Emotions About Emotions
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: Fear of fear, fear of anger, fear of sadness…we can have all sorts of emotions about emotions. Essentially, one emotion can layer on top of another. In this article, I talk about:
- how teachers/parents can sometimes pass on their fear of certain emotions to kids
- how you can reduce the negative emotions you have about certain emotions
- the tool I use most often when working with kids and adults whose well-being is being compromised by big emotions about emotions.
STOP PASSING ON YOUR FEAR OF EMOTIONS TO KIDS
“Many children of emotionally phobic parents develop the fear that if they start crying, they’ll never stop, which arises because they were never allowed to find out that crying naturally stops on its own when allowed it’s full expression. Because they grew up with emotionally phobic parents who stepped in to squelch their distress, they never experienced the natural rhythm of a crying episode and how it winds down.“
DR LINDSEY GIBSON
When you are emotionally phobic, you have negative emotions about certain emotions. You can feel very stressed and overwhelmed just by witnessing someone experiencing big emotions that scare you. If you are a parent or teacher, it’s important to be aware of your emotions about emotions. Your fear of emotions can get in the way of building positive relationships with kids. It can also get in the way of your positive mental health.
We can learn to fear certain emotions from our family. However, we can also learn to fear certain emotions from our teachers. After all, we spend more time with our teachers than our parents, growing up. This is an important fact to remember. It’s not just our parents who influence our social and emotional education. If our teachers are emotionally phobic, they can pass on their fear of certain uncomfortable or unpleasant emotions to their students. I sometimes see this kind of negative emotional contagion when I’m working one to one with kids who are experiencing exam/test anxiety.
There are also cultural beliefs that can keep us stuck in unpleasant emotions. In Japan, anger is culturally condemned and shame is condoned. In the USA, shame is culturally condemned, and anger is condoned. These emotional habits are often held in place by limiting beliefs like ‘Anger is bad’ or ‘Shame is bad’.
On a surface level, judging certain emotions as ‘bad’ may be something you want to keep doing; you assume that you are less likely to be a ‘bad’ person if you try not to feel them. In reality, culturally condemning certain emotions just pushes them into the shadows of daily life. They are still there, under the surface. They are just suppressed and unacknowledged.
At its most extreme, emotionally phobic beliefs can lead to toxic positivity being condoned, and all unpleasant emotions being condemned. When you engage in toxic positivity, you condemn the expression of all negative emotions. Limiting beliefs used to rationalize one’s fear of negative emotions when engaging in toxic positivity include:
- “There are people who are starving/at war in the world, so I have no right to feel any negative emotions.”
- “I should be able to live a perfect/peaceful emotional life, and just be happy 24/7, 7 days a week – all year round!“
- “There are people who are in a far worse position than me, so I should always feel pleasant emotions (even when I don’t).”
Beliefs that keep fear of unpleasant emotions at bay may work…for a while. Eventually, if you want to enjoy authentic positive relationships, you need to be honest and acknowledge your fears. Including your fear of emotions. There’s only so far you can go in developing a meaningful relationship with other people if you have to keep shutting down their authentic emotions that you feel too uncomfortable to handle.
The first step to building your emotional resilience involves increasing your body awareness and emotional awareness.
REDUCING THE FEAR OF EMOTIONS: WHAT HELPS?
“Don’t just say ‘I’m stressed.’ Try to put your feelings into words…Otherwise, it makes you more stressed…If you are not aware and accepting of your own feelings, then you won’t connect with the feelings of people around you. You may even shut them down, because you don’t allow your own.“
ESTHER PEREL
Precisely naming the emotions you feel requires body awareness. Putting your feelings into words is a well-being skill that can be learned. Its benefits go beyond well-being. It allows you to have healthier relationships with good communication. But if you’re scared of emotions, you may not even get to first base; your fear of emotions will stop you from even being ready to engage.
Fear is a common emotion about an emotion that blocks social and emotional learning progress, irrespective of age. Some kids and adults I worked with had developed a big fear of unpleasant emotions such as fear, sadness, panic, or embarrassment. It’s hard to process your fears…if you fear feeling fear! It makes sense, right?
I’ve done EFT therapy sessions with kids and adults whose well-being was compromised by their:
- Fear of fear (‘If I allow myself to feel my fear, I don’t know if I will be able to handle it’)
- Fear of feeling sad (‘If I allow myself to cry, I’ll never be able to stop’)
- Fear of panicking (‘If I feel my panic, it will only get worse so I try not to think about it’)
- Fear of feeling embarrassed (‘If feel embarrassed, I’ll blush and people will know I’m embarrassed’)
Most of the time, we never ended up needing to tap on the emotion they were scared of; that wasn’t actually the problem! The problem was the emotion they had ABOUT a particular emotion. Releasing the fear of the fear can literally be all that’s needed for a student or adult to enjoy a growth spurt in their social and emotional learning journey.
Fear of panicking during a test or exam is a classic example of an emotion about an emotion. People who have experienced a really big panic attack during a test or exam know how scary – even terrifying – it can feel. Luckily, there are a wide range of mindfulness-based tools that can help reduce the fear and stop the panic attacks in tests/exams from re-occurring. One of these tools is the Emotional Freedom Technique, also known as EFT Tapping, or just ‘tapping’.
EFT TAPPING: NON-JUDGEMENTAL AWARENESS OF EMOTIONS
“A recent study by University of Toronto researcher Brett Ford and her colleagues found…youths who believed emotions were controllable…were less depressed 18 months later than those who didn’t. In addition, they didn’t try to suppress their feelings nearly as often as other young people – a good sign, as suppression has been tied to poorer emotional health…Other research has found that believing happiness is valuable can lead people to be less happy, as they struggle to meet their own high expectations and experience disappointment. On the other hand, mindfulness meditation – which trains people to be nonjudgemental of their experiences, including emotions – can lead to better psychological health.”
DR JILL SUTTIE
A more advanced way of using EFT tapping to support our well-being is to tap away any unpleasant emotions we may have about our emotions. When we are free to feel our unpleasant emotions (including the unpleasant emotions we have about our emotions), we can take better care of our emotional hygiene. We bring mindful, non-judgmental awareness into our daily self-care habits. Our self-care and psychological health improve.
EFT can help us reduce the intensity of these emotions, rather than let these unpleasant emotions compound and balloon into something bigger. Think about it logically. Fear of fear…means double the fear, right? So if you reduce your fear of fear…you live less of a fear-based life. And we know that you can’t feel love (pure love) and fear at the same time. Just as we know that you can’t feel curiosity and fear at the same time. When you reduce the intensity of your negative emotions about emotions, your well-being inevitably improves. As a result, your sociability also improves.
You may have been conditioned to believe that it’s scary, shameful, or “bad” to feel unpleasant emotions. On the surface, these beliefs about emotions can seem useful and pro-social. Surely being happy means never feeling unpleasant emotions! Yet it’s hard to thrive, emotionally and socially, when you are emotionally repressed.
Some of the more challenging types of emotions to work on are the shame/embarrassment categories of emotions. For example, you may be stuck in:
- Shame of having felt anger/snapping at someone
- Shame of having felt fear/panic
- Embarrassment of having felt embarrassed
- Embarrassment of having felt fear/panic
It’s difficult to work on these feelings on your own. Yet the very nature of these emotions can prevent people from even being able to talk about them with a therapist, so they can gain relief.
People can have a lot of resistance to working with someone on reducing the intensity of shame/embarrassment. I’ve found, both in my work with adults and kids, that online therapy has opened the door for people to process heavy emotions like shame and embarrassment more gently. The option to turn the camera off while we work on reducing the intensity of these emotions often helps.
RESOURCES
About the author
Eleni Vardaki works online to support parent, teacher, and student well-being. Her mission is to help bridge the gap between mainstream education and the wellbeing skills we need to thrive. She believes in doable, sustainable interventions for student wellbeing in school and family cultures that value student and community wellbeing.
