Negative Emotions Are Healthy too
Hi, I’m Eva, and I created this publication — The Venting Machine, back in November 2020. It’s still small in terms of fellowship, yet we’re a proud community of writers.
What connects all of us is the need to let it out.
Life happens. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns out there. People get angry all the time, which is normal. What is important is what we do with the anger.
We live in a world where it seems like all our efforts are directed towards building and maintaining positive emotions: Joy, Gratitude, Serenity, Interest, Hope, Pride, Amusement, Inspiration, Awe, Love. Nothing wrong with that.
In comparison, people tend to avoid the negative emotions that include Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, Rage, Loneliness, Melancholy, Annoyance, most likely because they don’t know how to deal with them. As children, my generation and possibly your generation too, if you’re older, were educated to shy away and avoid these emotions.
We were told to “don’t be afraid, because we’re big girls or boys,” which often translated into feelings of shame if we allowed ourselves to feel worried. Do you remember that showing anger was often seen as inappropriate because it’s not nice to kick, hit or scream, even though that was the only way we could process the anger as an emotion? The same goes for other negative emotions. We needed to snap out of it quickly and pretend we’re all happy, Marry-go-lucky ones, when what we needed instead was an outlet to allow us to consume the emotion.
When we don’t consume anger or any negative emotion, for that matter, it can manifest at more intricate levels, which can affect our physical health. I speak about this topic in a story inspired by Gabor Maté’s book “When the Body Says No.”
For this reason, I created this publication. We need to normalize negative emotions by providing them a healthy outlet because there’s a space and time where, as humans, we must experience all emotions.
