How to Overcome Unexpected Emotions

Process for Dealing with Unexpected Emotions

Acknowledge the Emotion

Ignoring it won’t help. This doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can be as simple as: “I am angry.” Or “I am sad.” By giving it a label, the emotion will feel heard.

Let Yourself Feel the Emotion

When we experience difficult emotions, it can be easy to want to push it away and not sit with it. Feeling difficult emotions is uncomfortable and can bring in even more emotions.  Sending us down a toxic emotion spiral.

But the problem with not feeling the emotion is it can cause the emotion to turn into a repressed emotion. And repressed emotions can turn into health problems.  Creating an entirely different set of problems down the road.

By taking five minutes to feel the emotion, you avoid future pain.

How to Feel the Emotion

Start by identifying where it is in your body. Once you have found that simply pay attention to that area. Watch to see if it moves around or just stays in one space. While doing this focus on deep breathing to help keep you grounded.

You don’t need to analyze the emotion or do anything other than feel it. If it is difficult to do this, you can also use descriptive words to help you pay attention to it.

For example, if you are angry and you feel it in your shoulders you could narrate it as:

“The feeling is tight on my shoulders. It makes me feel like I am squeezing a ball. This flows up to my jawline too. Like when it is cold outside, and I am clenching. It seems to be getting calmer and now is back down to just one spot on my back.”

Over a few minutes you should start to feel the emotion calm and start to relax. You even may find yourself feeling a sense of peace. This is an indicator that your emotion feels heard and has moved onto being able to be logically handled.

If it isn’t calming down, you may need to move to physical activity to move the energy of the emotion. Take a walk or even just run in place.

What if I Can’t Calm Down?

If this emotion is so intense that you end up ruminating on it and feeling it is doing nothing then you may be experiencing an Amygdala take over.  The Amygdala is the part of your brain that manages fear and takes care of managing our flight or fight response. When it is active it stops the rational part of our brain from working.

To move past the fight or flight here are some things that will help:

• EFT Tapping – helps reduce the brains emotional processing and calm you down.
• Deep breathing with the exhale being longer than the inhale. This will shift you from the sympathetic nervous system and into the parasympathetic system. Which is what calms you after stress or danger. (For more on the nervous systems.)
• Call a friend or counselor – they can help you walk through the situation and see things differently.

I recommend that you create a protocol to help you in the moment to go through the tools that work for you to calm down. This can take some experimenting with different tools to see what works for you. But once you have that set, anytime you are overwhelmed emotionally and feel yourself spiraling out of control, you can quickly start your calm down protocol.

Understand the Emotion

Now it is time to begin to understand why you had that feeling.  The best way to do this is through journaling. Here are some journal prompts to help you:

• Why was I [Fill in emotion]? Be as descriptive as possible. This will help you identify areas that may need more attention.
• Was the situation I was in triggering any fears or old traumas?
• Do I have a need that isn’t being filled that is causing this emotion?
• What can I control in this situation?
  • How do I release what I don’t control?

Learn more about how to Journal

Re-focus on Solutions

Once you have a better understanding of what is going on it is time to switch to problem solving. Ask yourself this question:

How can I solve [what you identified as the problem triggering the emotion]?

Continue Emotional Healing Work

This may have been a situation you can quickly move past. Or it could have been one that ended up having many layers. Don’t feel like you have to have a solution or even be over the feeling instantly.

Instead give yourself time to continue working through it. There is no rush on emotional healing. It’s better to be slow and do it right!

For more emotional healing tools check out this article.