Science & Self-improvement

Sometimes reasoning may be used to deal with emotions, but this is not the right thing to do. Our capacity to reason is very important when it comes to categorize our perceptions and extract concepts by abstracting common features from many individual instances. Reasoning has a key role in understanding outer reality and without it we would be helpless when dealing with practical matters.

However, it is not good to mix reason and emotions because the interaction may be sometimes harmful. We may get involved in rationalizing our feelings, that is, searching for an admissible cause for them when we should be instead trying to comprehend them. Rationalizing means that the feeling is already there and we have to find an explanation to it, but this explanation must match a number of pre-existent rules and conditions. Comprehend, on the other hand, means to be sincere and find the real cause of our feelings.

Other times emotions can interfere with reasoning. To proceed rightly we must have a clear image of the outer world, one that is not muddled by emotions. Emotions can make that we think that the world is another thing that what really it is, and so our acts will be wrong. For instance, fear may make you feel apprehensively of the world. You will act in a way to over-protect yourself when there is no need to do so.

Although you must be alert to not let emotions interfere with your perception of the outer world, you must be aware that, in the inner world, emotions are reality. Inside us, feelings are the truth, and the way we deal with them will determine if we live truthfully or falsely. To explain emotions by reasoning does not eliminate them, as also does not blame others for our feelings. Feelings are there, and we must face them without denying or disguising them.

Growing up is a painful process, and we should not expect to grow up without experimenting pain. When you were a child, there were occasions in which your parents could help you with your pain and other occasions when they would let you alone. The term “to grow up” was invented in times when it was thought that development ended when a person became adult. It encompassed all sort of development: physical, intellectual, and emotional. Now we now that development in the intellectual and emotional spheres may continue during all the person’s life.

When you are an adult there will be occasions for suffering, and you will have to endure the suffering because it is part of the normal process of development. If you try to avoid the pain, you will be arresting development. However, this is what we often do when we think that a pain is unbearable. We may so proceed in the moment when we first suffer pain, but sooner or later we have to acknowledge it and go through it.

To deny pain is a defensive process. We defend against pain as we may defend against an enemy. This is only natural, as it is necessary sometimes to allow us some time to distance ourselves from the events. However, when we systematically build up defenses against pain the loss in energy that results from this process is almost as harmful as the pain itself.

Emotions are a sign of life: to have no emotions is like being dead. It is important to be conscious of our feelings, to understand them, and to be able to express them. Emotions are our way to react to our perception of the world, and so they contribute to shape the world we live in. They allow us to communicate with ourselves, which in turn enables us to communicate with other ones.

We perceive the world by means of our senses. However, each of us processes the raw data of the senses by a mental activity that leads to our own idea of the world. Our emotions have a part in building this image of the world, and consequently influence our acts in the future. The world that we perceive is in great measure a personal construction. When we accept responsibility for out feelings we are also accepting that we are responsible for our views of the world.

To have control of our feelings means to have control of ourselves and is the way to achieve autonomy and independence. This control can only be acquired by means of understanding what are feelings. Comprehension is the way to be the master of your emotions, and therefore to be the master of your life. When you acknowledge your emotions instead of hiding them, you are in a position to deal better with the world because you will not be avoiding reality.

To lose contact with our feelings means to lose contact with our inner part. Feelings should be acknowledged and expressed in a way that is socially accepted and appropriate to solve conflicts and foster our improvement. They can be faced defensively or constructively. In the first case, we are heading inwards; in the second, outwards. Obviously, the second should be the preferred alternative.

To comprehend our emotions means to comprehend which is our reaction to the world in which we live. They reflect our history and our development, our past, our present, and what we can expect of the future. To have emotions is to be alive. We cannot say that we are conscious of life if we are not conscious of our feelings towards life. Emotions tell us if what we have lived was gratifying or afflictive.

There are certain common ways in which people react to their experiences. Although each of us has his own way to manage experience, we are all similar when faced with events like a significant lose. This community of feelings is what permits that we have compassion for other people. That is what is meant when we say that human beings are linked by feelings. This is so because emotions are our most immediate reaction to events, rather than thoughts. We feel first and then we think. Thoughts are a way to deal with experience, while emotions are the experience itself.

Intelligence alone is not enough to understand feelings. By being very intelligent one is not bound to understand what one feels. We all know people that are very intelligent but that are dissociated from their feelings. They try to interpret the world exclusively by the use of reason, using a method that produces good results in many practical matters. In the case of emotions, however, it fails hopelessly.

An important tool towards building a healthy self-esteem is the control of emotions. This is something that seems strange to many people because the most common belief about emotions is that they cannot be controlled. People that admit that emotions can be controlled will affirm that there is no need of doing so, or even that the control of emotions is undesirable.

All these beliefs are wrong. Let us examine in turn each one of them. The first one says that emotions cannot be controlled. There is, however, a way to control emotions, and it is through one’s thoughts. This was known long time ago by a philosophical school called stoicism. Stoics maintained–and anyone can confirm it by his own experience–that an emotion is not the reaction to reality, but the reaction to what one think reality is.

Stoicism was originated within ancient Greeks and found two prominent exponents in the Romans Seneca and Epictetus. It asserts that one cannot change certain events, but one can choose his attitude towards them. This means that you can choose how you react to external events.

If you think that something that occurs will hurt you in any way, you will be sad. If, of the same thing, you think that it will not affect you, you will be indifferent. So, it is not the event what makes you sad, but what you think of it. You can control your emotions if you control what you think.

You can change the way you think about things. You can learn how to think differently about what happens to you, and can choose a way of thinking that permits you to avoid undesirable emotions. Of course, this must be done without faking reality because, if you pretend that reality is not as it is, the result will be that you will become insane.

Some people affirm that there is no need to control emotions. This is not the best approach to well-living because, if you exert no control over your emotions, your self-esteem will suffer. Self-esteem is the opinion you have of your capabilities, and it is mainly based on the history of your achievements(or what you consider achievements), or on the lack of them.

Any valuable achievement needs a continuous effort over time to be done. If you are at the mercy of emotions, you cannot deliver that continuous effort. You will work when you are happy and will fail to do so when you are sad. While this may be seen as very romantic, it is not the most efficient way to have important things done.

Self-esteem is also based on the perception you have of how you control your life. If emotions (and not yourself) decide what you should do, it is unlikely that you will feel that you are controlling your life.

Finally, there are people that say that it is harmful to control emotions. This conception is endorsed by a psychological school that argues that a mechanism called repression is the cause of many neuroses (mental disorders).Although therapies have been experimented in which patients were encouraged to manifest their repressed emotions, it has not been shown that this purification of emotions had lasting effects and, indeed, it may have contributed to increase the patients’ troubles.