Some emotions are secondary effects of our perceptions and thoughts. These manufactured emotions can cause us a lot of problems. Let’s try on a hypothetical example.
Perhaps you see a task in front of you that scares you and you freeze up. Once you recognize you aren’t getting the job done you get angry with yourself, or maybe you get angry at the person who assigned the task. Your thoughts about yourself being stuck have just manufactured anger. And now that you have to deal with being mad in addition to the fear you are likely ignoring because you have taken on another emotion on top of the fear.
Now what happens when you get in a fight with your family because this anger is burning while you are feeling some hidden or masked fear. Now maybe you start to feel some regret or shame in addition to the anger, and fear.
What a mess, right?
This mess didn’t start when the fear popped up. That was probably a first reaction and a natural response to doing the task. If you stop and approach that fear and handle that first you can probably avoid getting stuck… and if you don’t get stuck you don’t get mad at yourself. If you don’t get mad at yourself you probably don’t let that anger leak out with you family. That means the fight doesn’t happen and you don’t even have the opportunity to feel guilt or shame.
The trick here is to handle first things first and face or approach the fear in a way that helps prevent you from getting stuck.
Next time you find yourself struggling with strong emotions that are running a muck in your day I would challenge you to take a look at what is going on. Did you take on some manufactured emotions? Maybe you need to get to the bottom of things and wrestle with the root cause of the problem.
Thanks for Reading
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