MIND MOVES:Managing your feelings is an important aspect of mental health
THE VIVID radiance and magnificence of a rainbow in full display is an awesome sight - such a beautiful spectrum of colour, from red on the outside, to violet at its inner edge.
All of the colours of the rainbow contribute to its beauty and completeness, blending together in an intricate yet orderly weave of colour, harmony and balance.
The wholeness, the completeness of the rainbow endows it with an awesome majesty. A rainbow without say, red, green and blue would not be quite so spectacular.
We live to the fullest when the whole range of our humanness is developed and alive, including the full range of feelings, the rainbow of emotions. As we do with rainbows, we sometimes use the language of light and colour to describe people. For example, we speak of people looking radiant; of people's eyes lighting up; of people having colourful personalities; of individuals shining.
We frequently link colour and emotions in our everyday conversations and experience. We speak of being green with envy; being white with rage; yellow-bellied; having the blues; black depression.
Take your typical two year old. Most two year olds have not been socialised into suppressing their emotions. One minute they are crying their eyes out, their whole being expressing their unhappiness. Two minutes later they are rolling around the floor laughing. Whatever emotion they feel, they express the emotion to its fullest.
The healthy management of emotion is an important aspect of mental health. Each emotion has its purpose and place. We benefit from being able to access the full range of emotions as appropriate. If feelings are not managed well, they can wield enormous power, sometimes being quite destructive.
Having access to the full range of emotions is like having a gateway to a valuable source of information within us, aiding us to express ourselves and our needs. Learning to tune into our emotions and what they seek to communicate to us opens us to a subtle and immensely valuable personal world within.
If we become practised in the art of hiding our feelings from others, in time it may become second nature for us to hide our feelings from ourselves. Sometimes we confuse the desire to think positively with the desire to deny our feelings.
We give our feelings power over us when we deny them. Our feelings tend to lodge within us if we block them, often affecting us in subtle yet very powerful ways in our lives.
Some people channel many emotions into one dominant emotion. Some of us, being more comfortable with sadness than other emotions, either do not feel anger or we quickly transform it into sadness. A woman attending me recently described how she had felt increasing hurt, anger and frustration towards her husband during the day.
However, she did not express these emotions, or the need behind her anger and hurt. Instead, as was her pattern, she translated it into tears, with which she was far more comfortable than anger. As a consequence, her need remained unexpressed. Her husband was none the wiser regarding what was really upsetting her.
Another person who attended me was extremely comfortable with being angry and aggressive, but would resist and avoid contact with or expression of the hurt and sadness with immense determination. Routinely, she instantaneously translated the experiencing of hurt and sadness into anger.
Being angry gave her a feeling of wielding power, of being in control, being important. She has been attending the mental health services for 10 years, with anger as a principal presenting problem, yet the anger has never been fully addressed in interventions.
Neither of these people's method of handling and expressing emotions led to peaceful and satisfactory resolution of the situation.
Access to the wide spectrum of feelings helps us to live life to its fullest. Having access to the feelings is not the same as acting them out. For example, while it is normal and healthy for us to feel anger, how we manage our anger is important. Feeling anger does not give us the right to translate it into aggression, or to attack another person, physically or verbally.
If feelings are not managed effectively they can wield considerable destructive power. When we try to banish something so fundamental as human emotion, the emotion tends to find other ways of making its presence felt. Emotions which are denied, blocked or censored may go underground, and can become dangerously subversive.
Feel the feeling, listen to it, do not reject or judge it. Tune into each feeling and the need behind it, and you will increas- ingly see that every emotion has a place and a purpose.
• Terry Lynch is a psychotherapist and GP in Limerick