rage again, this time with cognitively moderated pauses and intentional emotional skills. (Please note that I’m not describing a rage disorder in either of these flowcharts. In a rage disorder, the stimulus is often untreated depression, other neurochemical factors, or possibly PTSD. The rage we’re looking at here is common, garden-variety rage.)
Something threatens your sense of self, standpoint, or voice → Anger is evoked → You calm and focus yourself and feel the anger → You name the anger and note its exact intensity, which gives you a moment to organize yourself → You ask yourself the questions for anger (What must be protected? What must be restored?) → You discover what the issue is, set clear boundaries without violence, and restore your sense of self without offending the humanity of the other person → Anger program ends → Congratulations!
Did you notice that there was no need to go to rage in the second flowchart? When you understand that you’re having an emotion, that you can feel it skillfully, that you can identify it, and that there are specific things you can do to examine the stimulus, then you don’t have to throw yourself into the raging rapids every time an emotion appears.
When you have Emotion Regulation skills, you have options—and freedom and breathing room—no matter what is going on around you.
So an emotion does this: it gives you information about an emotionally relevant stimulus, and it tells you what you’ve perceived and what you’re experiencing. Your job as the partner of your emotions is to feel the emotion, name it, ask the correct questions, and act in a way that is both emotional and rational. I’m saying it’s doable—not to mention vital for your mental health, the quality of your empathy, the quality of your relationships, and the health of your community. When you can work with your emotions empathically, your Emotion Contagion capacities will become much more understandable and manageable. This process will also support your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation skills, which will increase your empathic abilities in healthy and workable ways.
When you know how to feel your emotions, empathic awareness becomes easy (and fun and enlightening). More important, when you know how to feel your emotions, name them, and take the necessary, cognitively moderated pauses that will help you understand whether the stimulus (or your reaction) is valid, then your big, intense, and potentially dangerous emotions will become less toxic, and so will you.
As we move forward into learning empathic mindfulness skills and empathic communication techniques, it’s important to remember that the quality of your empathy relies upon the depth of your intrapersonal awareness. To become more empathically skilled, your primary empathic interaction needs to be internal—between you and your emotions (especially if you are currently dealing with any troublesome ones). In the next chapter, you’ll learn the empathic mindfulness skills that I developed to help you work with emotions and your empathic abilities at a moment’s notice. All of these skills will help you bring balance to your life—but again, if you’re dealing with an emotion that’s too much, please reach out for support from a friend, counselor, therapist, or doctor.