Accepting negative emotions is a sign of emotional well-being.
Yes. Although I've written about this before, I'll say it again: Recognizing and expressing—to the best of our ability—our emotions is fundamental to our well-being.
Happiness is usually easy to recognize, and since it's socially celebrated, it's also usually easy to express. So, let's leave that aside for now. Today I'd like to talk specifically about another type of emotion: sadness, fear and anger.
Absolutely everyone has experienced these emotions. It's only natural. So, Why can it be so difficult to recognize and admit that we feel them?
First, because feeling sadness, fear, or anger (or all of the above) puts us in a position of vulnerability, and admitting that we are vulnerable beings can be a difficult task. It confronts us with dark parts of our own minds and makes us uncomfortable. This discomfort isn't just mental; it also leads us to feel physically ill. However, experiencing so-called negative emotions is completely valid.
Recognizing that we are angry or sad can lead us to take action and change our situation more easily than trying to deny what we feel. The denial of emotions leads to resentment, anxiety, physical discomfort and a long etcetera.
All emotions are a source of information and can help us understand ourselves better.
Give them the right attention It's like calibrating our inner compass. Feeling sadness, fear, and/or anger is necessary. Recognizing and expressing it is also necessary. Which, of course, It doesn't mean that we have to stagnate in our negative emotions. nor use them to play the role of the victim.
Quite the opposite: accepting these emotions will allow us to take ownership of them and use them to our advantage.
There is a book I really want to read, precisely because I liked its title so much: “The creative management of anger”, by Jaime Izquierdo Vallina. Below I quote a portion of his description:
Many of the great geniuses who had revolutionary ideas or made momentous discoveries were, at first, and before going down in history for their contributions, angry individuals who had to fight against the established order. Their advances would not have been possible without, first, having gotten angry and, second, having controlled that angry energy, taming it, purifying it, and using it as fuel to prove the correctness of their postulates.
And I think that's the key. If we know how to use the energy of those emotions either to create something or to know each other better, we will enter the field of emotional well-being.
Emotional well-being doesn't mean, as it may sometimes seem, having a life without obstacles. Nor does it mean being an uncontrolled optimist. Rather, it means giving ourselves the space to experience what we feel with self-knowledge and sincerity.
Learning to identify and express our emotions, including negative ones, will promote our physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
