Is eating cake good or bad? Well, depending on your dietary intolerances, it can be either or neither. It’s really a silly question. Rather, it’s more helpful thinking of it as healthy or unhealthy. Is it healthy to have a piece of cake as a celebration of your birthday, sure! Is it healthy to have cake every night, probably not so much. It’s nuanced.
Personally, I like to approach emotions in the same way. Rather than trying to place emotions in the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category, we can recognise they’re all on offer, but we need to realise the impact in our lives. For example, anger could be healthy when it’s brought about because I see someone being abused, happiness could be unhealthy, when I take joy in someone else’s suffering.
Remember back to our first thought on this topic, ‘Why do we have emotions?’ because they move us. So, rather than assessing the emotion itself, the question can be, what is this emotion moving us to do? Is it helpful or unhelpful, healthy, or unhealthy?
I find a car provides a great analogy for this. The warning lights on my dash tell me when I’m about to run out of petrol or when the oil needs changing. The warning lights encourage me to check under the hood. The GPS on the other hand tells me where to go. It directs me to my destination based. This is a great way of recategorizing emotions. Our emotions can be warning lights, or they can be part of the GPS system. They can be telling us to check under the hood, not everything’s alright here, or they can be encouraging us to more in a certain direction.
When we misunderstand our own internal cues is often when things start to get further away from a healthy expression of our emotions. Let’s explore this with the feeling of frustration, something some people often would consider a ‘bad’ emotion.
Frustration at Home
I can arrive home at the end of the day frustrated. I can treat it like it’s a part of my GPS and use it to rage clean the house or yell at the kids. Conversely, I can treat it as though it’s a warning light and use it examine my internal operations and whether somethings wrong under the hood. Perhaps my frustration is like my gas gauge warning me I don’t have enough rest left in the tank. My long hours are suggesting I need some down time with friends.
Frustration with Friends
Perhaps I might be frustrated with a friendship. I could view that as a warning light internalising that frustration, taking on the responsibility for the friendship and avoid discussion and conflict. Which is a great way to grow resentment. Or, I could view that frustration as coming from my GPS system, compelling me to move towards my friend. In this instance the frustration compels me beyond the awkwardness of a conflict, perhaps to simply talk with them.
Frustration with the world
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and his son went and cleaned up rubbish on a beach with a group of people. When they finished on the beach sooner than they expected my friend went and collected another 7 bags of rubbish from a nearby car park. His frustration at the state of the environment caused him to be moved. He treated that emotion not as a warning light, but as part of his GPS.
Notice how the same emotion can be considered through many different scenarios, and the impact assessed not by the emotion that’s felt, but, with self-awareness, by the impact that emotion has on us?
The same could be done with happiness. I feel happy when I’m with my friends, so when I correctly discern that as part of my GPS I will want to do more of it. If I feel happy when I see someone else suffering, that should be a warning light and a healthy response would be to start to understand what about me makes me want to see this person suffer?
Emotions are complicated. We miss out on learning from them when we simply put them in the category of good or bad. If we struggle to even communicate our emotions sometimes, then maybe we should afford them the luxury of being as complicated as they feel. They warrant our time and energy, and in return they generously provide us with rich experiences and deep personal and interpersonal insights.
I’m no counsellor, but I do recognise that wrestling with emotions is both challenging and worthwhile. I encourage people, as I have, to discuss your emotions with others. Sometimes the best way of discerning whether an emotion is having a healthy or unhealthy impact is to simply allow someone less emotionally involved to give you their perspective. Find a friend, a loved one, a counsellor, someone you feel safe with and give them the opportunity to help you work your feelings through. Life will be richer for it.