Anger, sadness, guilt, envy or fear are emotions that have a bad reputation. However, thinking that these emotions are negative and trying to live with our backs to them, denying them, can lead us to a state of permanent confusion, says the author. christina romero in his new post, .
With this new book by Romero, aimed at both children and adults, we discover that these emotions are valuable and make sense. If we try to understand and love them – instead of rejecting them – we will be able to understand each other more and love ourselves better (together with them).
Do we still have a lot to learn about our emotions?
Yes. There is still a lot of confusion with what happens in our emotional world. In fact, The Silver Book of your Emotions (Editorial Contar en Tribu) belongs to a collection of books in which I choose different themes that seem pending for our world, as is also the case of death (The White Book of Death). This new book in the collection comes to provide a different perspective on emotions: it was created to accompany adults and young people who want to know and understand each other better, through their most uncomfortable emotions.
–We were taught to turn our backs on these types of emotions…
Exactly. All my life I spent being prey to my most painful emotions, without understanding them or understanding myself… Believing that if I kept them quiet or kept them deep inside me, time would take them away. Now I know that emotions are like the water of a silver river. They travel, circulate, flow through your body. They want to leave you a message, and then leave you…
The body keeps memory of everything we have felt. And emotions only want us to take their strength and express them, in order to release them and free ourselves. All emotions, when they appear, come to tell you something very important that you were telling yourself inside and that you didn’t even see until that moment…
–So these emotions that we were told were negative are essential to understand ourselves?
–For me, personally, it was revealing to know that before an emotion there is a thought (or several together in a herd) and that it is those thoughts, that way of interpreting reality, that which we tell ourselves internally, which leads us to feel an emotion. emotion or other. That gave me back a power and an awareness of my emotional world that I wanted to share through this book.
It is time to leave behind the idea that there are positive emotions and negative ones. Enough of telling us with so much confusion and blindness our emotional world. All your emotions are very valuable and have a meaning. It is not true that negative emotions exist. They are all valuable and have a function. They come to bring us an important message.
–But what can we do with the emotions that are most uncomfortable and painful for us?
–Up to now, what we have done is repress them, silence them, not understand them… But we need to get closer to the valuable message they bring us and feel them, especially in the body, to then release them, expressing them in different ways.
–What does anger come to tell us?
Anger is a very powerful and necessary emotion. He comes to our aid with all his biochemistry and we feel a lot of strength in our arms and legs. Anger wants us to remember that we deserve to express where our limits are, what we need and show it to the world.
Anger comes so that we see that we have unmet needs and that we deserve to put ourselves first. Say NO to the world to finally say YES to ourselves. Girls have been castrated by anger and boys by sadness. But they still belong to us.
Hopefully we learn to express our limits each time before, on time, without going violent in silence until in the end we explode too late and the blind anger that hurts comes out.
And what do we do with fear?
Fear is an ally, it is our friend. It is not there for us to rule out that path. Many times it shows us where our path does pass. Perhaps we need to prepare more or review what we have believed about ourselves (those lies that we take for truth and tell ourselves internally like “I can’t”, “I’ll die if I get on stage”). But most of the time our best potential is found when we do something despite fear.
–The illustrations of your new book are part of the message and there Francis Marín gives us art…
–Yes… Francis’ illustrations wrap up the message in that special way that only he knows how to do and dialogue with the psyche of the person who has the book in his hands. It may seem that it is intended for children because it is a small and illustrated book… But it is not. It is a book for adults and for young people from about 10 years old. I like to say that it is that book that a baby would give to each of the people who are going to accompany him in his childhood.