It helps to get a quick read on how accepting you are of emotion. What follows is not a psychometrically sound test, but the questions and your reflective answers will help you begin to determine how open you are to experiencing emotion.
Do You Stay Open to Emotions?
I often think about my emotions.
It’s best to experience my emotions to the fullest.
I pay a lot of attention to my feelings.
I feel at ease about my emotions.
I stay aware of my feelings, even when they are painful or negative.
Some people can’t stand strong feelings. They overreact to them. One of the most significant scholars in the field of emotions research, Silvan Tomkins, described people’s “affect-about-affect,” or how we feel about our feelings. Some people may be scared of their own anger, and others may feel disappointed or guilty that they have expressed or felt angry. Similarly, we have feelings about other powerful emotions as well.
If emotions contain valuable information, then being closed to this information can be harmful. In order to stay open to emotion, we can apply a behavior therapy technique known as systematic desensitization to our emotion experience. Systematic desensitization consists of several steps:
- Determine which emotions give you the most trouble.
- Make a list of situations that result in the emotion.
- Order the situations from least to most emotionally intense.
- Learn to relax through, for example, progressive muscle relaxation exercises.
- Generate a calm and pleasant mood and relax.
- Picture the least intense emotional situation.
- As you find yourself tensing up, start to relax again and generate a calming mood.
Each time you are able to visualize the emotional scene and stay open to the emotion, you then move up the emotion-intensity ladder. Once you feel that you can remain open to the upsetting emotion, it’s time to try it out in the real world; add actual behavior elements to your list of imagined events.
Consider a person who is optimistic, upbeat, and always happy. It’s not a bad way to be, but what if this person—we’ll call him John—runs away from negative feelings and thoughts? Won’t John be missing valuable information?
John has determined that he does not feel comfortable with sadness. He then constructs an emotion hierarchy, listing events that may be mildly sad for him to events that evoke very strong feelings of sadness:
- He loses a poker hand.
- It rains on the weekend.
- He does not get a pay raise.
- A friend gets injured.
- A friend at work is fired.
- A relative dies.
John learns relaxation strategies and imagines the first scene. As he begins to close his feelings down and tries to push the sadness away, he remembers to relax and to stay open to the feeling of sadness or loss. It’s pretty easy for him to do that because the emotion is fairly mild. With that success behind him, he later moves up the emotion hierarchy and imagines the next scenario. He repeats the process until he is able to stay open to all of his feelings.
John, or anyone else for that matter, will become quickly overwhelmed by trying to open up to strong feelings without a plan or preparation. So if you start down the path to greater openness, we want you to do so intelligently, by using an approach like the one we’ve just outlined.
The key is—and we’ll say it again—that emotions are data. Closing yourself off to your emotions and those of others closes you off to an important source of information. It’s neither easy nor even advisable to move from being a rationality-embracing person to one who experiences the extremes of sorrow and joy. Making such a transition is just like learning to ride a bicycle: it helps to start by learning some of the basics—like how to change gears, for starters.