“We both know what memories can bring 
They bring diamonds and rust.”

Diamonds and Rust – Joan Baez

Emotions

Renowned psychologists like Dr. Paul Ekman or Dan Casriel state a different number of core / basic emotions. These are:

When you are reading through this list of emotions would you describe them as a positive/ pleasant emotion (as a „diamond“ so to say) or would you say there are some really unpleasant emotions amongst them (some „rust“).

Although all of them are important and evolutionary necessary. If we would not feel fear we might not run away when in a dangerous situation. And if we would not feel disgust we might just eat that rotten food and get some severe poisoning. 

Here is a fact about our society. We are not really tolerating all of those emotions are we? If a child is angry and upset, so it cries and it screams we say that it is okay, as it is a child and it has not yet learned how to channel its emotions. But just imagine a grown up person behaving like this. Being angry on someone and just starting to scream… Or if an adult would just cry out of sadness. Tears running down the face, the whole facial expression filled with pain. I guess it would not only make us feel very uncomfortable in this persons presence, we would soon come back to expressions like „get yourself together.“ or „oh come on, stop behaving like a child.“

But why do we even have to learn to channel our emotions? When we are born with all of them? I have no answer to this. But i think this leads to us lying to ourselves and people around us maybe more often than we should. I wrote a bit about that in my posts The importance of being earnest or about being true to yourself and Highs and lows and lies.

I confess to you – i am currently experiencing a very specific emotion.  One of those unpleasant emotions, that i know to be important, yet  i never really learned how to deal with such emotions. You know what i do when i experience one of those? I just take it and put it into a nice little bottle or a nice little box. And whenever one of those emotions is coming to the surface again I just put the cork in a little bit stronger or I push the box down into my own archive of negative emotions. 

There is a scene in a book, two friends are walking down a staircase into a dark room. When they switch on the light they are first brightened by the light but when they find their sight again they discover a room filled with storage shelves and on those storage shelves there are boxes and bottles. Paper boxes, cardboard boxes, metal boxes, some are wrapped with an iron chain, padlocked. There are small bottles, big bottles. Dusty ones, some made of glass, some made of plastic. Some intricately woven, some just plain. 

They soon realize that these boxes and bottles contain nothing but memories and suppressed emotions. When they browse through the shelves one of the friends incidentally knocks one of the bottles over. It falls on the floor, breaks. Black smoke emerges from it, enclosing both persons. They can hardly breathe anymore. 

Well i won’t tell you how this scene ends, but i like it a lot as for me it is a perfect example of what happens when you just bottle up your emotions instead of dealing with them.

And i warn you – this is my strategy but it is not really one i would recommend. As when you open of those bottles it might lead to more and more of them breaking and leaving you in the smoke, with more emotions do deal with than you could have ever anticipated. 

So today i would like you to tell me about yourself. How do you deal with unpleasant emotions? Leave your own personal strategy in the comments or send me a message.

Hope you enjoyed

A.

Image taken at Steampunk Museum Transylvania https://steampunk.ro/ by yours truly, image edited with Lensa AI https://prisma-ai.com/lensa.

Read more about Dr. Paul Ekman at https://www.paulekman.com/about/paul-ekman/ and Dan Casriel at https://danielcasriel.com/about-daniel-casriel/.