Last Updated on April 13, 2023 by Mike Robinson
Emotional instability is present in a high percentage of the population. Obviously, we are not robots, and we all feel emotionally unstable at some point in our lives.
However, the problem is when this instability persists over an extended period, establishing itself in the person’s daily life and becoming an impediment to his well-being.
“I worry a lot about what others think of me. For any absurd reason, I feel ridiculed by others. I consider myself an expert at hiding what I really feel. I do not talk to other people about my problems or the things that worry me because I do not want them to.
Realize my weakness.
After graduating from college, I found a job within two months. I could not believe the luck I had! However, the first day of
work I had a panic attack.
The atmosphere in the office was very stressful. People spoke badly of each other constantly. I felt very insecure; I hated and avoided at all costs having to walk through the office; I was horrified at the idea that the companions would look at me and make comments among themselves. Simple tasks like making photocopies, giving some documents, or asking for help from a colleague opened up a whole new world for me.
The idea of going back to work in a few days terrified me. I felt guilty for not being able to stand and frustrated with myself. “
Do you feel identified?
Maybe you identify with some of the feelings and experiences that this girl describes about their own.
We can say that everyone, somehow, feels worried about what other people think of them. It is something human, since as relational human beings we want to please others, and it is something, therefore, that we must recognize without complex or shame.
The problem begins when one tries to repeatedly and constantly hide certain feelings out of fear of what others may think and fear of accepting oneself.
In my experience as a psychologist, I have come to realize and be amazed by the general emotional problem that marks our society. As an emotional problem, I refer to the great difficulty that exists in expressing emotions, identifying them, accepting them, and managing them.
Above all, what surprises me most is the general inability to accept certain emotions by believing that they are “forbidden.”
Of course, this general emotional deficit is for something and not because it is. Surely religion has something to do with this, as well as the established social norms of the type ‘one must be strong’, “weeping is weak’, and “it is wrong to feel anger or hatred’.
All these beliefs mark the person’s inner world.
6 Steps to Treat Emotional Instability
1. Do not judge yourself.
Make An Exercise. Concentrate on abstracting yourself from the society in which you live. For a moment, stop thinking about what is appropriate or not and what others can think of you; open your mind and go beyond the socially established; go to the most primitive, the purest feeling.
Also read: List of the Top 10 Positive Emotions
So try to be more attentive to what you feel. To identify the feeling, put the name that corresponds: fear, anger, guilt, joy, etc. Is there a way to go from being unconscious to conscious? Once the emotion is identified, accept that feeling as it is because it is yours and you are human.
Connect with your feelings; ask yourself questions like, “What do I feel? Why do I feel this way? Until you get to the nuclear feeling.
- Do not judge yourself.
- Do not be afraid if you have feelings that you do not quite understand.
- Do not try to understand them either.
Remember that pure feelings escape all reason.
2: Validate your emotions; they are yours, and they are valid!
Validate any feelings you have; however unpleasant you may think them to be. These feelings will remain there even if you turn your back. In fact, if you turn your back, you will feel them more strongly.
Like the previous example, Eli must accept that he does not love his mother. Nothing happens; it’s what you feel, and you can not go against what you feel. If he feels it is for something, nobody can deny his feelings because they are his.
Not to validate the feeling of not loving his mother caused him a great feeling of guilt that can become very oppressive.
Try to validate any unpleasant feelings you have. believes that there are no prohibited feelings; that is an invention of the human being.
Freedom is within everyone. As Voltaire says, “Man is free at the moment he wants to be free.”
3. Accept your emotions, however negative they may be.
Accepting your emotions will set you free from all guilt. If you realize that you feel hatred towards your father, validate your feelings and begin a process of accepting this feeling.
At first, because of your emotional instability, the anger and hatred that you will feel will be greater. But little by little, these feelings will be modulating and lowering in intensity, and you will then be able to rationalize them and lead them.
Eli finally manages to accept the rage he feels towards his mother for how he treated her as a child. Accepting this feeling leads her to feel emotionally closer to her mother and can thus help her overcome her grief. Freeing himself from all guilt.
4: Rationalize and drive your already accepted emotions.
Once you have accepted the emotions you feel, you have the ability to decide what to do with them.
If you had tried to make decisions with the emotional Instability that you had, surely the decisions had been of the type: “I will not speak to you again in my life,” “You will find out who I am,” “It is a bad person and does not deserve anything,” “and things like that.
Instead, once you allow time for the emotions to calm down, you can relate to others and accept things.
“My father has behaved badly with me on many occasions, and he has done me a lot of damage, for which I have feelings of rejection towards him.” However, there are things about him that I like, so I decide to pursue my relationship with him even now in a different way. “
5-Know Thyself
It is certainly the key to everything—the key to success and the key to happiness. When you listen to your inner self, feel your emotions, and accept them as they are, you can know yourself.
It is not possible to know yourself if you have barriers and emotional defenses, because these barriers do not let you see who you really are. In fact, that is why you have created these barriers—to keep others from seeing your true self.
Knowing yourself is what gives you the security and confidence to face any situation. And this security and confidence are what take you wherever you want. It is what brings you steadily towards your goals and makes you feel full during the journey.
6-Go to a professional
When you have made your armor too large, it is difficult to assess your most pure and primitive emotions. You may find it very difficult to know what you feel and why you feel it.
He has become accustomed to walking through life with this great defense, and he does it almost automatically.
Anxiety, for example, is a way to have your body and mind alert you that something is not working well and needs more exploration. Pay attention to these signals that your body and your mind send you.
If this is the case, try to overcome for a moment the fear that they will enter your inner world and let a professional break down the huge defense that you have built. That’s just what you need to stop being afraid and start feeling free.
Start opening the valve of your pressure cooker.
Panic attacks and anxiety are generally nothing more than vivid emotions that have been refused and blocked for a long time and, in some way, seek a way out. To understand it, I like to exemplify it as a pressure cooker.
Imagine the steam that is created inside the pressure cooker with the exhaust valve closed. If we left it for a long time with the valve closed, there would come a time when the pot would explode because the steam has no outlet.
Then open the valve so that the steam is coming out.
The same thing happens to people. If we do not give vent to the emotions we have, there comes a point where they try to get out as much as they can, whether through anxiety, depression, stress, or the body through somatization, among others.
Therefore, we must understand that emotional instability is the result of hiding emotions that one does not want to recognize or accept because doing so carries a great burden of guilt that one is not willing to assume.
A case of emotional instability
Let’s take the example of a daughter:
Eli loses his mother and, after two years, has not yet been able to overcome her death. He is very unstable, insecure, and afraid, and he begins to develop an obsessive fear of contracting any disease.
Eli talks about her mother and remembers her as a great woman, always ready to help, always with the neediest people. Now without her, she feels a void, as if something had been torn from her.
Upon entering her inner world, Eli realizes that she actually has strong feelings of rage at her mother for the cold and distant treatment she received as a child. He had always been more interested in and had helped more needy people than his own daughters.
Eli had not been able to take on this rage he felt towards his mother, and instead he had idealized it, always speaking very well of her to others and
The importance of acceptance:
She expressed what a good person she was.
By recognizing and accepting these feelings of rage, she actually felt them and realized that she was not obliged to love her mother. Her anxiety and her obsessions disappeared.
This is a case that exemplifies how the non-recognition and non-acceptance of emotions provoke an instability that can lead to pathologies such as anxiety and hypochondria (or any other pathology).
“You will honor your father and your mother” can be one of the messages that unconsciously mark our being, and we forbid ourselves to feel negative emotions like anger or hatred towards significant people.
However, sometimes these emotions are inevitable, even if you do not want them, and denying them can produce great emotional instability. In the end, the emotion that causes this instability is guilt—the guilt of feeling anger or hatred.
Eli’s great emotional ambivalence toward her mother made her feel very unstable. An instability dominated by a great sense of guilt.
He felt rage at her, but she was his mother, so he had to love her. However, deep inside her, I did not want her, but how can I recognize that I do not want my mother? That’s horrible! She is my mother! What kind of daughter she would be!
And so, for years, the person has been creating a story that does not correspond with their real feelings, creating a carcass of false feelings that he does not want anyone to discover. It is enclosed in itself, preventing others from entering.
They are feeling increasingly insecure in dealing with others, fearing being criticized, fearing not to be accepted and valued, and prioritizing the feelings and thoughts of others over their own.
