Visual guide: How do emotions shape our experiences?
What comes up for you when you think of emotions? Are you curious about them? Interested in learning more? In tune with them? Suspicious of them? All of that is valid. They’re a complex and fascinating subject.
Something I learned in graduate school while studying to become a therapist was that emotions are important, valuable, and central to our daily lived experience. For me, this challenged the conventional idea that emotions are irrational, unreliable, or untrustworthy (we can do a whole other post on why this narrative exists in the first place).
What I have come to realize is that we deny or avoid our emotional experience, we are missing out on a really big and beautiful part of being human. Now, there are folks (myself included) who have built up protective walls to shield themselves from painful emotion or distressing feelings—I recognize that the spectrum of emotional experience is not available all of the time for each of us, and I recognize why we would want to avoid the discomfort that feelings can bring.
Healing and growth is not all or nothing. Slowly and gently opening yourself up to how you feel is OK. This post offers one way into your inner world.
Emotions are the foundation of meaning
Some folks who are new to feeling into their emotions might like an intellectual way in. Using your thinking brain can feel safer than just feeling all your feelings at once. So, I made this visual guide for you to depict how emotions help us create meaning from our experiences. By becoming more knowledgeable about your feelings, they can start to feel a little less overwhelming, strange, or scary.
Final note
When it comes to relating to emotions in a new way, I advocate for curiosity as a starting point.
I love curiosity because it doesn’t require us to know everything, right this second (something I struggle with myself). It doesn’t require us to feel positively or to like our emotions. It only requires us to tune in, wonder why we feel the way we do, and allow ourselves to be a little bit in awe of how complex and wild the world is.
Curiosity doesn’t require us to know everything, right this second.
When we treat our emotions with curiosity, and combine that with some knowledge, we have a safer and more predictable way to start feeling our feelings—from joy to guilt to sadness to disappointment—I invite you to get curious and discover how your emotions shape your world.
