Emotional Self-Care (Remodeling and Reframing) - Page 1 of 8
Emotions can serve us well by adding vibrant color, richness, compassion, joy, and love to our lives. Emotions can be the catalyst for acts of kindness, generosity, and courage. It is emotions which transform meaning to meaningfulness, motivating, inspiring, encouraging, and enriching our lives.
Emotions can also serve as a warning, a call to action, or an indicator that something is wrong in our lives. Emotions can trigger pain and despair.
The emotional dimension of human life is closely tied to the social aspects of our lives. We often experience emotions in the context of our relationships with others - especially people who are significant in our lives. Our interpersonal communications are often colored by emotions such as anger, hurt, joy, and love.
When consider our "emotional well-being", we usually think of how we feel in relation to other people - family members, partners, friends, co-workers, etc. A significant portion of time we may spend with counselors and therapists - to improve our emotional and mental health - is actually focused on improving your human relationships.
In his popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic, Stephen Covey suggests that our social dimension is comprised of our "service to others," "empathy," and "synergy." Further, he suggests that our social dimensions include "mutual support" and "validation" by others, and other's "self-fulfilling prophecies" about us: predictions made by an individual or group about another individual or group.
Covey reminds us of how we serve as a reflection to other people of their own values, beliefs and actions. Likewise, we use others to serve as a reflection for us.
Early psychological theory espoused by Adler suggested that
social interactions define the way we perceive the world, how we
perceive ourselves, and how we believe we can best fit in. Recent
research by prominent educational psychologists has reinforced that
there are three basic goals toward which we strive: competence,
autonomy, and relatedness. We are social creatures who seek out
independent identities and who long to be judged as being capable of
succeeding in our culture.
