A curious aspect of emotional management is how much we mismanage our emotions due to our lack of self-awareness and misunderstanding of what they are. With our irrationalities taking the better if not the best of us, it has become more than important to pay attention to how those intangible parts of us threaten the tangible parts and things that really matter to us, but which we are incidentally and increasingly unconscious of.
Our often left unattended negative emotions lead us to terrible extremes and we do ourselves great disservice if we pretend not to know, if we live in denial of them or if we fear to venture into exploring them by paying attention.
Mismanaged negative emotion is tantamount to irrationality because we become guilty of being unable to profit from good reasoning. If negative emotion like anger is not well managed as a result of an angry person's failure to exercise restraint or self-control, such anger can get to an extreme of spewing vile words and engaging in wrongful acts that tend towards being vengeful. A negative emotion like anger is not necessarily bad in itself but if it is not controlled it can get out of hand, and lead to damaging outcomes.
Imagine the harm that envy can cause if it is acted upon. Envy is an expression of bitterness at the goodness and progress of another person. This should be condemned in its entirity. Envy is not the same as jealousy because jealousy does hold virtue. One can be jealous over the person that one loves. The Creator is jealous over His creation. But bitter jealousy tends towards hate and incites destruction. When anxiety goes unchecked, it leads to haste and in haste, there is no want of errors. Often, decisions and actions made in haste produce negative outcomes in the long run.
As we try to make this clear, let us x-ray four ideas.
Emotions and Irrationalities
When sadness is induced by the fact that someone else is doing well, then we have a case of envy on our hands. This emotion of sadness is unreasonable and thus, irrational. When this becomes concluded through action, the fruit can be physical harm done to another either directly as causing bodily harm, or indirectly at their loved ones, or even against the object of envy like property. Some spiritual school of thought would refer to this as wizardry or witchcraft. It is indeed preposterous. This is an extreme degree of irrationality. Why would one feel so sad that someone is doing well to the point of being unhappy and then sliding into a semi-depressed state? How can envy drive a person to the point of mudslinging and arson? If you are such a being, you do need urgent help.
Mortified and Unmortified Emotions
When an emotion like that of anger is not mortified, it can lead to irrationality. What is mortification? To mortify means to subjugate or subdue our body, passions, our vile desires and vain imaginations by abstinence, ascetic discipline, or self-inflicted suffering. It is an intentional and deliberate act of discipline and self-control. When passions and desires are left unchecked but allowed to run freely, they are not mortified.
There are places we should not go to, there are people we should avoid for some time, there are foods like drinks that we should not take because they make us do some things that we may regret doing. When we do some things, they trigger some emotions and get us to some almost irreversible corners where we condemn ourselves. Those emotions are there but they laid dormant until we feed or activate them based on the things that we engage in. We wake them up. The point is that we do know that we would become irrational if we do those things and yet we do because we lack the self-control to abstain from them. This is how lust becomes sin. Our mastery of self helps us to know these things and we should be able to mortify them to avoid embarrassing ourselves and others.
Emotions and Rationalities
When we have a positive emotion like happiness and appreciation, we show vivacious attitude and express gratitude towards others. We exhibit rationality. When we are aware of our irrationalities, at moments where they may tend towards the negative, we can consciously bring the negative to a check by not yielding to it. This is possible because we have developed potency against negativity. We have an antidote against chaos. It is how we bring our negative emotions under control.
As humans, we do have egos that sometimes push us towards inordinate desires and ambitions. When we recognize them and are able to stay away from them, we earn mastery over our emotions and are therefore rational beings. When we keep ourselves away from those attendant weaknesses, we earn reasoning points. When we are not able to and tilt rather to the negative, we are irrational. This makes us narcissists.
Who is a Narcissist?
A narcissist is someone who is overly self-involved and often vain and selfish. At what point is this a burden to others? Nobody abides alone. Anything that is alone may only be minimally productive; not maximally. A narcissist thinks more of self than others. The idea is one of 'my way or the high way.' This means that the ideas of others are hardly or may be of less a consideration to them. This is an extremely selfish and self-serving state that tends towards greed. It does require urgent attention.
When a person is like that and does not know it, such cannot use interdependence. People with high cognitive abilities tend towards this bend, especially when they find it difficult to show respect to their colleagues in the workplace.
The narcissists want you to believe you are wrong and that they are right even when it is the other way around. When they are wrong, they insist otherwise and would hardly let go. When you find it difficult to let go after a tiff with someone and would rather resort to ensuring that the person is brought down, you are playing the narcissist's card.
The tendency towards the self accounts for other traits like judgments and evaluations that are tainted with nepotism and tribalism. Racists are extreme narcissists. These are incurable cancers that cause chaos in our world.
Now, with anxiety, when we are anxious about the things we cannot change and control, the tendency is to tilt towards worrying. Our inability or failure to control those things may be due to our unbridled and lustful desires. The lust for something can lead one to sadness and sadness, if it goes unabated, can lead to a state of depression. Depression leads to misery both for the depressed and their close associates. People can have memory loss and other miserable conditions. When depression runs its course, it can lead to stroke or suicide as the victim loses the hope of recovery.
Humans have committed crimes because they were depressed. They got to the point of unattended negative emotions to being compulsively and addictively irrational as to taking life either of themselves or of others. Because depressed persons seek solace in drugs and alcohol, they can be pushed into criminal activities. And when the causes are investigated and discovered it is sad to find that issues like unrequited desire for the opposite sex, inability to achieve certain lustful desires, unabated envy towards others, and the like pushed them off their precipice.
Many times it is difficult to discover when people get to such extremes because they hardly talk about their aversions and secret obsessions as they are considered a stigma and shame in the society. If we can find someone to confide in and share such issues with, we can be relieved and indeed get rescued from such a perversely negative state.
The people we choose to talk to do matter a great deal because what they do with the information, who they share it with and how they manage it can either further break or make us. The world is indeed a difficult place because the minds of humans are quite steep, complex and often negatively so.
Our insecurities do lead us to such extremes that we may not be able to recover from. Resilience is a great value that can help us bounce back to reality and reckoning. Where we feel insecure in our relationships, whatever kind they are, we become estranged to the people we should draw strength from and that could amount to betrayal because we have misplaced trust, misinvested mental and emotional strengths and instead of gaining and multiplying strength through collaboration with the people we associate with or seek support from, we actually lose. The reason is that someone is not rational because they abused confidence and trust.
Often in romantic relationships between males and females, differences become irreconcilable sometimes because such relationships were engaged in for all the wrong reasons. Either parties had a different idea about what they wanted to achieve. While one wants this, the other wants that. There are secret agendas. Emotional energies are wrongly invested.
When the people we claimed we love do not requite what we called love or what we thought was love and they took advantage of us, it seems like we have been cheated. But sometimes it could be due to our unbridled negative desires. Our initial love, so called, then turns to hatred and we discover that we actually did not love the person in question. We were actually lustful and sadly the majority of the relationships that are carried on are that way. People are just in a 'situationship', an 'entanglement', while thinking they are in a relationship. Question is: Deep down in their mind and heart, did they not know or were they just having some fun while it lasted?
That is the case of a negative emotion going further south. Lust, not love, went full circle and then it exploded in their faces. If this is recurring, we may eventually have a case that may drift towards sadness, despondency and depression. Many have taken lives for this. We have heard countless stories and have this experience lived and relived.
To avoid this, we can test red flags to know how much someone wants us, to know how much someone needs us and how much they are committed to us before we invest more in them or even invest at all. When you like something, whatever it is, you invest resources to. You give your time, your energy, your money and more to it.
When you claim to love, you even do more. But, it is important not to go in hastily and then ignore the obvious signs you are seeing. You have to check with yourself always, more than you check with the other person. Do not make your emotion say what it is not saying. This affects every other kind of relationship. Emotions do not not lie, if you have been rightly informed all along.
We must invest in ourselves. We must discover who we are on the inside and intentionally develop what we found. This is the journey into self-awareness, self-development and leadership. Our maturity truly begins with knowing our emotions and mental faculties. If we do, we are able to self-regulate and play in our space with others. This should keep us sane and free from errors.
