Coach as Instrument: 5 Common Myths About Emotions

This Week's Attunement

“An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what’s going on in the world around you.”

—Lisa Feldman Barrett

 

Most of us aren't directly educated about emotions. It's not a subject offered in most schools, and what we do learn is typically taught indirectly and usually in our family of origin. And there, we learn more about emotions by how they are reacted to than by what is said about them.

As a result, many popular misconceptions exist about emotions, what they are, what they mean, and their value. In this newsletter, I'll share five common myths about emotions and the truth of each one.

Note: Feel free to share this newsletter with your clients who are exploring their emotions and developing their emotional literacy.

Myth #1: Certain emotions are "bad" or "wrong."
Truth: Emotions are neither "good" nor "bad," neither "right' nor "wrong."

All emotions provide us with important information about how we are experiencing and interpreting our lives. While we experience some emotions as pleasant and some as distressing, there are no "good" or "bad" emotions. And there are no "right" or "wrong" emotions. All emotions are valid and valuable.

Myth #2: If we "feel" an emotion, we'll "act out" the emotion.
Truth: We can access and experience a feeling without expressing it.

Accessing an emotion and taking in the information it has for us is separate and distinct from expressing an emotion.

I'm reminded of Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl's quote, "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Events of this life will undoubtedly stimulate our emotions, and our autonomy, power, and self-agency lie in mindfully choosing a response. While emotions certainly carry an energy to them, we can feel an emotion, experience it fully and then choose if, when, how, how much, and to whom to express it.

Myth #3: Emotions are distracting, useless, and not helpful.
Truth: While our emotions may be distracting, they are necessary for our physical and psychological survival and well-being.

We need our emotions to provide us with the information necessary to take actions that keep us safe, to allow us to connect and communicate with others, to inform our decision making, and give our lives meaning. Emotions are essential to a healthy life.

We may be distressed by the sway the emotions have over us, especially if we can't regulate our emotional experience. However, relating to emotions as if they are useless and not helpful is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. The challenge is not the emotion, but our ability to regulate our experience of it.

Myth #4: Emotions can't be controlled.
Truth: There is a germ of truth in this myth. Some aspects of our emotional responses are involuntary, such as some of our physiological responses. That's true. What is also true is that we have choice around what we do with and how we express our behavioral responses.

Myth #5: Part a) If I feel something, it must be true. Part b) If I feel that I should do something, then it's the "right" thing to do.
Truth: Just because we feel something doesn't mean we are somehow "right" to feel it. And just because we feel we should do something doesn't mean it's something we'd be proud of.

A core component of every emotion is our interpretation of whatever generated it. And our interpretation is subjective and can be more influenced by our own state of mind, our past experiences, and how we learned to defend ourselves than the reality of whatever we experienced. So interrogating our interpretations is our first step in divining what actions we'd be proud of.

Well, that's it — five common myths about emotions and their accompanying truths. I hope this newsletter has provided you with some responses to clients who harbor some of these same misconceptions. I hope this supports your work with clients in understanding their emotions and what drives them.

Note: I'd like to thank Dan Newby for the idea for this newsletter. The concepts described are my own, and the idea regarding there being "myths" of emotions came from Dan. Thank you, Dan.