Emotions and Feelings
The Mindfulness Response educates us about emotions, feelings, and moods, and how they can be helpful for us. Understanding what emotions and feelings can do helps me realize that my symptoms are trying to tell me things about myself, and what I need today. Working with a team of providers keeps me in a safe place.
Awareness of My Distress
People with severe symptoms have intense, worrisome troubles that can create negative thoughts. The negative thoughts interact with emotions to influence our behaviors. This interaction can overwhelm us. The interaction creates unmanageable moods.
Understanding how quickly they form is needed to help slow reactions to emotions and feelings.
Participants who experienced past trauma and developed psychosis symptoms talked about triggers to their strong emotions. When experiencing a trigger or psychosis symptoms, negative thoughts arise, and they cause misperceptions in social situations. The use of mindfulness helped slow down the response to the trigger. The group talked about this and how participants understood that there was a choice for a different reaction.
Cultural Awareness
Participants talked openly about emotions and difficulties managing them. Families and friends encouraged them to seek help. During treatment, they noticed that they influenced others who had mental illness but had not started therapy.
NAMI (2023) explains how Whites, Multiracial, and LGBTQ+ adults lead other racial groups in seeking out treatment. Females seek treatment more than males but are lower than LGBTQ+ adults. Blacks follow the others and lower percentages of Hispanics and Asians seek treatment for mental illness. In youth under age 18, depressive disorders are the most common reason for admission to the hospital. Of adults who reported a mental illness, one-third also experienced a substance use disorder in 2021. About one in five U.S. Veterans experienced a mental illness in 2020.
One participant who was LGBTQ+ was relieved to express their feelings, and psychotic symptoms, dissociation, and voices. The participant admitted that this was the first group that talked openly and didn’t feel judged by others but felt accepted. Others validated the experience and agreed. The entire group discussed how they experienced hallucinations, and difficulties managing PTSD and psychosis symptoms when they occur together.
Understanding What Emotions Do For Us
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (n.d.) describes feelings as sentiment, chord, or passion. Emotions can inspire, initiate dreams, be creative, or bring wonder and awe. Emotions and feelings are not good or bad, they just exist. They are pieces of information.
Emotions and feelings are real, and everyone has them. Group therapy participants talked about how relatives or friends told them, “Oh, don’t feel that way.” This leads to conversations to determine whether another person can understand your perception of the emotion. One member asked how you cannot feel an emotion. It’s there. It doesn’t make sense. The group agreed that this was an awkward moment.
Emotions and feelings are related, and in some cases, researchers attempt to differentiate them, but no clear definition is accepted (Barrett, Lewis, Haviland-Jones (2016). Emotions and feelings are conscious decisions that form our expressions. After considering all the data we decide how to respond to stress or excitement. These expressions can be interpreted and expressed differently from one person to the next in the same situation. The differences can be the person’s past influences and personality. Where one person sees a party as a fun event, another sees an anxious social situation.
The group therapy participants talked about a strong emotion and were challenged to find ten more emotions underneath that strong one. This took time and reflection. Often, we have more emotions, but we don’t recognize them. With regular practice of mindfulness, we learn to identify and acknowledge all emotions and feelings. Emotions give clues to our problems and help us understand how we view the world.
The Mindfulness Response and the Brain
The Mindfulness Response teaches a person to observe, notice, and acknowledge thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations. When practiced over five weeks regularly, a person can slow down the process and decide to respond to distress differently. Mindfulness teaches us the ability to observe and to use this skill. Mindfulness helps us understand how quickly they are created. With practice, old habits can be broken. It takes weeks and months to break a habit. It also takes time to learn new actions, or how to be assertive. Not all thoughts are true since negative thoughts coming from depression or anxiety will be influenced by strong feelings.
Our brain is working all the time. It gives us information about the environment. From this rapid information comes our emotions which influence thoughts. They are sparked from brain data from the limbic system and the pre-frontal cortex. We cannot easily hide our emotions as seen in facial expressions, communication, and non-verbal communication.
The brain registers body sensations and generates emotions which release neurochemicals into the blood. This creates a fight, flight, or freeze episode for us with strong feelings. The neurochemical changes influence our moods. These triggers can be slowed down with the 10 minutes of mindfulness practice done several times weekly.
The brain makes snap judgments about everything and when anxiety or depression, shame, guilt, or anger are present, negative thoughts can arise. Our brain provides information constantly about our environment. These negative thoughts can trigger PTSD memories and create psychosis events (hallucinations, delusions, special messages, or others). Emotions are interpreted rapidly, so it’s important to understand how they can influence your thoughts.
Whether or not the distressing feelings and negative thoughts were true is a problem that group therapy members sought to comprehend. Ellis (1962, 2019) explains this with the irrational thoughts. The brain’s job is to create information about our current environment and instantly deliver that information to us. The next step is to understand that emotions can be tied to negative thoughts and PTSD triggers, and from these stronger feelings arise from this information. Understanding how this can grow into a large problem can help alleviate distress.
Understanding the Present and the Past
Understanding yourself from the past, and how you responded to a situation is part of learning and growing. Everyone can learn and grow each day. Everyone can try to learn and practice new things every day. We cannot learn and grow unless we see a need to do this. When we reach a certain level of personal understanding it tells us that we need to change.
Moods can be powerful and can last for hours or days. With depression and anxiety, moods can become sour quickly since the emotions of anxiety and depression add an extra layer to our mood when we wake up in the morning. Bad moods we get can be difficult to change and they can turn a sunny day into a cloudy one. It takes many skills to manage a mood. It is important to identify all your feelings from a bad mood. We turn to different parts of ourselves to change bad moods, which include thoughts, feelings, and actions or behaviors. Sometimes we must try to do things and even force ourselves to go somewhere to break out of the negative mood. The change might be helpful, so why not experiment and try it?
Emotions, Feelings and Moods
Emotions and feelings come quickly from the brain and can create negative thoughts that influence our actions and behaviors. These bits of information are quick reactions and create our moods. The brain works constantly to give us information about our environment. It does not mean that the thoughts or feelings are correct.
Feelings and moods can affect thoughts and take over for hours or longer. Learn to identify strong, intense emotions and feelings and write them down for individual therapy.
Try to notice the power of the mood.
Then, try to notice your feelings.
Mood that was trouble______________________________________________
Other feelings that I have identified_____________________________________
Emotions and Feelings _ Moods_________________________
Instant reaction Persistent
Momentary Enduring
Fleeting, Ephemeral Long-lasting
__________________________________________________________
The Mindfulness Response and Intense, Enduring Moods
When strong emotions, PTSD triggers, or psychosis are combined, they can create negative thoughts and strong enduring moods, and group therapy participants talk about feeling overwhelmed. Self-compassion helped them understand their emotions, feelings, and moods differently. It was used in a thought journal format and included self-compassion. It reminded them to apply the three self-compassion skills of mindfulness, self-kindness, and common humanity.
The participants were encouraged to work with an individual therapist, to call their clinic, and their support person. They were instructed to leave a message by phone. Being open and honest about symptoms is needed to provide care.
Identify Feelings
It’s important to identify all of your feelings. There may be one strong and intense feeling, but underneath it may be another ten to fifteen more feelings. All of them need to be acknowledged. They give us information about ourselves. They are clues to our well-being. We can learn from distressing emotions and feelings. We may not realize this for months or years later, but they are helpful to us.
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