How Can We Better Identify With Our Emotions?

Imagine the following scenario: You walk into the train and you happen to chance upon two of your childhood friends. Your face lights up as you take tiny steps forward to prepare for a surprise pounce on one of them. Their conversation soon becomes clearer, but you stop almost immediately. You heard something, and it wasn’t pleasant. They were badmouthing about you.

What would you feel in this situation?

Anger. Sadness. Probably. Can we be surprised? Yes. Can we be fearful? Yes. Can we feel shameful too? Yes. We can go through a myriad of emotions and actually acknowledge it when it is being mentioned. This shows that how we often think of emotions being one-sided or felt one after another is a flawed concept. We don’t just feel one sort of emotion, neither do we feel them in a synchronized sequence.

I believe that our emotions are so complex and nuanced to the extent that it is tricky to identify how we feel, and even trickier to express how we feel.

When we were younger, we either say that we’re feeling “good” or “bad”. As we grow older and have a better idea in identifying how we feel, we tend to use words such as “angry”, “sad”, “happy”, “surprised”, “afraid” and “disgusted” to broadly express how we feel. Yet it seems it isn’t enough. If we were to draw a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being mild and 10 being intense) of how angry we feel when we encounter the aforementioned situation, we probably wouldn’t rate it as low as 1, neither would we rate it as high as 10. We are angry, but not that angry. It goes the same for surprise, fear and sadness too. We are surprised, but not that surprised. We are fearful, but not that scared.

We are sad, but not that sad.

It is similar to how issues tend to scream at us whereas opportunities whisper. We often react immediately out of a need to take care of problems right away. On the other hand, opportunities often fade into the background. In this case, problems are almost like that one emotion we are often blindsided by, and opportunities are the rest of the emotions that form our complete emotional landscape. We have to consider the idea that if we can choose to see a fuller picture of the positivity intertwined with its negative bits, we can also choose to pause and feel our crystallised emotions.

It is possible that we feel both positive and negative emotions at the same time.

We can be angry at the fact that our childhood friend is betraying us, at the same time, we can feel a surge of relief as this piece of evidence confirms our position in this friendship. When we take our multi-dimensional emotional experience into account, we can then make better informed decisions. We do not feel one emotion, neither do we feel the range of that one emotion. What we are feeling involves the entire spectrum of our emotional experience. Some emotions last longer than others, and some are more intense than others. So, do we truly know how we feel when we say we do?