When joy gets stuck: Exhilaration We’ve looked at the three happiness-family emotions: contentment, which is like a deep and healing breath that follows a sense of inner achievement; the giddier state of happiness, which bubbles up, takes your hand, and skips with you into the bright future; and joy, which arises when you’ve worked to arrive at a place of beauty and full-bodied communion. However, there’s … Read More
Welcoming Joy! After learning about each of the emotions one by one (you can find the list of emotions on my Start Here page), we arrive today at the final emotion in the happiness family: joy! Joy is different from happiness in that it is deeper and larger somehow. It is closer in its essence to contentment, but instead of coming forth after an achievement (as … Read More
In my post on contentment, I wrote about how shame and contentment work together to help you uphold your ethics and values. Your sense of self and self-esteem come from the healthy interplay between contentment and shame, which are two vital social emotions. Interestingly, too much self-esteem and contentment can be a very bad thing, and can actually be a factor in bullying. When contentment goes … Read More
Welcoming contentment! (Excerpt from The Language of Emotions): Happiness tends to anticipate a bright future, while contentment tends to arise after an inner achievement. Contentment arises when you’re living up to your own expectations and your internal moral code, and when you’ve accomplished an important goal or done your work well and properly. When it’s working well, your contentment comes forward in response to tangible actions … Read More
Happiness helps you look outward (or forward to the future) with hope and delight! As I’ve been posting about the emotions one by one, you may have noticed that when I talk about emotions, I almost never start with the happiness-based emotions. It’s not that I don’t like happiness; I do! It’s that the three different types of happiness I identify in my work — happiness, … Read More
Hello emotional kids and parents! (That’s all of us, you know.) Emotions are at the center of all learning, thinking, and behavior, and you can learn how to work with them skillfully. Kids especially love learning about their emotions, and we’ve made a 2-page chart for kids that helps kids understand exactly what their emotions do and what gifts and skills they contain. This kids’ chart … Read More
As the publication date for the new and revised edition of The Language of Emotions nears, I want to share some of the praise the book has received from two people I admire very much. Gavin DeBecker “The Language of Emotions has changed the way I relate to others, and to myself, forever.” Gavin DeBecker, author of The Gift of Fear and Protecting the Gift Gavin is a security expert who … Read More
The Darkness before Dawn: Understanding the Suicidal Urge Suicidal feelings are painful but normal responses to deep pain and deep trouble — and people survive their suicidal urges every day, and go on to live and thrive. If you or anyone you know feels suicidal, there are some excellent free resources that can help. First, here in the US, you can contact the 988 Suicide & … Read More
How Do We Celebrate Our Mothers? A real-world poem for Mother’s Day How do we celebrate our mothers — The ones who are here and the ones who aren’t? The ones who gave their lives for us, And the ones who walked away. The ones who lovingly directed our lives as if we were art projects, And the ones who never knew how to welcome us … Read More
Hello, Emotional People! That’s all of us, you know. Emotions are vital to everything we think, every idea we have, and everything we do. But most of us haven’t learned how to work skillfully with all of our emotions. Luckily, we can learn to work well with our emotions at any stage of our lives. One of our licensed Dynamic Emotional Integration® professionals, Jennifer Asdorian, created … Read More