Category: Emotional Fluidity

True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.

Belonging Verse Fitting In

Belonging	Fitting In
Authentic	Other pleasing
Being accepted for you	Being accepted for being like everyone else
Being somewhere you want to be and they want you	Being somewhere you want to be, but they don’t care

Because your self-esteem is an assessment of who you are and what you’ve accomplished compared to your values and your goals, even with high self-esteem you can still feel insecure if you’re self-critical.

Connection

• When you feel seen, heard, and valued

Disconnection

• Occurs when there is social rejection, exclusion, or isolation
• It can further lead to
  • Insecurity
    • Types: domain, relation, general
    • Self-security: open and nonjudgmental acceptance of one’s own weakness
  • Invisibility
    • Types: interpersonal, group, and representational
  • Loneliness
    • Different than being alone
    • Interdependence > independence
    • It is a sign we need social connection (e.g. when you’re hungry you need food)

Compassion

• The daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and other with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering
• Pity is the near enemy and distancing or cruelty the far enemy

Empathy

• Cognitive empathy: perspective taking or mentalizing
• Affective empathy: experience sharing, emotional attunement with another experience
• The best empathy is to understand what someone is feeling, not having to feel it for them.
• You need to move away from walking in someone else’s shoes

The most effective approach to meaningful connection combines compassion with cognitive empathy.

Sympathy

• Near enemy of empathy
• Leads to disconnection and feeling sorry for the other
• Creates compassion fatigue
• Emotional exhaustion or burnout happens when you focus on your own personal distress, which is an inability to respond empathetically to the person in need
• You need boundaries to be able to love yourself and others well.
• Be clear about what is okay and what is not okay.

Comparative suffering

• Fear and scarcity trigger comparison
• Example of rank suffering
  • You’re worried about your teenager becoming disconnected and isolated during quarantine when thousands of people in India are dying?
  • What we fail to understand is that the family in India doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your concern only for them and withhold it from your child who is also suffering.
• Piss and moan with perspective

Anguish

• Shock and incredulity
• Grief and powerlessness

Hope

• Is not an emotion; it is a cognitive process
• Function of struggle and discomfort
• How to practice hope
  • Set realistic goals
  • Figure out how to achieve and find alternative paths with setbacks
  • Agency (believe in self)

Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.

• Developing resilience to cultivate a hope practice
  • Personalization: Remember to think about the larger issues and context; don’t get caught up with self-blame and criticism
  • Permanence: Practice thinking about the temporary nature of most setbacks as part of how we look at adversity on a daily basis; Ask yourself, “Will this be a big issue five minutes, hours, days, years from now?”\
  • Pervasiveness: Find the areas of your life that are still good so you don’t fall into the trap believing that whatever you’re up against stained every single thing in your life

Hopelessness

• Strong emotion of when,
  • You do not know what you want
  • You cannot figure out how to achieve your goals
  • You do not believe in yourself
• Best to combat by practicing hope and avoid leading to suicidal tendencies

Despair

• Hopelessness about entire life and future
• You feel like tomorrow will be just like today

Sadness

• Sadness is important in your life and should be felt
• It can lead to being more motivated, sensitive to social norms, and being generous
• Sadness is not depression or grief
• Linked to feeling moved, being connected and to be human (e.g., a sad movie can make you feel moved and creates enjoyment)

Grief

• Occurs when there is a loss, longing, or feeling lost
  • When challenged by a loss in your life, you will reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning
• Different types of grief
  • Acute
  • Integrated (adaptation)
  • Complicated
  • Disenfranchised

Love

Lovelessness

Heartbroken

Flooding

Hurt

Trust

Betrayal

• The most devastating organizational betrayal is cover-ups
• Occurs when it is more important to protect that reputation of that system (i.e. corporation, nonprofit, university, government, church, sports program, school, or family) and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of individuals and communities
• It is rare to heal from betrayal, but it can be done with significant courage, vulnerability, accountability, amends, and action

Self-trust

Self-betrayal

Defensiveness

• “At its core, defensiveness is a way to protect your ego and fragile self-esteem.”
• You can combat this with grounded confidence

Shame

• Intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that you are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection
• Shame thrives in silence, secrecy, judgment.
• The antidote is empathy and believing you are not alone
• Self-compassion helps, consists of self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness
• Shame is the root of unethical behaviours in culture

How to build shame resilience

Recognize shame and understand its triggers	Recognize when you’re in the grip of shame, name it, feel your way through it, and figure out what messages and expectations triggered the shame. Don’t pretend it’s not happening and get swept away.
Practice critical awareness	Reality-check the messages and expectations that are driving your shame. Are they realistic, attainable, what you want to be? Or what you think others need from you?
Reaching out	Own and share your story. You cannot experience empathy if you’re not connecting.
Speaking shame	Talk about how you feel and ask for what you need when you feel shame.

Perfectionism

• Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism
• Perfectionism is a “self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
• Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance.
• Perfectionists were raised being praised for achievement and performance (e.g. good grades, manners, nice appearance, sports prowess, rule following, people pleasing).
• The danger lies in adopting the belief that you are what you accomplish and how well you accomplish it

Healthy striving is self-focused—How can I improve?

Perfectionism is other-focused—What will they think?

Guilt

• Guilt focuses on the behaviour, not your self (i.e., you did something bad verse you are bad)
• Can be a positive because can lead you to do something to set things right
• Negatively correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression unlike shame
• Remorse is a subset of guilt; acknowledge we have harmed another, feel bad about it, and want to atone for our behaviour

Humiliation

• Unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or shamed by others
• Strong link between mass violence (e.g. school shootings) happening from humiliation as the root cause

Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence. – Elie Wiesel

Embarrassment

• Fleeting discomfort during social situations
• Usually minor in nature and usually humor involved

Comparison

• Comparison is not an emotion, however it drives your feelings, affects relations, and your self-worth
• You try to simultaneous fit in and stand out
• You are often unaware of social comparison
  • Social comparison can happen both up and downward, usually leading to fear, anger, shame, and or sadness
• Comparing is often a creativity killer
• Comparison is inevitable, it happens to all of us. How you respond to comparison is your choice
  • Choose connection over comparison
  • You can also choose to “focus on your lane”

Admiration

• Social comparison that inspires you to be a better version of yourself

Reverence

• Is a subcategory of admiration
• Reverence leads you to form a connection and a desire to move closer to the object of reverence
• Usually leads to adoration, worship and veneration
• Irreverent, is not having respect for what is official, important, or holy

Envy

• When you want what the other person has

Resentment

• Resentment is “hidden envy”

Jealousy

• Usually involves a third party, that threatens the connection you have with another person, not necessarily what they possess

Shadenfreude

• Sha-din-froy-da, “meaning “harm joy”
• Feeling joy from the suffering of others, usually stems from fear (e.g. Covid vaccine and anti-vaccine narrative)
• Connected to envy, hostile and destructive emotion

Freudenfreude

• Shared joy in the success of others
• Shoy (active interest in asking personal questions) and bragitude (expressing gratitude toward someone for sharing good news) cultivate freudenfreude leading to more meanginful connection

When two feelings are in tension with one another, admitting to the uncertainty leads to greater credibility and grounded confidence.

Cognitive Dissonance

• When you hold two cognitions (such as ideas, attitude, beliefs, or opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other (e.g. cult followers when proven wrong or smokers)
• Choose courage and being curious over comfort
• Helps you to rethink and relearn

Amusement

• Pleasurable, relaxed excitation, usually involves humor

Bittersweet

• Tension of happy and sad
• Different than ambivalence, unsure if you are happy or sad

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a yearning for the way things used to be in our often idealized and self-protective version of the past.

• Bittersweet: yearning/loss
• Rumination: negative past
• Reflection: adaptive & psychologically healthy
• Worry: future focused

Paradox

• Appearance of contradiction between two related components
• Paradoxes are hard and good for you

Irony

Are you doing something up in humor that actually requires clarity and honesty?

Sarcasm

• Related to irony, can ridicule, tease, and or criticize

Stressed

• Being in the weeds
• Overwhelmed is a subcategory of stressed, when we feel “blown”

Dread

• Response to the high probability of a negative event in the future

Anxiety

• Can be both a state and trait of being in tension with worried thoughts
• Coping Mechanisms
  • Worry
  • Avoidance
• Excitement
  • Linked to anxiety

Fear

• Can be both a state and trait
• Is present focused
• Responses: flight, fight, or freeze

Vulnerability

• Often seen as a weakness, however it is the “greatest measure of courage”
• You typically want to avoid uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure, thus it takes great courage to be willing to lean into vulnerability

Boredom

• An uncomfortable and frustrated state of wanting to engage in a satisfying activity, but being unable to
• Boredom can lead to greater creativity and imagination

Disappointment

• Highly correlated with unmet expectations
• There are 2 types of expectations
  • Stealth (unexamined and/or unexpressed)
  • Examined and expressed
• Greater the expectation, greater the disappointment

Regret

• Usually within our control (e.g. education, career, romance, parenting , self-improvement, leisure)

The idea of ‘no regrets’ doesn’t mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe we have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with our lives.

Discouraged

• Losing motivation and confidence about future effort

There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment.

Resigned

• Lost motivation and confidence

Frustrated

• Feels out of control, prevents achievement and outcome

Pride

• Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to your accomplishments or efforts.
• It is a positive emotion, that has been tainted by religious language.

Hubris

• Hubris is an inflated sense of your own innate ability.
• It is related to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments.

Humility

• Humility is an openness to new learning combined with a balance and accurate assessment of your contributions, including your strengths, imperfections, and opportunities for growth.
• It is not downplaying yourself or your accomplishment. This is modesty.
• It is not low self-esteem, meekness, or letting people walk over you.

Humility allows us to admit when we are wrong — we realize that getting it right is more important than needing to ‘prove’ that we are right.

• Humility is key to having grounded confidence and healthy relationships.

Intellectual Humility

• Is a willingness to consider information that doesn’t fit with your current thinking.
• You can demonstrate intellectual humility while still being confident and having strong convictions.
• You may hold strong views, but you are open to hearing other point of views.

Anger

• Anger is generally an emotion that is not welcomed due to your own discomfort of the emotion.
• “We all have the right and need to feel and own our anger.” However, anger often masks emotions that are more difficult to name and even more difficult to own.
• Anger is a catalyst that can be used to transform into something life-giving. Maintaining any level of rage, anger, or contempt over a long period of time is not sustainable.
• Thus, it is imperative you determine what’s behind your anger.

• Download the free “What’s Behind Anger” poster.

Contempt

• Attacking a person’s sense of self (contrast to criticism which is associated with attacking someone’s character)

When someone is angry at you, you’ve still got traction with them, but when they display contempt, you’ve been dismissed. – Pamela Meyer

• Motivation Attribution Asymmetry
  • Assumption that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate.
  • Each side thinks it is driven by benevolence while the other is evil and motivated by hatred.
  • Usually leads to contempt, a noxious brew of anger and disgust.
• Having contempt of one’s ideology can lead to contempt of people

Disgust – Dehumanization

• Disgust is an emotion that keeps you safe from the stuff that can make you sick.
• Danger is when you turn disgust into an emotion that is weaponized against people who make you sick, simply because you either disagree with them or they are different from you.
• Moral disgust is even more dangerous because of its dehumanizing implications.
• Once you dehumanize people, it is easier to be violent and cruel to them because the innate part of your brain and heart that says not to hurt people is shut off because you’ve stripped them of their humanity.
• Dehumanization is the greatest threat to humanity.
• Once a target is viewed with disgust, research shows that the judgment seems to be permanent. The perceived reprehensible moral character becomes immutable and unforgivable.

Self-righteousness and righteousness

• Self-righteousness as a “terminal uniqueness”, you think you’re different from everyone else.
• Stop assuming that people who disagree with you don’t care about people or issues as much as you do.
• Moral outrage is self-enhancing and related to self-righteous anger
• Be super conscientious about the moral outrage and instead focus on doing the next right thing.

If there’s anything that looks and feels like a pig rolling in shit these days, it’s performative moral outrage, especially on social media.

Awe

• Awe inspires the wish to let the object of awe shine. You want to stand back and observe.
• Awe leads to greater cooperation, sharing resources, and sacrifice. It brings greater unity.
• It allows you to value others, see yourself clearly, and evoke humility.

Wonder

• Wonder inspires the wish to understand.
• You want to explore and learn. Wonder fosters your curiosity and adventure.

Curiosity

• Curiosity is both a state and a trait. It is both an emotion and cognition.
• You identify a gap in knowledge and commit to close the gap with your heart.

Interest

• Interest is a cognitive state, not an emotion.
• You want to engage with a topic mentally.

Confusion

• Confusion is like “optimal interest”. It is an epistemic emotion.
• Your confusion can lead to deep learning, especially when you are not in comfortable learning environments.

Surprise

• Surprise is the short bridge between the heart and mind.
• The interruption stems from information that does not fit your current understanding and expectations. The unexpected amplifies your emotion.

Calm

The best way to assess if you are calm is to ask,

“Do I have enough information to freak out? The answer is normally no.

Will freaking out help? The answer is always no.”

Gratitude

Gratitude is “an emotion that reflects your deep appreciation for

• what you value
• what brings meaning to uour life, and
• what makes you feel connected to yourself and others.”

Gratitude is an emotion, but you must practice gratitude to experience its full power.

Methods of practice include journaling, meditation, prayer, art, and gratitude check-ins.

Practicing gratitude leads to a deep capacity for joy.

Foreboding Joy

“Finding joy is the most vulnerable human emotion.”

Foreboding joy is being afraid to allow yourself to experience and feel joy because of your fear of that joy being ruined by an unforeseen disaster.

When you push away joy in this manner, you limit yourself immensely.

Tranquility

“Tranquility is associated with absence of demand and no pressure to do anything.

The four elements of experiencing tranquility

1. A sense of getting away
2. A feeling of immersion
3. Holding attention without effort
4. Compatibility with one’s preference

The difference between contentment and tranquility is with contentment you usually have a sense of completing something and with tranquility, “you relish the feeling of doing nothing.”

In other words, dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. “Americans reward the sweat of doing everything ASAP.”¹

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/of-interest/2023/12/23/fun-is-dead/ ↩︎