Published on March 19, 2025 by Zencare Team. Written by Lauren Gargano, LCSW, Psychotherapist.
Professor Peter Salovey and Professor John D. Mayer, to whom the concept of emotional intelligence is attributed, said that how we perceive feelings, use them, understand them and manage them ultimately has an impact on our behavior and our satisfaction with life.
Emotions, or feelings, are a natural part of being human. An internal response to the external environment, emotions are happening all the time as we walk through life. I might find myself angry when my partner ignores me, or I may feel excited when I see an old friend for the first time in years.
We are not always aware of our emotions. To a certain extent, this is natural. But in other instances our lack of emotional awareness is problematic. Because emotions are an integral part of being human, without awareness we miss a crucial component of our experience. Most of us are walking around in the dark, and don’t even know it. Access to emotions gives us a complete picture of ourselves and our experiences, turning the light on. And the ability to understand and manage them provides an ability to have control over our lives, allowing for more ease and happiness in life.
Some assume that emotions, particularly unpleasant emotions, are a problem because they can get in our way. Frustration is an emotion that we have all experienced and wished we hadn’t, it can stop us in our tracks. It’s tempting to ignore emotions so that we can move forward, especially if you struggle with understanding and managing your feelings. But emotions require our attention, they are important clues to what we need and want. In fact, all issues boil down to roadblocks understanding our emotions. Struggling in a professional or personal relationship? Difficulty making a decision? This is an indication there are feelings that need to be understood and managed, and when we are able to do so suddenly the struggles and difficulties disappear.
Awareness Is The First Step
Emotions are the unseen mechanisms that shape our experiences. Awareness of emotions is the first step towards having control over how we interact with the world, and naturally lead to coping skills that ultimately create more ease and happiness in life. The importance of emotion can not be understated.
Barriers to awareness of our emotions are not uncommon. When we notice difficulty becoming aware of our emotions it is important to be curious, not judgmental. There are signals to barriers, and they include overthinking, procrastination and self-criticism. If you notice yourself engaging in any of these it’s a sign you are feeling something outside of your awareness. Take a moment to pause, consider you are feeling something outside of your awareness, and see if the emotion comes to the surface.
Understanding Emotions
Understanding emotions plays a pivotal role in our mental health. In our society, quick fixes abound and symptom relief is popular. But if we focus on the symptom we only gain temporary relief. If we understand our emotions we can get to the root of an issue and gain lasting resolve. For instance, social media allows us to connect more easily, temporarily easing the symptom of loneliness. But the root of the issue, disconnection, doesn’t get fully addressed. In this example, if you find yourself frequently turning to social media, consider that you may have a deeper sense of disconnection that requires meaningful, in person connections to satisfactorily resolve.
Emotions are an integral part of the human system, they provide important information about what we need. Overlooking them means missing a critical piece of one’s experience, walking around in the dark without full control of our lives. Understanding brings the missing pieces into your hands, allowing for more effective ways at navigating through life.
Understanding Our Own Experiences
A critical component of understanding our emotions is understanding that our own experiences in the first seven years of life are a major influence in how we understand our present. These experiences create a map in the mind about what we can expect, and this is used throughout life to make sense of our own emotional experience and that of others. As young children, our minds are malleable and these experiences in the first seven years create a lens through which we view life — we will find experiences that fit our map or we distort our experiences to fit the map. This information provides a blueprint for understanding emotions in our present. For example, if we often find ourselves in relationships that feel controlling, reflect on the dynamic in our earliest relationships and determine if they were marked by being controlled. Or, if we suspect that our current relationship is not controlling but we feel controlled anyway, you may be interpreting your feelings and the behaviors of others through an outdated lens that needs better understanding and adjustment.
Barriers to understanding our emotions are common. Because there is a lack of information about the emotional and psychological systems, we may not have the necessary information to navigate our internal worlds. If you find it hard to understand your emotions despite having an understanding of these systems, consider you may be leaning too heavily on your mind, a defense against deeper emotional exploration. For instance, you may find rigid conceptions of reality (such as black and white thinking) predominating. If so, start there and consider the function this type of processing provides. Everything is understandable, start where you are.
“Mental health disorders” such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, bipolar, borderline, addiction, schizophrenia and the like all speak to the symptoms associated with an inability to understand and manage our emotions. To better understand your emotions, reflect on what you are feeling, and use the knowledge about its roots to help navigate to relief and resolve. For help along this journey, consider the following:
Anxiety
Symptoms Include: Stress, tension in the body, excess energy making it hard to sit still, uncertainty, worry, distraction, difficulty making decisions and taking action, hard time trusting oneself, fear, perceived instability, sense of insecurity about oneself or the other in relationships.
Root Issue: Inability to trust oneself. Who are we? And is it ok? Signaling a lack of adequate mirroring in childhood.
Depression
Symptoms Include: Feeling heavy, sad, lethargic, lonely, disconnected.
Root Issue: Unresolved anger that sits inside the body, and gets turned against the self. A focus on the past. Signaling old anger that didn’t have an adequate outlet.
Depressive symptoms are often coupled with anxious symptoms.
ADHD
Symptoms Include: Difficulty concentrating, hard to sit still, hyperactivity.
Root Issue: Different types of overwhelming emotions percolating beneath the surface with nowhere to put them. Signaling an atmosphere of criticism or dismissiveness towards emotions in childhood.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Symptoms Include: Obsessive thought patterns, compulsive and repeated behaviors.
Root Issue: Overwhelming feelings, no sense of control over the environment or one’s response to it. Signaling a particularly controlling environment without adequate room for self development in childhood.
Bipolar
Symptoms Include: (Mania) racing thoughts, inability to sleep or eat, excess of energy, euphoria, followed by sadness, flat affect, feeling disconnected and withdrawn (depression).
Root Issue: Suppressed grandiosity. Signaling a lack of support in one’s self assertion and creative expressions in childhood.
Borderline
Symptoms Include: All or nothing emotions, impulsivity, inconsistent and confusing relationships, inconsistent self-esteem and sense of self, emptiness.
Root Issue: Diffuse sense of self, undefined and confusing internal world. Signaling caretaking that oscillated between neglect and over involvement.
Addiction
Symptoms Include: Inability to moderate consumption.
Root Issue: Early childhood neglect, overwhelming feelings, lack of ability to self-soothe. Signaling a lack of soothing in the earliest years (birth – 1.5 years).
Schizophrenia
Symptoms Include: Persistent confusion, hallucinations, delusions, and thinking these realities.
Root Issue: Undefined sense of self. No distinction between self and world or self and the other. Signaling lack of separation from caregiver and chaotic environment in childhood.
Understanding what we are feeling plays a key role in the management of our emotions. Better management of emotions is important because otherwise emotions get in our way, creating dis-ease.
Awareness + Understanding = Better Management of Emotions
What are steps to managing our emotions?
Managing emotions requires us to be able to do the following:
- Name the particular emotion.
- Understand why we are feeling it.
- Know that the emotion is normal.
- Moderate the intensity of the emotion.
If you are unsure how to do this on your own, first practice with someone in a safe environment. A space to talk about emotions without judgement, without being rescued or taken off track are important aspects of a safe environment. Once this environment is secured, the other person can reflect what we are experiencing and why, which demonstrates that our feelings are valid and brings clarity to our emotions. We need validation and help clarifying in order to be able to do this for ourselves later on. In addition, exploring emotions in a safe environment decreases the intensity of the emotions as the other person carries some of the weight of the feelings for you. Practice with a trusted friend or family member, or a therapist.
What gets in the way of managing emotions?
- Overwhelming emotions, or when we have too many emotions at once.
- Strong feelings that feel like they fill up our whole being. This often happens with the emotion of anger, when we "see red". But can also happen with positive emotions like love or lust.
- Muted emotions, that make it hard to know we are feeling anything at all.
- Lack of clarity about what we are feeling, making it difficult to put them into words. We know we are feeling something, but do not know what.
When we have a hard time managing our emotional state, we have a hard time moving forward in life.
Unmanageable emotions act like a roadblock. They demand our attention until they are addressed, and therefore become distracting and limit our capacity to attend to other things. We feel stuck. Ever wonder why you procrastinate? There are unmanageable emotions, sometimes outside of awareness, that are getting in your way of taking action.
Unmanageable emotions can have other consequences too. When they feel intolerable, we turn to whatever we can find to help make them more tolerable. This might be food, drugs, alcohol and sex. Learning how to manage our emotions relieves the symptom and the root of the issue.
What are the benefits of being able to manage emotions?
“We now know that children who have learned to understand what triggers strong emotions such as anger and anxiety and respond to those emotions appropriately are more accountable, do better socially and academically, and are happier and more successful in life.” — Sanya Pelini, Ph.D.
Emotional health is dependent upon our ability to manage our emotions. Emotional health looks like:
- Self-Awareness: Brings understanding of how others perceive you, building empathy, a critical component of healthy and successful relationships.
- Self-Regulation: Allows you to think before taking action, take responsibility for how you react, and overall improves emotional expressions.
- Internal Motivation: Allows you to set your own goals, show initiative, overcome setbacks and persist towards reaching those goals.
- Empathy: Allows you to sense other people’s emotions and understand what they need, leading to better and more meaningful relationships.
- Social Skills: Allows you to build bonds with others (despite any differences), and which allows for better problem solving and conflict negotiation.
- Physical Health: Unprocessed feelings get stored in the body, and play an important role in physical ailments. In fact, most issues with physical health have an emotional component. When we know how to better manage our emotions, our physical health benefits, too.
To learn more about the emotional and psychological systems of all humans, visit BeingHuman-101.com. And follow our Instagram page @beinghuman_101 for updates on our offerings. Founder Lauren Gargano, LCSW, is a psychotherapist of over 15 who brings her experience and knowledge to the general public through classes, articles and retreats.