Emotional analysis will help you to understand your
emotions and what they are telling you. You can decide whether they are
correct or not, and either change your interpretation of the situation
or take action.
Use Your Emotions
Excessive emotions such
as intense anger have tremendous power to damage the complex social
relationships on which we rely. They can also lead to rash and unwise
actions. However, this is only part of the story. Like the
fight-or-flight reflex, negative emotions give us the benefit of a
speedy, and sometimes effective, response to simple situations, at the
cost of a sophisticated and reliable analysis of more complex ones. Even
if instant action is not required, our emotions can alert us to
something to which we need to pay attention. We can then utilize more
sophisticated analysis techniques to understand the situation in detail.
What someone says may not be what she means. Read the emotions behind the words.
Check Your Fundamental Assumptions
There are six
main automatic assumptions that can lie beneath negative emotions. The
specific emotions we experience in a difficult situation depend on which
of these assumptions or factors apply. These assumptions are:
The situation is relevant to our goals.
The situation threatens our goals.
The situation will turn out badly.
Something important to us is being threatened.
We are responsible, or someone else is to blame.
We have some power to affect the situation, or we have no power at all.
Hear the Warnings
NOTE
Emotions can be a useful early warning signal of a problem
Emotions can be an
important early warning system. We experience different negative
emotions for different reasons, and we experience the emotion because we
are making specific subconscious assumptions about the situation. For
example, we feel anger because we are subconsciously assuming that
someone or something is frustrating goals that are important to us.
Emotional analysis can help us to get to the root of why we are
experiencing negative emotions and look closely at whether the
information they are communicating to us is right or wrong. If the
assumptions we are making about a situation turn out to be correct, we
can learn from the early warning signals and do whatever we can to
change the situation. If our assumptions are incorrect, we can change
the way we see the situation.
Techniques to Practise
When you experience a negative emotion, follow these steps to carry out an emotional analysis.
If you practise this type of analysis regularly, it will soon start to come naturally to you.
Use relaxation techniques to calm yourself down so that you can think clearly about why you are upset.
Identify your assumptions. Using the list of fundamental
assumptions and the list of emotions and assumptions opposite as a
checklist, work through them and identify the assumptions that you are
currently making.
Challenge each of the assumptions rationally to see whether it is
correct or not. Don’t be harsh with yourself – be fair. If it helps,
imagine as you make each challenge that you are your best friend.
Take appropriate action. When your assumptions are incorrect, the
negative emotion should change or disappear as soon as you acknowledge
this. If there is some element of truth to an assumption, recognize this
and consider how to manage the situation. It may be possible to derive
energy from the emotion, and motivation to achieve what you need to
achieve. Remember that controlled, well-founded anger can actually be
hugely motivating and enormously powerful.
Analyze Your Anger
As an example, suppose
that you have identified that you are angry and you recognize the
assumptions listed against “anger” in the table opposite. The next step
is to challenge these assumptions by asking rational questions such as:
“What goals are being challenged? Are they important? Are they really
being frustrated? How severe is the damage? Am I attributing blame
fairly?” Likewise, if you have identified that you feel shame, ask
yourself if the ideal you have created is realistic. Ask similar
questions about any assumptions that you are making.
Check Your Assumptions
Psychologist Richard S. Lazarus (and others)
proposed a theory stating that we experience different emotions for
different reasons, some of which we understand consciously, but some of
which we process subconsciously.
The emotions we experience depend on our assumptions.
Where our assumptions are correct, our emotions alert us to situations to which we need to pay some attention.
Where they are incorrect, we can act impulsively and foolishly.
Are Your Assumptions Correct?
Emotion
The feeling that a demeaning offence has been committed against us and ours
The feeling of facing an uncertain, existential threat
The feeling of facing an immediate, concrete, and overwhelming danger
The feeling of having transgressed a moral imperative
The feeling of having failed to live up to an ego ideal
The feeling of having experienced an irrevocable loss
Assumption
Important
goals have been frustrated; our self-esteem, or people, objects, or
ideas that we value are damaged; others are to blame.
Our
survival or what we hold to be important is under threat; we are
uncertain about whether the threatened situation will occur and we are
unsure about its severity; no one is to blame.
There is a threat to our survival or to what we hold to be important; no one is to blame.
We have failed to live up to an important moral standard; we place the blame for this on ourselves.
We have failed to live up to an ideal of ourselves; we blame this on ourselves.
Our
self-esteem, or people, objects, or ideas that we value have been
damaged; no one is really to blame; we are unable to recover the
situation.
