The health field offers many satisfactions such as having the opportunity to help patients in their recovery. Although it cannot be denied that there are also many adversities along the long road. Therefore, it is to regulate the development of negative emotions that can have different repercussions on the mental state of doctors.
On this point, specialists in thanatology from Gayosso Group point out that the first thing to do is to get a definition. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, it is something harmful, that hurts and therefore its presence is bad.
The nature of emotions is that they arise automatically without cognitive elaboration. This means that thoughts are not involved in the appearance of these and for this reason it is not something voluntary that can be planned or decided at will.
With this in mind, emotions are reactions and, as such, have specific functions. Among them is promoting guidance on what is happening. They also help signal the presence of the need, inform what is significant, and influence the mental organization to take action that will lead to the satisfaction of that need. That is, they allow one to be trained to respond to the height of the circumstances that are being experienced in an adaptive way.
Are emotions the same as feelings?
Unlike emotions, feelings are after the cognitive elaboration of the emotion, that is, after interpreting and giving meaning to emotions. At this stage reasoning is already actively involved and positive and negative thoughts begin to be constructed, or as the psychotherapist Miriam Muños Polit labels them, feelings of development or deterioration.
Therefore, all emotions such as fear, affection, joy, sadness are at the service of survival. They reveal the urgency of preparing ourselves to carry out congruent actions that allow us to satisfy the needs that arise. So all emotions are adaptive and involuntary reactions that are always positive for development, adaptation and survival.
It is here that reference is again made to the definition of bad, since sadness and anger, for example, are not bad in the sense that they are not harmful. They do not hinder development but on the contrary, an anger can train someone who is feeling it to react correctly before an abusive situation. The emotion puts you in the necessary context to set limits appropriately.
Negative emotions do not exist
This does not mean that “seemingly” unpleasant emotions should be ignored or misplaced. It is essential to seek to meet the needs that arose through the pain of loss and sadness. Although it is not desirable, it can help to train in those moments that are worthwhile to withdraw from the world and work with our interior to find answers and meaning in moments of mourning or suffering.
“According to the above, we can conclude that there are no negative emotions, since they are not controllable and arise before thoughts and decisions. Feelings of deterioration may be experienced. But these are caused by thoughts, which they can try to control and make them more aware. That is why emotions, regardless of whether they are pleasant or unpleasant when experiencing them, are always my allies in favor of my development”, commented Sergio Saucedo, Psychologist of the Grupo Gayosso Thanatology program.