The 7 Invaluable Emotion Skills You May Not Yet Have

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Think of your emotions as your own private battalion, guiding you through life and protecting you.

Every emotion you have plays a significant role. Each is there to alert you and defend you, motivate and connect you, and steer you through life.

Emotions send you vital messages, most times in the form of sensations in your body, that give you information about who you are.

And, so, it saddens me when people don’t treat their emotions as important. To know that many, many people are not using their battalion to their advantage. To know that many, many people feel lost and confused.

Learning the Emotion Skills

Emotions influence every aspect of our lives, and, yet, no one formally teaches us how to use them. As a psychologist and specialist in childhood emotional neglect, I find myself teaching emotion skills often to my therapy clients.

Childhood emotional neglect is common and invisible in our world today. It happens when you grow up in an environment where your feelings go unacknowledged. As a result, you learn to ignore your emotions, too. You enter adulthood disconnected from your feelings because you were never given the opportunity to learn the invaluable emotion skills.

Emotions are your greatest gift but are futile if you aren’t taught how to properly use them. Imagine being gifted a large sum of money at birth. If your parents don't teach you how to properly save and invest, your money can easily slip through your hands. You don’t intuitively know what to do. You need someone to show you the way. The same idea applies to emotions.

So, now, since your parents couldn't teach you, let me be your guide.

The 7 Invaluable Emotion Skills

1. Become aware. Living in the world today poses quite a challenge. With so many distractions pulling our attention toward the external world, we tend to rarely focus inward on ourselves. And that’s the first step of building your emotion skills. You won’t find your emotions outside yourself. They live within you, waiting to be acknowledged. Each experience you have registers in your body. Awareness of what’s happening inside lays the foundation for all other emotion skills to take place.
2. Identify and name. Once you understand that emotions reside in your body and you start to feel your emotions inside, you’re ready to label your feelings. This can take some patience as you begin sorting out the nuances of each emotion: where you feel it, what sensations you have, and which emotions have similar or different qualities. Once you differentiate among feelings like joy, sorrow, fear, and anger, you can get even more specific. Instead of simply identifying that you feel “good,” what word can best describe your internal experience? Do you feel relaxed? Pleased? Reassured? Attentive? It’s important to pinpoint exactly what it is you feel.
3. Accept and validate. Do you ever get mad at yourself when you have an emotion you don’t like? Do you ever regard your feelings as a sign of weakness? As a child, were you told that you were overreacting when you expressed your feelings? If so, you’re at risk of judging, rejecting, and even shaming yourself and your emotions. If this is the case, see if you can offer your feelings some curiosity, openness, and compassion. Look at each emotion as holding a very important message that you’d like to receive and understand.
4. Learn the story. By now you have noticed your feelings in your body, identified what it is you feel, and accepted these feelings. Next, think about why you may be feeling this way. Old feelings frequently get activated by something happening in the present. Let’s say you just had a big, angry reaction toward a friend. It can be helpful to think about why this is bothering you right now, but also other times when you had similar feelings. Because if you never processed them with emotion skills, these feelings have been stored in your body, easily rising to the surface without your awareness or understanding.
5. Sit with it. Imagine each time you practice these emotion skills you’re sitting on a bench with the emotion. You are getting to know it a bit better. But if you get up and leave the bench before it’s done sharing with you, your emotion stays stuck on the bench. It needs you to stay with it. This can be quite challenging when your emotions are intense, unpleasant, or painful. It’s common to get off the bench when it seems like too much—attempting to push it down with distractions like food, shopping, drinking, or whatever else might help it go away. But that doesn’t work! Stay on the bench until you have gained understanding.
6. Manage it. Every emotion is important and needs to be heard. But, remember that you are the one who’s in charge. You get to decide what to do next. Consider the message your emotion is telling you. Is it healthy? Is it healthy to do what it’s telling you? Or does this emotion just need understanding and validation without action? You don’t get to decide what you feel, but you sure get to decide what you do with your feelings.
7. Express it. You made it to this step if you decided you would like to take further action. Maybe your anger told you that you need to speak up for yourself, your joy told you that you should continue with a certain activity, your fear told you to protect yourself, or your guilt told you to come clean. People sometimes attempt to take action or verbalize their feelings before they’ve done the previous steps, creating more confusion or distress in their relationships. The more you understand yourself and your feelings, the better you’ll be at expressing yourself to others.

Using the Emotion Skills to Change Your Life

Let’s think about the seven emotion skills and you. Were you ever taught these skills? Do you use one of them, some of them, or all of them? Are some easier or harder to practice than others? How are you feeling as you learn about them? You can start practicing right now and use the skills to explore some of these feelings.

It’s my hope you realize you have great power inside you in the form of your feelings. So many people don’t know this and feel powerless as a result. Your miraculous batallion of emotions is waiting to be discovered. All you need to do is turn inward. And listen.

© Dr. Jonice Webb