Finding Emotional Intelligence in Negative Emotions – Positive Purpose in Sadness Anger and Fear

Emotional intelligence is severely undervalued. When you feel stuck, frustrated, stressed, upset, or overwhelmed, skillful emotional awareness is the key to moving forward. Beneath your discomfort is a specific emotion that can guide you. The key, then, is to understand the messages of your feelings and to become skillful in the proper use of their energy.

Even so-called “negative emotions,” such as sadness, anger, and fear, convey important information and energy to take specific actions that can help you and others. Emotions arise with a purpose and when this purpose is fulfilled, the feeling plummets. Unfortunately, as a society, we have not learned to sufficiently understand and value emotional energy and information, so we tend to treat these feelings crudely.

For example, with an emotion like anger, you may express it explosively or hide it below the surface, because you don’t want to act angry. Either you express your feelings reactively or you stop feeling altogether.

Emotional Intelligence expert Karla McLaren describes a healthy third alternative. She says that you can facilitate the healthy flow of emotions by consciously “channeling” the information and energy that emotions provide. In other words, emotions contain meaningful messages along with energy to do something about those messages. This is true for both so-called “negative” and “positive” emotions.

For example, McLaren suggests that:

• ANGER occurs when you, or someone or something you love, feel threatened and need to take protective action or set a firm boundary.

• SADNESS arises when you need to let go of what no longer serves you or the past, in order to move on.

• FEAR arises to encourage you to take preventive measures.

• JOY propels you into expansive, expressive, and creative action.

• COMPASSION drives you to care about others.

Therefore, each emotion has a MESSAGE and ENERGY to perform a specific type of action. Tuning into your emotions helps you receive these messages and take these actions.

Let’s explore the first three of these emotions in more depth. Sadness, anger, and fear are often misunderstood and mishandled. We tend to repress them, get stuck in them, or express them unskillfully, with negative consequences.

So as you work through these emotions, it’s important to do so consciously. Approach them as a curious observer with an attitude of attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment. Know that emotions are simply information about yourself, others, and events, along with the energy to do something with this information. They do not define who you are and will pass as you collect your information and take appropriate action.

(Note: If you feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by feelings to the point where you can’t consciously process them, seek help from a counseling professional who is trained to work with intense emotions.)

The positive purpose of sadness

The purpose of sadness is to allow you to let go of what no longer works or what is over and done with. Sadness is a watery energy that flows down and allows you to release what no longer serves you, so that you can regain fluidity and flexibility in your life.

By allowing the appropriate sadness to flow through you, you will make room for new energies and new possibilities. If you don’t consciously acknowledge the sadness or know how to flow with it, you will either bury it inside yourself, in a perpetual cycle, or get lost in the feeling and feel overwhelmed.

Here is a practice adapted from Karla McLaren’s book, “The Language of Emotions,” that can help you consciously process feelings of sadness.

1. When you feel sadness wash over you, take some quiet, private time to focus on the feeling. Tune in to the feeling of sadness, locate where it resides in your body, and approach it with curiosity to find out what it has to tell you.

2. Take a deep breath as if you were filling your entire body with your breath. As you exhale, make a sighing sound and feel the energy of your sadness flowing like water through your body, through your legs and feet, and down to the ground.

3. Stay centered in your inner space and ask your sadness the question: “What needs to be released or let go right now?” Do not rush to complete an answer. Instead, keep the question open. Listen and feel inside.

Repeat your sighing breath through your body as many times as you feel the need and keep your question open for your deeper knowing to answer. You may know right away what you need to release, or it may become clear later. Either way, tuning in to sadness (or any emotion) consciously starts a process of discovery and integration that will help you move forward.

The positive purpose of anger

Anger arises to create and preserve personal boundaries and safeguard personal space. Gets angry when a personal boundary or the boundary of someone or something you care about is broken or violated. When you are able to identify the source of the perceived threat and use the energy available in the anger to strengthen your personal space and take appropriate action, the anger will recede. It will have served its purpose.

Here’s a practice adapted from McLaren for gathering information and using the energy in your anger:

1. When you feel anger rising, focus inside your body and get more in touch with the felt sense. Approach the feeling with curiosity to learn more about it.

2. Take a deep breath. As you exhale, imagine and feel as if the energy of your anger is traveling outward in a sphere around you, your personal boundary, reinforcing it with a bright color. Do this until you feel a shift in your energy, so that you are witnessing, feeling, and working with the energy of your anger without being consumed by it.

3. Ask your anger this question: “What needs to be protected or restored?”

4. Then ask, “What action will restore healthy boundaries and protect what’s important?”

These questions help you identify what feels threatened, so you can take appropriate action. Try this when anger flares and see how it works for you.

The positive purpose of fear

We have been told “Fear is what holds us back” and “The only thing to fear is fear itself.” If we can overcome our fears, we will be able to live fully and realize our hopes and dreams. But what if this perennial wisdom about fear is missing something? What if fear in its essential form is one of our wise guides?

Emotions take three main forms: unconscious reactive expression, a repressed cyclical state, and a healthy, free-flowing state. It may be that we are only familiar with the first two forms of fear: a reactive expression that makes us cower, and a repressed state that creates constant low-level anxiety.

Fear in its healthy and free form is something else entirely. What if fear can signal intuitive awareness of something that needs attention? What if it can alert you to an important action?

This form of fear is a sixth sense that reaches across your personal space to pick up cues about what is going on within you, with others, and in your environment. Fear can alert you to what is happening in your own body. It can alert you to the actions and intentions of people around you and to surrounding conditions. When you learn to discern this information, it can help you choose wise actions.

To learn how to use fear as a wise guide, try this simple practice:

1. When you feel fear rising, take a quiet, private moment to focus on the feeling. Tune in to the feeling of fear, locate where it resides in your body, and approach it curiously to see what it has to tell you.

2. Take a deep breath as if you were filling your entire body with your breath. As you exhale, imagine and feel your breath filling the sphere of your personal space about an arm’s width around your entire body. Feel your personal space and the larger space around you and look for subtle cues. For example, you may be attracted to an area within your body or look at something or someone in your environment. You may feel the need to move closer to or away from something.

3. Stay centered in your personal space and ask your fear, “What action needs to be taken right now?” Do not rush to complete an answer. Instead, keep the question open. Listen and feel inside. See what is presented. You may have an inspiration to take a specific action.

It can take time to learn to discern the guiding signs. As best you can, be patient. The simple act of tuning into emotional signals is a cultivated skill. You will increase your ability to feel the inner guidance of fear and all of your emotions through mindful practice over time.

You will also learn to discern the quality of cues that represent accurate current guidance from false interpretations based on painful past experiences. There is a different quality of felt in the precise guide versus the false one. False guidance can feel alarming, stressful, or rushed. You are fixated on what happened in the past or overly anxious about the future. Accurate emotional guidance has a real, present, forward quality that feels like perfect timing.

So, in short, as emotions arise, rather than distrust them, what if you welcome them, become curious, and ask:

• What is the sensation of this emotion in my body?

• What emotion is this exactly?

• What is the message of this feeling?

• What is he asking me to do?