Expressing negative emotions when we feel them does not mean losing our reason. Because getting angry, saying "enough, I've arrived so far", reacting to those who want us submissive, predictable and quiet is a healthy and even necessary reaction. Our temperament, after all, has the full right to overflow from time to time to allow us to express, to let us channel these negative emotions.
The biographers of Winston Churchill tell that the famous British prime minister had inherited the leadership and the Victorian poise of his father. His mother had stubbornness, energy and an innate capacity for seduction. However, as the politician himself said more than once, his family was also characterized by having a peculiar coat of arms that he also carried with resignation in the basements of his mind: depression.
Anger is problematic only if it is very intense, frequent and irrational. Managed with intelligence can be our best channel to solve certain situations.
Her "black dog," as Churchill called her, haunted the deepest intimacies of her life. Facing the outside was that energetic and strong willed man who was able to prevent Britain from succumbing to Nazism, he who stood out as a great journalist and who even reached a Nobel literature. However, from the inside, all the accumulated tension, contradictions and anxieties were engulfed like stones, like slabs that digest one by one and in strict silence.
Because the politician had the full right to lose the forms from time to time to show courage and energy, but the man always hid with his "black dog", his books and his endless bottles of brandy ...
Negative emotions can be expressed without losing the forms
If there is something that our society has taught us in an equivocal way, it is that there are good emotions and bad emotions. In fact, if we say at this very moment that anger, anger and anger are healthy, it is very possible that more than one person sees a certain contradiction in the statement. How can a series of emotions traditionally related to aggression, conflict or even violence be good?
Well, this type of attributions so common among the population are one more example of our lack of competence in emotional matters. Because if there is something that we should have clear is that "there are no good and bad emotions." Even more, if we make the mistake of suppressing, swallowing or disguising our anger or our anger, what we will achieve in the long term, in addition to an emotional indigestion, is that the emotions we call "positive" lose their intensity.
We have the full right to express negative emotions. Of course, the best thing is that we do it with intelligence and assertiveness. Grant us permission to demonstrate our anger and our anger before anything that causes us contradiction, annoyance or anger. Because the fact that these emotions are associated with discomfort does not mean much less "be bad." Even more, what we achieve with them is something very necessary for our psychological well-being: asserting ourselves and resolving conflicts in order to adapt ourselves much better to our contexts.
People are born with the ability to be aggressive. However, that does not make us bad people. The rage has accompanied us since our childhood and our ultimate responsibility with it is to use it in a functional way to defend ourselves and set limits.
Adaptive anger and good anger
Ana is a high school teacher and teaches math to several third year ESO groups. Besides being an excellent teacher, she has excellent leadership qualities for her profession. He knows how to communicate with his students when they do not pay attention or when they do not perform as they should. He is agile to communicate, quick to react and knows how to give vent to his emotions so that they impact his students positively. With the energy that he gets from his own emotions, he manages to animate, direct and inspire them at the same time.
However, all these qualities that Ana demonstrates in the classroom, does not have them in the private sphere, with her family and her partner. She is the one who does a thousand juggles to satisfy everyone, she who takes hours from where she does not have and she who is unable to say "no" to any favor, demand or whim that her own demand. Our protagonist already accumulates such a level of anger and frustration that she senses that from one moment to another she will be affected by her work.
Next, we suggest you reflect on some simple principles that would be very useful to Ana and to any other person in the same situation
Keys to achieve intelligent emotional expression
In the first place, it is necessary to remember a detail: to manifest our negative emotions without losing our reason we must make use of functional, adapted and controlled anger. We refer to that communication in which the person does not use the cry, the insult or the useless reproach. That where each spoken word passes previously through the filter of respect, calm and firmness.
The feelings are not repressed or put on makeup. If there are things that bother us, that harm us and that harm us, we will not swallow those emotions like someone who swallows a stuffed food that he does not like.
However, it is also not about responding "to the second" to what we do not like just when rabies has us kidnapped. In case of doing so, it is very likely that anger will take us to its most dysfunctional side and resolve the situation in the worst possible way.
The most appropriate in these cases is to plan beforehand what we are going to say, how to say it and when to say it. This plan gives us the possibility of being smarter, not necessarily false or artificial.
To conclude, as we have seen, well managed anger has the potential to give us the strength we need to solve many situations. Therefore, losing the forms in an intelligent, respectful and assertive way gives us the possibility to free ourselves from that knot in the stomach, from that trap in the throat and even from that "black dog" called depression to which Winston Churchill walked so much and secretly during a good part of his life.