Why You Are Not Your Emotions
Emotions are like costumes. What if you could wear them only when you need them?
Antonieta Contreras, LCSW-R, CCTP-II, BCN
Many of us may not be aware of what emotions are. Depending on where you were born, you may not have the vocabulary to describe them because you never talked about them, so you didn’t need the names for them. If you practice a religion, you may not have been given permission to acknowledge or manifest them, and you may find many of them labeled as sinful; some branches of Buddhism, for instance, use the term “delusion” to refer to basically all of them and assume that having them is “ignorance.” Hence, it’s not surprising that so many of us fail at managing them. It is more likely that we either learned to repress them or that we have learned that manifesting them intensely gets us some attention or some comfort.
“Emotion,” like the concept of “mind,” is something that even if we don’t know what it is, we all know we have. Experiencing emotions is part of feeling alive; they are such an important part of our communication that Emojis have become as important as the alphabet.
Still, finding one definition of “emotion” is impossible. There is no one accepted theory that could explain what emotions are and how they operate.
