Are we emotion starved??

I was recently invited to speak in a training program and came across lot of professionals sitting in front of me and when i smiled to them they smiled back to me. I felt as if a very simple expression of joy which is smile tends to be more of reaction than an action. It is nearly very difficult to be openly expressive about what we are feeling and being about to empathsize about what the other person is going through.

We are overthinking our emotions and underthinking the others feelings. I feel this is something very serious as this further leads to non expressed emotions on our part and non validated emotions on the part of others. So as humans we are putting each others emotions at the background and waiting for others to understand and accept us as emotional beings.

As a part of my own way of dealing with this situation I have started asking ‘how are you feeling’ rather than ‘how are you?’. It was one interesting tip I read in an article to incite the people to think about their emotions and express their feelings. Another aspect of this I have been noticing is that whenever we share my feelings, rather than understanding and validating them I feel the people around me advice how to distract and suppress that emotion and it somehow makes me feel that the emotion that gets distracted or suppressed is worse than not expressed.

We as individuals look for connections and relationships in our lives for exactly this reason as we are clueless about what to do with our emotions which become our guiding lights for all the decisions that we make, both voluntarily and non voluntarily. We require relations which provides us enough space to be explore and express our emotions and make us live like humans.

I can very categorically see two very distinct part of individuals in the society, one segment is of those who are brutally expressive and are disrespectfully aggressive about their demands from the relationships and social framework and another segment comprises of people who are absolutely guarding of their emotional states and keep repressing their ideas and expressions for the fear of judgement and isolation.

We need to carve out a generation and a pool of people around us as role models who are unapologitically expressive of their emotions yet decisively respectful of others feelings. Such a balanced approach needs a lot of learning from the experiences and social validation for being true and wise in dealing with the everyday challenges of life.

Let us all be adorable, joyful and peaceful before we are famous, wealthy and successful!!