Yes — because admitting to yourself that you feel means getting closer to yourself, says existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. No, argues psychiatrist Francois Lelor: if there is trouble at work, it is useless to beat a doll with the face of a boss at home. Let’s hear both opinions.
Yes
“Paying attention to your emotions, allowing yourself to experience them is important, first of all, because it is emotions that are responsible for the perception of the vital, essential for us. What we feel now and what this means for our vitality — life force — these are the questions that our feelings give an answer to.
In addition, they are closely related to our body, since they originate there. Have you noticed how differently we treat what is happening before the holidays and after it? How unemotional is a sick person? When the vital forces run out, the problem of the release of emotions does not arise: we simply have nothing to throw out, there are only a few drops at the bottom.
But in order not to be captured by apathy, it is important to learn to pay attention even to fleeting feelings, not to dismiss them. And the main thing is to tell about them not to someone, but first of all to yourself: to analyze where they come from and what they serve for.
When you hear your sadness, you will feel one of the rarest human pleasures — closeness to yourself.
Returning home later than usual, complain about fatigue, say: how sad that work still takes so much strength and energy; what a pity that today you can no longer do other things. Be sad, let the feelings be, express them — for yourself.
When you hear your sadness, you will feel one of the rarest human pleasures — closeness to yourself. In this warm and quiet state, aggression, exactingness, resentment go away, as if our spiritual “computer” is rebooting. When we habitually hold back feelings, we say to ourselves: “Stop: men don’t cry!”, “I’m strong, I can stand it!”, they will definitely manifest themselves (later) as an unexpected affect, resentment out of the blue.
But what if a person from birth tends to get stuck on negative emotions? Long walks and sports help him emotionally relieve himself. He learns the art of living in his body, for example, coming to the gym in the evenings, adding loads under any stress. Does he express his feelings? No, but he takes them into account, treats them well and allows himself to be as he is … although, perhaps, he would not wish such an inheritance to anyone else.
NO
“You feel that you are literally exhausted by your experiences. Perhaps you are even thinking about going to a psychotherapy group, where you are invited to pour out (without hiding) your rage and anger, scream loudly and hit the pillow hard (as far as possible for you), or sob, remembering old grievances. In other words, make an effort to release emotional tension with the support of other participants in the meeting.
The idea of emotions as something superfluous that must be disposed of decisively dominated psychology for a long time. But many studies show that «emotional venting» is not so positive.1.
Instead of expressing feelings by beating a pillow, we should learn to express them at the moment when we experience them.
In the course of the experiments, it turned out that after we blow off steam — slam the door, scream, give free rein to our anger — we feel even more rage, become more irritable, our blood pressure rises, unlike those who do relaxing exercises. or just waiting for the anger to subside by itself.
The offer to cry, recalling a sad event, leads to the same result: a person becomes even sadder and feels more upset than someone who was simply asked to talk about the incident, without being asked to bring himself to tears.
Instead of expressing feelings by beating a pillow, we should learn to express them at the moment when we experience them and take care that our emotions are not offensive to others. In this way, we will simultaneously resolve, for example, the conflict that has arisen and avoid further bouts of anger.
So, being able to express emotions does not mean throwing them out after a while, on the contrary, it is the ability to express them at the moment when they flood, taking into account the situation and personality traits of the interlocutors. And it is useless to restrain them, because we need emotions, first of all, in order to establish communication and find our place among people.”
1 E. Kennedy-Moore, J. Watson Expressing Emotion. Guilford Press, 1999; Anger, Aggression, and Interventions for Interpersonal Violence. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.