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In this episode Joel and Antonia tackle the question: “Can people control their emotions or do emotions happen to us?”

In this podcast you’ll find:

Antonia’s video on the emotional thermostat.

Joel’s video on changing negative emotions to positive emotions.

Total Control vs. No Control Theory of Emotions: Can you control your emotions or not? by Jeremy Sherman

Two camps:

  1. You have total control of your emotions;
  2. You have no control over your emotions.

Both are extremes. Both are unrealistic. We need to fall in the middle.

“Full and total control” is a long game statement. Not an in-the-moment statement.

Social surroundings alter expression of emotion. You have control of your emotions when you feel you should be in control, like in a social environment.

Emotional expression and the emotion itself seems very intertwined.

Are we in control of our dreams? There are ways to take control of your dreams. Some people have this ability naturally. Others train themselves to do this. It’s called Lucid Dreaming.

It is similar with emotions. Controlling your dream world is harder than controlling your emotions.

You can’t control your unconscious mind completely, but you can have influence over it with breathing techniques and meditation.

The idea that you are not in control of your emotions sounds strange. No one can get into our heads and tell us how we should feel. We interpret the data set within our mental framework.

All of us experience emotions very subjectively. There are consensus definitions of emotion which we assume are objective, but they’re not. They are still subjective.

Some negative or toxic emotions can shorten your life. Especially toxic emotions like resentment.

Harboring emotions can become addictive. If you have a tendency to trend toward toxic emotions, you will have a shorter, more unhappy life – and vice versa. If you trend toward happiness, forgiveness, and joy, your life will be more meaningful, and you will live longer.

What increases the quality of your life?

Sometimes we believe that harboring resentment or other negative emotions will keep us safe from being taken for granted.

To have no control over emotions indicates we are static, whereas the mind is plastic. If the mind is plastic, emotions are plastic because they live in the mind.

Would you ever tell someone that they don’t have control over their mindset, outlook, or religious experience? No, but to tell someone they don’t have control over their emotions is acceptable.

You can build skill in controlling your emotions over the long game.

If your Judging processor is extraverted (INFJ, INTJ, ENFJ, ENTJ, ESFJ, ESTJ, ISTJ, ISFJ) you are going to have more of a concept around controlling emotions than a Perceiver. A Judgers evaluative criteria is based on how the outside world is being impacted. If people are just showing up any way they want, the outside world becomes destabilized.

Controlling your emotions in the outside world is going to be more of a Judger thought.

And the idea that you should feel permission to express your authentic emotion, no matter where you are, may be more of a Perceiver belief.

The people who are the most protective of any emotional experience are going to be IFPs (ISFP, INFP).

They want the entire range of emotions at all times. Like the keys on a keyboard. The IFPs want the whole range available to them.

There is a more skillful way to do it, though so that it is more pleasant for everyone.

You may not always be in control of the emotions that come up for you, but you are responsible for the emotions that come up and how you express them. Nobody else can be responsible for your emotions.

Whether emotions are positive or negative is context dependent. How much are you impacting your life by emotion?

Everybody should have permission to feel the emotion that is coming up at the moment. If you don’t acknowledge emotions as they come up, you won’t have a clear starting point to identify when an emotion is happening.

Giving yourself permission to feel an emotion doesn’t mean you are giving it permission to explode outward and affect everyone around you.

We have an emotional comfort zone. The more your comfort zone is set to joy, satisfaction, and happiness the more you will endeavor to maintain that comfort zone.

As opposed to being calibrated to grief, sadness, and depression and looking to return to that comfort zone whenever life takes a turn toward more positive things.

We should process through the negative emotions and endeavor to maintain a more positive mindset. We shouldn’t be living in the zone of toxic emotions.

We can decide where we want our emotional thermostat set.

Give yourself permission to feel the full spectrum of emotions, then realize that you have the control to return yourself to a space that is more rewarding in the long run.

If you know how to live with your emotional thermostat set really low. If you feel empowered in this mindset, and can empower others, please tell us how you do this.

We go through phases of our emotions as we grow and develop.

Progress varies. We are all at different phases of development. We like to paint the ideal even if we aren’t there yet. If you don’t like it, throw it away. Do what works for you. This is what works for us.

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26 comments

  • Laura
    • Laura
    • September 22, 2016 at 11:37 am

    Tasha, I have some thoughts on your point of ‘karma’, in relation to a situation where you would expect most people to feel a very particular way after how someone has treated them.

    I’m going to go straight to some pretty nasty situations here. If someone killed your entire family, you would probably feel really angry, fearful, grievously sad, hopeless, etc.

    You would probably (unless you really disliked them) not feel super happy and excited.

    There is some context here, and some karma. Assumedly you loved, or at least at some point loved your family. And this has created some emotional channels such that when your family is hurt, you feel a range of so-called ‘negative’, but potentially useful, emotions.

    So initially you feel very hurt. And this feeling is important for the grieving process and a motivator for our legal systems.

    If you wish to gradually wean yourself off that emotional addiction, however, it will take a long time and be a lot more difficult than for example if someone just told you your family sucks.

    I suppose this catalyst, the data that comes from the other that sets of your chain reaction thought and emotion process, is weighted in some way. But I suppose this comes back to our judging nature. We judge murder as a lot worse than verbal insult, in most contexts.

    Still, if you are taking your karma as ‘normal’ for a particular social context (in my society you would be expected to be angry if your family is killed) then it becomes easier for others to manipulate your emotions. If the other person knows somehow what chain of events is likely to be triggered in your head when they take a certain action, then they are manipulating your emotions, and so controlling them, even if indirectly.

    This is commonly seen with bullying. I myself was bullied for quite a long time by a particular person, without being able to see the situation completely clearly. So now, even though I am slowly chipping away at that resentment, I cannot help but feel that this person has ‘put a dent’ in my emotional processing abilities. Overall I am still responsible for my emotions, but I feel that this person has made it more difficult for me to control certain emotions.

  • Rebecca Sink-Burris
    • Rebecca Sink-Burris
    • September 21, 2016 at 6:06 pm

    I learned from a therapist that one could often choose how to respond to a situation rather than just feeling as you have habitually in the past. For me this translated into me deciding to be angry rather than sad in some situations. Very empowering as letting myself go toward sadness led to more depression and passivity, while telling myself to be angry led to positive action on my part. I am pretty sure that growing up, it was OK to be sad but not to be angry.

  • Tasha
    • Tasha
    • September 21, 2016 at 5:00 pm

    Johnathan, thanks for making that point! I was wondering also about that initial emotional response, and how it seems to be out of our control. Like Joel said, we can control how we process and express the emotion after feeling it, but where the feeling comes from in the first place seems to be unreachable to us, like a void.

    My interpretation is that the initial feeling comes from our already predisposed mindset which is shaped by our belief constructs, childhood and social conditioning, emotional IQ etc. Let’s call those things our “karma”! For example, when a hopeless emotion surfaces when your date doesn’t contact you back, that is a direct reflection of your karma! One person might feel hopeless due to low self-esteem and not feeling good enough, where as another person might instead feel curious and wonder if their date is maybe sick or had an accident. Karma shapes our initial reactions! These reactions are triggered by the other party (intentional or unintentional) but are still created by us in our own reality.

    I believe that our “karma” can not only be rewritten, but is the core foundation to changing any aspect of our lives in a deep, authentic way. So does this mean our initial emotions are controllable? In the present moment, no: once an emotion is birthed, it’s there waiting to be examined or shoved deep inside and neglected. But in the long run, yes: with mindfulness, self-compassion and consistent effort, we can change our initial emotional reactions :)

  • Gopi Jayaraman
    • Gopi Jayaraman
    • September 21, 2016 at 12:45 pm

    1. Positive thinking
    2. Emotional Intelligence
    3. IQ

    1 + 2 – 3 = innocent, non-productive (who manages these people loses emotion control)
    1 + 2 + 3 = achiever, easy to get things done (the balanced layer)
    1 + 3 – 2 = arrogant, productive but irritates (who reports/work with these people loses emotion control)
    2 + 3 – 1 = criminal, cheats in the long run by talking nicely (who reports/work with these people loses emotion control)

  • Jonathan Randle
    • Jonathan Randle
    • September 15, 2016 at 10:57 pm

    I must admit, I always have a hard time with this idea of “no one can MAKE you feel anything.” I heard it in psychology class a long time ago, and my initial instinct (as is now) was to say, “But people DO make others feel emotions”. Perhaps I am not just getting a key element in your argument, Joel, but I still can’t see it.

    In your example, you are redirecting the narratives that trigger those emotions. But don’t those restructured narratives come AFTER the initial visceral reaction? And if so, then you are not in control of how you initially feel, but you are only in control of how you interpret and express.

    “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But words CAN hurt me (my feelings at least). Especially if you know my narratives and how I as a human react to tone, symbol, expression. When I say and hear someone else say “a person made me feel this way,” what I am saying is that they triggered an emotion or reaction within me involuntarily, or that wasn’t of my own will.

    In my mind, the best way to describe it is if you think of the outer person (physical nature) as made of transparent water. The shape of the person is formed by this water. And imagine you can see inside the person (the psyche/mind/soul), and you see the cluster of emotions (sadness, anger, happiness, nostalgia) as different colored nodes or coins or whatever. To make someone feel something, all a person would have to do is bring up a “finger,” press through the water layer, and “poke” at one of the nodes, which brings about an initial ripple reaction throughout the body. Of course the nodes can ripple to other nodes and create different shades of emotion, but that initial reaction is still there.

    For example. If someone gave me a book, I would feel excited and then happy/grateful. Or if someone cut in front of me, then my initial reaction is anger and then to say something very unpleasant to them.

    What I hear you saying, Joel, is that you either protect certain nodes or you redirect that initial ripple and assign it to another node (anger to happiness). You do what you have termed “emotional aikido”. But what I am arguing is that even if you redirect or change the narrative, someone or something still pressed that node that made you feel a certain reaction initially. And that’s something you can’t control (or at least I don’t see how you’re controlling it).

    What are your thoughts? Am I still missing a piece of your argument?

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