To teach our children how to
express own Feelings and Emotions we have to understand and be able to identify
them ourselves. Each of the emotion has a specific purpose and place in our
life. We need happiness, sadness, anger, fear, jealousy, envy, guilt,
grief, shame, and even depression every now and then. One of the biggest trick
to leave a happy live is to let the emotion come and go, and to not treat it
one better or more important than the other. Here they are after Karla McLaren based
on her book “The Language of Emotions.”
Happiness
Happiness is a rest stop emotion.
If we treat happiness as an emotion we need all the time, we’ll suffer without necessity
when our other emotions arise. If all we know and all we want is happiness, we’ll
tend to avoid, ignore, suppress, or mistreat our other emotions, and then we
won’t be happy too often. When we work skillfully with “negative” emotions subsequently
we feel happy, contented, or pleased.
Sadness
Sadness is an emotion that most
of us try to avoid; nevertheless listening to sadness can help us to let go of
things that don’t work, so that we can make changes in our lives and room for
things that work for us. Sadness has a powerful physical component that drops us
downhill - and if it stays activated for too long, it can obstruct our sleep,
eating, or even our hormonal system. Just as it is with any other emotion,
sadness shouldn’t be with us forever. It should do its job and move forward. Grieving
is a negative emotion and much different from sadness. Grief arises not when we
need to let something go, but when we have no choice about letting it go, and
when we’re losing something over which we have no control. Grieving is a slow
and languid process that takes its own time.
Anger
Anger is a mood state, but quite
important. It helps us to set boundaries, protect our sense of self, and take our
stand in the world. Anger helps us to guard our position, voice, standpoint,
and individuality. Anger is a very social emotion, which brings us a great deal
of energy, forcefulness, and focus. If we can understand its nuances and
subtleties, we can function more intelligently in our social world. When we
know we feel anger, we can make an intelligent emotional decision about what to
do. We should ask ourselves a question: What must be protected or
restored? Asking the inner question can help us to direct that intensity
into a healthy action.
Fear
Fear is our intuition, the
emotion that tells us when change is occurring, when we need to adjust to
something in our environment, and when we need to take action to avoid harm or
injury. We must be aware of the fact that fear requires us to check in and
figure out what we’re being alerted to. Asking a question: What action
should we take? can help us to identify and work with our fear in useful way.
Fear is a lifesaving emotion that primes our brain, muscles, and all of our
senses for action. If our fear is stuck in a feedback loop, we may become
overwhelmed and exhausted by the activation it causes. It’s important to be able to calm our body so
that we can get back into a workable relationship with our fear.
Shame and Guilt
Guilt is a concrete status; we
are either guilty or not guilty, while shame is a natural emotion, a consequence
of guilt and misconduct. When we didn’t do something wrong, we are not guilty.
However, if we are guilty, and we want to know what to do about
the fact of our guilt, then we have to learn to work with the
information shame brings to us. Here is a positive aspect of shame. The
practice for shame is to understand it as anger toward ourselves, which means
that we can make reparation and change our behavior. This kind of shame is called
“appropriate shame,” because it relates to something real and fixable. If our
shame is appropriate, it will stop us from doing something we shouldn’t do, and
it will help us to change our behavior and make amends. However, there is
another form of shame called “applied” or “foreign” shame, which comes from
shaming messages we pick up from others and incorporate into our life. Applied
shame can be toxic, especially if it relates to us not being good enough, smart
enough, lovable enough, etc.) In that case we need to work on a good strategy
to end applied shame.
Jealousy and Envy
Even though jealousy and envy are
separate emotional states they carry similar information. Jealousy arises in
response to unfaithfulness or deceit in an intimate relationship, while envy
arises in response to the unfair distribution of resources or recognition. Both
emotions contain a mixture of boundary-protecting anger and intuitive fear.
Both exist to help us to set or restore lost boundaries after they’ve assessed
an authentic risk to our security or our position. On the other hand, if we
suppress our jealousy and envy, we would have trouble to identify or relate to
reliable companions, and we would be disrupted by our disastrous attempts to
bolster our self-respect and security. Both jealousy and envy arise when we have
detected a risk to our social and personal security. Shutting them down is
incorrect. When we stifle our jealousy and envy, we not only lose our awareness
of the situations that brought them forward, but also we lose our emotional
agility, our instincts, and our ability to navigate through our social world
and relationships.
To learn appropriate
vocabularies go to
from “The Language of
Emotions” by Karla McLaren
Or another choice http://www.sba.pdx.edu/faculty/mblake/448/FeelingsList.pdf
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