#13: 10 Common Myths About Emotions
Today Marielle and Ed discuss the 10 most common myths about emotions. These myths can come from the culture around us and from the families we were raised in. Asking yourself where you learned some of these myths may be helpful in debunking them. Some myths have to do with a fear of being out of control with emotions and other myths are more about equating emotions with the truth of who you are. Listen in for an in-depth look at 10 common myths about emotions!
Show Highlights:
Myth 1: Having strong emotions means I am out of control.
- Feeling the emotion and the behavior get conflated
- It can feel like strong emotion automatically equals out of control behavior
- Intense emotion can be very physical
- Taking action on our strong emotion makes it feel out of control
Myth 2: If I start crying, I’m never gonna stop.
- We always start crying, often sooner than we think
- Under all circumstances, we do eventually stop crying
Myth 3: I need to push down my anger or it will become dangerous.
- Anger also has a life-span, if we let it move through us it will dissipate
- We can feel angry and not act on it in a dangerous way
- We have a lot of power over how to handle our own anger
Myth 4: If I am feeling very emotional, I must do something to change it.
- Emotions give us information
- We don’t necessarily need to change emotions
Myth 5: Reason is better than emotion.
- Or it’s always better to be rational than emotional
- Sometimes it sounds appealing to not have emotions
- Emotions connect us to others
Myth 6: Emotions can just happen for no reason.
- Emotions are a response to something even if we don’t know what that is
- If you’re having a strong emotional response, it’s a signal to do a little exploring
Myth 7: I am my emotions.
- We are so much more than our emotions
- It’s not uncommon to feel more than one emotion at once
- If you are basing your identity on your emotions, it will be hard to have a stable sense of self
Myth 8: It’s inauthentic to try to change or question my emotions.
- Sometimes it’s not effective to feel or act on an emotion
- Sometimes our emotions are not aligned with our goals or values so the most authentic thing to do is to work to change
- Our emotions don’t always fit the facts
Myth 9: My emotions speak the absolute truth.
- Sometimes our strong emotions are based on interpretations or assumptions rather than actual facts
- Just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s true
Myth 10: I need to be very emotional to be creative.
- Emotions help support creativity but we don’t have to be overwhelmed by emotions to be creative
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#13: 10 Common Myths About Emotions Transcript
Marielle Berg
Hello and welcome to The Skillful Podcast, where we explore DBT and RO-DBT skills to help you reduce emotional suffering, improve your relationships, and become more present in your life. I’m your host, Marielle Berg, a psychotherapist at the Bay Area DBT and Couples Counseling Center.
Marielle Berg
So welcome back, Ed.
Ed Fowler
Thank you.
Marielle Berg
I am really excited for today, because we’re going to be unpacking 10 common myths about emotions. And we wanted to talk about this today, because so often, difficulties in managing emotions are related to these common myths that a lot of folks believe or are raised with.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, I think that that we don’t tend to, like have a lot of discussion about what emotions are, what their purpose is, what how to deal with them. And so it’s very easy, especially starting as children to develop ideas about emotions that are never discussed or challenged. And sometimes those ideas are actually myths that aren’t so accurate. And it’s helpful to think them through a little bit.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And I think that unless they’re named, oftentimes people don’t know, and myself included, that we’re believing these things. And so it’s helpful to sort of spell them out and check in with ourselves to be like, oh, how much do I believe this is true? Where did I learn this?
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
Sometimes these things are taught really explicitly in families. Like it’s not okay to be emotional in public, or it’s always better to stuff down your emotions, and sometimes it’s just modeled for us. We just pick it up.
Ed Fowler
Yeah.
Marielle Berg
So let’s delve in right away with our first myth, which is: Having strong emotions means I’m out of control.
Marielle Berg
This is such a common one, where strong emotions are equated with loss of control. So the truth about this is that all of us can feel deeply and not be out of control. And the out of control part comes, not from the emotion or feeling itself, but from actions that come with the emotions. And oftentimes people conflate the two, because they feel something really strongly, and then it’s quickly followed by some kind of impulsive or perhaps self destructive behavior, or an addictive kind of behavior. And then the two things gets sort of coupled. I have a strong emotion, automatically I’m out of control.
Ed Fowler
And I think that that comes because if we have strong emotions, when we’re young, and start to cope with them with ways that don’t really work and feel out of control, we’re just going to keep practicing that until we learn something new. And so it can seem that there is a connection there, strong emotions equal whatever the behavior is, after the emotion. And one of the things I appreciate about DBT is being able to separate those, that the emotion is one thing, that what we do is a totally different thing. And we have more ability to manage what we do, if we’re thoughtful about it.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And with that thoughtfulness, it allows us to let the strong emotion be there, which can be quite physical. Oftentimes, strong emotions mean we can all have a physical correlate. So intense anger can be felt, you know, in our, in our limbs, in our jaws, maybe behind the eyes, or our heart might, our heart rate may go up, we might find ourselves breathing more shallowly. So it can be very physical. But that part is not out of control. It may feel super intense, but it’s as we were saying a moment ago, it’s the action, it’s the taking action on the emotion that leads to the out of control.
Ed Fowler
So that ability to feel emotions and let them be there before acting is so valuable, and like, takes so much practice to to get there.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and it’s it’s a practice and part of being with discomfort, because it’s uncomfortable. And trusting that the emotion I mean, this is not a myth. I think we’re gonna have time to talk about today, but the emotion’s not going to kill us and we don’t have to act on it.
Ed Fowler
Right. Oh, yeah, that’s a big one.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. Do you want to have us move on the second myth?
Ed Fowler
So then a second myth would be: If I start crying, I will never stop.
Ed Fowler
Which kind of is related to that idea that emotions followed by actions are automatic. So for instance, if we’ve had the experience of feeling deep sadness, and just crying and crying, then we can feel like yeah, I’ll never stop crying. I think, more often, if we really pay attention, if we have deep sadness, or sometimes for people, if they feel angry, they’ll start crying. And it feels like it goes on forever, they, we, never stop. And the reality is, we always stop crying. At some point, we stop crying, right?
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
And oftentimes sooner than we think, then we necessarily notice that we’ve stopped, we’ve moved on to another emotion. And so this is like a total myth, that if I have an emotion, or if I start crying, I’ll never stop when it’s, you know, we stop eventually, under all circumstances, right? And so being able to remind ourselves that whatever emotion I’m feeling right now, if it’s making me cry, or if it’s making me angry, if it’s really filling me with all sorts of physical sensations, this will pass. This will pass. And DBT gives us lots of things to do while we wait for it to pass. I think the starting point is, is acknowledging I will not feel this forever.
Marielle Berg
Yes, recognizing that all emotions sort of have their lifespan. And they, they pass, they may come back, but they do pass through us. And I feel like I’ve heard the or some variation of if I start crying, I will never stop so many times. If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.
Ed Fowler
And again, I think that like, I’ve certainly felt that like, oh my god, if I if I let myself feel sad, I’ll get stuck in it. And I’ll never get out of it. Right? If I let myself feel angry, I won’t be able to get out of it. And I’ll be stuck. And I think that comes from not knowing what to do if we’re feeling strong emotions. And so yeah, we do feel stuck, because we don’t know what to do.
Marielle Berg
Yes.
Ed Fowler
For me now, knowing whatever emotion I have will pass, I still can get into that thinking of like, oh my gosh, if I let myself start crying, I’ll never stop. But I’m much quicker to be able to be like no, like, if I let myself cry, it will come and go.
Marielle Berg
Yes.
Ed Fowler
Crying actually will help the crying to stop.
Marielle Berg
Absolutely, it will help the crying to move through. I think so often, when people say if I start crying, it will never stop. They’re really talking about this fear of their own grief or sadness. And like, if I take the lid off this, it will just overflow and there’s no end to it. And it can feel like that. And certainly grief can sometimes feel like that. But it gets compounded by trying to push it down. And then it’s, you know, when we try to repress something, it doesn’t go away, it just sort of builds in the intensity.
Marielle Berg
And so related to this, or with the, when people believe that if I start crying, I will never stop that can lead to a whole host of ways of avoiding grief, and sadness, all the different, functional and not so functional ways we might try to avoid feelings. And we could say this probably for all our emotions, for all the way from, you know, overworking or oversleeping to you know, zoning out in front of the computer. These are all ways that we can sort of numb ourselves to these intense emotions.
Marielle Berg
And this is related, I’ll go into the next one. Since I’m talking about ways to numb ourselves, which certainly we can all do with grief and sadness. But another one where there can be a fear that it will, the emotion will be too much is our next myth, which is: I need to push down my anger or it will become dangerous.
Marielle Berg
Similar to the myth we were talking about a moment ago with sadness, anger also has a lifespan. It builds and it can feel very intense in the body in particular, there can be a lot of energy there. But if we let it move through us, it will dissipate. We can do things. Like think, thinking like if we’re angry at a coworker. And so we can feel really intense anger, maybe we want to lash out, but we we choose not to we let the anger ride through us. And then we’re feeling a little better. And then we start replaying that conversation with our coworker in our mind, the anger comes back up again. So there are ways that we can reactivate the emotion. But the anger in and of itself isn’t dangerous.
Ed Fowler
Right. I think that’s again, the idea that whatever the behavior is that follows an emotion, is, is completely tied to the emotion itself is such a huge myth, right? So we can feel angry and not act on it in a dangerous way. That’s possible, right? And if we’ve had experiences of being really angry and getting out of control in a way that was hurtful to ourselves or to other people, then it makes sense that we’d be afraid of that.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
I think when we can notice the feeling, notice the emotion, and take a step back and just let it be and choose how we want to respond, choose what we do, then we can have less fear that our emotions will be overwhelming or dangerous.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, I think what you said had a moment ago was, like we could say over and over and really needs to be highlighted. I can’t remember exactly how you said it. But you can be angry, and have it not lead to a destructive action. Because for so many people, because they’ve had the experience of being angry themselves, and lashing out in some way, or being on the receiving end of someone else’s anger, especially a parent who was angry while the person was young, anger can be coupled with really scary behaviors.
Ed Fowler
Right, right. And again, I think that myths are often the extremes. And there’s some truth, anger can be dangerous. And I think many of us have had the experience of having someone be angry in a way that was threatening or dangerous to us. We’ve had the experience of having our anger overwhelm us in a way that was dangerous, right? But it’s not always, it’s not every time. And certainly we have a lot of power over how we handle our own anger. We just need to know what our options are. When we don’t know options, then yeah, it is overwhelming. But when we, when we know what we might do when we notice the anger, then it doesn’t have to become overwhelming or dangerous.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And with anger, I also like to think about, because this isn’t talked about very often, that there’s something to be learned from our anger, if we can be with it and not have us not have it lead us to complete overwhelm, or to acting out in ways that were going to lead to regret. There’s something our anger often is trying to tell us, maybe a boundary has been crossed, or there’s some action that we need to take.
Ed Fowler
We’re gonna get into this as we go along. But you know, emotions give us important valuable information that we can’t get in other ways. And so if I’m feeling angry, something has happened. And I need to kind of look at what that is.
Marielle Berg
Yes, yeah.
Ed Fowler
So our fourth myth about emotions is: If I am feeling very emotional, I must do something to change it.
Ed Fowler
And I think it comes back to the idea that if I’m feeling really strong emotions, they’re going to overwhelm me. I need to make them go away. I have to do something to make this emotion go away. And if we don’t know what to do when we’re feeling different emotions, if I’m feeling really intense guilt, or if I’m feeling really intense anger, or sadness, whatever it might be, if I don’t know what to do to deal with it, then yeah, I’m going to want to change it and make this emotion go away. When the reality is that again, emotions are telling us something.
Ed Fowler
So sitting with it, and trying to understand, what is this emotion telling me? What kind of information is it giving me for what to do next? Then we don’t necessarily need to change the emotion, right? But if we don’t, if it’s just like, Oh, my God, I feel so guilty, this feels awful. Let me make this go away, let me change this, I have to do something that changes right now. That’s where we can make the emotion kind of get stuck, or do like, take some action that then we regret. So we felt guilty, and then we, you know, use some kind of compulsive behavior to change it. But then we felt ashamed of doing that. So we’re just running away from those emotions. So you know, with all of these myths, being able, having the capacity to sit with it, and learn from it and consciously choose our actions is very different than just doing anything we have to do to avoid the emotion.
Marielle Berg
Yes, as we’re talking about this myth, I’m thinking about a rubber band and how it can expand. And that when we’re trying to learn to expand our emotional capacity, it’s a similar kind of thing, where we have more depth or stretch, I don’t know what word I want to use with within this, than we often realize, to hold strong emotion. And not necessarily to rush to change it or try to fix it. But to let it live inside until we figure out if, or you know, figure out what we want to do, if anything, because sometimes there isn’t something to do around it.
Marielle Berg
And I think the Mindfulness skills that we teach in DBT can be really helpful for being with some of the strong emotion. So the Observe and the Describe helps us sort of take a step back and just name what we’re feeling, without that urgency to make it go away or change it immediately.
Marielle Berg
And that leads us to our fifth myth, which is: Reason is better than emotion. Or another way of saying this is, it’s always better to be rational than emotional.
Marielle Berg
So the truth is, we really need our emotions. They can make us react quickly in the face of danger. They make us reach out to those in need, and they motivate us to form intimate relationships. So some of that, even though we’re talking about the more impulsive behaviors that come with strong emotions, some of that is really helpful.
Marielle Berg
If we see a baby crying, left alone on a street corner, we’re probably going to rush up to it, and try to get help for that baby. So or any other kind of dangerous things, if we see a child, you know, in a crosswalk of a street, we’re going to try to push them out of, you know, danger’s way. So there are things about our emotions, and being able to react quickly that we absolutely need for our own survival and for our survival as a species. And if we didn’t have emotions, then we wouldn’t form intimate relationships. So if people are only living in their rational minds, or put a high premium on rationality, and being reasonable, it’s really difficult to form intimacy with others.
Ed Fowler
And when we talk about these myths in group, like, I get the idea that like, oh my gosh, I would love to just not be emotional at all, just be reasonable all the time. Because, you know, when we talk about the, you know, Reasonable Mind versus Emotion Mind when we are looking at our Wise Mind concept. Reasonable Mind is very cool. It’s factual, right? And, and Emotion Mind is hot, and, and impassioned. And so when emotions are strong, it can feel to us like, oh, my gosh, reason is so much better. Why can’t I always just be factual and cool, right? The reality is, we need both. They’re –
Marielle Berg
Because it’s boring.
Ed Fowler
I mean, again, in the moment –
Marielle Berg
Judgment.
Ed Fowler
That’s a judgment, yeah. In the moment, it sounds great. But we would we would be sobored, right? If it’s just like, oh, let me reasonably think about whether I want to eat this thing or not, right. There’s like, a certain amount of being able to, like, use our emotions to figure out what to do.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
And there are extreme examples, like if you know, like, a car is coming at us, and the emotion to run, you know, just kind of fills us, and we’re, our fear is like, so intense and we run, then we’re going to avoid getting hit by that car, right? We’re not going to be able to sit there and reasonably think of, that car seems to be going very fast. I wonder what I should do, right? And so in those extremes, emotions are life saving in a way. But in any circumstance, emotions just are. Like, we’re, we’re born with emotions, we have emotions, being able to understand them, being able to notice them, recognize them, and have a sense of what to do to respond to them, makes emotions less scary. And therefore we don’t feel like oh, I don’t want these emotions at all. I just want to be reasonable all the time.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, I think about how, and so many folks when they come into our group, and I totally get it, the when we talk about Reasonable Mind versus Emotion Mind and Wise Mind. There’s people think, oh, the solution is to just be in Reasonable Mind all the time. Because there’s a way that the pendulum has swung too far to one side. So they might be too much in Emotion Mind and that it’s hard to live that way. And it causes a lot of problems. So like, oh, I want to swing the other way. And being reasonable only all the time. But as we just talked about that we can’t, and we we need, we need emotions, and we would not connect to other people, we would not have relationships if we didn’t have emotions.
Ed Fowler
Right, right. Again, sometimes that sounds really great.
Marielle Berg
Let’s not have any emotions.
Ed Fowler
If our relationships are feeling like overwhelming in some way. It’s like, Yeah, let’s not have emotions. You know, again, we would be so bored. And that’s not reality. So.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and I think and lonely.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
So another myth, the sixth myth that we want to talk about today is that: Emotions can just happen for no reason.
Ed Fowler
And this goes back to the idea that emotions are just a thing that happens, that becomes overwhelming. And there’s nothing we can do about. And the reality is that emotions are always a response to something. We are built as human beings with emotions, to have the capacity to respond to things that goes beyond our reasonable abilities. And so being able to recognize I’m having a really strong emotion, it seems to be coming out of nowhere. Well, it’s not coming out of nowhere.
Ed Fowler
This emotion is a response to something. What is it that I’m responding to? So sometimes we can feel really angry and not know why. And it’s because we had like a really fleeting thought about something where our limits were crossed, and we just kind of briefly remembered it and got angry out of nowhere, right, it seems, and it’s like, oh, no, there is something that happened that is making me angry.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, I think what you’re talking about is the way memories and associations, particularly from the past, like can happen outside of conscious awareness or even in the present, with leading to a sense that feelings are happening for no reason. Because we don’t know what happened. We’re not usually consciously aware of what got set off.
Ed Fowler
Right. And with, for instance, sometimes we have like really strong emotional responses that do seem to come out of nowhere. And sometimes that’s because there’s something traumatic that’s been triggered, right. And trauma is stored in our brains in a way that isn’t always connected to time and place. And so sometimes really powerful emotions that seem out of nowhere may be a response to some kind of trauma. Often, it’s just like, our mind is moving more quickly. And we’re not noticing the connections, they’re always if we’re feeling a strong emotion, something triggered it.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
It’s a response to something and taking that step back to notice, what is this emotion? What am I feeling? Can I trace what I’m, I’m responding to? And if I can’t, then this means this is something outside of my conscious mind. And I may need a little help with this, with figuring out what’s going on here.
Marielle Berg
Absolutely. And I want to give an example here, I know, when I was younger, I would often feel the emotion of sadness or loss come up as the weather turned warmer, as we were approaching summer. And I think for a long time, I thought, Oh, I just summer makes me kind of sad or depressed. And it took me a while to realize that it was the end of the school year and the changes in the transition that would come with that every year that I was experiencing a sense of loss. And so I would sort of equate warm weather with sadness, when actually, the sadness was coming from the ending of a school year and transitioning into something new. Of course, I didn’t know all this when I was younger. But reflecting back, I can see the connection there.
Ed Fowler
Right. And so as adults, we can recognize, if I’m having a strong emotional response, and I’m not sure what it is, I need to do a little exploring, rather than believing this myth that emotions just happen for no reason, and then we’re missing something. And that emotion is probably going to keep coming back. And so we want to be a little bit more curious about it.
Marielle Berg
Unless in my case, you move across the country to a place like the San Francisco Bay area where there is no summer, so now I don’t have to feel them anymore. Solved that problem.
Ed Fowler
I guess that is another possibility. Across the country, across the world.
Marielle Berg
That’s one of the main skills we actually teach. Just just leave.
Ed Fowler
Just move.
Marielle Berg
Right?
Ed Fowler
When all else fails.
Marielle Berg
So the next one, our emotion myth number seven. Let me back up because the first six emotional myths that we just talked about have a lot to do with control or fear of being out of control around emotions. So I just want to recap what they were.
Marielle Berg
So the first one was having strong emotions means I’m out of control. Two, if I start crying, I will never stop. Three, I need to push down my anger or it will become dangerous. Four, if I’m feeling very emotional, I must do something to change it. Five, reason is better than emotion, or another way of saying this, it’s always better to be rational than emotional. And the last one we talked about, number six, emotions can happen for no reason.
Marielle Berg
And then the next few we’re going to talk about or they have a little bit of a different flavor, these myths are more about equating emotions with the truth of who you are. So conflating emotions and your identity.
Marielle Berg
So number seven, related to this is: I am my emotions.
Marielle Berg
And the truth is, each of us is so much more than our emotions, even if we’re really emotional, or highly sensitive people. And because our emotions are constantly in flux, it’s really hard to have a stable sense of self when we attach our identity to our emotions, because they’re always changing. And it’s not uncommon to feel more than one emotion at once. So you can be angry and sad at the same time over the same thing. And if you are hinging your identity on your emotions, and that’s the myth of I am my emotions, that unstable sense of self is really going to trip you up at times.
Ed Fowler
I think that when for those of us who who do have strong emotions and have always had maybe stronger emotions than others, we can develop a sense that like being a very highly emotional person is my identity. This is who I am and and then to say like if I, I’m just an angry person, or I’m, I’m just a very depressed, sad person, right? And the reality is that, when we hold that idea, we are really missing a lot of our lives and a lot of who we are, all the different aspects of our identity, and focusing on one thing to the exclusion of others.
Marielle Berg
Yes.
Ed Fowler
Maybe focusing on one emotion, anger to the exclusion of all the other emotions we feel strongly, or the fact that we have a lot of strong emotions, and saying, that’s who I am when there’s so many more aspects to ourselves. So being able to recognize emotions are part of who we are, rather than just conflating it all together and ignoring other important parts of our identity.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, well said, thank you.
Ed Fowler
And the eighth myth that we wanted to talk about today is the idea that” it’s inauthentic to try to change or question my emotions.
Ed Fowler
And so we we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how emotions are triggered by something, they give us information, it’s usually helpful to just notice the emotion and let it be rather than try to push it away, or change it. And of course, in DBT, we have a whole skill called the Opposite Action, around changing our emotional response. And I so with DBT, the beauty of it is that everything fits, like. So we can put a lot of emphasis on don’t try to change your emotions, just let them be, and then say, or try to change your emotions.
Ed Fowler
So when we get into talking about Opposite Action, and noticing if I’m having a strong emotion that maybe isn’t really tied to what’s going on in the moment. So I’m feeling really angry, but there’s, it’s about something from a long time ago, and it’s not about the present, acting on that anger is probably not going to be effective for us. So we might want to do the opposite, do something different, right? So maybe laugh or joke, as a way to not just go with an emotion that maybe isn’t going to be helpful to us.
Ed Fowler
And when we get into this idea of maybe do something different. People often say that feels inauthentic, it feels fake. To try to be happy when I’m feeling really sad, or to try to be joking when I’m really, really angry. And in DBT, where what we’re really always looking for is what’s effective? What’s going to get us where we want to go, what’s going to keep us moving in the direction we’re trying to go in our lives? So if every time I feel angry, I act on that anger, and sometimes I’m angry about stuff from the distant past and not the present, so I’m yelling at somebody at work, when really, I’m angry about stuff that happened when I was in school 20 years ago, right? That’s not going to be effective.
Ed Fowler
Sometimes it’s valuable to notice our emotions. And also notice, where’s this emotion coming from? If this emotion is not coming from the present, or if I don’t really know where this emotion is coming from, but it’s not probably going to be effective to express it right now. Changing it is the most authentic thing we can do.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
To do something different is actually really authentic. Because it’s, it’s, it’s saying, this emotion maybe doesn’t fit in the moment. And I want to do something that’s going to be effective.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And the emotion we might feel in the moment doesn’t necessarily fit our goals and our values. So if we are really scared to go on a job interview, if you feel it’s inauthentic to change your emotion, maybe you’re not going to show up for that interview, but you have bills to pay. And in that case, your best bet is to try to work on changing, your emotion, reducing your fear ,so you can show up and achieve your goals.
Marielle Berg
And I think that people who struggle with or folks who really believe that it’s wrong or inauthentic to change their emotions can buy into the myth we talked about a moment ago, number seven, which is I am my emotions. Because if you are your emotions, if that is the truth of who you are, then of course, it’s going to be inauthentic to try to change your emotions, because you feel like you’re going against your deepest essence. And so we are really trying to uncouple that, or challenged that idea that our emotions are saying the truth of who we are, and that they’re always to be trusted.
Marielle Berg
Right.
Marielle Berg
Because as you said also that in DBT it’s sort of the both and. So yes, certainly many times there are things about our emotions to listen to, and pay attention to, there can be wisdom there. And other times there just isn’t and trying to change your emotions is much more effective.
Marielle Berg
For example, I have a fear of driving up hills
Ed Fowler
Okay.
Marielle Berg
and so, and, I Yes, I do, so live, I live in San Francisco
Ed Fowler
Wrong city.
Marielle Berg
It creates a huge problem. So if I thought, well, I am my emotions, so I’m really scared to drive up the hills. So I’m just not going to which I have tried. It creates a lot of problems.
Ed Fowler
Imagine you driving all over the Bay Area trying to avoid hills to get from point A to point B.
Marielle Berg
I have tried that. And I have a friend who is scared of driving through tunnels, which thankfully, there’s not as many tunnels, right, there are a few. And so you know, if we’re gonna go with it’s wrong or inauthentic to try to change those fears or phobias, both myself and my friend, it’s going to be super hard to get places, right? Well, that would be an example of a time when it’s actually much more authentic to work on changing the emotion, because it’s more aligned with how I want to live.
Ed Fowler
Right. And that’s an example of where, you know, emotions don’t always fit the facts of the situation, right? And they’re giving us information, right? And so sometimes we sit with the emotion, sometimes we feel the emotion and let it pass. Sometimes we act on that emotion, and forcefully speak to someone to kind of express that anger. And sometimes we change the emotion, and do something that’s going to be more effective. So that when it comes to emotions, there isn’t an always or never. It’s really about being thoughtful in our approach to the emotions.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and flexible.
Ed Fowler
Yeah.
Marielle Berg
So myth number nine moving on, is again, these are all kind of different nuances. I am my emotions, which was number seven. Number eight, was it’s inauthentic to try to change or question, my emotion.
Marielle Berg
Number nine is something we’ve already talked about, but: My emotions speak the absolute truth. My emotions are the end all be all of what is true.
Marielle Berg
Sometimes strong emotions are based on our interpretations of events, rather than the event itself, which is exactly what we were talking about a moment ago. My interpretation of driving over the hills is that somehow gravity is going to suck me back down. It’s nonsensical, certainly. So, so but here, I would say that my strong emotion or my fear is not based on facts of the, of what’s actually happening. It’s based on an interpretation or assumption. And this is a way that our emotions don’t always speak the absolute truth. And so especially if you’re very sensitive, or you’re highly emotional, it can be really hard to challenge this idea that just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s true.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, I think and that’s what we look at when we’re talking about emotions, and DBT is, you know, does this emotion fit the facts of the situation? Because sometimes it doesn’t. And our skill of Nonjudgmentalness when it comes to Mindfulness reminds us that we often have interpretations, assumptions, judgments, about situations that are our own creation, it isn’t the situation itself. It isn’t the person itself. It isn’t the emotion itself.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
But it’s our interpretation of that. And if my interpretation is based on faulty logic, then it is not going to give me effective options.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And we’ll talk about in a future episode, we’ve already mentioned Opposite Action, but the skill that precedes Opposite Action is Check the Facts. So what we’re discussing here is really checking the facts. Because believing that our emotions speak the absolute truth is assuming that our emotions are reflecting what is actually happening. And it’s not always.
Ed Fowler
Right, right. And then our 10th and final myth that we wanted to talk about today is: I need to be very emotional to be creative.
Ed Fowler
Oftentimes, people who are naturally creative, find that that comes from their ability to express strong emotion. And I think it’s an extreme statement to say that being creative requires being very emotional, having strong emotions, maybe having kind of out of control or overwhelming emotions. There are plenty of people who are extremely creative, that have strong emotions that they manage. They’re not emotionally all over the place. And so I think that, you know, in DBT, we always want to be careful of the extremes. So I need to be very emotional to be creative is kind of an extreme statement. Sure, emotions help creativity. But we don’t need to be really emotional. We don’t need to be overwhelmed with emotion in order to be creative.
Marielle Berg
And as a matter of fact, even though strong emotion can be great fodder for creative material, can really be generative, if we don’t have a reasonable or rational mind on board, that song is never going to get written, that painting will never get done. You’ll never write that short story on emotions alone.
Ed Fowler
Right, right. Yeah, I definitely have, you know, worked with people who have like lots of creative ideas that come from an experience of strong emotions. And their, their struggle is they have to sit down and somehow express that they have to get it on paper, they have to put something together, they have to meet with people in order to get that that creative idea out there. And so we do need that balance in order to let our creativity flow.
Marielle Berg
And I think that this last myth around needing to be very emotional to be creative, can fuel self destructive behavior in creative folks. So reaching for substances or being more chaotic. And the the, you know, under the premise that that is the basis of our creative life. And it’s, as we discussed, you know, it’s, it doesn’t help with the carry through, and it’s certainly not sustainable. It really burns people out.
Ed Fowler
Right. So with all of these, you know, we’re always looking for balance. That we need to strike a balance in that if we’re in some sort of extreme in our thinking, or in our actions we want to notice that and come back to the middle.
Marielle Berg
Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for being here with me again today Ed, to challenge some of these common emotional myths.
Ed Fowler
Yep. Thank you.
Marielle Berg
Thanks for listening to today’s episode. To learn more, or if you’re in the Bay Area and want to get started with therapy, you can find us online at bayareadbtcc.com. That’s bayareadbtcc.com.