Psychotherapy for Learning How Emotional Patterns Affect Behavior

Psychotherapy can help spot how emotions affect specific behaviors. This would mean learning the basics of how you feel. Emotions tend to be more complex than thoughts. That is why you will need a psychiatrist to help simplify things for healing. If you want to learn how psychotherapy can help you understand your emotions and behavior, here are the details.

The basic emotions

Studies show that there are eight basic human emotions. The positive ones include joy and surprise. The negative ones include sadness and disgust. Mixing these feelings together may even result in even more complicated emotions. Psychotherapy can help an individual accept these feelings.

The stimulus

Every emotion starts with a stimulus or subjective experience. The experience can be as simple as spotting a leaf to something huge as a loved one’s death. These personal events can trigger emotions in one individual. Each individual has a different set of feelings.

Different people can feel different about a single experience. One example is the death of a person. Some people may feel sad about the loss of an individual. Other people may feel angry about it.

Complicated emotions can appear in different ways. They may not be identifiable right away. These feelings are combinations of at least two basic emotions. Some of them have accompanying facial expressions, while some do not.

Examples of these complex feelings are regret and jealousy. Psychotherapy can help an individual go through these complex feelings. This can prevent destructive behaviors. The individual can then live a productive and pleasant life.

The behavioral responses

Behavioral response is the expression of a specific emotion. The response can be a smile or a frown. The responses may vary depending on the personality. Sociocultural beliefs and upbringing can affect behavioral responses as well.

Behavioral responses signal what a person feels to other people. They can also be important to one’s general well-being. Studies show that keeping feelings bottled up can lead to high blood pressure and rapid heart rates. That is why expressing emotions is said to be healthy.

Benefits of understanding emotions

For centuries, feelings have helped humans survive and evolve. Humans can escape danger when they do not feel good about a situation. Emotions drive an individual into doing what is necessary. Positive and negative feelings can encourage a person to take the next step. This can help with one’s personal life and career choices.

Positive feelings result in favorable behavior. Negative ones result in disturbing behavior. Psychotherapy prevents the nurturing of destructive emotions. It also prevents the person from expressing them.

Feelings become destructive if the behavioral response hurts the person having them. The pain can also affect the people surrounding this person. Understanding these emotions is important in determining how a person behaves. Psychotherapy can help in this matter.

Emotional awareness is being in touch with one’s emotions. It also involves transforming these feelings into proper behavior. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, check, as well as control feelings. Good emotional intelligence can help people improve their lives.

Some people believe that emotional intelligence can develop over time. Other people believe that this is something a person should be born with. Psychotherapy can help improve a person’s emotional awareness. It can help enhance a person’s emotional intelligence as well.

Individuals with emotional intelligence can move toward social and personal growth. These people understand the feelings of other people and also their own feelings. Those with low emotional intelligence cannot manage emotions (personal or another person’s). This often results in negative behaviors.