Creating Emotional Roadmaps

As a sex and relationship coach, most of what I do is help people navigate complex emotional terrain. Emotions can be subtle, ephemeral, and hard to detect, or they can be overwhelming, heavy, and immovable. Emotional states can coexist or be in conflict. Increasing our awareness of and learning to better regulate and process our emotions leads to emotional intelligence and emotional empowerment. These are skills that all of us can learn, and doing so is essential to reaching our full human potential and building deeply satisfying, long-lasting relationships.

So how do we get there?

Defining "emotion" seems like a good place to start, but according to Wikipedia, "there is no scientific consensus on a definition." The complexity of the emotional landscape is reflected in the wide variety of ways we conceptualize emotions and the diversity of therapeutic approaches to working with them. Here is a definition that I find useful in my coaching approach:

Emotions are brief, felt mental states that arise from the mind's conscious interpretation of bodily sensations that occur automatically and unconsciously in response to internal and external stimuli as a way to regulate arousal, direct attention, and motivate behavior.

There are four important parts of this definition that serve as landmarks as we learn to map our emotional terrain:

• Stimulus

• Bodily sensation

• Conscious interpretation

• Arousal, attention, and behavior

Usually, it's best if we move through our emotional response in the order listed above, but it's not always that straightforward. We may not be aware of the stimulus or why it triggers a certain reaction. We may be disconnected from our bodily sensations due to trauma or social conditioning. Maybe our conscious interpretation is self-defeating and leads us down a spiral of rumination. Sometimes we skip the conscious interpretation altogether and go straight to reactive behavior. Other times we want to respond to stimulation and sensation without our conscious interpretation getting in the way. These are just a few examples of how the process can be nonlinear.

By creating emotional roadmaps, we increase our awareness of what's going on at each stage. One way to do this is to work with a partner or a coach to intentionally trigger certain emotional responses and then pay attention to what happens at each stage. As we build emotional intelligence, we become more able to do this in real time. We become better able to use our conscious interpretation to choose how we feel about things and how we behave as a result. Below is a brief discussion of each stage, along with some questions to consider when creating emotional roadmaps.

The Four Stages of Emotional Response

Stimulus: Something happens. It can be an external event, such as an interaction with another person, or it can be internal, such as a thought or a memory. Sometimes our reaction seems out of proportion to the stimulus. Trauma and past emotional wounding can make us overly sensitive or completely numb, leading to over- or under-reactions.

Bodily sensations: These occur automatically and unconsciously. A tear comes to our eye. Our face turns red and hot. We get butterflies in our stomach. Bodily sensations are the first thing to happen in response to the stimulus. Tuning in to this early warning system is critical to improving emotional regulation and building emotional intelligence.

Conscious interpretation: How do we make sense of the stimulus and our bodily response? What feelings, thoughts, and impulses arise? If it's uncomfortable, what defenses come up? This is the stage where we begin to have agency. We can reframe negative interpretations, soothe our own hurt feelings, and intervene to limit rumination.

Arousal, attention, and behavior: What do we do in response to the stimulus? If we react impulsively or defensively without making a sound conscious interpretation, we often behave in ways that make our situation worse. Instead, we want to be able to regulate our arousal and direct our attention so that we behave in ways that move us closer to a desired outcome.

Moving Forward with Emotional Empowerment

It's interesting to note that the words "emotion" and "motivation" share the same Latin root, movere, which means "to move." Emotions can serve to put us in motion, but they can also leave us stuck in our tracks. Creating emotional roadmaps is one way to develop the skills of emotional intelligence and emotional empowerment. Emotional empowerment is the ability to understand what our emotions are telling us and to use that information to create the life and relationships we truly desire. Rather than allowing our emotions to drive us into unconscious and habitual reactions that often make a situation worse, we can learn to regulate our emotions and consciously choose responses and behaviors that move us closer to desired outcomes.