What are emotions?

Whether you're completely engulfed by your emotions or you repress them, whether you give them a lot of importance or none at all — if you're a human being, you have them. So let's talk about what they actually are, and how to work with them wisely.

Emotions are messengers

Very simply, emotions are messengers from you to you. Each one carries a specific message. When you're young, the range is usually just "I feel good" and "I feel not good." As you grow, it widens — a bit angry, sad, fearful, happy — and then wider still: frustrated, despair, elated. Specific words point at specific, distinct feelings, and it's at that level of specificity that the message actually becomes useful.

Where the message comes from — and why it sticks around

Emotions get triggered by things happening around you or inside you, and they tend to hang around in your body until their message has been delivered. That means you can be holding onto an emotion from when you were very young, simply because you never let yourself receive what it was trying to say.

Your emotions are trying to help you.

Valid — but not always true

Emotions respond to your perception, which makes them very valid — but not always true. That's an important distinction. Say someone criticizes the color of your shirt, and it triggers a memory of having to keep changing how you dressed to fit in at school. The anger or sadness that comes up is valid: it's responding to something real in your system that still needs attention. But it doesn't mean the person in front of you is a bad person who needs to be cut out of your life forever. The emotional tone is valid; the story your mind builds on top of it isn't automatically true.

My own story with this

I did not come into this world good with emotions. My strategy, basically, was: don't ever show you have any. Repress them, smile all the time, and maybe let yourself feel some frustration during sports. That held until I was seventeen, when I got my first boyfriend and had no idea what was happening to me — huge emotions, unleashed all at once. I was forced to get wise about it fast. In my house growing up, we didn't really talk about emotions much, which is common. Having had to learn this the hard way, I value it enormously — and I watch it help the people I work with just as much.

The four families of emotion

A few years into my own energy healing work, I picked up a book — Carla McLaren's The Language of Emotions — and it changed how I understood all of this. Emotions are energy: vibrating information in motion, which is really just what the word says — e-motion. Different emotions move in different directions, and how they move correlates with the specific job each one is trying to do for you. Four families: fear, anger, sadness, joy.

Fear — pay attention now

The fear family includes fear, anxiety, panic, trepidation, nervousness. Fear moves upward and grabs your attention: pay attention, now. Anxiety points at something coming in the future — plan for it. Panic says something is happening right now and you need to act to save yourself. When an emotion in this family is clean — responding to something actually happening — it can be genuinely life-saving.

Anger — reclaim your space

The anger family includes irritation, frustration, rage. Anger moves outward; its job is to reclaim your sovereign space. This is one of the emotions I work with most, because so many of the sensitive, kind people I work with have learned to swallow it. When it's clean: a boundary got crossed, and anger is putting it back. Rage shows up in response to something genuinely wounding — it wants to roar and fight. Frustration shows up when your path is blocked — it's the energy that clears the way. The function of anger is to restore the boundary, not to start telling someone they're a terrible person. For anyone who feels like they don't have boundaries and takes in emotional information all day, learning to let anger do its actual job is how you reclaim fuller space.

Sadness — let it move through

The sadness family includes sadness, grief, and situational depression. It moves downward — like water passing through you, carrying the debris and the old energy with it, preparing you to let go. Think of the leaves in fall: a letting go, followed by a renewal in spring. Depression, in this frame, is more of a "stop everything" signal — something isn't working, and it's calling for a pause and a real review before you can move again. Once you actually let go, you're lighter, and you can keep moving.

Joy — expand, then let it complete

The joy family includes gratitude, elation, wonder, and joy itself. This one wants you to transcend your small bubble — the way a child is happy with no containment at all, just pure elation. It shows up when you win something, accomplish something, and like every emotion, it runs its course. If you're constantly chasing the next accomplishment just to keep feeling it, that's not sustainable. Seeing joy as a messenger too, instead of a permanent state to defend, helps here as much as anywhere else.

What to actually do with them

The practice is to let yourself feel regularly — to receive the message instead of avoiding it — and to listen in a neutral way, without attaching to the emotion or building extra loops on top of it. That's not easy. It's exactly why a mindfulness practice helps. And if there's a lot of accumulated emotional energy — a lot of unopened mail — it helps enormously to have someone alongside you who knows how to open it without getting overwhelmed, and can help you actually read what's inside.