Emotion Processing & Emotional Intelligence | Their Importance for Mental Wellbeing

Note: This blog post is not a replacement for therapy or other interventions. The information I share here is based on research papers, articles, chapters and my experience as a therapist. But what I write here might not answer your specific questions or cover your specific concerns- this is general information. Please reach out to someone for assistance if you believe you need it. We deserve all the help and resources that we need!

Have you ever watched a magnificent piece of art and found yourself getting teary-eyed, or watched something so funny that you were laughing at your workplace while your coworkers watched you incredulously, or felt a tightening in the chest and churning in your stomach before a major life event? All these and more happen because of... drumroll please... emotions. 

When you read the APA Psychology Dictionary's definition of emotions, this is what is mentioned:

"A complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter or event. The specific quality of the emotion (e.g., fear, shame) is determined by the specific significance of the event."

Let me simplify this a little: When we are exposed to something, let's say, we were reprimanded by our boss or teacher, we may have felt our chest tightening, our palms getting sweaty, our face/body heating up, our head hurting, we might have had thoughts like "I am stupid"/"I deserve a better boss or teacher"/ "I don't get paid enough for this", we may have felt like crying, we may have felt our face fall and being engulfed in this heavy feeling where we feel sluggish. All these experiences can encompass feelings of sadness, shame, or even anxiety: our emotional response to a situation.

 Fascinating, isn't it? We have all these thoughts, physical feelings, and we experience them depending on the situation we are in, so we feel differently in different scenarios. To say that emotions are complex doesn't always explain it all; emotions are multilayered experiences that arise from our brain's and body's ability to process our surroundings and respond to them accordingly. To think that emotions usually are handled by our limbic system, one of the oldest parts of our brain - well, not as old as the brain stem, but still(if old is gold, was a body part, it should be the limbic system!)! But other areas of our brain are also involved with understanding and processing our emotions- like the prefrontal cortex.

And emotions have intrigued professionals for years now, and I don't blame them; our emotions can transcend gender, personality, time, culture or environment, but can also be shaped by social norms, gender roles and personal experiences. 

Years ago (more like a decade and a half ago), little me found an encyclopedia (not really) and started reading what I now know as case vignettes of cultures and how sometimes emotional expression depends on specific norms and expectations. I realised later that ABCs Of The Human Mind was not traditionally an encyclopedia but more like a treasure trove of research compiled together by Reader's Digest, which I will still ask you guys to check out. But I was fascinated by how even emotions surrounding grief can be differently expressed across the world.

But I am not writing this article to talk about cultural differences in emotions, but more so about something I observe a lot in therapy and in life.

Processing Our Emotions....

If you have been in therapy or watched/read a myriad of content talking about emotions, then you have surely heard about emotion-processing.

If emotion-processing were a cake, then its ingredients would be our ability to recognize and name what we are feeling, notice how our emotions can benefit any task we are doing, understand the reasons behind our emotions- why we feel an emotion- which can help predict our reactions in the future too and finally also how we manage our emotions. You might notice that all of these 'ingredients' are somehow connected, and that's because they are. The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test assess our emotional intelligence, and processing our emotions is an integral part of that.

Do We Have a Hierarchy Of Our Emotions?

In the explanation above, I haven't mentioned specific emotions that are 'good' or 'bad' emotions, and that's because it is hard to define them that way. In no way does it mean that actions can't have consequences; we can't be shocked about being restrained or arrested if we violently attacked someone because we were angry (we can feel both shocked and angry, but acting on them will have consequences). Very often, in therapy, I see people feeling immensely guilty about feeling emotions like jealousy or envy because they are 'bad'; what that usually leads to is a reluctance to process it- we avoid processing our emotions because we have already jumped to the conclusion that we are bad people for feeling that way. This can be harmful because we end up feeling guilty, ashamed, anxious or depressed, but not understanding the actual reasons for our feelings.

This seems to be true for many other emotions seen as bad- anger, irritation, or even sadness (Inside Out is a great movie depicting that, where Joy seems to hold a revered position as a positive emotion, and even Anger, Disgust, Fear, and Sadness take a backseat). But like the movie Inside Out demonstrated, masking our emotions with Joy isn't always healthy; even the so-called unsavory emotions deserve processing. 

So How do we Process Our Emotions?

If you remember our cake recipe  parts of emotion processing mentioned above, you might notice how it is almost like an action plan to make sense of our feelings. Emotion processing is not one thing but multiple steps put into one delicious cake (sorry about the incessant cake parallels). I will share two groups of emotion processing, one where we focus on an emotion and break it down and then one where we scan for more emotions because we are complex creatures, and hardly ever feel one thing at a time.

Group A: Let's Process the 'Not-So-Great' Emotion

"Let's say, you are sitting with your family and one of your family members has said something really rude to you that was unwarranted. You feel your cheeks heat up, your heart starts beating faster, your throat closes, and you try to blink away the tears that have started forming in your eyes. Before you know it, you are crying, and you run out of the room- your family is mortified, your parents either defend you or get upset with you. But the most isolating part is how guilty you feel after."

 This is just a scenario to paint the picture of feeling an emotion. You can pick an incident from your life, sit with a notebook and do this activity with me. Mayer and Salovey have done extensive research on Emotional Intelligence for decades, and their work has shed a lot of light on emotion processing, too. According to them, people who have high emotional intelligence process their emotions generally in the following way (we can incorporate the four steps and modify them a little to process our emotions in real life).

1. Okay, so here our first step would be to acknowledge the situation at hand- it sucks being in a family gathering and feeling humiliated like that. Acknowledging what feelings came up for you: What were you feeling then? Was it humiliation, sadness, isolation, or frustration? Naming our emotions- all of them- that we felt in that moment helps us paint a picture. When we do this step, we can also check in on our physical sensations because many people find it easier to label their physical sensations first.
2. Then we try to understand how our emotions (how we express our emotions) influence our thoughts. When you cried after hearing the family member's comment, what did it do to the problem at hand? Did it silence the person, did it make them feel bad for saying you things, did it serve a purpose for you? Was there any other way we could have expressed our feelings? Many times, when we feel embarrassed by our reactions afterwards, we might express ourselves through crying or emotional outbursts, not only 'because we can't control ourselves, but also because we believe it is the best way to express ourselves and make people understand us. We can then reason with ourselves to tap into other emotions that facilitate thinking assertively, or creatively to handle a scenario. Maybe reasonable frustration with the family member might help you more to communicate how you feel, and for them to listen to you. Sometimes, people can train themselves to see their situations differently to invoke feelings that help them think or act differently.
3.  We can then ask ourselves questions like: What about that comment made me feel like that?, What were other things that happened with me that day, that could have contributed to my emotions?, What was my reaction like when a similar interaction happened in the past (if it happened)?. These are some of the general questions we can ask ourselves to gauge what brought on that reaction. This can help us predict if we might react similarly in future situations (or maybe politely call out the disrespect next time), or we can challenge our thoughts and belief systems connected to our emotions, too.
4. Managing our emotions is also a part of emotion processing: Emotion regulation skills are dependent on our consistency, so that it becomes easier to use them. Imagine yourself as a high-ranking spy (or anything you like) who gets access to multiple gadgets to complete their mission. Strategies to manage our emotions are like picking the gadget that will get the work done with the least amount of damage. For some people, consistent practice with assertiveness skills helps with not being overwhelmed by conflicts; for some people- consistent mindfulness practice, meditation or yoga helps them physically make themselves relax, which in turn calms them too; for some others challenging the thoughts helps not get swept away by our feelings and for some acceptance of what we are going through helps us be empathetic towards ourselves.

 A key thing to remember is that not every strategy might work for everyone, and that is okay; we might also take some time to become comfortable using these strategies, which is also understandable.

Group B: Acknowledging all our emotions

Generally, when we process our emotions, we realize that we hardly feel one emotion at a time, but it is important to not dismiss this complex cocktail of our feelings. 

"You and your sibling are both close- you have grown up like best friends, and you see each other as mutual support systems through different life events. Your sibling ends up doing really well in life- everything that families can boast about, and you... You are just not there yet. You notice feeling the pit in your stomach when your family and friends boast about your sibling, you feel like crying sometimes when you look at yourself in the mirror, you notice your mind jumping to conclusions like, "my family is surely disappointed with me", "I am such a failure I shouldn't show my face", "my sibling doesn't want to be seen with me" (there isn't truth to any of them but we believe it is all true). The worst part is you feel guilty and angry at yourself for feeling this way about your sibling- after all, we are supposed to only be happy about our loved ones' achievements. If we feel anything else, we are horrible beings."

 Have you felt something like this before? If not for family members, but for close friends, spouses or any loved ones? As you read this, you might aggressively nod your head to say, "NO. I could never feel like that". Some of you reading might have never felt jealous of a loved one, but to those of you who have.... It's okay.. You are not a horrible person for feeling that way. I don't know you, but I can still say these emotions don't make you terrible. But if you find yourself hurting others because of feelings of jealousy or anger, then we might have to talk (or you can talk to someone you trust to help you process your emotions); but the emotion itself isn't the criminal.

 I like to do one activity with clients sometimes in therapy- It is a Guided Imagery exercise that I modify to fit the person's session needs. The exercise can look something like this (this is just a general overview and not the specific imagery script):

We imagine that we are in a room (you can imagine your room and imagine a few furniture pieces that stand out to you), and we start walking around observing the space: because it represents our mind. We then pick out the largest furniture that we notice first, it can be our bed, the table, a cupboard, basically anything that you might see first as you enter the room. We assign our most obvious emotion to it (so we obviously have to do the first step of emotion processing, which is naming the feeling). Then we don't stop there, we start going through the other furniture pieces, smaller ones, and assigning more emotions to them, we start with whatever feelings are coming up- maybe isolation, disappointment with ourselves, shame, sadness, confusion. The aim is to label all the emotions we label as negative AND positive. More often than not, you may realize that even when jealous, you might feel proud of your sibling (this is a continuation of the example above), you might feel admiration, you might feel happy, but the guilt from feeling jealous could have overshadowed all the other emotions. 

Acknowledging emotions as complex is important... because they are, and focusing on only one feeling might not always be helpful. We can then follow the steps from Group A (above) to process our feelings better after doing this imagery exercise.

Conclusion

You might read the section written above and think to yourself, "Ugh, there are too many steps; emotion processing is complex and takes time."

Well, that's because emotion processing is not always easy, and it does take time... initially when we start practising it. But for many people, it becomes second nature; for some people, emotion processing is more difficult for unpleasant emotions that we don't want to touch with a pole. I mean, how can we process something that we don't even want to acknowledge? This can be one of the reasons why acknowledging and sitting with our emotions takes a long time- it is uncomfortable. Gentle curiosity towards our emotions is more effective than aggressive criticism because our goal is to feel our emotions, but not hurt others or ourselves in the process. Journaling can be a good way to write down our emotions and follow some of the prompts above. But you can always reach out to someone to get more personalized help.