Building Blocks for Emotional Health

What is emotional health/emotional intelligence?

Having good emotional health or intelligence as it is often called, is our ability to deal appropriately with situations in life while allowing ourselves to feel each emotion that comes up in any given situation.  No emotion is negative, in fact what emotions are, are pieces of energy which have a message for us.  When we realise this, we can use this to our benefit.

Antonio Damasio defines emotions as “Energy in motion, e-motion”. We are all made of energy and our emotions are pieces of energy that flow through us when we feel something.   Our words carry the energy of our feelings and influence the person they are directed at.

If we speak in a loving manner to a child for example when they are feeling ill, they will feel nurtured and loved.  On the other hand, if anger gets triggered inside of us by something someone does we may respond in an angry tone and may even spit out our words infused with rage.  Rage, as an emotion, is anger on fire and the energy of these words will have an energetic influence on the other person.

Of course, there are times when someone may do something to us or say something to us that is not right, and we may be justified to feel anger towards them. However, learning to harness this anger may have a better result for us in the long run.

This does not mean we have to accept what the other person did or said to us, it just means we are emotionally intelligent enough to respond in a way that serves US best.

Skills to become an emotionally intelligent person 

Being assertive is a more intelligent way to approach a situation like this, saying what we mean in a way that the other person realises we don’t accept what they have said or did.  We really stand in our personal power when we do this.   Of course, it is not always easy to do this, but for our emotional and mental health it is a skill that is very empowering for us!

Learning to not take things personally is also a huge lesson for us to learn as is learning the skill of being resilient.

Learning these life skills helps us realise that another person’s outburst is coming from their story not yours.

Not my monkey, not my circus. 

Anger and what it has to tell us

Let’s take a lot at anger as an emotion and how we can use it in an emotionally intelligent way.

Anger tells us our boundaries are being attacked, our personal power even.  When we feel anger, this may trigger in us a sense of “how dare they invade my personal space”. 

This may be because it is triggering a past story when our personal power was taken away from us; perhaps we were told to sit down be quiet or suck it up.

Another person may not get triggered in the same way as they may be comfortable with their personal power and so they will not react with anger, it may just wash off them.

We are all different and we all react differently to what others say to us depending on the stories we hold and the emotions that are wrapped around these stories.

What is our fear telling us?

Fear tells us instinctually that something is about to happen or could happen to us and is a very necessary emotion, but one we want to learn to let flow through us, just like all the emotions. We don’t want to stay in fear of everything as when we hold onto fear it can turn into its’ higher spectrum of fear which is anxiety.

As with anger above we can learn to work with emotions like fear and anxiety and understand what they are trying to tell us.

Energy therapies 

Energy therapies work well with emotional issues and stuck emotions in our energy body, because we are dealing with like for like.  A therapy like Emotional Freedom Technique (which you can learn free at my website) is a great tool to help us unravel our emotions from the stories we hold onto.   And more importantly we begin to see what emotion is there and what story is attached to it.   This awareness allows us break free from emotions we no longer need nor want to hold onto.

EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique is a tool that once we learn it, can be used anytime one of life’s curve balls hit us.  We can also use it to deal with another person’s emotions towards us or another person’s projections on us.

We can all learn skills to help us be more emotionally intelligent and in so doing take back control of our life and manage our emotional and mental health.

Dolores Andrew-Gavin, Author, Soul Care Practitioner, Speaker, Podcaster, Energy Therapist and Mum.