Do You Want to Control Your Emotions?

When people talk about emotions, they use specific words.

Those words matter.

They reveal what the people really think about emotions.

By paying attention to the words someone uses, you can see whether a they are afraid of their emotions, stumped by them, in turmoil because of them, groping to “re”-gain control, or simply bitter about the whole having-emotions thing.

Wanting to control emotions

When someone says they want to:

Control
Keep in check
Manage
Deal with
Tame
Domesticate
Master

their emotions… they’re likely pitting their emotions as adversary.

Or maybe just nuisance.

And their goal is to dominate with mighty left-brain thinking or enough minutes of mindfulness meditation, so that their emotions don’t dominate them.

That kind of me-against-them mindset leads to problems later on.

It focuses on controlling something that you can’t control, distracting you from the only thing you can control — which is your response ability to your emotions.

And it puts you at war with yourself.

Not needing to control emotions

When someone says they want to:

Work with
Learn from
Grow from
Partner with
Use constructively
Nurture
Integrate

their emotions… they’re speaking to a more balanced relationship with them.

They know that there’s no such thing as controlling what is just a part of yourself.

And that it’s smarter and more realistic to move toward emotions rather than away from them.

Lots of people want to control emotions

There are plenty mental health professionals, psychologists, life coaches, and educators who describe emotions in unbalanced (and outdated) ways.

All you have to do is put their words under a magnifying glass, and you’ll start to see the signs of dysfunctional beliefs about emotion.

This is why it’s important to always check your sources and ask yourself, “Is this person/organization/ideology representing a balanced/constructive/response able relationship with emotions?”

And this doesn’t just apply to mental health professionals, psychologists, life coaches, and educators.

It applies to everyone else who has some type of authority in a social system.

(We’ve got plenty of mythlore pitting emotion as the nemesis to reason, being slowly corrected by cognitive-affective science.)