When I talk about The Language of Emotions, one of the central ideas I try to get across is that all emotions are useful. If you can approach them with care and ask them the right questions, there aren’t any “bad” emotions. Every emotion has a specific function, and all of them are important and instructive. Some very intense emotions (such as hatred and panic), which I call the “raging rapids” emotions, need to be handled with care, but in most normal cases, 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 continually 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 the raging rapids ones) will respond to you and will resolve when you’ve paid attention to them and made whatever corrective actions they require. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, “emotions are action-requiring neurological programs.”
From that post: So, for instance, fear requires that you take action to orient to change and novelty, or to avoid physical harm. Anger requires that you take action to protect or restore your sense of self or your standpoint (or the selves and standpoints of others, if your anger is related to social justice). Shame requires that you take action to avoid injuring others or yourself (if the shame is authentic to you. It’s important to first identify whether the shame has been applied as a control mechanism from the outside). Sadness requires that you take action to let go of something that isn’t working anyway, and grief (which has a very different purpose from sadness) requires that you actively mourn something that is lost irretrievably. And so forth.
Each emotion is an action-requiring neurological program, and in The Language of Emotions, I explain what each emotion is for and how to work with it as itself (rather than trying to pretend it’s something else, or that you don’t have it).
With this action-requiring construct, we can be a bit more precise in our understanding of how much emotion is too much: If you’ve got an emotion that repeats continually and will not resolve itself, no matter how many times you try to perform the action for that emotion, that’s a clear sign that you could use some intervention. Let’s look at one of the emotions above so you’ll know what I mean.
The importance of Fear
From its healthy, flowing state (where it is your instincts and your intuition), your fear is evoked into what I call its mood state (this is when most of us can feel it) by change, novelty, and the possibility of physical danger. The actions 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, 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 resolve the reasons for your fear, and your fear will recede naturally.
I’m not sure why, but the cataclysm never felt plausible to me. It just seemed preposterous somehow, and I sort of ignored it. I remember joking that if it did happen, I would be on a small floating piece of destroyed California, which would contain a fully-stocked Nordstrom’s department store (this was my idea of luxury at the time. I mean, come on — a grand piano in the lobby of a department store? That’s mad swanky.) People in the group thought I was too young and too silly to understand the importance of the cataclysm. Perhaps they were right.
2010 Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (in Self Help)
2010 Silver Medal from the Nautilus Awards (in Personal Growth/Self-Help/Psychology)
As I pondered your responses and requests, I kept being reminded of things I had just read in Antonio Damasio’s book, 