Understanding and Managing Emotional Truths

We all have positive and negative emotional truths that need to be managed. Many people struggle with managing negative emotional truths. The work of managing negative emotional truths begins with acknowledging that you have a negative emotional truth, rather than attacking it. By not attacking it, you can find out how that negative truth was formed. We practiced that a bit a few weeks ago by examining how our self-worth formed. Giving ourselves the freedom to look at and investigate the root of where and how our emotional truth was formed allows us to look at our emotions with our objective mind. Looking at our emotional truths through the lens of our objective mind helps us to pinpoint the root of any issue we’re struggling with. I am not saying that looking at things rationally will magically fix everything; that is simply untrue. Rather, what I am saying is that the process begins by looking at things objectively, which allows us to understand our emotional truths.

Once we understand our emotional truths, it is helpful to look at them objectively and ask ourselves why we believe them. It is very rare for the root of our unhappiness to be a rational thought. Most people find that their unhappiness is fully grounded in negative emotions and the belief that they are unreliable and not worthy of trust. The work that moves us away from self-loathing, anxiety, and depression is learning to trust ourselves. When we trust ourselves, bad things are very temporary because we know we will get through them. Finding the root of negative emotions allows us to look at the inciting incident that created that emotional truth and assess whether that incident was accurately understood. Most emotional truths are created in childhood, which means they are rarely accurate. As we discussed a few weeks back, these childhood beliefs and negative emotional truths are at the root of negative self-talk that undermines our wellbeing, sense of self, and ability to trust ourselves.
The reason I have revisited this is because it bears repeating. Negative emotional truths should not define us. These negative truths need to be inspected and challenged. By building a habit of reflecting on our emotional states and challenging negative emotions, we can reclaim and reshape our truth. If the journey of introspection leads us to the conclusion that our negative emotional truth is correct, we can begin to take the steps to change that.

Change begins with a decision to do so. It is important that we understand how our mind works and investigate our mental process so that we can keep the things that are working for us and change the things that are not. One truth about you is that you desire to improve your life, trust yourself, and have more good days than bad. How I know this is that you have read this blog post, and the only reason for doing so is because you are seeking. Wherever you are at in your journey, I can say with 100% certainty that it is not your forever. You’ve already started the good work of self-evaluation and learning to trust yourself. I hope this post has given you some tools to continue the work and get to a place of trusting yourself and having more good days than bad.

Posted on Tuesday: 21 February, 2023