Don't Trust Everything You Feel

By Zoe McKey

Are you happy with your behavior when in a highly emotional state? Or do you rather feel out of control, confused, or overwhelmed?

We hold beliefs about what our emotions mean and often make decisions – even major ones – based on them. But sometimes these ingrained beliefs are not helpful. How can we distinguish between helpful emotional reactions and overreactions? What alternative, healthy coping strategies can we adopt to replace the unhealthy ones? 
 

Enhance your self-awareness, accelerate self-healing, and crystalize your trauma understanding. 

This book asks you self-exploratory questions and helps complete exercises for self-assessment, self-regulation, and emotional understanding. Knowing yourself, what triggers you - and why - are some of the most important information you can get. While you can accelerate self-exploration with the help of a therapist, you can still make a lot of progress on your own.

Discover the real "whys" behind your emotions. It's not always obvious. 

Emotions are neither "good" nor "bad." They all serve an evolutionary function. They are all messengers.

• Discover how long emotions last and how to shorten their effect.
• Step-by-step guide to map your emotional landscape.
• Actionable techniques to self-soothe.
• How to reframe your negative outlook.

Zoe McKey is an internationally best-selling author and a communication and lifestyle coach. She knows firsthand how it feels to be directionless in life, feel like you're only going through the motions instead of living intentionally. Using her decade-long experience, she will guide you to discover your truths for yourself.
 

• Create a more stable, accepting, and self-aware version of you. 
• Understand what emotions are and how they affect you.
• Learn about your emotion schema. 
• How to adopt a healthier emotional coping style.
• Rewire your beliefs about who you are with self-validation. 

We all have unique beliefs, thought patterns, and triggers. Knowing yours well improves your responses to triggers. Stop acting out without knowing why. Have more constructive arguments in relationships. You can't choose what emotion to feel but you can choose how to react to it. And that choice makes all the difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zoe McKey
• Release date: Sep 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215404683

Book preview

Don’t Trust Everything You Feel

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Learn to Question, Understand, and Validate Your Emotions

By Zoe McKey

Communication and Lifestyle Coach

www.zoemckey.com

[e-mail]

Copyright © 2022 by Zoe McKey. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the author.

Limit of Liability/ Disclaimer of Warranty: The author makes no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaims all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and recipes contained herein may not be suitable for everyone. This work is sold with the understanding that the author is not engaged in rendering medical, legal or other professional advice or services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. The author shall not be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an individual, organization of website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the author endorses the information the individual, organization to the website may provide or recommendations they/it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet websites listed in this work might have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

For general information on the products and services or to obtain technical support, please contact the author.

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Table of Contents

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What Are Emotions?

How to Classify Emotions?

Three Key Elements of Feeling Emotions.

Subjective experience.

Physiological Response.

Behavioral Responses

What are not emotions?

Conclusion

Chapter 2: How Do You Think About Your Emotions?

Reappraisal and suppression.

Thoughts affect how you feel.

How to change your beliefs about emotions?

Chapter 3: Emotion Schemas

What are emotion schemas?

Robert Leahy’s Cognitive Model of Emotional Processing.

The 14 Dimensions of Emotion Processing

Chapter 4: Happy and sad at the same time?

What are mixed emotions?

An interesting finding.

Cognitive Dissonance.

Chapter 5: I can’t help it.

Emotional Dysregulation.

Causes of emotional dysregulation.

Negative Effects of Emotional Dysregulation.

How to manage emotional dysregulation?

Chapter 6: How Long Do Emotions Last?

The Longevity of Emotions.

Watch the stories you tell yourself.

Chapter 7: Mission Impossible: Acceptance.

Why is better to accept emotions?

The benefits of accepting a negative emotion in practice.

What acceptance is and what it is not.

Non-reactivity and non-judgment.

Chapter 8: How do you cope with...?

Problem-focused coping strategies

Emotion-focused coping strategies

Healthy and Unhealthy Coping.

Chapter 9: Master the E word

What is empathy?

How does empathy develop?

Types of Empathy

An interesting study.

How to cultivate empathy?

The Power of Self Questioning

Chapter 10: V for Validation

What is emotional validation?

How to validate emotions?

Avoid Invalidation.

What emotional validation is not supposed to be.

One Last Thing...

Other Books by Zoe

References

Endnotes

Chapter 1: What Are Emotions?

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What are emotions? Trying to find a conclusive, real definition[1] of this question seems just as challenging as trying to imagine the size of infinity. It’s mind-twisting. Philosophers, researchers, and cognitive scientists have tried to define what emotions are – with inconclusive results. Some scientists argued that capturing the exact meaning of experiencing emotions is not even necessary to investigate what they are and what their impact is.[i] Others say that to grasp a concept in its theoretical and empirical reality, and to communicate about it with others, one must have a clear understanding and vocabulary of the subject.[ii] My goal in this chapter is not to attempt the impossible and find the conclusive definition of emotions but to present you with the evolution of emotion research and a framework for contemplation about this ungraspable sensory experience that is at the steering wheel of our life.

The bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion, said William James, the father of American psychology... in 1884. Yes, that’s not a typo, that’s a full century before George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, takes place. When I started my research on the definition of emotions, I didn’t think I would find a scientific, neuropsychology-heavy work from the late 19th century. William James, in his paper What is an Emotion?, introduces bold ideas to the world of cognitive psychology. In the quote above, he states that emotions are the sensation of bodily changes. In this work, he also defends the theory that emotions and how we express them serve as adaptive functions, suggests that anticipating an emotion can trigger the emotion because they are associated with our previous experiences, and states that different emotional experiences lead individuals to have different levels of risk tolerance.[iii]

The above observations may seem like common knowledge today, but back in 1884, these were revolutionary ideas that shaped the future of emotion research in psychology. James’ attempt at the definition has since been questioned and debated by future experts. In 2004, Klaus Scherer, a Swiss specialist in the psychology of emotions, argued there was still no universally accepted definition of what emotions are. He considers this a problem, because without consensual conceptualization... of exactly what phenomenon is to be studied, progress in theory and research is difficult to achieve and fruitless debates are likely to proliferate.[iv] The German professor of psychology, Rainer Reisenzein, disagrees with Scherer’s statement, arguing that such a definition of emotions is unnecessary from a research and communication viewpoint. All that is needed for these purposes is a description that allows one to demarcate [...] the class of emotions, and thereby to identify one’s research object to oneself and others, Reisenzein wrote in his 2007 research paper.[v]

Without delving too deep into the scientific community’s internal debate, let’s see how different researchers pinned down the profound complexity of human emotions. Just to write this very sentence, I will commence with Norman Denzin’s definition that comes to us 100 years after William James’, in 1984. Emotions, according to Denzin, are "a lived, believed-in, situated, temporally embodied experience that radiates through a person’s stream of consciousness, is felt in and runs through his body, and, in the process of being lived, plunger the person and his associates into a wholly new and transformed reality – a