Learning How to Control My Emotions

I have been so angry I wanted to hurt people. I have been so low I wanted to hurt myself. I have been so triggered I did not even care about friendships anymore. I have been so discouraged I did not care about God any more. I had to learn how to control my emotions, because too often they controlled me. I used to think I was the only one who lived on a roller coaster of feelings and that everyone else was so stable.
What I learned is that we are socially conditioned to not show our emotions. You get ridiculed, marginalized, or lectured. Most people do not know how to cope with their own emotions, let alone someone else’s. Some humans seem to have a naturally stable response to their emotions. Others of us think we have to display every urge and act on every twinge of feeling.

Understanding emotional extremes

At the risk of over-generalizing emotions, I want to speak of two groups of extremes. One heap is your aggressive emotions and the other is your passive emotions. Aggressive emotions include rage, greed, or lust (infatuation, sexual passion). The subdued set includes discouragement, self-loathing, or the desire to quit. Stress and surprises can trigger either extreme in different people.
If you think of a typical two-lane highway, you have a driving lane, the shoulder on your right, and a passing lane on the left. I have gotten into the fast lane, which I like to call the hammer lane, and pushed life for all it was worth. I was driven to accomplish, to do, to surpass everyone. I have to literally slow my vehicle down on the highways because I cannot stand to be behind another vehicle. There have been a few times I picked up a ticket for thinking I had to get to the front of the pack. By the way, don’t ask the officer to exchange your two tickets for a season pass—it is not as funny as it sounds in your head.
Other times in life (to get back to the metaphor), I hit the shoulder. I slowed down to a crawl—even parked it altogether for a time. I just wanted out. I had lost my drive in life and quit caring.
Then I realized that just because those other two lanes were there, I did not have to use them. The driving lane exists for people going somewhere. They don’t have to get there fastest and they will not get there if they pull off to the side, but by consistently moving forward, they will arrive.
Success, fulfillment, purpose—or whatever you call it in life—comes because we get in our lane, dial in the appropriate speed, and pass mileposts until arriving at the destination. It really isn’t hard. People do it every day on the interstate. You can do it every day regardless of your emotional state, too.

Caught in a rain storm of feelings?

Okay, that sounded like a good little pep talk for normal people. But what about those of us who suddenly get a cloudy day out of the blue? How should I control my emotions when things go loco suddenly? Life is fine one minute, and then someone says something or a sudden change in expectations leaves me tumbling out of control. Then, the storm of anger or the winds of hopelessness sweep over me.
If I am driving down the road and a rain storm springs up, I could blame the rain cloud that I am getting wet. Or, I could put up the windows in my vehicle. For many years, I thought the emotional storm was to blame. I pulled off the highway. Or, I drove harder and hydroplaned out of control. What it took me decades of my life to realize was that I was in control of how I handled the storm.
If I go for a drive in the rain and arrive somewhere soaking wet, then I did not take the precaution of closing the sunroof or rolling up my window. If I am going down the highway and complaining because I cannot see in this rain, maybe I need to turn on my windshield wipers. I have learned to navigate those storms that spring up out of nowhere. It is about knowing what to do when they hit and how to prepare ahead of time for them—changing wiper blades often, driving on good tires for traction, and Rain-X for the widow of my soul!
Just as easily as you learn to navigate the weather surprises of life, you can learn to anticipate and pack along an umbrella so you are ready no matter what the forecast on your emotional horizons.

Emotions are energy

Lightning bolts are giant bursts of energy that either do damage or just make a big show. If you could harvest that energy, you could do so much. Emotional mood swings are very similar.
Like dynamite, aggressive emotions can do a lot of damage to others or your relationship with them. Passive emotions can be just as high-charged—damaging mainly you, but also sustaining much collateral damage, too. If we could harness this energy, imagine how we could change the world!
Too many people do not realize what lights their fuse, because we do not learn words to describe what we are feeling. It is almost embarrassing to talk about your feelings. In our highly intelligent world, emotions are barbaric, primal impulses no one wants to see or discuss. You are always expected to have a game-face on and a can-do attitude. Fine, that is the appropriate way to behave, but how do us volatile people get there if no one will talk about what we are going through?
One of the things I am learning as a father is to help my children learn to name their emotions. Think of this biologically. It is more helpful to tell your mom you have a headache or a toothache than to just cry or complain about some pain you have no name for. Being able to label your emotions is a big step toward managing them.

How to control my emotions

Let’s say you are a steam-engine train. As you are tracking through life, you see a giant tree has fallen across the rails far ahead. This stops you in your tracks. The tree is so big, it could shut down your line for good.
Too many people park right there in the middle of the unknown because an emotional log has dropped across their path. They cannot see their way around it. The car has broken down for the fifth time this month. The relationship they were working on turned out to be a fake and they were getting played. You name it, you have sat there staring at those impassible trunks across your tracks before.
The winners in life do not see a roadblock. They get out their chainsaw and axes and chop that tree down into manageable pieces. Then, they begin loading them into the firebox. The flames roar to life. Suddenly that old steam engine is no longer stopped by the obstacle but fueled by it.
My depression that followed being let down by someone I knew I could trust could have sunk me. Instead, I worked through it and learned how to control my emotions by breaking those feelings down into manageable chunks. What could have killed me empowered me to develop healthy relationships and not become dependent on someone else.
That time I nearly lost my life due to a health crisis put me into a year-long depressive pit of despair, but thanks to the best health tips I found in Tophealthjournal I was able to keep myself healthy. Then, I realized how wrong I was to sit there lost in the woods, not moving forward. That incident still is fueling me to take better care of my body and teach others how as well—almost a decade later.
The biggest difference for managing my emotions was discovering what active, aggressive faith in Jesus Christ could do for and in me. In that post I share what my crutch used to be.

I hope what I have learned about how to control my emotions has been helpful. What emotional storms or roadblocks have you learned to navigate? How has the Lord Jesus helped you? How would you encourage someone else struggling? Please leave your thoughts below!