Why do we have emotions?

Emotions, we all have them. At best they can be life-affirming, and at worst, torturous and confusing. But why, what’s their purpose? It’s a reasonable question for anyone to ask, especially someone struggling emotionally.

The language of the body

The first thing to understand is this, emotions are a natural bodily function. And while we might ‘think’ about them in our heads, we feel them all over, in our ‘gut-feel’, in our ‘heartache’. Emotions in all their colourful variety are the body’s language - a form of communication, messages from body to mind, motivating us to adapt ourselves or our environment in some way. Either to move towards something/someone (love) or away (disgust).

The second thing to understand is that the body (when functioning correctly), does nothing that it doesn’t feel it needs to. It is inherently conservative in its use of energy because every calorie expended in doing something, must be replaced, from limited resources. Our lungs only inhale as much oxygen and our hearts only pump as much blood as the body feels it needs, any more would be wasteful, inefficient. 

So, understanding emotions to be a message from within. What kind of things might they be saying? At a basic level, the objectives are quite simple – to keep you stay safe, healthy and socially connected in a positive way. If those things are taken care of then, should the environment allow, the chance of your genes being passed on are increased – a universal drive for all living organisms.   

So, for all their complexity, emotions have an evolutionary utility at their root.

Creating conscious knots

Which raises the question, if emotions are a naturally occurring function, why can they give us so much trouble? The answer to this lies in the complex dynamic between, the conscious and unconscious mind. The conscious mind being the part of you that does your thinking, the part you’re aware of and through which you reason and decide on what action you’ll take – it has an executive function, informed by culture. As much as the conscious mind likes to think it’s in charge of the show, it’s the mighty unconscious mind that really keeps it on the road. The unconscious mind regulates all your bodily systems, filters all your sensory data, remembers all the experiences you’ve had and much more – all taking place in the background, without you giving it a second thought – beneath the awareness of your conscious mind.    

So why is that a problem exactly? Because on one hand, an emotion is a pure expression of the unconscious mind, we don’t have to consciously think about having them, they just happen, sometimes completely out of the blue, like panic. However, we use our conscious, rational mind to try and understand our emotions, which in most cases, it just isn’t capable of. So instead, we end up making guesses as to why we feel certain emotions, give them names, draw conclusions. Conclusions which can easily become a mindset, “I feel nervous in this type of situation, it must be that making me feel this way, I will avoid it in future” – thereby tying ourselves to a belief which limits how we can live. This process of putting conscious conclusion to unconsciously generate emotion is a central theme in many for the problems people bring to the therapy room, they’ve tied themselves in knots which hold them back from making the changes they want.

The need for movement

Another cause of emotional problems is suppression. We are told, often at a young (impressionable) age that certain emotions aren’t acceptable, either because of who we are (boys don’t cry) or in order for us to be accepted in certain social contexts. So, we do our best to push those emotions down, and with enough practice we can get really good at it, sometimes not even realising we’re doing it. If the emotion is particularly persistent, we can even split off that part of our personality altogether, so that we can ‘get on with things’. The problem is, by repressing and ignoring emotions for long enough, they become tangled and frustrated, the energy doesn’t go away, it just simmers below the surface, feeling stuck.  Emotions are energy, they need to move, not be locked in – the word e-motion comes from the Latin emovere (to move out, remove, or agitate). As anyone who has untangled a ball of string will know, the more knots, the harder they are to work loose, what may have once been clear emotions of sadness or fear can become a more complex and generalised condition, such as Generalised Anxiety Disorder or panic disorder, phobias , depress-ion and much more besides.

Hypnotherapy works by connecting people with their unconscious emotions in ways that allow them to understand more about why they’re happening (to hear the message of their body more clearly), to unravel the knots created by their conscious conclusions, and to release pent-up emotional energy so that they no longer need to carry it with them in the same way.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing emotional difficulties, please feel free to get in touch. You can book a consultation call here: https://calendly.com/tom-carter-hypno/consultation-call