On Emotions
As a student, I sometimes sit after my therapy skills practices and reflect on what I could have done better. I start to realise that at the core of it, I am trying to help clients make sense of themselves. I would also have to be decent at picking up their emotions and reflecting it back to them. Then I started asking, how is it that I can identify emotions in others in order to better support people? And how do I adapt to the fact that emotions can switch in a blink of an eye, moment to moment? The more I try to answer these questions, the more I start to notice how quickly they become complicated and overwhelming. It seems so clear in theory but it feel less certain in practice, especially when I apply it to real experiences outside of skills practice to my friends, family, and even myself.
I have been taught that emotions, feelings, and moods have distinct definitions, and on paper that structure is useful. Since emotions feel abstract, it definitely gives a way to categorise them in the process of learning to help others. Yet when I try to recognise these differences in myself or in others, they do not always appear as clearly as they are described. People do not present their emotions in neat categories, unless in skills practice, and even I struggle to name what I am feeling at times. This makes me question how much of emotional understanding comes from definitions and how much comes from simply being present with someone's experience. Aren't the definitions we have too boxed and quite black and white? From how I understand it, emotions are too free flowing to theorise. Otherwise, wouldn't philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have the full answer by now?
“Emotions aren’t something to be solved, they’re something to be sat with.”
I often reflect back on how I felt in skills practice and how fellow pupils shared that it sometimes feels like they are acting or forcing a response. I think this raises the question of how one can remain congruent without fully understanding what is being experienced. When we learn about therapeutic skills, we are told to balance a minimal amount of questioning with a good balance of noticing how the client is feeling. If emotions aren't always clear, predictable, or easily defined, then empathy cannot rely on getting it right every time. Of course, asking too many questions can also undo a lot of the therapeutic relationships.
Nobody likes the Spanish Inquisition, as we have been told!
I had an epiphany about this internal confusion when I was watching two children in the playing. There was a little boy around the age of eight who had accidentally tripped another girl over while they were running around, and she sat there holding her shin and knee while trying not to cry. It really caught me off guard when the boy tried to reassure her after his apology. He said to her that he can tell how much it is hurting and he would sit there with her until the pain went away, and all too quickly they were disrupted by other children asking them what happened. Perhaps I was shocked because we often get told we need to practice our empathy skills and such, but I realised that emotions and empathy are already so innate in us. When we try to over intellectualise something so primal and intricate, we often lose the core of the point. Emotions are how we perceive our shared reality. Most of us know what pain, sadness, happiness, and the like is. It isn't something we need to define in order to recognise it in others.
“At the core of it, we should not be trying to fix people, but we should try to help them make sense of themselves.”
In time, I am coming to realise that perhaps the challenge is not in learning the name of the emotions or how quickly they can switch, but in unlearning the need to over analyse them. It feels clearer now that empathy doesn't come from having the right words or the correct interpretation, but from simply recognising what is in front of me and responding to it. That means embracing the imperfections, even in myself. Sometimes it is not knowing what to say or ask. It can be as simple as validating what the person is going through without unthreading the bundles of emotions within a span of five minutes. It is allowing space for the person to sit with their experience and go at their pace, instead of rushing to make sense of it for them. In doing so, I have gone from wanting to understand the intricacies of emotions to respecting that emotions are private experiences and the best I can do is build the trust to let that person unpack them in their own time.
