Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life for Teens by Sheri Van Dijk

Author:Sheri Van Dijk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

The Messages We Receive About Emotions

Once you’re able to identify how you think and feel about your emotions, it can help to think about why you think and feel this way. We often receive messages from our family, our friends, and even society in general about our feelings. For example, your parents might tell you: “It’s not nice to be angry”; your friends might say, “Enough already; just get over it” when you’re feeling sad; and society provides us with stereotypical messages such as “Boys don’t cry.” Take a look at the following stories about some people who received certain messages in their lives about emotions. These stories are meant to get you thinking about where your own thoughts and beliefs about emotions are coming from.

Tyler’s and Brandon’s Stories

Tyler’s parents separated when he was ten. He remembered them arguing a lot even before then. His father would often come home late from work, and his mother would be angry with him for not calling to let her know. Tyler’s father would keep telling his mother she had no right to be mad at him because he was working overtime to pay their bills. He would say that she was just trying to get under his skin and that she really knew what buttons to push to make him angry.

When he was thirteen, Tyler started to have problems with anger. He would “stuff” it for as long as he could; he didn’t want to express his anger, because he thought it was “bad.” Eventually, though, Tyler would end up exploding and all that built-up anger would come out at once. His friends stopped spending as much time around him because he was unpredictable; he would get angry and blow up at them for small things. It also affected his relationships with his family, and Tyler was feeling more and more alone.

Brandon grew up in a family where emotions in general weren’t expressed much. If he got excited about something, he was told to settle down because he was being annoying. If he was sad, he was told to stop being a creep, and if he cried, he was told he was acting like a girl, because boys didn’t cry. Anger was labeled “mean” or “not nice”; and anxiety was for “cowards” or “scaredy-cats.” With all of these direct messages about how negative many of his emotions were, it’s no wonder that Brandon had a hard time letting himself feel emotions, never mind express them! He would do everything he could to ignore, avoid, and push away his emotions, and he certainly wasn’t accepting of them. He had heard these messages for so long that Brandon would judge himself when he felt these emotions.

These are just two examples of how we can develop beliefs about emotions. Sometimes the messages we receive are subtle, like in Tyler’s example, where the messages weren’t directly said to him, but he absorbed them anyway. Other times the messages are more direct, like Brandon’s experience, where he was outright told that emotions are bad.

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