A Practical Guide to Mastering Emotions

Emotions like anger and hate can be frightening because they can get out of control & master us. But the good news is we can master them instead — by understanding them. Understanding where they originate from, knowing they are valid, and understanding the wisdom they communicate is the key. 

When we understand painful emotions, we master them. 

Understanding is the opposite of judging. Judging emotions keeps them trapped inside us, haunting us, hurting us and others. If I choose to believe I’m a bad person for feeling bitterness toward my mom, the bitterness doesn’t go away, but stagnates within me, seeping out at people closest to me, triggering me whenever someone remotely echoes my mom. This is how bitterness masters me. 

But when I lose the judgment and seek to understand why I feel bitter toward her, I realize I’m not bad. I realize she hurt me and has never apologized and changed, and my bitterness is valid. I understand the bitterness is just a feeling – not a reflection of me, but a reflection of her. I see how it is designed to give me wisdom, to say “this person is unsafe.”

How to Self-attune

Many of my clients ask how they can learn to self-attune, and I want to discuss what this looks like practically. 

First, I want to point out how tragic it is that we need to be taught how to listen to ourselves. We live in a world where we are taught from birth to disregard our emotions and bodily sensations, trusting authority figures instead. This is what we experience from parents, medical professionals, the school system, and the workforce. It’s like the blind leading the blind, no one realizing the answers are within, no one listening to their gut. 

My goal as a therapist is not to be one more expert, but to lead clients back to themselves, as the expert on themselves. This is a completely new paradigm, even for many therapists. 

The solution starts with our disposition toward ourselves, in which we stop gaslighting ourselves, but know we’re inherently good. We see our body and emotions not as obstacles that sabotage us, but vehicles that deliver wisdom. 

When we feel anxious, depressed, or engage in unwanted behavior, instead of believing we are problematic, we view these as symptoms of something that is problematic, seeking to understand. 

For example, if instead of beating myself up for drinking too much, I seek to understand why I felt compelled to numb myself. Maybe I felt resentment at someone I was with. Then I validate that resentment, giving it permission to exist, vs. have to dissociate from it through alcohol. I then ask the resentment what it needs. Does it need assertive speech or a boundary with this person? Then I commit to meeting that need. 

For most of my life I judged my unwanted behavior of being flirtatious. I wasn’t obviously flirty, but I could feel inwardly how I wanted to make good looking men like me. One day I decided to stop judging but to understand what fueled this compulsion. I realized it wasn’t that I ever liked the man, but wanted him to like me. It dawned on me that I was trying to win the approval of my father through these men. My epiphany was the solution, because after that I no longer felt any temptation to flirt. 

If I feel anxious, I remember that anxiety stems from dissociated anger. I give myself permission to be angry, and seek to understand why I feel this way. I allow myself to feel it in my body, and maybe it shows up in my throat. This tells me there’s something my throat needs to say, so I seek to understand. Does it need to hold someone accountable? I validate the anger, then I commit to meet the need. 

When we experience somatic pain, such as a headache or gut illness, instead of viewing it as something to escape from, we seek to understand what our body is attempting to communicate. The more we understand, the less our body has to be dramatic in order to get our attention, but can relax and trust us. 

Maybe my gut feels afraid of something I’m about to do, and it’s causing me pain. Instead of taking pain meds, I seek to understand the fear, meeting the underlying need. Does my gut need me to say no to an activity? Does it need reassurance from me that I won’t betray myself? Is it alerting me to someone untrustworthy? 

The gut is where we feel shame, disgust, betrayal (including self-betrayal), distrust and fear. Fear is never an isolated emotion, but is fear of shame or anger – oftentimes our own anger. 

Many therapists know that trauma survivors can have a lot of fear, but I’ve found what they fear most is their own anger. They weren’t able to express their anger at the time of the trauma, and it’s still stagnant w/in their body. The good news is they don’t need to address the perpetrator, they simply need to channel the anger into words in fantasy and express it out of their body. This can be done anytime, in writing or spoken words. 

The more we dissociate from anger and disgust (hate), the more these feelings take on a life of their own, becoming a shadow that haunts us. 

When we stop viewing our feelings as bad, but trust them to give us wisdom, and therefore master them, they no longer lurk in the shadows, casting frightening images. This is how we integrate. 

It’s all a matter of perspective, one in which we recognize that we matter – and this includes all parts of us, including our emotions. 

What if human behavior actually makes sense? What if we are wired to be more intelligent than we ever knew? What if the key to maturity and freedom is simply self-understanding and self-kindness? And what if the end result allows us to better understand and love our neighbor? 

When we learn to trust our emotions moment to moment, we learn to express anger in kind, respectful ways, vs. suppressing it until it eventually explodes. We learn to be a person of integrity, b/c there’s no guessing what we really feel. We say things like, “no thank you,” or “I’m starting to feel resentful,” or “that’s not OK.” 

Self-attunement promotes self-attachment, where we become our own trustworthy attachment figure. It promotes maturity, confidence and peace. Self-attunement allows us – and those around us – to blossom. And how desperately the world needs our beauty.