I've recently learned that I have a fundamental assumption about emotions, one that I've carried with me since my early teens, whose inverse is the point of this post. It goes like this:

Emotions are problems. Once solved, I can be normal again.

Emotions are indeed problems to be solved from the perspective of a student attempting to cram for a final tomorrow, an engineer looking for a bug in his program, or in any other one of the thousand intellectual heady situations in which I've learned to try succeeding at life.

To solve this problem, I first learned to become aware of emotions. Sometimes just becoming aware of emotions was enough to be stable. Then, I learned to feel them. That helped too. Sometimes feeling an emotion makes it go away. But often they don't. They hang around, and become louder, and then I start trying to escape because there's no end to it otherwise. That's part of what I was trying to understand at the end of that post. That understanding starts with changing my belief that emotions are problems, because they don't have to be. In fact, they're uniquely useful.

Emotions are uniquely useful

In Dune, Paul Atreides recites the famous Litany Against Fear during a test of his abilities:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Most people remember this quote to remind them of the danger of fear. Fear is the mind-killer. We must fight and conquer fear so that our brains remain unmurdered.

But most ignore the most important and practical part: I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

What is fear's path? Fear focuses you on what is needed to survive at the exclusion of all else. Its path bestows vision in an otherwise blinding life-or-death situation.

In other words, fear is useful.

If you're reading this right now and going, "okay, that's obvious," I'd have agreed with you before. But my revealed preferences stated otherwise. All of my actions around fear, until just recently, were about fighting and ignoring it until it went away. Which rarely worked.

What allowed me to accept this truth is realizing that only fear can focus me in this way. Only fear can process hundreds of pieces of sensory information in less than a second to make a snap judgement about my attention. Logic and reason may be more accurate, but they're serial. One point must lead to another. Too slow. By the time my brain has caught up, the situation is over.

When I allow fear to focus me, I'm nimble, I'm responsive, I'm acting, I'm there.

What about when fear is unhelpful? For example, the fear of public speaking, asking someone out, or ordering pizza over the phone?

When fear seems unhelpful, it's probably pointing to a deeper belief that's colliding with reality. Public speaking doesn't involve any actual nakedness, and even if people judge you for the worse, you won't be exiled from the tribe. Getting rejected doesn't mean you aren't worthy of love, and perhaps pushing through a few of them would show you that you are worthy. Unfortunately, messing up a pizza order is the one exception - calling Pizza Hut and saying "I'd like to pepperoni a pizza with order" and instantly hanging up in shame will result in the nuclear apocalypse.

Another example: Anger. When anger arises, there's a boundary being crossed. Anger provides limitless fuel to protect that boundary, if we so choose. If anger seems inappropriate, then there's probably an operating belief that can be re-evaluated. The same could be said for sadness (honorably letting go), guilt (moral compass), envy (your true, unfulfilled desires), or any other emotions, which I leave as exercises to the reader while I continue figuring them out.

In summary, emotions point to deep truths about a situation or yourself almost instantly. Conscious, rational thought can't do this. That makes emotions pretty darn useful.

Okay, so if emotions are useful, how does one make use of them?

Emotions are partners

I've always found the phrase "work with your emotions" to be too vague to make sense to me. Instead, I've learned to treat emotions as embodied, collaborative agents. Like a people I'm partnering with on a project or assignment. Here's what I mean:

Emotions are embodied. They are often felt, surprisingly, in physical locations in the body. They often need to be felt - the physical lowering of your head, the knot in the pit of your stomach, the tears in your eyes. Emotions have an age, too. Sometimes they feel like toddlers, other times like wise elders.

Emotions are collaborative. They want to be heard. You can ask them questions (politely). Sometimes they tell you things. They provide you boundless energy when aligned, and you can provide them much needed release. Sometimes you need to lead them; other times, they lead you. You can thank them for providing you insight, which lead to gratitude and sometimes placation for strong emotions.

Emotions are agentic. They arise of their own volition and often point you to things you're not conscious of. Sometimes they're "wrong" about a situation, which reveals a deeper belief its based on that you can update, affecting that emotion in the future. Emotions can act - or at least, they often require you to act - to address the belief they're based on. You can have a totally different relationship with different emotions. For example, one's relationship to fear might be more mature and trusting than one's relationship to anger.

Treating emotions like partners is how to put this all together. It accords to emotions a respect that allows you to develop a connection with them. Strengthening that connection leads to more integrated communion with all of your emotions, like an experienced soccer team communicating nonverbally with each other on the field to create an opportunity for a goal.

One caveat is that when emotions have been repressed and are felt for the first time, they will not feel like equal partners. They'll feel like toddlers. They'll interrupt you at the most inconvenient times, cry very loudly, and drop dookies in places they shouldn't. There is a period - probably at least a few weeks if not a few months - of unavoidable growing pain to experience the benefits of integrated emotions. Over time, you'll begin to hear what they have to say.

Finally, this post wouldn't be complete without mentioning dissociation, aka the #1 way to make sure emotional growth never happens. There's only so much dissociation an emotion can take before it metastasizes and goes subconscious. And are plenty of ways to dissociate in our modern world. All I'll say is that it's painful to feel repressed emotions, but eventually, it's necessary. There's a calmer place on the other side, always.

How this change has affected me

Over the past few months, I've improved my awareness of myself and the world by listening to what my emotions have to say. Just as my eyes show me where things are in the world, emotions have helped me process and understand social interactions, identify load-bearing beliefs about myself, and guide me to express myself in ways that feel more mature and evolved.

Most importantly, and more than ever before, I feel peace. Not every day, but many days. Like a balmy summer day with nothing to do, but on the inside. My sleep has stabilized for the first time in a long time. My relationship to my emotions - and inevitably, my relationship to myself - has started to change for the better.

To the Aamir who is rereading this in the future: Going down this path was absolutely worth it. Emotions aren't bad, they're good. If you lose your way, find the way back through your emotions.

Putting it all together

In The Language of Emotions, Karla Mclaren identifies the concept of an "emotional genius":

My brothers invented a silly phrase - "emotional genius" - and it always made us howl with laughter. None of us could envision an emotional person - a sloppy, weeping, raging, fearful person - as a genius. The two words seemed to fight each other in the most ridiculous way, which is why I came back to them throughout my life. Was it possible, I wondered, for people to be as brilliant in their emotional lives as they were in their intellectual and artistic lives?

I'm aspiring to this goal by learning to work with emotions as partners. I'm trying to stop conquering fear, stop calming down, and stop escaping when those emotions get too intense. Getting scared, getting sad, getting angry - even if just for a moment - allows me to hear what the emotion has to say. And strangely enough, I often find myself calmer and freer than ever before.

Here's a different assumption about emotions that I'm taking with me into 2025:

Emotions are partners. If we collaborate, we can grow together.