Can BAD Feelings be GOOD for us?

Posted by Dr Kate Lemerle, Psychologist  |  19 June 2016  | 

Getting rid of bad feelings seems to be what brings nearly all my clients to counselling. Most people typically start by telling me that they don’t want to keep having negative emotions, they just want to feel happy. And this has been the goal of popular psychology for many years now.

The quest to find ways we can all float in a sea of positive emotions has been like searching for the elixir of life. It’s meant that research has been targeting ways we can get rid of bad feelings, and has done the pharmaceutical industry one very big favour.

But could there be something good in having bad feelings? Is it really bad for us to feel sad, jealous, embarrassed, angry or confused?

New research shows that there’s an important place for bad feelings in our lives, and trying to avoid or “heal” them can actually be doing us more harm than good.

According to Todd Kashdan, a psychologist at George Mason University and co-author, with Robert Biswas-Diener, of “The Upside of Your Dark Side”, negative emotions are really important for our survival – they set off alarm bells that something’s wrong, so we start to pay more attention to things around us.

Think about this example: your partner starts acting strangely, coming home later than usual and being secretive, hiding his (or her) phone and disappearing outside alone. You start to feel confused, anxious, suspicious, worried, and insecure. Not good feelings!

Now if you didn’t have these feelings alerting you to something odd, you wouldn’t pay any attention the change in behaviour…and the outcome might be one failed relationship. But because your emotions are sharpened and tell you something’s not right, you take some action. You tell your partner you’ve noticed something different and you’d like to talk about what’s happening. Hopefully, you do this in a positive way by saying you’re worried and feeling a bit insecure. And because your partner really does care about you, he (or she) looks sheepish, apologises, and then admits that plans were being made with your friends for a surprise birthday party for you…and now it’s all out in the open!

So let’s think about the benefits of some of the common bad feelings.

Anger

Anger is one of our most misunderstood emotions. Anger happens when we’re being exploited, and it activates a survival instinct to try and regain the balance of power between two people. It is one of the best emotions for driving people to action, rather than staying in a fixed position. For example, if people don’t feel angry about things like animal cruelty, or civil rights, there would never be any changes to laws to protect the vulnerable!

Shame and Guilt

These are two of the most powerful emotions after anger. They can consume us and cause many emotional and psychological problems. But look at these emotions as being the glue that holds our society together. All societies have an agreed set of rules – break the rules and the fabric of the social group comes unstuck. Somewhere over the millions of years of evolution, our brains developed specific sets of neurons responsible for keeping us connected to our “tribes”, and for this to happen, we had to be able to feel shame and guilt if we broke the social rules. Without these feelings there would be complete anarchy. Guilt motivates you to make amends once you realise you’ve done damage to another relationship. Shame makes you look inwardly and reflect on the consequences of your behaviour – and if you’re feeling shame for something you didn’t do yourself, it can be a powerful motivator to forgive another person’s actions.

Envy and Jealousy

These are also very powerful emotions that can consume us if we let them. Both are energisers for action – envy drives us forward to make our lives better because we identify with the source of our envy and strive to improve our lives. Jealousy can be a powerful feeling that reminds us how precious another person is to us, and motivates us to work harder to repair and rebuild a relationship.

Sadness and Grief

In our society, it’s often considered a sign of weakness to be consumed by sadness or grief and many people end up being treated with medications for having these feelings. This is unfortunate, because sadness and grief are totally natural emotions to feel after a deep loss. In fact, the depth of grief can be a good litmus test for the love we felt for the person or situation we’ve lost. Sadness for loss of a job can drive us to re-evaluate our work skills and do something to improve ourselves for the future. Grief for the loss of a loved one can motivate us to set up charities to help others who share a similar experience. It can be the trigger to make the world a better place.

The important thing we all need to learn is to manage our bad feelings. They can flood us and make us do things we regret afterwards. On the other hand, owning our bad feelings and being able to channel them into something constructive – to use them to fuel good actions – is the real purpose of these emotions.

[1] Source of image http://drarata.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Emotional-Trading-547×276.jpg