Follow your heart or act rationally?
How about doing both because you cannot truly do one without the other.
The Problem
When I was in graduate school, a friend of mine said that “as southern men it seems like we were raised to think that we only had two emotions: anger and happiness — everything else was pretty much not safe and was meant to be stuffed down or self medicated with drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll.”
I may have paraphrased here a bit, but the notion stands. Anger and happiness are all we have to color our world if we have never been taught otherwise.
In reality, this limitation of emotion does not just impact men. It has detrimental effects on men and women from all backgrounds and upbringings.
This may seem trivial but if you have only ever been allowed to experience anger and happiness and you feel an emotion like sadness what are you going to do with it?
If you never learned what sadness is and how your body experiences it your body will just pick the closest experience it has and just run with that — like a train off the rails (because what does sadness look more like, anger or happiness?)
When this plays out over the course of someone’s entire upbringing they will inevitably end up confused and frustrated by their emotions because they have never truly learned what their body is trying to tell them. They will become sad and lash out in anger. They will be anxious and say things they cannot take back. They will become scared and run away from relationships and into isolation for fear of lashing out again the next time they are overwhelmed.
“The whole range of emotions is our heritage, not just cheerfulness and joy. There are everyday occurrences that make us a little sat, or disappointment, that worry us and scare us. Fear is a part of human experience. So is anger.” Dr. John Gottman, The Marriage Clinic
Our emotional heritage, as Dr. John Gotman so eloquently put it above, includes far more than mere happiness and simple, reactive anger.
Anger, sadness, grief, joy, pride, anguish, love, anxiety, and everything in between are meant to communicate something to us — we just need to listen in order to learn. We do not need to continue sweeping them under the rug. These are part of being human, and there is nothing wrong with being human, it is not something from which we need to heal. It is something we need to learn — and each person is their own teacher.
The Reasoning of the Heart
All of our emotions have powerful reasons to exist and manifest themselves in our lives. Our bodies and emotions are just as involved in our decision making — it is not just our brains running the show. The poets and philosophers are more correct in speaking of the heart as a decision making organ than we often give them credit for. Blaise Pascal in his work Pensées said that “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know… We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.”
Although Pascal is speaking philosophically and with the voice of a poet — his intuitions about intuition have been demonstrated as truth. For more research about this check out The Righteous Mind by Johnathan Haidt. I won’t bore you with the details here…
“We know truth, not only by reason, but by the heart.”
Some people grow up with a truncated sense of emotions because they had to stuff “negative emotions” down and not display them or else face some array of consequences (and sometimes they may have had good reasons to do so). Each time we ignore an emotional experience we are missing an opportunity to listen to it, to understand its purpose, to have it color our lives with vibrancy.
We need our emotions not just to enjoy life but to actually live at all. A life without sadness or grief can border sociopathy is these emotions are never felt as they are meant to be. A life without anger can lead to complacency and never standing up for oneself or for others when anger is not experienced and expressed healthily. A life without anxiety leaves us with a massive to-do-list and no drive whatsoever to complete it — only compounding our stress even more.
Learning from our Emotions
Our emotions can be our guides but we can only listen to them if we know how to speak their language, otherwise its babble. And the first step for this process is to open our minds up to the diversity of our emotional experiences by simply providing more words to work with other than anger and happiness or simply stating, “I’m fine.”
A great first step is to familiarize yourself with and work through a feelings wheel — which is just a fancy way of laying out some synonyms for our primary emotions. Please note, there are dozens of these floating around the internet and there is no definitive wheel. These are tools used to organize emotions/feelings to help them feel less chaotic.
There is nothing really magical or definitive about this circle or the words within it apart from the conversation it can generate between you, your body, and your emotions. If you are ever feeling stuck or unable to make sense of your emotions, there is always help that can be found with friends, family, and even professional help.
Some ways that this can be easily helpful:
- Start using more descriptive words to express your emotions.
- Use the outside of the circle to find what your experiencing and see what core emotion you may be feeling and then using coping skills that target that emotion more specifically.
- Use the blank spaces to add words that more aptly describe your experience(s) with an emotion. We all experience emotions differently so get to know yourself better.
- Use an uncolored version of the wheel and take some time to reflect on these emotions and pick a color that best represents how you experience an emotion. [Most people pick blue for sad but I worked with a client who use blue for happiness because she loved the sky on a clear day].
- Make a short list of where each of these emotions shows up in your body. For example, I feel all my stress in my jaw because I clinch my teeth when I am overwhelmed. Practicing this may help you notice your emotions quicker because, sometimes, our bodies will tell us something before our mind does.
Conclusion
Connecting your body, emotions, and mind to your overall sense of self takes a lifetime of work but the first few steps can create a significant change in your overall well being today. Its more like one giant leap that takes place with a single step. We do not need to make a choice between following our heart or acting reasonably — in order to act purposefully, in line with our values, and as a whole human being, we need to act with both emotion and reason. To do otherwise is a disservice to ourselves.
So don’t stay stuck with only 2 emotions to color your world — there is so much more out there to experience that makes life vibrant.
