# 23 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Music bypasses your thoughts to affect your emotions directly. It is unique among art forms for this quality as far as I’ve discovered. Take care then, what you are inviting to stir your emotions.
Music affects emotions and brain responses in emotional centers regardless of lyrical content, or whether the pieces are solely instrumental. There is a body of brain imaging and clinical proof that music bypasses your thoughts to affect your emotions directly.
This topic is worthy of a book or a doctoral thesis on its own. I will limit my commentary to calling your attention to the facts stated. Of note is that one study linked above showed that hearing sad music provoked some people to deeper levels of sadness.
“… the study found that for some people, sad music can cause negative feelings of profound grief.”
~ Memorable Experiences with Sad Music—Reasons, Reactions and Mechanisms of Three Types of Experiences published in Plos One
Emotions usually spring from thoughts
Emotions usually arise as the products of thoughts, and independent of willing them into existence. A person can choose to be happy, but cannot by willing it, make it so directly. One cannot will happiness. One must first think happy thoughts… or listen to happy music. Music affects your emotions directly, not needing the mind to act as conduit.
I am listening to jazz by Art Pepper as I write this. This is the first time I’ve immersed myself in an hour of his playing. I am familiar with him as a jazz musician only because I’ve read references to him in some Barry Eisler books, and I’ve heard snippets of tunes while watching the Bosch detective series derived from Michael Connelly’s novels. (You can stream Bosch on Amazon Prime Video).
Having no familiarity with Pepper’s music, I am enjoying his fluid, sensual, upbeat, even cheerful jazz clarinet and saxophone as the perfect accompaniment to writing. There is nothing melancholy or depressing about it. It is urgent and energetic—sometimes staccato, phrased like well punctuated sentences. He plays woodwinds the way a hummingbird flies, darting here and there—never still for long. There is nothing angry, and certainly no rage. I find myself carried along, fully engaged with the virtuosity of expression, the coolness of style that draws me in like a whisper rather than repelling me like a shout.
Ray Bradbury said the best jazz musicians play as if they don’t believe in death. An hour or so in and I know Pepper is an unbeliever, too. Listening to him I don’t believe in death, either. Rather, I feel smarter, more sophisticated and cosmopolitan—more vibrant and alive. It would be the perfect soundtrack for a dinner party, or an art crawl. Perhaps to serenade a gathering of happy, comfortable friends as they sample wines, cheeses, and chocolates. I like it. It makes me feel good and I will add Pepper’s jazz to my rotation.
You have your favorite music. Ask yourself what it does for you. How does it make you feel? Do you have a “go to” band or song?
Music as mental health medicine
I have a life-rule not included on my 99 Life Tips list, but it would easily be the hundredth tip. Never, ever drink when you’re down. That, too, is a story in its own right. You should, however, have some healthy alternatives for self-medicating your mental health. I find there is nothing better than music. The studies linked above cite the therapeutic value of music as well. Music affects your emotions. Just take care to recognize which emotions you’re inviting yourself to feel when you make your choice of music to listen to.
“Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything, take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy
You are the one who can make us all laugh
But doing that you break out in tears
Please don’t be sad, if it was a straight mind you had,
The second quote is an enlargement upon a clause of Proverbs 23:7, which says:
”As he thinks in his heart, so is he…”
~ Proverbs 23:7
We Live The Lives We’re Willing To Live
My essay, Your Will Cannot Control Your Emotions…, focuses on what the will cannot do. The focus of this piece is what you can choose to do. You can change your life. You can change how you feel. But to change how you feel, you must either change how, or what, you’re thinking.
Greg, are you saying that my life and my emotional condition are the products of my thoughts?
Yes, dear Reader. That’s exactly what I’m saying. I wouldn’t expect you to take me at my word. After all, who am I to you?
But please don’t let the fact that I am unknown to you keep you from hearing these truths. Perhaps you stumbled this post at a time when you have ears to hear exactly what it is you need to hear.
Each of us lives the life we’re willing to live. Period. You woke up today in a life your current thinking has created for you. Our inner narrator acclimates to, and perpetuates our script. We dutifully play out our scenes. Believing ourselves to be free, we fail to recognize that too large a percentage of our lives is spent responding and reacting to stimuli over which we exercise little to no control. We feel ourselves going through the motions of a life somehow not our own.
To Be Free Is To Think
And even if we feel bad about it, we too quickly grow accustomed to it. Perhaps we don’t like the direction our life has taken. But if we never stop to think, not just reflexively respond, our lives will not change. The most free thing a person can do is think for themselves. All freedom blooms from that first, most basic, unchainable freedom.
But if you allow your mind and attention to be either captured, or misdirected, you’re giving that freedom away, or using it in a way that will do you no good. Unless you learn to be awake, aware, and not on auto-pilot, your life won’t change. How could it? Who will change it? Who will change your emotions or your circumstances, if not you?
These are psychological, physiological, philosophical, and spiritual truths. There are volumes of writings that prove my assertions, inasmuch as these ideas can be proven.
Again, I say, if you want to change how you feel, you must either change how, or what, you’re thinking. The surest, and only way, to get a different output, is to change the inputs.
Your Thinking Creates Your Life and Your Feelings About It
You will never feel good while thinking about what’s bad. You will never find solutions while focusing on the problems. You feel bad because you spend more time looking at what is wrong in your life and world than what is good and right in it. You find no solutions because you don’t allow yourself to imagine what your life would look like fixed, absent the problems that plague it. Without a vision of a better state of affairs, how do you know which direction to go? How do you know which means to use, which levers to pull, which variables to change, to get to that imagined result?
Change in your feelings and circumstances may not happen overnight. It may take a lot of work. There may be false starts and resets, but if you keep thinking of the life you want, and the steps you can take to get there, you will one day wake up in a different life those different thoughts created. And you’ll feel fundamentally different for the entire journey.
I suspect you’re feeling a tiny flame of inspirational hope that things can be different. That you can feel better about your life. Yes, you can. Fan that tiny flame. It will be hard, but worthwhile work, to change your patterns, change your thinking, and transform your life into the one you actually want to be living. You can do it. You’re the only one who can. You hold the keys.
Saying this woman feels “bad” doesn’t reveal much about what she’s really feeling. We would have to go granular to find out. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed by author)
# 45 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: In the face of negative emotions, go as granular as you can to analyze and identify exactly what it is you’re feeling. Generalities like, ”I’m just sad,” won’t work.
No matter your optimism, positive-mindedness, or mental toughness, there will be times when you feel bad. Unfortunately, this fact besieges and ensnares us all. Even those whose practice is to deny negative emotions, for a moment feel bad enough to trigger their denial response. It is neither a crime, nor a sin, to feel bad. In the physical world, pain is a signal that something is damaged or injured and needs protective care. Ignoring physical pain can lead to permanent damage.
This is also true of emotional pain. Ignoring or denying mental and emotional pain is not an effective strategy if mental and emotional health is the goal. Neither are generalizations a good remedy. Telling yourself, or others, ”I’m just down today,” or, ”I just feel bad,” doesn’t give any clues either to what it is you’re really feeling, or to the cause. Think of the last time someone mouthed this to you. Did their, ”I just feel bad,” provide enough useful information to offer a solution or ease their suffering?
Sometimes, we guard our privacy by deflecting unwanted attention away from our down times. Uttering a generic, ”I’m just a little down,” can be a defensive, avoidance technique. However, it’s not healthy to do this to yourself. One practice that is helpful is to probe deeper than these surface generalities to unmask exactly, precisely what you’re feeling.
Emotional Nuance Is More Than Semantics
There is a difference between ”sadness,” and depression, and between depression, and anxiety. Likewise, are you ”upset,” or frustrated? ”Angry,” or just annoyed? Do you feel ”hurt,” or ashamed? Are you simply ”bothered,” or do you feel overlooked and invisible? These nuances of emotional intensity and precision are more than mere semantics.
Going ”granular” yields analysis of your feelings with specificity. And the process of ferreting out precisely what you’re feeling, will often reveal why you’re feeling it. Oftentimes, this discovery is the insight you need to change the way you feel. Sometimes this happens instantly. Other times, you’ll come away with a hard-won lesson that can bring beauty and wisdom from the pain. At minimum, you will have a diagnostic tool revealing the root causes of the matter.
The next time you feel bad, go as granular as you can. Dive deeply to discover exactly what you’re feeling. You’ll likely also uncover the ”why” of your negative emotions, and this awareness will equip you to address the roots, and not just the bad, surface fruits, represented by those generic ”bad” feelings.
Emotional Intelligence starts with the recognition that All Emotions Are Valid
# 44 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Allow everyone in your life to feel how they feel, they’re going to anyway. If you tell them they shouldn’t feel a certain way, you’re alienating yourself by your own emotional ignorance.
To start, I want to acknowledge and thank John Gottman, author of multiple books, relationship and marriage therapist par excellence, and founder of the John Gottman Institute, where many fine people continue his work on relationships and emotional maturity. Many of the things I will touch on in this article I learned from reading his books and watching his videos and Ted Talks (like this one with over a million views).
I’ll also be linking to several articles for further reading. I promise I’m not intentionally plagiarizing any specific comment, phrase, or idea, but after 16 years of assimilation, I’ve adopted a lot of the language as my own.
Wow. Where do I start with this one? It is regrettable that I discovered the truth that all feelings are valid, far too late in my life. 40 years old, married, and the father of 7 kids, I was an emotional idiot, alternately over or under reacting to the negative emotions of the people around me. I even became a full-time minister. Nevertheless, I possessed zero, ZERO emotional intelligence. Why? Mostly because of how I was raised, and consequently conditioned, to deal with negative emotions.
Before proceeding, it must be noted that emotions, typically thought of as feelings, are not just feelings. They are behaviors, too. The feeling of anger can give rise to an outburst (behavior). Negative emotions form patterned responses (including associated behaviors) from a young age.
Four Parenting Styles
Gottman identifies four distinct parenting styles that influence the development of these patterned reactions. These styles imprint children for dealing with negative emotions as they grow into adulthood. I’ve linked an article outlining each of the styles. Only one of them can develop emotionally stable kids who grow up to be emotionally intelligent and emotionally mature adults. That style is the ”Emotion Coach”.
Emotion Coach parents recognize the validity of a child’s negative feelings, and help their child work out appropriate responses. This is the crux of the matter if you ever hope to become emotionally intelligent, benefitting both yourself and the people with whom you are in relationship. All emotions are valid, even if all responses are not.
I wasn’t raised by an Emotion Coach. I was raised to deny negative emotions, to ignore them, and to distract myself from them. My mom was a bi-polar, suicidal alcoholic who took her own emotional medicine. When she felt bad, which was often, she wrote bad checks, or passed out drunk, or slept with inappropriately aged young men, or sometimes…took handfuls of pills.
Whenever I felt bad it was, ”Here honey, you don’t need to feel that way, have a drink.” And when I got angry, she’d get just as angry, or worse, apparently believing the way to exorcise anger was to blow it out of your system. We could be angry together. It was us against the stupid world.
Being A Christian Doesn’t Impart Emotional Intelligence
So, of course, my life followed the stereotypical pattern. I didn’t like to feel bad. I had learned that I shouldn’t have to feel along with many ways to make myself feel better. Sex, and cocaine, and weed were great ways to avoid, ignore, or distance myself from negative emotions.
This wasn’t going to end well, but it was definitely going to end.
At 21, I became a serious Christian. I mean really serious. But reading and memorizing large swaths of the Bible didn’t make me emotionally intelligent. In some ways, my poor understanding of Jesus and Christianity made me less so. If a Christian feels bad, it’s their fault, right? God doesn’t feel bad. Jesus doesn’t. If you feel bad, you must be doing something wrong that more prayer, or listening to more teaching tapes on Faith, or attending more meetings on Sundays and Wednesday nights can fix.
In short, I grew up believing that feeling bad is not okay. Feeling bad when you’re a Christian is REALLY not ok. I mean, what’s the point?
Maybe you grew up in a lion’s den, too. Maybe you were taught to deny your negative feelings because it is not acceptable to feel bad. I want to say however you feel right now is valid. It is how you feel. You don’t have to rationalize those feelings or justify them to anyone. They are yours, and you are entitled to them. I’m sure if we could all see inside your life and your head, we’d understand a lot better why you feel as you do. And if we couldn’t, that’s our problem, not yours.
Having said that, all of your responses to your feelings are not appropriate. I’ll explain shortly.
Even as an ardent Christian, I went years in a state of emotional detachment to people. Growing up with a mom who routinely attempted suicide, and even more regularly threatened it, doesn’t exactly make one trust and value long-term relationships. I had seen her be gut-wrenchingly depressive so often, with nothing ever coming of it, that I completely detached if anyone around me ever cried or got upset. My mom’s drunken, cryee-faced, suicide routine had taught me that kind of drama wasn’t real, and not something to get too alarmed about.
Inappropriate Responses
For years, I was happy, rarely depressed, not a substance abuser, had a wife and kids, friends, and at 26, became a full-time minister.
Then, 12 years ago, after 22 and a half years of marriage, I found out my wife was cheating on me with an old high school ”friend” she had reconnected with on Facebook. I was so emotionally oblivious that it went on for 6 months before I discovered her treachery. But then, according to pattern, I was devastated and angry. Murderously angry.
Those feelings, given my situation, were completely valid. (I even had a licensed Christian marriage counselor tell me so). Feeling betrayed, I wanted to kill. That’s understandable. But actually killing either of them would have been horribly inappropriate. It wouldn’t have erased the adultery, it would have just put me in jail for murder.
That’s an extreme example, but it is my story, and I’m sticking with it.
I’m also ashamed to admit, that sometimes after my girls became teenagers, struggling with typical teenage girl problems, they would cry themselves to sleep at night, and I was emotionally unavailable. Sometimes I would make it worse by telling them to pray. I didn’t want them to feel bad. I offered many reasons why they shouldn’t…usually heavily laced with what I thought were uplifting scriptures. But my attempts were born out of a stupidity about the nature of emotions and emotional connection.
It seemed the more they cried and hurt, the more shut down and aloof I became.
This all changed one night when I picked up my 15 year old second daughter from a party with friends. I knew she had a crush on a boy at the party and on the way home I asked her about him. She became upset and teary as she explained that he had hardly paid any attention to her. Crying, she told me he had been obsessed with another girl. Then she told me how bad this made her feel about herself, and how she would never have a boyfriend.
It was the perfect opportunity for me to be a good, loving, understanding father to a teen-age daughter who just needed me to be there for her. It was a chance to hear her, validate her feelings, and relate to her that I had been rejected and ignored at her age too, and I understood how bad that could feel. I wish I had been that father.
Instead, I told her how silly it was to be upset. I explained that at her age nothing was going to come of this crush. And I told her that the boy was probably not ”godly” anyway and that she was much better off not getting any more involved with him. I told her to be thankful and to feel good that that was over. I can vaguely remember her looking at me incredulously with a tear-streaked face in the dark car. And I thought I had done so well trying to make her feel better.
The Turning Point
When we got home, I went about my normal routine and thought nothing more about it. After a while, I overheard her talking with her mom. She was crying and clearly upset. I got up and came into the kitchen where they were. My daughter was sitting on a barstool, her face in her hands. More teen-aged female drama, I thought. Hadn’t I already dealt with this and helped her get over it on the way home?
I said, ”You didn’t feel this way on the way home, and we get home and you fall to pieces?”
”I cried all the way home, Dad,” she said.
”What? Now, you’re just lying.” I said in return.
She jerked her head up, tears streaming, and I had the flashback of her face in the dark car. My emotional blindness astonished and floored me. After apologizing profusely to her, I retreated into my mind to try to understand how I had tuned out her emotions and her crying on the way home.
Though I had failed at getting her to ignore her bad feelings, I had succeeded in ignoring them myself. My patterned response to her crying had been to erase it from reality. So much that, to me, it didn’t even exist. I had marched into that kitchen in righteous indignation, clouded by emotional self-delusion, as if she was making up the whole dramatic scene just to curry compassion from her mother. I was stunned…in the best possible way.
Emotional Connection
The next day, I searched for the words ”Emotional Connection” and discovered John Gottman.
Do yourself a favor and watch a video, or read a book. Don’t be like me. Er, don’t be like I was!
I’m not that same detached, emotionally unavailable man anymore. It has taken work. Some of the time it has felt very artificial because my ingrained tendencies to deny, deflect, and distract were so deep. I’m no longer afraid to feel bad, quite the contrary. And I have the distinct pleasure and honor of hearing my girlfriend tell that I’m the most emotionally intelligent person she’s ever known.
I have the unspeakable satisfaction to be there for my kids when things are bad, knowing that now, I’m in it with them. I’m able to relate to their emotions, and validate them, and they know it. I’m much more the Emotion Coach now, even to my adult children. I teach and model for them that all emotions are valid, even if all responses are not. I’ve stopped telling them how to feel, or how they shouldn’t feel. I let them feel how they feel. They were always going to anyway.
And I have the chance to share these things with you, dear Reader. I hope you’ll find how affirming and strengthening it is when you allow the people in your life to feel how they feel without judging them, or trying to change their feelings, or ”make them feel better.”
One of life’s greatest gifts is a kind soul who will help us shoulder the burdens of times when we feel down. A friend and partner with whom we can share our hurts without fear of judgement. One who will hear us, hold us, be there through it with us, allowing us the space to feel all we need to feel, and who will help us respond appropriately. You can be that gift.
PS–
There are times you’ll be in a position to validate and affirm someone’s emotions, when you believe the reasons for their emotional state may not be sound. That can happen. When it does, I encourage you to connect emotionally. Tell the person you understand how they feel. You may even say something like, ”It’s understandable you feel that way since that’s how you see ____________.” The time to discuss the reasons for the feelings will come after you affirm the existence of the feelings.
One of the building blocks of apologizing well is the acknowledgement of how you made the other person feel
#4 on my, 99 Life Tips – A Listis: Learn to apologize well – that includes not just what you did, but also how what you did made the other person feel.
My post, Own It When You’re Wrong – And The Self-Respect Too implores the reader simply to be able to apologize when necessary. For some, the act of saying ”I’m sorry” is a significant hurdle to overcome. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt. You’re able to form those words and express them when needed. So, let’s look at how to apologize well. Knowing how is a step toward emotional intelligence. Apologizing well is a demonstration of emotional intelligence.
First, recognize the emotional prompts motivating your apology. You may feel anything from mild embarrassment to severe shame. But you know at some level, you feel uneasy sweeping the situation under the rug, pretending it didn’t happen. You aren’t looking for someone else to blame, because your conscience is already blaming you. If you didn’t feel bad about what you’ve done, if you didn’t own it, you wouldn’t be contemplating an apology.
Now, there is a second step in knowing how to apologize well. For your apology to really mean anything, you’ll need to see that if is causing you self-directed negative emotions, it is an easy jump to realize how the target or object of your wrong must be feeling. If you feel bad for what you’ve done, they likely feel worse for having it done to them.
Third, recognize that this effect, this subsequent hurt you caused, is the outgrowth of the act itself, is just as damaging, and needs its own acknowledgment for any real relational reparation to occur. To apologize well, the inclusion of this acknowledgement is mandatory. If your apology is to be full and sincere, this is the critical component your ”victim” needs for there to be any restorative effect.
Don’t avoid this by simply mumbling a quick, ”my bad.” Even if you cannot know exactly how your ”sufferer” feels, at minimum, acknowledge that you didn’t make them feel good. So, at this stage you’re recognizing both what you did wrong, AND, the negative feelings it has produced.
Now, express your regrets and remorse over what you did. Say so plainly. Do not use the word ”if” when making an apology. Don’t say, ”I’m sorry, if what I did hurt you.” And don’t apologize for how the other person feels like this, ”I’m sorry you feel that way.” That is little more than a manipulative, blaming tactic clothed in a lame pseudo-apology. You don’t want to be told how to feel, and neither do they.
And finally, connect emotionally by expressions of remorse over how your actions or words made the other person feel. ”I’m so sorry I said that to you. I know my outburst must have really stung and embarrassed you, and I’m really sorry for making you feel that way.” Or something along these lines, ”I feel terrible for how my words hurt you. I am truly sorry.”
Again, to apologize well requires this emotional component. A good apology demonstrates emotional intelligence, and has the ability to both reconcile and restore. Learn to apologize well.
If you’d like to read further on this subject, here is a great article from MindTools that dives more deeply into some other aspects of a good apology. And also this one from PCD Counseling.
