So often throughout my time with young people, I hear them speak of good or bad emotions, or positive and negative emotions, and I sit with the sense that the client is almost imprisoned by this way of thinking and feeling.

And this has got me thinking, is there such a spectrum for how we feel? And the answer I've got to, as no doubt have many sharper minds before me, is no there isn't.

Our emotions tell us so much about how we're experiencing the world we live in. In Western society - speaking from the UK - we label so much as either good or bad, or positive or negative. And this is unhelpful when trying to make sense of how we're feeling and the meaning we take from the world around us.

Sticking with the most common feelings people are able to label such as happiness, sadness and anger (the big three I hear throughout sessions), it would be easy to label happiness as good or positive, and sadness and anger as bad or negative. But this often comes from a narrow perspective and doesn't give room for growth and healing.

For example, if someone does something that causes us to feel angry, do we take the time to consider what it is that's actually triggering that response from us. Does it bring up things from our past? Does it make us feel out of control? Does it make us feel unsafe? Anger is often a secondary emotional response to something much deeper and can be telling us so much about our inner world and our experiences. We can also use anger for good once we have made sense of it, taken meaning from our experience that's caused it before developing empowerment to make a change that we can consider beneficial to either us or the wider world. It can also help us to develop empathy for another if we start to think of feelings in a more complex way and try to understand the stories at play.

I feel, when we see things so rigidly as either good or bad, we can also link our self-esteem to such labels. Therefore, if I feel angry which is bad, I am bad. Or if I feel happy which is good, I am good. If we begin to see anger as a response to feeling unsafe, for example, we then start to see that it doesn't reflect who I am but how I am in a certain situation.

So next time you're feeling a certain emotion that you consider 'bad', I encourage you to take the time to broaden your perspective around the root cause of it, try to make sense of that and develop a richer and deeper understanding of your response to the world. 

If you want help with this, counselling is a great way to develop that kind of understanding. If you decide to try counselling, make sure you take your time in choosing the person you'd like to work with, get a sense for them and then give it a try. Counselling really can help you make sense of you.

Go well.

Jeff