How safe are we from our own emotions?

Which are the socially admissible limits in between we are allowed to display emotion?
How dangerous are emotions in today’s world?
Are we even equipped to deal with emotions anymore? Can we understand their role in today’s society? Do we even respond to nuances or just to the big 5, fear, excitement, hate, anger and disgust. De we even recognize joy, surprise, shame, guilt, attachment?

Emotions are our learning tools, we experience to world through emotion, we seek what felt good and we avoid what didn’t. Pretty basic, wouldn’t you say so? I believe that we are becoming numb to the emotions, recognizing only the ones that bring us the biggest thrill. We ignore so much from the input we receive through emotion. We are taking in all the senses that we then explore and evaluate with our thoughts and we call them  emotions.
We are also filtering so much nowadays, some may say due to the abundance of the stimuli that bombard our senses, some may say due to a certain lack of emotional maturity that enables us to deal with emotions in a healthy and constructive manner.

I have noticed that the level of control over the expression of our basic emotions, tends to become more loose as we are in groups, with friends and family. Naturally would you say, there is a sense of familiarity and nonjudgmental environment that encourages our self-expression. Well, yes… and no. The fact that we let more unfiltered emotions out into the world, does not mean that we understand them, not that we are learning anything from this experience. It just means that we have reached a level of comfort that enables us to drop the barriers that regulates the permeability of our self-expression.

You see, I believe that we are heading towards a complete emotional meltdown, and we are experiencing more of the extremes of ourselves, from various reasons that I shall probably debate at a later time… perhaps in a book that is still to be written.

Now, what I would like to accentuate is the fact that if we do not come to accept , understand and use our emotions as the learning and expansion tools that have been gifted to us, then we risk to become completely disconnected from ourselves as well as everything else. Normally this would not be such a bad thing, a perfectly rational and logical entity… or not really?

You see, to take this even further, if we render our emotions as totally hectic and unreliable, then we would appeal more and more to our reasoning, believing that it might take us further in our lives. I am sure it will, until it will soon pendulate between impossible choices, as it has no other inner compass, no core values, no beliefs, nor a true sense of self (besides the little trickster Ego). We would be incomplete, and thus not enough to discern between good or bad, except from what we had learned from exterior experience, that might not always be the best way to learn.

We assign meaning to our own existence using the perfect trio: Mind – Body – Heart.

Any imbalance here would produce drastic and chaotic results. The Body – Mind duo we all know, but the Heart is the divergent in the story that has the potential to rise us above all that we have dared to dream. Also, it has the potential to crush us under the weight of our own thoughts and experiences.

Emotions are a good thing, if we know how to absorb and respond to them.

Emotions come to us as a response triggered by our mind, by our thoughts. We cannot always control the thoughts that pop up into our heads, but most certainly we can control how we choose to respond.

Some people, I have most recently found out, they are so deeply disconnected and so far away from controlling their emotions, that they are simply reacting to thoughts – emotions as they come, they take little to no time to critically analyze the thoughts and the feelings that are being generated by the external world.

I find it sometime frustrating to communicate or become the receiving end of such an emotional outburst, that turns into judgement and frustration. We are all juggling between our mind and our feelings, sometimes we make ourselves proud of how we have dealt with a certain situation, and sometimes we can agree that we could have handled it better. The ratio I find it always changing, depending on so many factors, that are all in the end leading to one main cause: our sense of self-worth. This comes together with our level of responsibility and awareness, over our own thoughts and feelings.

Some days are better than others, sometimes the Sun shines up high, along side with our mood of the day, and sometimes… there is wind and rain and gloom… right there at the bottom of our own misery.
This fluctuation is most of the times associated with a person that is living a life led by his or her feelings. Living in the moment as they say, but with a twist. Taking things as they come, letting them go, don’t get too attached on people or relationships, what is meant to be will be… surely you recognize this mindset. It is all good and warm and fuzzy, but in my humble opinion, this is not a sustainable and healthy way of living life.

Why?, I hear you ask?

We are who are at our core, as we build our life on the decisions that validate our beliefs system. This has at its center our core value system. The values that we most identify with, will steer our life.

Relying mostly on our feelings, will bring good and also bad on the surface. There are good trades, such as compassion, empathy, openness, carrying, but there are also less good trades to take into consideration: inconsistency, unreliability, erratic behavior, anxiety, emotionality, and perhaps another bunch of them that are not that important to name right now, as name calling is not what I am looking for. I am looking to make a distinction between 2 major categories of people, and to see how their interactions might better work out if they were to be aware of these distinctions, and accept the differences that brings us all together in the end…