The 'emotions' that make 'me' suffer
Tell me what I need right now!

The key to psychological pain lies in ‘emotions’!

Joy, love, and pleasure are emotions that make us feel good.
Sadness, anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, envy… … are emotions that cause us pain.
Why did painful emotions arise? If painful emotions were unnecessary as humans evolved, they would have been eliminated.
But the emotions that cause us pain expand further.
Compared to the past, we have more experiences, more resources, and more information to share and live with.
Diverse experiences broaden our human relationships, abundant resources segment the rich and poor, and an abundance of information forces us to make endless judgments.
In it, we sometimes feel uncomfortable emotions such as sadness, anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, and envy.
Why do we feel these emotions? The gist of this book is that it's because of "deficiency."
That is, when we lack something we need, we immediately feel painful emotions.
What are these deficiencies? According to this book, they are simply as follows:


The reason we grieve is because we have lost something precious to us.
The reason we feel anxious and fearful is because we want to be safe from something that threatens us.
The reason we get angry is because our rights have been denied or ignored.
The reason we are jealous is because we feel that the person we want to be attached to will be stolen by someone else.
The reason we are jealous is because we ourselves are capable, but only someone else is recognized.
So, to put it the other way around, we want to not lose what is precious, we want to be safe, we want to protect our rights, we want to protect the people we are attached to, and we also want to be recognized.
This desire is the essence of human life, and it stems from our desire to be complete human beings.
That longing manifests as emotions such as sadness, anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, and envy, which are accompanied by pain.


So how can we become aware of this fact ourselves? The author, a clinical psychologist, says each emotion carries its own message.
The message is that sadness, anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, and envy each contain a message.
Those messages are messages that your emotions are sending to you.
For example, the message of the emotion 'hwa' says:
“My suggestion was ignored” or “Someone slandered me in my absence.”
So the author says that if we listen to the messages of our own emotions, we can realize why we are feeling that emotion right now.
Of course, such messages vary depending on each individual's circumstances and environment.
But there are also commonalities.
In other words, the gist of the messages is to tell yourself what is valuable to you and what your goals in life are.
So, the author says, emotions tell us what values ​​we want to protect and what goals we want to achieve in life, and reason helps us find ways to achieve those values ​​and goals.
To put it metaphorically, emotions are an expression of a destination, and reason is the choice of means of transportation.


In this way, this book focuses on the message of emotions.
And to unravel each topic, the author provides a friendly and vivid account of several interesting clinical psychology experiments, the resulting psychological theories, and psychotherapy counseling cases.
In this book, the author poses and answers the following questions about emotions:
That is, it talks about 'why emotions that cause us pain exist, why emotions never give up, what controls emotions, why we live wearing 'mental glasses' (schema), what is the nature of emotions, what are the roles of emotions and reason, what kind of Siamese twins are emotions, what kind of desires are emotions an expression of, why emotions are neither right nor wrong, what is the function of sadness, what is the desirable attitude to have toward sadness, what message does anger contain, what are the positive effects of anger, why jealousy and envy are stronger than anger, what message do anxiety and fear contain, how to embrace the pain of emotions, and what misunderstandings we have about our own emotions' based on clinical psychology.
Perhaps for this reason, the contents of this book have become a popular core liberal arts subject at Korea University, and applications for the course are flooding in.
Korea University filmed K-MOOK video lectures because it could not accept all 700 or 800 students who applied for the course, and the writing of this book began for the same reason.

Some people who are in extreme emotional pain may even consider self-harm or suicide.
When the pain is too great and there is no way to reduce it any further, death is considered the solution.
For such clients, I sometimes recommend ice pack exercises as part of pain relief.
This is a practice of holding an ice pack tightly in your hand for one minute.
Holding ice can be quite painful.
After the client endures for one minute, the physical pain and the mental pain disappear instantly.
This is because the endogenous analgesic effect that soothes physical pain also soothes mental pain.

--- p.38

Sadness has another function.
Sadness helps us to look at the phenomenon with coolness.
Normally, we tend to think in a way that is advantageous to ourselves.
This is called 'self-serving bias'.
So they look cool and pretty and they seem more capable than they actually are.
Everyone has a bit of a 'self-serving bias'.
It is an evaluation that adds one's potential ability to one's actual ability.
So sometimes when something bad happens, we blame others, and when something good happens, we take credit for it.
But when I'm feeling sad, I tend to look at the situation more objectively than usual and wonder, "Is it my fault?"
Why is that?
--- p.144

There were people who came to the counseling room for treatment of depression but refused to change.
As it turned out, he wanted to avoid the pain of depression, but at the same time, he felt guilty about treating it.
Five years ago, his two-year-old child died in a car accident while he was driving.
Since then he has suffered from depression.
Several years later, he tried to overcome his depression but was unable to do so, so he came to the counseling office.
But he was not proactive in treating his depression.
The symptoms of depression did not improve either.
I told him.
“Imagine there was a magic button on this table.
Press this button and your depression will disappear.
“Would you like to press it?” He hesitated.

--- p.147

When do people get angry? Anger often arises in everyday life.
For example, when I see someone who is "free riding" (not contributing to the organization's work but only benefiting from others' roles) during team play, I get angry at their unfair behavior.
I also get very angry when I am ignored.
So, 'anger' is a legitimate emotional response to my rights and my values ​​being excluded or ignored.

--- p.154

Self-esteem can be said to be a 'sociometer' of one's own worth.
The social dashboard is sensitive to abnormal signals about whether I will be included or excluded from society.
When our self-esteem is hurt, we primarily feel sad and anxious.
But there is an emotion that appears at the same time.
It is 'hwa'.
Sadness, anxiety, and anger are like a spectrum of light that appears in many colors.
And the root cause of the appearance of those three 'colored' emotions is wounded self-esteem.

--- p.161

We all live with worries.
But there are people who are worried because they have a lot of worries.
So, how much worry is appropriate in life? According to research, 80% of the general public lives with useless worries.
So it's perfectly normal for us to worry a lot about unnecessary things.
But there is something to note.
That means 85% of the things we worry about are actually very unlikely to happen.
So, 15% is what actually happens.
However, it is said that about 80% of what actually happens is something we can handle ourselves.
In the end, of the things I worry about, only about one in a hundred is really something I should worry about.
99 of them are things you don't have to worry about.

--- p.193~194

It may seem easy to recognize your emotions, but it is not easy to recognize them because emotions often pass by in an instant, and we often habitually ignore or suppress them.
In psychology, techniques for noticing and exposing oneself to emotions have long been integrated and utilized in psychotherapy.
Recent research has shown that techniques for noticing and exposing one's own emotions are actually very effective strategies for activating the brain regions that regulate emotions.

--- p.216