What Do You Mean, There's a Good Way to Feel Bad?
Think you can't change your emotions? Think again.
Hi and welcome to ‘Something More’. I’m Caroline Ferguson, psychotherapist, mindset trainer and speaker. If you’re new here, we explore mindset, self-leadership and a life that matters, along with the odd story and moment of ridiculousness. Thank you for reading this free post. If you choose to upgrade, you can join our monthly, live group-coaching sessions and receive extra mindset tools in your inbox.
Many of you will know that I’m currently nomadic.
As part of my adventures among the wilder corners of the British Isles, I look after people’s houses and pets while they’re away. I’ve just finished a two-month stint in a 16th Century farmhouse on the edge of the Dartmoor National Park, a rugged area of deep-green valleys, high moors and towering granite tors in the south-west of England.
Falling in love with the critters is a hazard of pet-sitting. I fell hard for Millie, a beguilingly scruffy Border Terrier with penchants for cheese, tummy rubs and tennis balls. At the grand old age of twelve, she’ll still happily chase a ball for hours and is especially pleased with herself when she manages to cram two in her mouth at once. We were inseparable for nine weeks and I madly miss her funny groans and her sweet, hairy face.
Animals definitely have emotions
Many of the pets I look after display anxiety, especially in the first few days after being abandoned by their humans and left in the company of this strange new person. Within a few days, though, they discover there’s love, play, and crunchy carrot chunks on tap and they start to relax.
Millie proved to be a marvellously chilled out girl, apart from when it was time for 1️⃣, her mid-morning chew stick, and 2️⃣, her dinner. I set 11:00am and 5:00pm daily alarms on my watch to make sure I delivered on time but I really didn’t need them as Millie’s inner clock was spookily accurate.
As food time approached, she’d grow increasingly restless until, a couple of minutes before alarm time, her frustration would ramp up almost to meltdown point, despite cast-iron evidence that food always arrived and she hadn’t yet starved to death. I could almost hear her shouting, “YOU HAVE TO FEED ME RIGHT THIS SECOND OTHERWISE IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AND I CAN’T BEAR IT!” **
Watching Millie wind herself up was a good reminder that we humans do this to ourselves too.
One of the most valuable things I learned when I was training in Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) is how to read mine and my clients’ negative emotions. Negative is a word loaded with inbuilt judgement so I tend to use ‘uncomfortable’ in this context.
REBT suggests that there are two types of uncomfortable emotions:
UNHELPFUL – keeping us stuck in loops of reactive thinking and feeling.
It’s hard to shake off these emotions and the thoughts that go with them. Our feelings sabotage us and make it difficult to act in a rational, productive way.HELPFUL – proportionate response to a challenging situation.
These emotions tend not to leave us feeling stuck. We’re able to process our feelings in a healthy way and take constructive action.
Note that we’re not talking about scale or intensity of emotions here; helpful feelings can be just as intense as unhelpful ones. It’s the DRIVERS of those emotions and the IMPACT they create make them helpful or unhelpful.
We’re not just talking about reducing the badness of the feeling.
Some might think that if you score 80 percent on the anger scale, it would be a good thing if you can shift down to 30 or 40 percent. We don’t take this approach in REBT, on the basis that an unhelpful emotion is still unhelpful. Whether you’re at 80 percent or 40 percent, you’re still stuck.
Instead, we work on transforming the actual emotion to one that is proportionate and appropriate to the situation. Instead of keeping you stuck, this more helpful emotion will allow you to process what you’re feeling and move on.
I’ll talk about how we do that in a minute. First let’s take a look at what these emotions are.
REBT recognises eight UNHELPFUL emotions and their HELPFUL twins
Everything challenging we feel, no matter what we call it, tracks back to one of these eight emotions:
Let’s look at an example
Let’s say someone asks for your help and you spend hours working on a solution for them. When you deliver, they say, “Oh, thanks but I decided to go in a different direction.”
Grrr…
It’s natural to feel irritated that they’ve wasted your time and didn’t have the courtesy to let you know they no longer needed your help. They’ve gone against your values of good manners and consideration so it’s understandable you feel annoyed. You may also have the uncomfortable emotion of hurt laced in with your anger.
How you really feel, and how you respond, depends on the story you’re telling yourself about them and the situation. You might, for example:
Say nothing (even though they may have behaved like this before), but hold on to resentment and behave in a passive aggressive way.
Speak sharply to them and keep harping back to the event, while making a universal judgement that they’re not good enough (and question your own worth since they thought so little of you).
Pause to acknowledge how you feel, explain calmly that it would have been helpful if they’d let you know, then clear the air and establish some ground-rules for the future.
With 1 and 2, the anger is front and centre and you’re stuck in the feeling that you’ve been wronged. With the third response, you’re still feeling (justifiably) annoyed, but you’re able to express yourself clearly and take a more constructive approach. You don’t lose control of yourself, nor get waylaid by anger.
What determines whether an emotion is helpful or unhelpful?
That is the golden question. To answer it, we need to reflect on what causes us to feel anything at all.
People often say things like, “You made me angry”, or “Why are you making me jealous?”, or “They made me feel guilty”. Until we learn differently, we associate our feelings with the situation we’re responding to, i.e. event A causes us to feel emotion B.
It’s true that circumstances do have an impact on us – when bad stuff happens, it’s natural and appropriate for us to feel bad. But the cause of the deeper, more lasting, more consequential impact is often not the situation itself, but our story about it. As we build self-awareness, we learn to acknowledge and take responsibility for the fact that the way we think shapes the way we feel.
Pragmatic emotions are an automatic and effortless consequence of pragmatic thinking – and that’s a beautiful thing.
I know I keep posting this quote from Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, but it really does sum it up: “We are disturbed not so much by events as by our beliefs about them”.
FACT: We can’t change our feelings by trying to change our feelings.
Many people advise us to use affirmations and meditation to change our emotions. If this works for you, then go for it, but I have doubts about the effectiveness of these methods. As my paying subscribers who read this recent post will know, I believe the only way to sort out a perpetually wet floor is not by constantly mopping the floor, but by fixing the leak in the radiator that’s causing the puddle.
Emotions are not independent entities: they’re consequences of several things:
the situations out of which they arise,
our past experiences,
how we feel about ourselves and others,
and, most importantly, the stories we tell ourselves about those situations.
Sure, we can try to influence events, but the best way to exchange an unhelpful emotion for one that’s more constructive is to recognise, challenge and change the story that led to the emotion. Our beliefs are the leaky radiator: they’re what we need to fix (though first we need to be able to hear them, which is why I call self-awareness the number one life skill we can learn).
Semantics warning: Let’s not kid ourselves. We can label anxiety as concern all we like, but if our underlying story remains the same, what we’ll be feeling is anxiety in concerned clothing. To fix the stuck emotion of anxiety, we need to rewrite the beliefs that are pinning it in place.
Suppose we can’t describe exactly what we’re feeling?
Sometimes we have an awareness that we feel ‘bad’ but we can’t pinpoint exactly what emotion we’re feeling. In these cases looking at the underlying theme (middle column in the ‘Uncomfortable Emotion Pairs’ graphic above) can give us clues about what’s going on for us, and our likely stories about the situation. We all have our own PACES triggers and spotting these patterns can help us grow our self-awareness.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve fond it thought-provoking, please do a quick restack or share so that others can see it too. I’d also love to hear about your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
If you’d like help with changing your beliefs and reshaping your emotions, we do this work in our monthly group-coaching sessions. You can upgrade your membership whenever you like using the button at the top – try it for a month for £12 or go straight for the great-value £80 annual subscription.
Take care and see you next time,
** We didn’t have the same level of drama at breakfast as Millie enjoys a lie-in and demands a glorious cuddle session before starting her day.
And that’s a sweet puppy!
The chart is quite useful. It’s a way of reframing what’s going on.