The Language of Emotions | Book Review

I wish that we taught more about emotions and spiritual health in schools and churches. A podcast that I recently listened to said that only about 8% of people are really ‘self-aware’ even though many of us think that we are more aware than what we are. Understanding our emotions is a part of that. Emotions are also a key gateway to our spiritual self. In fact, spiritual healing involves feeling strong emotions and breaking down our ‘disassociation’ with them.

Personally speaking, I have been unable to understand or describe many of my emotions mostly because I didn’t know how to work through them. I thought that I was working through them but instead I was trying to ‘treat’ my emotions instead of letting them treat me. (Deciding what was good or bad and then trying to correct it. Instead of letting them communicate my needs, boundaries, etc.)

I just completed this book 'The Language of Emotions' last month and it has helped (and is helping) me so much! I can see so many of her explanations in my own life. In this book, Karla McLaren says that we don’t choose feelings. They come to us to speak and that we can learn a lot if we just asked them questions. Here are some of the things that she’s has said that I have found proven to be true from my own history. But I wasn’t able to make these connections until her book.

--

Suicidal thoughts aren’t because you want to die. It’s actually because your soul is trying to alert you that you’ve had enough of something in your life and if you’ll just ask these questions, you’ll get immediate answers:

• What needs to end now?
• What can no longer be tolerated in my soul?
• What needs to be killed in my life?

I have been suicidal once in my life. I knew that it was because there was something that I couldn’t get away from. I didn’t want to die but suicide felt like that was the ONLY way out. It took a while before I could change the situation but once I was able to remove myself, the suicidal urges completely stopped! If you’re here, PLEASE ask yourself these questions, then seek help how to change whatever surfaces in your reply. You won’t get locked up just for having thoughts and it’s not anything to be embarrassed about. Please let someone help you navigate this.

-- Anger is a call for better boundaries and a catalyst for change.

-- Shame and anger both are intertwined with many other emotions and are often queues that there are deeper feelings that need to be examined.

-- Sadness brings fluidity to your life, revealing your authentic self and desires. It grounds you to, and helps you move through, other emotions and helps you relax.

-- ‘Stuck sadness’ occurs when anger wasn’t available to help you move through it. (Usually, because we’re taught that anger is bad and so we suppress it.) Sadness supports change and vulnerability. While anger offers stability and protection.

-- Sadness brings water forward to move and soften us.

-- Despair traps water in an unmoving pool. We don’t mourn but instead wallow.

-- Grief is different than both. Instead of bringing the water to us, grief brings us to the water and asks us to plunge under the surface and in doing so be changed forever. Grief is the utterly necessary river of the soul.

-- Fear is related to your intuition but not all fear is bad. (From a completely different angle, another book I recommend here is ‘The Gift of Fear’ by Gavin De Becker. This one helped me started listening to my gut when I frequently found myself in dangerous situations.)

-- If you dam one feeling, you dam them all. If you don’t honor ALL of your emotions, you won’t move into wholeness. The strongest emotions will pretty much repeat themselves (and intensify) until you deal with them.

-- Suffering stops being suffering as soon as we draw a concise picture of it.

-- Separating from the physical can actually help you feel and see your emotions for what they are, like an ‘Eagle eye’ view of the system instead of judging them as good or bad. Feel them. Watch them. Learn from them without judgment. Then you make decisions once you have what you need to know.

-- But when people ‘throw out’ or try to get rid of judgment altogether (because they think it’s ‘bad’), they often lose their ability to discern or process.

-- In people whose emotional processing centers have been destroyed by disease or trauma, they often left unable to make judgments or decisions.

-- Depression is a stop sign. Ask yourself why you're being stopped. I’ve also seen (elsewhere) recently that depression is a sign that we need ‘deep rest’ aka ‘to be still’ to let our emotions talk to us. Clear off the agenda and go sit with yourself for a while. I can even attest that my own depression often comes because I am simply ‘overstimulated’. If I can carve out downtime to rejuvenate that is often the only thing that I needed to do to re-center.  –Nature expedites this for me!

-- Happiness & joy are signs that you're responding appropriately.

This book has been so useful in helping me understand my emotions that I’ve journaled a lot of it and even listened to parts of it twice. I can see it being a point of reference for a LONG time.

You may feel weird with some of her exercises but try them when you need to. You may be pleasantly surprised at how easy and useful they are.

Another tool that has helped me is a feeling wheel and learning the definitions of feelings even when I think that I know what they mean.