While I originally started writing this post in January, after watching the Oscars—and witnessing the “slap heard round the world”—I figured now might be the perfect time to finish/post it…

Confession time

Growing up, I did not learn how to effectively manage my emotions. Maybe this sounds crazy to you! Or maybe, just like me, this was your experience too. As a matter of fact I wrote this post for YOU. Maybe you currently feel like you are not in control of your feelings. Guess what? It’s because…you’re not.

Managing your emotions means having access to or learning healthy emotional regulation skills. Unfortunately, if you struggle to manage your emotions, then chances are these skills are not something you learned growing up.

Now, to be clear, I don’t know if Will Smith ever learned how to regulate his emotions as a child. (And for those who believe his behavior was a form of assault, I am not saying that a lack of emotional regulation skills is ever an excuse). As a matter of fact, I personally believe that what most of us witnessed Sunday night was just the tip of a very large iceberg—there is so much more under the surface that triggered or exacerbated his response!

That being said, what I will say is that even you have the ability to act out emotionally due to never learning appropriate or healthy ways of managing our anger/emotions. So if, like me, you saw plenty of online commenters saying they could never have an outburst on that level…

When it comes to managing your emotions, chances are you were given less-than-stellar advice. See which one of these you’ve used, been encouraged to use, or were advised to do while growing up:

• Ignore the feelings

• Don’t let them bother you

• Just pray the depression/anger away

• Just let it go

• Stop being so freaking sensitive

• Fake it till you make it

• Don’t be a baby

• Men/boys don’t cry

Sound familiar?

In my family, the main messages that I received (especially implicitly) growing up was that negative emotions were bad. If my feelings were bad, then I too must be bad (#kidlogic). And of course nobody wants to be “bad”. The problem with you not learning how to manage your emotions is that you end up in one of two ways:

(1) you’re an emotional volcano (that erupts from time to time) or

(2) you become emotionally overcontrolled (and become essentially detached from your emotions).

I was unlucky enough to experience both of these extremes at various points in my life. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty and leave it at that…

Eventually, I started to feel like my emotional reactions were outside of my control. Do you ever feel that way? Maybe you notice that you have mood swings, frequently experience negative emotions you can’t manage, or feel as if your emotions have a mind of their own. Maybe your friends or loved ones have called you out for having a “bad temper,” or having “an attitude.” When you struggle to manage your emotions it can feel like you’re on a never ending, wild roller coaster ride—one you didn’t sign up for! (If you haven’t already, you may want to check out my other post on feelings here before continuing).

One of the reasons why you may feel this way is because you still haven’t learned good emotional regulation strategies.

Instead, whenever you expressed your negative emotions, one of two things happened.

One, you were made to feel as if your emotions/feelings were bad.

“You don’t have a right to be angry!”

Or two, your emotions were downplayed. What this basically means is that you were consistently sent the message that your feelings weren’t that big of a deal.

“You’re always making a mountain out of a molehill!”

For example, can you remember being upset about something and crying about it and being told, “Keep it up! I’ll give you something to really cry about”???

Or maybe when you would get upset your teacher would try to cheer you up as opposed to talking to you or trying to understand why you became upset in the first place. I can remember that as a kid I would occasionally get angry about something. My mom would then try to cheer me up.

In some cases, I would get even more angry and say, “Leave me alone! I just want to be ANGRY!” I know, I could be “dramatic” 😂. To which she would sometimes make funny faces to try to get me to laugh. Now in many cases, the funny faces worked; but then I would be left with conflicting feelings as I was still very much angry and even felt more frustrated by the fact that she had gotten me to laugh.

While my mother’s (and others’) intentions may have been good, the message I received was that my “negative feelings are unacceptable and something to get rid of.”

Religion and Cultural influences

If you grew up in certain religious or cultural environments, you may have been sent the message that you were a poor representation of your religion/culture due to your negative emotions.

“If you were spiritually mature you would never have felt that way.”

“People in our culture never get angry in public; you’ve made the entire family look bad. What’s the matter with you?”

In other words, the overwhelming message is it is not okay to feel angry. It is not okay to feel unhappy. It is not okay to feel worried. It is not okay to feel depressed.

Today, I’m here to remind you that this is absolutely NOT TRUE.

Feelings are neither good nor bad—they’re neutral. Feelings provide you with useful information about what is going on internally and externally. This is why it is perfectly okay and normal to occasionally feel bad, sad, angry, upset, furious, enraged, disappointed, depressed, anxious, confused, dejected and more. It is even healthy to acknowledge that your feelings are valid, even when they don’t always make sense to you.

In order to learn how to manage your feelings you have to learn to first accept them—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Your positive and negative feelings make up a huge part of your experience of the world and how you perceive and interact with the rest of the world. In order to build healthy relationships you have to learn to accept all of your feelings and feel your feelings (which means building up your distress tolerance skills) before you will ever be able to manage and regulate your feelings. You also have to remember that feelings change. Once you start doing that, you will be in a much better place to manage your emotions in a healthy and effective way.

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