Emotions are Clouds

So, I am all about analogies. I am a visual person, so they really help me grasp concepts. One of my favorites is comparing clouds and emotions. I have found that the majority of my clients are terrified of feeling negative emotions, as if they will suck them into a black hole from which they will never return. I used to feel that way as well. What I discovered, personally, was that if you will accept your emotions and learn to deal with them in a healthy manner, then you will move right through them, but that is another analogy for another blog...

For today, we are just working with the premise that emotions are not the big scary, all-powerful monsters that we are so terrified of destroying us, but merely clouds traveling through our sky. They are always morphing, always moving and the minute we get comfortable under one, it has changed and floated away. So we know that there are only four basic types of emotions: sad, mad, glad, and scared. I find it fascinating that when I ask my clients to draw the four emotions as cloudy skies, some of them assign the same type of clouds to different emotions. This highlights the point that: they are not truth, they are just experiences that change fairly quickly. We do not have to fear the parts of ourselves that feel emotions so acutely, for clouds are going to alter themselves from big, fluffy, and shaped liked a cute bunny; to stormy and dark, and back again in one day.

So then, what are we supposed to do with these emotions? Well, what we tend to do is to engage in some of our typical self-defeating behaviors used in order to avoid feeling our emotions, like drinking, shopping, gambling, excessive internet-ing, eating….pick your poison. The problem here, to continue with the cloud analogy, is that we might hold our heads down in the midst of a storm and attempt to tell ourselves that we are not getting rained on and blown to and fro by a strong wind, thus denying our experiential reality, and part of ourselves.

The damage done by this is: 1. The negative effects of the self-defeating behaviors 2. The perpetuation of fear of emotions 3. Denial of parts of ourselves that are legitimately attempting to tell us something important.  

Okay, so if not that, then how do you take care of yourself in the midst of having a sky filled with big clouds of emotions? It is so simple, and honestly, a little boring, that you tend to overlook it. Get an umbrella. Get under cover in a shelter. Take care of yourself and accept the clouds. In other words, it is doing self-loving things, like taking a hot shower/bath, meditating/praying, talking about your feelings with someone safe, exercising, whatever works for you to feel comforted. (Now, for certain emotions, like anger, you do need to do some more specific things, but we will talk about that in another blog.) The point here is: don’t be frightened by your emotions, they are transient and will not engulf you. Engage in self-care measures and you will begin the process of acceptance and love of self.

by Jennifer Yaeger, LPC, CPCS, CMAC