Find inner balance

“I can’t even imagine that I could hit the table with my fist, yell at someone or complain about the boss’s ugly attitude, even to my own wife. This is not even a question of restraint, respect for oneself and others, although this is important. It seems to me that educated people should not behave like that. 38-year-old Maxim is sure that the ability to restrain himself and his emotions is the foundation on which any relationship should be built. On the other hand, he would like to be a little more relaxed, emotional and open with his loved ones: “When we get together with family or friends, I feel more like an observer than a participant in the holiday. It would probably be nice to get closer to people easier, talk about trifles, “let go” of yourself sometimes, although I hate this word.

The way we show emotions, tightly control them, advertise or manage them, is influenced by culture, upbringing, stereotypes. “Whether a person gets along well with their emotions usually depends on what they learned as a child,” explains existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. “It’s good when parents understand that a child has the right to any feelings, they try to notice and respect what he experiences: they rejoice together, feel sad, allow him to experience misfortunes in the way that suits him.” Children, growing up, often adopt the model of behavior of their parents (although it happens the other way around: growing up, they behave “on the contrary”). “When we allow a child to live what he feels, he develops tolerance not only for his own fears, sorrows and joys, but also for the feelings of other people,” continues the psychotherapist. “But parents often don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, they themselves are cold or emotionally closed, because their own parents were like that. As a result, the child remembers that his fear or anger causes fear and anger of parents, and tries not to give vent to feelings. And then he ceases to consider them something important and loses access to himself.

“What got into me?”

But feelings do not disappear anywhere: they begin to live their own, uncontrollable life and become the cause of unexpected actions, sudden affects. It happens that repressed (forgotten) emotions take the form of their opposite: sadness is hidden behind ostentatious joy, fear is hidden behind a flash of anger … “But the mechanisms of psychological defense do not work endlessly: at some point, true feelings break through and overwhelm us,” adds Svetlana Krivtsova . – So, a person who considered himself calm and even cold suddenly falls passionately in love with the “wrong” woman, destroys his family, makes a lot of irreparable mistakes. And the scrupulous and patronizing suddenly becomes biased and unfair … ”The repressed feelings return, and then we cease to understand who we are: under the violent pressure of emotions, our self-esteem decreases and even collapses.

Understand the language of our feelings

Our reaction to current events is also linked to our past. Whether we like it or not, memory communicates our vulnerability. That is why those who are prone to control do not like even pleasant surprises. “The difficulty is to distinguish between feelings that speak about us and those that speak about the situation,” explains the therapist. – To do this, you can ask yourself the question: what I feel is related to what is happening now or is connected with my previous experience – something was remembered, responded, got sick? By trusting our emotions, we better navigate life situations and find peace of mind more easily. “There is one special mood – the mood of the world in the soul – in which we find ourselves and understand what is happening without distortion,” says Svetlana Krivtsova. “The state of the world is something quite different from the tight control of emotions for the sake of restraint. As neuroscience studies show, different parts of the brain are working in this case compared to the situation of punishing self-control.

Emotions as a necessity

To hold back tears and emotional outbursts, to avoid getting close to people, to give up your desires … Control over emotions requires constant restrictions and rationalizations. But at some point, the schemes fail: “for some reason” the wife (husband) leaves, children become strangers, friends disappear, work that made sense is no longer happy. “Those who strive for complete control over their emotions do not realize that this is simply impossible: feelings still arise, and even if we succeed quite successfully in hiding them, their pressure does not disappear,” says Svetlana Krivtsova. “Besides, suppressing them is risky: even if emotions disappear from our consciousness, they remain both in the unconscious and in the clamps of our body.”

The price of self-control is too high: constant internal tension, lack of deep relationships with people, ignorance of oneself. “Emotions are our vital need, the key to understanding who we really are,” the psychotherapist sums up. – A life in which there is no place for experiences is perceived by us as unlived (even if it looks like a rich one) and ultimately leads to despair. That is why it is important for us to learn to accept our experiences, sensations, feelings and emotions as they are.

Read more:

• Four Steps to Peace of Mind

Kristina Kretova, 28, soloist of the Bolshoi Ballet “It took me a while to breathe life into my dance”

“While I was at the ballet academy, I tried to basically learn ballet techniques. And the parts that I then danced did not require too much emotional involvement from me – these were most often mass numbers. But I remember well how the teachers constantly told us, the students, to smile … And when I came to work in the theater, it became clear to me why: they often say about beginning ballerinas: “she dances like a student” or “she hasn’t experienced it yet.” And it’s really difficult – at the age of 18 to dance the way the party requires, the way the audience wants! I began to learn this from my teacher, who explained literally every emotional outburst to me – first in the part of Giselle (it was my first ballet), then in Swan Lake.

Now I can’t remember exactly when I managed to breathe life into my dance, but I know very well that this did not happen immediately. It seems to me that to this day I am learning not to work on stage, but to live, to dance with feelings. I approach acting very carefully, I often “rehearse” my emotions in front of a mirror, I am not at all afraid of being ugly or funny on stage. I try myself in various roles, I try to bring to the stage all the experiences that I happen to experience in life. In my opinion, it is much more important for the viewer to empathize, to experience what is happening on the stage together with the hero, than to note the impeccability of the artist’s movements. Although the better we master the technique, the more freedom we gain. Now I am working on the role of Anyuta in the ballet of the same name, and I really like that great opportunities open up before me. I will try to combine in this image everything that I get from reading Chekhov’s play, that I hear from the choreographer Vladimir Vasiliev, as well as all those emotions and experiences that are known (so far!) only to me alone.

Recorded by E.Z.