Can We Control Our Emotions?

When my child whines or throws a tantrum, it feels like an automatic response for me to get upset. I will often act in a very unhelpful way toward them. Many times, I end up yelling and then facing the guilt afterwards. This response almost never feels like something I can actually control in the moment. This sparked an interest in me to better understand emotional regulation and cognitive reframing is a valuable tool in the toolkit of an emotionally intelligent person.

Thinking vs Feeling

There is an age-old philosophical debate about reason and emotion, and which better serves us as humans. Which should guide us in this wild kaleidoscopic ride we call life? Well like most of these never-ending debates it almost always seems that the answer is “and” not “or.”

Reason and emotion are incredibly useful resources for living an integrated life. However, they have different purposes. Emotion gives us data that helps to motivate us by connecting us to our body and it’s interactions with the word. Thinking and reason allows us to analyze this data and decide how best to utilize it for our benefit. If we instead view emotions and reason as enemies, then we will not be able to effectively combine the two and problems will arise in our emotional responses. Cognitive reframing can be an effective tool to allow us to combine our reason and our emotion based on the strengths of both to greater serve us, rather than thinking one should fight the other. It’s always about moving toward more integration, more harmony, more unity.

Mind the Gap

So, what causes emotions? Where do they come from? Essentially, an emotional response arises when there is a gap between how we would like some aspect of reality to be, and the way it actually is. I don’t want my kids to throw tantrums, but they are in the middle of throwing one. This gap provides the space for an emotion to arise. Often people feel as if emotions happen solely because of something external to themselves that causes the emotion. For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, it’s easy to assume that the anger you feel is directly caused by the inconsiderate actions of that person, and it does often feel that way. However, the more we become aware of our inner world and are honest we realize that our emotions are actually a combination of the external events and our inner thought processes.

Variation in Emotional Response

Suppose someone is acting rude toward you. One response you could have would be to feel angry or upset. However, you could also feel empathy and compassion for the person. If the external event was the sole cause, you would not see this variation in possible emotional responses. What accounts for the difference, the cognitive framework of the individual and their thoughts about the event in that moment. Of course, the difficulty in recognizing this in practice is that often we are very identified with our thoughts alone and therefore are not conscious of them in the way we could be if we were centered in the seat of self, watching our thoughts and emotions rather than thinking we are them.

Cognitive Reframing

When we are having an emotional response, there are two main factors as we mentioned that are driving the type of emotion that we feel.

1) An image we have in our mind of how the situation is.

2) An image we have in our mind of how the situation ought to be.

The tension between these two are responsible for the emotional reaction we feel but the wonderful thing is that we can shift one of these two in nearly all cases such that the emotional response can be altered.

Reconstrual

When we shift the first aspect, the image of how the world appears in the moment this is referred to as reconstrual. This involves analyzing whether our image of how the world appears in that moment is accurate or if there is possibly something we are missing. For instance, in our prior example where a person is rude to you. Is that person really being rude to you specifically or are they maybe just in a generally bad mood? This could be the little shift in awareness that helps to make you have a different emotional response, one of compassion for that person that might seek you to try to do something to improve their mood or at least give them some grace.

Repurposing

In many cases shifting the external world is not really possible. Sometimes we do have an accurate picture of the external world and it just kind of sucks in that moment. Something happened, you lost someone you care about, you got betrayed by someone, etc. In these instances, there is another aspect we can shift and that is our image of our ideal goal or what we think ought to happen. In the simpler, example from before of a rude person, repurposing could be shifting from a thought of I want everyone to get along with me, to a more dynamic approach of thinking I want to show compassion to people regardless of how they act.

Emotions About Emotions

There is a lot going on in our world that can cause very strong emotions. School shootings, war, poverty, and all the seemingly endless suffering can be an overwhelming source of negative emotions for sensitive and informed individuals to try to cope with on top of all the normal demands of life they face. However, often the reason ruminating and fixating on these problems can be such a source of distress is because we often layer on top of the negative emotion a feeling about that emotion. We feel bad about the state of the world, because it doesn’t match our ideal vision for how it should be. But we also feel bad about feeling bad, because we feel that others aren’t experiencing these things and so we shame ourselves about them. Applying cognitive reframing in these situations can be super helpful in allowing us to normalize the fact that most individuals deal with these types of emotions and can help us to remove that added layer of emotion on top of the already difficult emotion.

Transformative Power

It can be difficult to know if it is just 24/7 news showing death and destruction to us at all times or if the suffering in the world is increasing, but the fact remains that suffering is a part of all of our lives that we are not likely to get rid of because it is a fundamental part of this reality and our nature as sensitive beings. However, we can through cognitive reframing shift our relationship to suffering and our emotions such that reason and emotion work together to make us move more toward wholeness, the state we were created to live in. This is how we can show up to life with all its suffering but not let it outbalance the love, joy, and compassion that are the counterbalance to these forces.

Practical Steps

• Begin noticing what the “gap” is that is leading to the emotion
• Consider alternatives through reconstrual or repurposing
• Be patient and consistent

Thank you for your time and attention.