There is discussion lately about how why negative emotions are good. This reframing is helpful for clients and individuals trying to understand and accept their emotions. Interestingly, scientists dating back to Darwin have found why negative emotions are good: they help us perform helpful basic human functions.
Emotion, or “affect” is a way the humans and other mammals become quickly motivated to respond to situations. Emotions help us focus our attention, rev up our bodily systems, and garner responses from other humans. Negative emotions like fear, anger, or sadness help us respond to difficult situations that require our attention.
For example, fear helps us be ready to respond to threats by activating the fight/flight/freeze response. Anger leads us or others to right a wrong when our goals are blocked. Sadness leads us to seek support when we experience a loss or helps others see when we need support.
These responses are good or “adaptive”! Without negative emotions, we would likely be less motivated when we need to act or pay attention to a situations. Negative emotions also communicate our needs to others.
Negative emotions are difficult to experience, though! Not only do they feel uncomfortable, but they sometimes activate negative associations and negative beliefs about ourselves. This discomfort may be why many individuals believe negative emotions are bad.
Intense and frequent negative emotions and how we respond to them also contribute to depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other experiences. This brings about the idea that we often express to clients: it’s not what you feel, but how you deal with what you feel. It’s okay to experience anxiety, but it gets in the way if it leads us to avoid everything. You never get a chance to disprove what you’re anxious about, so it will simply stick around or intensify.
Therapy focuses on emotion regulation versus emotion generation for this reason. We usually cannot control which emotions arise, but we can decide how we respond to them. There is a good new book outlining effective ways clients can regulation emotion.
Research has always worked to nonjudgementally understand how certain ways individuals regulate emotion lead to resilience or to more difficulties. This effort includes which emotion regulation strategies help people cope with negative emotions!
The good news is that evidence-based therapy provides therapist resources to help clients learn these ways to regulate negative emotions. Therapies like DBT, CBT, and the new Unified Protocol address emotion regulation directly. That way, they can have the benefit emotions provide us as humans along with helpful ways to manage those emotions to improve their own lives.
