Emotions ?

Dear all,

as you may have noticed, the last few posts have been dedicated to some of the primary emotions in aim to highlight their important role in our lives.

Our emotions are the main drivers of our moods, our relationships with other people and the whole social life. They connect us to other people, things and events and signal us that our response is needed. By recognizing and understanding our own emotions and other people’s emotional states, we learn the patterns of behavior that are required to relate to others. The ability to recognize and understand the emotional states of another person helps us to understand different aspects of social situations and to adjust behavior accordingly.

The development of emotions begins very soon after birth, and since then, when interacting with the environment, we begin to express our emotions, recognize them and control them. From an early age, children differ in how often they experience and express certain emotions, which events provoke them and how they and others react to those experiences. How we will react to a certain situation largely depends on our experience, our temperament, i.e. partly genetically conditioned typical way of emotional experience and reaction, and actions and behaviors we learned from people close to us, our immediate models from the environment in our childhood.

We have written about several primary emotions – anger, fear, sadness and happiness, which occur very early in our lives and accompany us throughout life.

Most people divide emotions into positive and negative. However, we should note that emotions are neither good nor bad, but indicators that something is happening to us, or something in our immediate environment. Therefore, it is more appropriate to talk about pleasant and unpleasant emotions, which we can feel in our bodies.

It should be noted that unpleasant emotions shouldn’t be avoided! Without experiencing unpleasant emotions, there is no complete emotional development. They have an important function to help us protect ourselves, adapt to some new circumstances and challenges, and survive, as they physically and mentally prepare the body in a certain way for the new circumstances.

The pleasant emotions, such as happiness, surprise and pride, are associated with a feeling of freedom, contentment, security, inner peace, signaling us that we can relax. In addition, they help us to think in a more creative way about all the possibilities available to us regarding certain situations. Such creative solutions and analysis of situations, expand our range of childhood behaviors, and allow us to develop and adopt some new behaviors over time, which will help us achieve our personal goals and create quality social relationships.

It is also important to note that children experience and express emotions more intensely. Therefore, the adults around them, and especially the parents, play an extremely important role in the emotional development of a child. They teach them how to understand, recognize the primary emotions, while later they introduce them to the more complex ones, thus making a large array of emotions. Thus, it is important is to allow the children and encourage them to experience the whole spectrum of emotions, those pleasant and unpleasant, and to learn and help the children to express them in an adequate way. Any way of expressing emotions is allowed, except those by which we can hurt someone or ourselves in any way. Suppressing emotions and inhibiting their expression for an individual can be extremely detrimental to our well-being and lead to both physical and psychological difficulties.

Therefore, remember that all emotions are important – the pleasant ones and the unpleasant ones. Allow yourself to feel them and express them appropriately! If you think you are having difficulty with this or if you as a parent notice that your child is having difficulty with it, we encourage you to seek help.

Our activity today is therefore dedicated to your emotions! Remember the last time you felt emotions of fear, sadness, anger and happiness. We encourage you to think about where have you felt them in you body. Was it in your ches? Your feet or arms? Or even your eyes? Think about them, learn something new about yourself and get to know your emotions! ?

Center Luka Ritz