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We are living and parenting in the era of emotional attunement and emotional processing which is often helpful but not always.

It can be very confusing as there’s so many articles and advice about listening to your feelings but there’s also many articles and advice about not following your feelings.

Let’s try to make sense of this…

When to NOT listen to our emotions?

There are many instances where it is best to use our VALUES to guide our behaviour and our actions

NOT our feelings.  Often, we put too much weight on our feelings.

Here are some examples:

When we feel anxiety it is because we perceive a threat, not that we are actually facing a true emergency.

With the feelings of worry and anxiety, we need to check-in with ourselves and ask “Is this a true emergency or a false alarm?”  When we realize that it’s a false alarm and we’re not actually being threatened, we need to do the opposite of fight/flight/freeze and take steps to move towards the situation.  (As described on p.22 of my children’s book, Surfing the Worry Imp’s Wave)

Instead of worry or anxiety, we can focus on the VALUES of Courage, Adventure and/or Fun to guide our actions.

When we feel hurt because of the way that someone has treated us, we need to remember that “Hurt people hurt people“.  This is most likely more about them than about ourselves, and so we need to notice our feelings of hurt and let them go.

Instead of hurt, we can focus on the VALUES of Empathy, Self-Respect and/or Forgiveness to guide our actions.

When we feel depressed, we want to stay in bed all day and withdraw from the world, but if we let these depressed feelings guide us to do this each day, we would feel worse and worse.  In my article, How to Move Up From Feeling Depressed, I discuss behaviour activation to help ourselves feel better with actions versus following our feelings.

Instead of feeling depressed, we can focus on the VALUES of Resilience, Optimism, and/or Openness to guide our actions.

When we feel shut-down, closed and resentful in relationships because of erosion in a spousal or parent-child relationship (Gottman’s four horsemen – contempt, criticism, defensiveness, stone-walling), we need to use our values to help us get unstuck.

Instead of closing our heart, we can focus on the VALUES of Communication, Honesty, Growth and/or Social Connection to speak our truth and use conflict resolution skills or when a relationship has ended, grow into a new relationship where common values are shared.

When we feel “not good enough”, due to social media comparison, society comparison or a legitimate struggle achieving a goal, we need to recognize that we’re feeling this way but use the value of Logic to fact-check and guide our actions.

We can also use positive self-talk to give ourselves encouragement and Self-Compassion.

For a new skill, we can remember that we can’t do it YET but like strengthening a muscle we can get there with practice and consistency.

Instead of being down on ourselves, we can focus on the VALUES of Logic, Self-Compassion and/or Self-Discipline.

Donna Ashworth, my favourite, highly-sensitive, Scottish poet and author of many books of poems on Life, Love and Loss wrote the beautiful poem, You Are Youier, in the image above.  (I purchased the PDF of it from her website for $3.50 so I can print it and share it with my clients.  All proceeds from this poem go to charity.)

I love how she uses incorrect English to emphasize her point of what folly it is to be comparing ourselves to others.  All it does it make us feel bad.  Why do we add “er” to everything to compare? Nature doesn’t so why do we?

Instead of feeling bad, we can stop comparing and appreciate our own individuality, our strengths and our struggles, by focussing our actions on the VALUES of Self-Awareness and Humility.

When Do We Want to Listen to Our Emotions?

When our emotions are in line with our values.

For example, we feel very sad when we lose someone we love because we valued their love in our lives.

We feel suspicious when our intuition is sensing that something is off because our value of integrity is speaking to us.

We feel disappointed when a friend lets us down because it doesn’t reflect the value of loyalty.

We feel excited when we try a new opportunity because it’s in line with our values of fun and adventure.

In my children’s Self-Empowerment groups, I will now be adding this topic of identifying our values to help guide our actions.

Last week I wrote about How to Identify Our Core Values, as this is such an important concept.

As Roy T. Bennett, author of The Light in the Heart, wrote:

“Your core values act like your internal compass which navigates the course of your life.  If you compromise your core values, you go nowhere.”

Warmly,

 

 

P.S. For more information about my next round of children’s Self-Empowerment groups for children ages 7-9yrs. and 10-12yrs. (in-person and online groups), please visit here.