therapy Archives - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

March 16, 2023March 29, 2023

Pessimism

Pessimism is a coping strategy that protects us against the vulnerability of having hope.
Feeling hopeful leaves us open to potential disappointment or rejection. If we are fearful or avoidant of these experiences we are more inclined to rely on pessimism to protect us from experiencing them.
Our pessimism can blind us; it can limit our sense of the possibilities for ourselves and our future.
Many of us get stuck in a pessimistic stance without realizing it. To work towards recognizing pessimism in yourself, look out for rigidity; if it feels like you can’t imagine something would work, or something could change, or if it doesn’t feel worth trying, you may be approaching with pessimism.
While it’s okay to “start” with pessimism (if we are so inclined), it’s not recommended to end there. Instead, work towards integrating the counterbalance to pessimism, which is being realistic.
When we work towards being realistic we can see the possibility that the pessimistic outlook has some merit to it, but we can also hold hope and awareness that other outcomes are possible.
You’ll notice I’m not naming “optimism” as the counterbalance to pessimism. Optimism too is a strategy, one that can keep us hopeful, but can also limit our ability to see realistic barriers that might encroach on any given situation.
In its extreme, optimism can be a form of denial, while pessimism can be a state of hopelessness. It is helpful to try and step into you “optimistic” self to think through a scenario, as well as your “pessimistic” self. This can counter-balance rigidity and help pull you closer to a realistic stance.
It’s helpful to identify if a pessimistic stance comes intuitively to you as a first line response to an idea or potential pursuit so you can work on making use of it, and then counterbalancing it with a more realistic approach.
Ultimately, having a more realistic approach will not shield you from the vulnerability that comes with feeling hopeful or taking a chance, but it will enable you to make choices about when you are willing to enter a situation that involves risks (including the emotional risks of feeling rejected or disappointed).

For many of us, we have a pessimistic outlook as a way of insulating ourselves from the vulnerability we’d to feel if we allowed ourselves to hope. This is a tempting strategy to employ if we’ve been hurt, rejected, or disappointed in the past, and we can come to lean on our pessimism as a protective barrier between us and (potentially) feeling those feelings again.

Pessimism can be helpful because it enables us to think to through barriers to achieving a desired goal or outcome. It limits us when it interferes with our ability to assess an individual scenario based around its unique likelihood of coming to fruition. Pessimism also creates problems when it interferes with our ability to identify how valuable (and risk worthy) a pursuit is to us as individuals. When we rely on pessimism, our priority is often to shut down an idea or pursuit, often because we want to avoid a negative outcome (including feeling negative feelings).

An overly pessimistic stance can lead to feeling helpless and un-empowered. Pessimism can stop us in our tracks before we get started, and it can interfere with our ability to see genuine possibilities for ourselves and our future. It’s hard to act on your dreams (even ones that may be possible) if you’re a pessimist.

The antidote to pessimism is holding a realistic stance, one that holds awareness of why a situation might not work out *and* that there are other possible outcomes. When we’re realistic we can weigh the likelihood of success against our personal priorities and risk thresholds. To be clear, you can have a negative outlook on a situation and not be taking a pessimistic stance. Sometimes a situation is a long shot, or won’t work out, and you are realistically assessing the factors at play when you decide not to pursue it.

If you inclined towards pessimism, use it as a starting point and allow yourself to get in touch with the reasons why something may not work. Then, work to explore the potential for alternate possibilities and outcomes. At that point you can decide, based on your own personal thresholds, whether it’s worth it to you to take the emotional, social, financial, relational (etc) risk.

Comments:

If you are someone who relates to the notion that you want to protect yourself from negative emotions, I’d encourage you to read my prior posts on how all emotions (including negative ones) are useful and essential. The first covers how negative feelings are actually incredibly important tools to help us find long term happiness, and the second helps us better understand (and accept the need for) our anger.
The idea that pessimism serves a purpose is very linked to the concept of secondary gains, which are the positive aspects of something that is otherwise problematic in our lives.

October 18, 2022March 27, 2023

Think like A Therapist

“How do you do it?” i.e. “How do therapists spend all day listening to the emotional duress of others?”. Our training includes tools and perspectives that enable us to listen with a buffer. Read more if you too want to learn more about not taking other’s struggles home with you.
One (but not the only) reason folks often struggle to tolerate painful emotions is because it triggers a “fix-it mode” in us that leaves us wanting to take action in a way that makes the situation better. The trouble is, we can’t “fix” all situations in life and emotions are not light switches that can be turned on and off.
So, we need perspective one: You cannot stop someone (yourself included) from feeling their feelings. Take that pressure off of yourself and the situation. We can distract or ground at times of emotional intensity, but big picture what alleviates negative feelings is learning how to tolerate, work through, release, and ride them out.
Learning how to have a sustainable relationship with our emotions can take time (and therapy), though we can channel our desires to “fix-it” into efforts to connect, which can help someone struggling feel better even if a problem remains. This means offering the person in duress (you included) genuine empathy, compassion, validation, and support.
To offer that softness we need perspective two: Trust that the emotions are valid, even if we don’t fully understand them. Fighting or denying negative emotions often interferes with the process of releasing them in ourselves, and spurs disconnection and the experience invalidation (which creates a whole other host of problems) in others.
Big picture: release the idea that negative feelings are “bad”, “avoidable”, “problematic” etc. For us to be happy and satisfied we need to accept that negative feelings are a part of life, and it is our job to learn to sustainably live with both our negative and positive feelings.
Holding these perspectives when we (or others) are struggling means our “job” becomes less about “doing” (i.e. fixing or problem solving) and more about “being” (i.e. trusting, connecting and listening). This takes pressure off the situation and often makes listening and tolerating easier and less stressful for all parties.
Therapists are also comforted by their trust in the therapeutic process and see pain (and safely working through it) as a necessary part of the journey to a happier and more fulfilled life. This helps anchor us in those difficult moments; we know your pain and working through it is a necessary step along the way to feeling better.
If you too can try and develop that trust that you (or others) will make it though, you might find you feel safer, less frantic, and more comforted at difficult times. You may need to actively remind yourself or others that you can and will feel better some day – and that you have felt better in the past, even when it felt inaccessible at the time.
Lastly, we therapists know that the more we work through pain points in our lives, the less other people’s pain points trigger us. This is called widening our window of tolerance, and it means we can, over time (and often with therapy) learn how to be with intense feelings in a manner that doesn’t overwhelm us.

I get asked all the time, “How do you do it? How do you sit with people’s emotional pain as your job?” “Doesn’t it exhaust you, doesn’t it burn you out?”. Today, I am attempting to answer that question, and share some of the tools us therapists use to manage our work of sitting with painful topics. While this isn’t training on how to be a therapist, if you can adopt the perspectives in this post you may find yourself more at peace with your negative feelings, and more able to stay present, supportive, and connected to others when they are struggling.

When our relationship with our emotions is working well, emotions come and go. When we struggle with our emotions it’s usually because we have some hangup in the process of finding, feeling, accepting, and releasing our emotions. Big picture, our job, as your therapist, is to help you learn how to process through your thoughts and feelings so you can eventually do that work outside of therapy (without us). For that reason, us therapists are often looking for opportunities to accompany you alongside your painful emotions so you can experience, with support, your emotions in a manner that helps you productively work through them, learn from them, and make use of them.

For this reason, your therapist is not afraid of your emotions or the intense feelings and reactions you have to your life. In fact, it’s the opposite; your therapist is actually actively looking for those “pain points” and is working to help you process through (rather than avoid them or linger over them). It’s ok to need help in this process, that’s why we therapists exist. Not everyone has the intuition, models (or both) for how to have a constructive relationship with our feelings.

If you struggle with others painful emotions, try and be curious with yourself about what may be happening, and explore whether or not you truly buy into the perspectives in this post. More often than not, our struggles tolerating others pain comes from our own difficulties with accepting that negative emotions, and learning to be at peace with their existence, is a necessary fact of life.

Comments:

Today’s topic is complicated. While we aren’t “therapists” for our friends and family members, to have close relationships we do need to be able to hear people’s struggles in a manner that is sustainable for us, and that doesn’t put the burden of their problem on us. At times, in relationships, folks look to others to solve their problems for them or to take accountability they themselves don’t take. This helplessness can be a problem, quite separate from any discomfort we may hold listening to the struggle of another person. Today’s post is simply meant to help offer a handful of perspectives that might help you be more at ease when someone is sharing their struggles with you.
There are other ways us therapists manage the emotional intensity of our work too (things like only seeing a certain number of clients a day, or a week, etc). When we struggle, we often seek out consultation to make sure we’re offering what our clients need from us. There are many other ways we take care of ourselves in our job. Don’t expect that holding these perspectives is all that a person would need to tolerate an emotionally difficult topic, just know that holding these perspectives helps.
Remember to trust your intuition, if you are listening to someone and really feeling like they are struggling too much, or are in a major crisis – this is a time to reach out to professionals for help. We therapists don’t exclusively rely on “trust in the process”, we also call in for extra help and supports (like medications, hospitalizations, outside consultation for us to get a second opinion on our work with a client) when needed.
In your own therapy (if you’re in it) be curious about temptations you have to withhold from your therapist due to concerns with “burdening” your therapist with too much. One of the points of the therapeutic relationship is to have a safe place where you feel unrestricted in your ability to share whatever pain or hardship you are enduring. If you find yourself withholding, talk to your therapist about your fears that what you’re experiencing may be “too much”. There is probably a lot of fertile ground and opportunities for healing for you to explore what “too much” is, how you know if you’re “too much” and how you perceive in others cues that you’re “too much” for them. For more on this, I have a whole post on the things we don’t say in therapy, and how that effects from treatment .
I talk about the importance of going through stages of processing with your emotions. For more about how emotions “work” when they are “working well” see my posts explaining emotions and their brevity.
Unclear what I mean when I say we need to learn from our feelings? See post about how emotions are like traffic signals.
I mention the window of tolerance in this post, a foundational framework for understanding what a constructive relationship with our inner wold looks like.
Brene Brown has a great little video on the power of connecting through empathy, and how we can help alleviate emotional struggles by being empathic with one another. In addition, if find you have a difficult time accepting the pain of others I have another post that may help you dig deeper into what’s happening as you try and tolerate another’s trauma.
I talk about the connecting nature of offering validation in this post. I have another post on why validation is important.
I mention that sometimes emotions are too intense to be present with, and we need tools like grounding and distraction. There are a host of distress tolerance skills that can help at times of emotions intensity. More to come in future posts.

October 17, 2021March 27, 2023

Displacement

Our feelings are harder to access in environments where they are not welcome. This can be with certain people who we feel shut us down, and it can also be with our internal world if we believe certain feelings are bad, unproductive, or unacceptable.
When we can’t access and process through our feelings directly we may find ourselves prone to using displacement. When we “displace” we focus our energy, attention, and conversation around something other than the core issue at hand.
Displacement can be an indirect way of addressing an emotionally charged / intense topic or a topic we can’t find an accessible entry point into discussing or feeling our way through.
Example: you’ve had a bad day at work and take out your anger on your family once you’re home. Perhaps you’re feeling angry about work, and simultaneously feeling like you can’t change that environment / express yourself there and maintain professionalism (i.e. you can’t find an accessible entry point at work to handle your concerns in a direct way).
Although you don’t want to be irritable at home, you may (consciously or unconsciously) rationalize to yourself that your family is “stuck with you” and so you release your frustrations at home. In this scenario the person has displaced their anger at work onto their family members and in an environment where they feel their negative emotions are more tolerated.
Sometimes displacement of this nature can happen even when we don’t consciously *feel* angry. So yes, this means you can have a feeling, not register that you are having it, and then direct a release of it toward some other topic or person in your life.
The trouble with displacement is we focus our attention, energy, and conversation around the focal point, at times without acknowledgement or awareness of the underlying issue(s) at hand.
Unfortunately, even if we can “resolve” the displaced issue (in this example the conflict with our family), we haven’t resolved the core issue (work) and the recipient(s) of our displacement often leave the interaction(s) feeling like the other has been unreasonable.
If we are regularly displacing in our lives we run the risk of resentment in relationships, having the same fight repeatedly, believing our internal world is unreasonable, and feeling confused by or untrustworthy of our reactions.
More in today’s post and comments about how displacement can creep into relationships and decrease our ability to solve problems in our lives. Also, tips for how to find displacement and what to do about it.

When we “displace” we focus our thoughts, communications and/or reactions to a “stand-in” person / object / situation as opposed to the actual person / situation we are having a reaction to. When someone says they feel treated like a punching bag, often they are describing being the recipient of someone else’s displaced feelings.

Displacement can happen in lots of ways, imagine you and your spouse are in a fight about how the dishes are loaded in the dishwasher. More often then not those types of fights are a displacement of a different, larger, and more emotionally overwhelming topic. Instead of facing that topic head on, we can displace onto something more accessible and concrete, like how the dishes are loaded. In this scenario the intense emotions about a larger dynamic (could be anything, perhaps how heard one party feels) are displaced onto a smaller dynamic (how the dishes are loaded) that comes to represent the larger one.

Sometimes we can displace as a way of protecting ourselves from feelings we don’t want to have or believe we shouldn’t be having. At those times we can be fully wedded the the notion that we are having reactions to “the dishes” rather than some larger problem we don’t want to be true of our relationship or in our lives.

Other times when we displace, we may feel aware that the strength of our reaction doesn’t totally make sense. A helpful way to get to core of an issue when you suspect displacement is at play in yourself or others is to ask (in a collaborative, non-judgmental, and accepting manner):

Can you articulate why there is so much emotion or heat around this topic?
Does it feel like this type of thing happens in other ways we may not be discussing?
What else happened today or recently that this reminds me of that I might also be having a reaction to?
Does it feel like we might really be talking about something or someone else here?

Until we can get to the core of the issues we face we are at risk of having the same underlying concern or conflict around “stand-in” topics. With curiosity and introspection we can work to understand and know ourselves better to catch displacement in the act, and get to addressing core underlying concerns.

Notes

One of the reasons that therapy is effective is that a skilled therapist provides a space for someone to feel their feelings without judgment. The relationship becomes a safe place to release your emotions, and it’s not uncommon for patients to find themselves surprised by what comes out in a session. If this has happened to you in treatment this is often a great sign that you feel safe in your relationship with your therapist and they are helping you access, process through, and release what is already there and needs room to come out.
Once we’ve gotten good at recognizing the signs of displacement in ourselves and can recognize when we’re displacing from one topic to another the displaced topic itself can become a helpful entry point into conversation. For example, “I’m noticing myself feeling angry about the dishes but as I think about it, I’m realizing it’s not just the dishes, it’s more that the dishes are one example of how I feel like I ask you to do something and it doesn’t happen. I think we really need to talk about this because I can tell I’m getting resentful”.
Affairs in relationships can happen for many reasons, but one avenue for thinking about them (and there are many others) is through the notion of displacement. If you are having an affair one of many questions you can ask to build introspection and awareness is what need aren’t you getting met from your partner or your life that you have displaced into this other relationship?
I mention in the post that sometimes we can feel like our reactions don’t totally make sense for the situation we are in. Sometimes this is because we are displacing, but all feelings are valid even if they are about numerous situations at the same time. See this post on the cumulative nature of emotions as well as this post on how our brains make associations for a deeper dive into that topic.
I mention in the post that our feelings are harder to access in environments where they are not welcome including our internal world if we believe certain feelings are bad, unproductive, or unacceptable. See more here for how to approach your internal world in a way that won’t shut it down .
I mention in the post that we can have an emotion and not register we are having it. It’s true. For more about how this works see this post on emotional blocking.
Alcoholics Anonymous groups talk about displacement too, though they use the phrase “Coming out Sideways” to discuss how emotions or reactions can come out “sideways” to a focal point other than the core issue, problem, concern, or person.
Our insight into our use of displacement can vary even if we are otherwise self-aware and reflective. We can be very self-aware in some categories of our life and in some relationships, as less so in others. Further, we can displace more around certain types of issues than others. Our insight can vary based on a variety of factors including whether we’re in our window of tolerance, or when we’re operating outside of our limits.

July 15, 2021March 27, 2023

You Married Your Parent?

When we are drawn to relationships that parallel our relationships with our parents we are often drawn to how we FELT in the relationship and our experience of the relationship.
This can include the role we take on in relation to the other person, what we expect of them and how they’ll react, and our sense of how we’re supposed to be around them.
Your experience of a relationship is likely to be unique to you, which means it may not be similar to experiences other people (including your siblings) had of your parent.
An example: For the parent that had a temper, think about your experience of that, perhaps it’s something like ‘I had to walk on eggshells around her, and I felt like I had to keep her protected from something that might make her too angry. I was often scared or nervous when something might upset her’.
While your spouse may or may not have a temper, you can explore whether or not there is an experiential parallel in how direct you feel you can be with your partner, or if you feel like it’s your job to keep your partner “in a happy zone” because it’s hard for you to trust they’ll be able to productively manage upsetting information independently. You can also consider how similarly you feel when you anticipate they’ll be upset
We end up in parallel relationships often because we are drawn to that familiar feeling, role, dynamic, or experience.
When we build insight and understanding into what our relationship was like for us we can make decisions (in an active way) about whether that served us (or not) and whether that’s an experience we want in our relationship(s) moving forward (or not).
So when we question, “am I dating my parent”, we want to be on the lookout for both traits between your partner and your parent as well as your experience of each relationship.
You can end up “marrying your parent” by marrying someone who makes you feel the same way or take on the same role in the relationship even if they have very different personality traits.
See post for more information and sample questions to ask yourself to help you build this understanding.

For most of us, when we consider whether or not we’re dating or married to “our parent” (as the expression goes) we think about this concept in terms of interests or personality traits. For example: my mother was organized and so is my spouse; my father was a runner and so is my partner; my parent had a temper and so does my wife.

Many of us know we are drawn to what’s familiar, and so yes, we can be drawn to familiar personality characteristics. When I’m thinking about whether or not someone may be replicating an earlier relationship pattern in a current relationship I’m also on the lookout for “experiential” parallels, something I find far fewer people have heard of or considered.
By experiential, I am referring to YOUR experience in the relationship. We’re looking at how our personality interacts with the personality of another person for a unique relational dynamic between us.

For many of us it can be hard to get descriptive in a concrete way about our experience of our parents as the relationship becomes our standard for “normal” far before we have the capacity for words or for memory.

A helpful way to explore this idea is to focus on your experience in the early relationship and your experience in your current relationship and see what parallels arise. Ask yourself questions about your experience, and it’s ok if your responses surprise you.

Samples:

How understood, alone, connected, or important did I feel?

When a problem arose did I feel safe in discussing it? Afraid? Like it was my job to figure it out alone? Maybe it wasn’t my job at all?

How was accountability handled? Who took responsibility for problems or accidents?

When a change needed to be made did I feel like it was my job to adapt, did I expect them to adapt? Did we all work towards making changes?

When something needed to be figured out was I included? Ignored?

These prompts will help you connect with how you felt, the role you took on, what you expect of others, and what the relationship was like for you. We can then use that information to help us change patterns that may not serve us moving forward, and work towards keeping dynamics that did work well for us and our relationship.

Notes:

If you’re having a difficult time getting descriptive about the relationship (i.e. going beyond “the relationship was good” or “the relationship was bad”) read more about how to find and use descriptive language in ways that help us move beyond words like “good” or “bad”.
Still having a tough time identifying your experience? When you try and explore it let go of how you think you “should” feel and allow yourself to be present with whatever comes up, even if it feels surprising or uncomfortable.
This post also relates to a prior post where I cover how our early experiences shape our understanding of what to expect of ourselves and those around us.
An example of relational experiences that occur with specific personality traits: For the parent who got a lot done, ‘I always knew I could rely on her to take care of things, but I also always felt like she was so busy, or distracted, or not really present with me and so I got used to feeling like she wasn’t totally plugged in to me’. Whether or not your partner “gets a lot done” in the way your parent did, if we were having you pay attention to your experience of the relationship we’d want you to be reflecting on how important you feel when you’re together, and exploring how much you feel like your partner offers you their full attention when you’re together, and how available to you they are.

April 23, 2021March 27, 2023

Emotions as Traffic Signals

While “bad” feelings don’t feel as nice, they are actually incredibly important tools to help us find long term happiness
What if, instead of trying not to have negative emotions, we could learn to embrace them just as we do positive ones?
Negative emotions, like positive emotions, are signals to us about what does and doesn’t work for us
The trouble is sometimes we don’t feel the way we think we “should” feel in a scenario, and so we often want to push our feelings away.
Or, sometimes negative emotions are just plain hard to feel and hold on to because we’ve gotten so used to not feeling them and we don’t like how they feel.
We want to try and work towards connecting with our negative emotions in a sustainable way.
Negative emotions can teach us about what we value (sadness when we experience a loss), when we’ve made a mis-step (guilt), when we feel wronged or betrayed and need to protect ourselves (anger).
Without working on learning how to approach and tolerate these feelings we are vulnerable to missing important cues about what can make our lives better.
See post and comments for how this is different if we are depressed or anxious.

A common request I get in treatment, “You’re going to help me get rid of my bad feelings, right?”. It makes sense. Feeling good feels good and feeling bad feels bad. But, that’s not how it works OR how we want it to work.

Think of your emotions like a traffic signal that help you get to know your authentic self (meaning your personal beliefs, preferences, likes, dislikes, interests, values, and limits. See comments for more).

We are not capable of long-term and sustainable happiness if we are not in touch with our authentic selves, so learning to accept all your feelings is an important step in the process of having more positive feelings overall.

Red light emotions make us stop and signal to us that something isn’t quite right. Those include anger, sadness, guilt, shame, embarrassment – and most other emotions you might lump in the “bad” category.

Green light emotions are a signal to move closer to something. Those include joy, pride, satisfaction, hope, interest – and most other emotions you might lump into the “good” category.

Whenever we feel an emotion we are offered an opportunity to pause, reflect, understand, and learn. Examples of some of those lessons are in today’s comments.

Unfortunately, many of us struggle to tolerate the experience of feeling our negative emotions because they feel bad, we don’t like them, and most of us don’t have practice in accepting them. There is a sweet spot between feeling them “enough” to make sense of them, and stewing in them (or overwhelming ourselves with them). Finding that personal sweet spot can take some practice.

When we we’re depressed we’re often so over-run with negative feelings (they’re on overdrive) that they can be difficult to process through or make sense of. Sometimes we feel numb or don’t really feel anything at all. If either of those describes you that’s a sign to consider professional help from a therapist. See comments for more.

So, although you may be tempted to push away negative emotions, try to work towards seeing them as your teacher and your guide. This is best done once you are out of the throes of the negative emotion – sometimes just getting through is all you can do in the moment.

Notes:

Think about what each emotion signals to you. Some examples below for the purpose of some of our most common emotions.
When we feel anger we’ve received a signal we feel wronged, betrayed, or exploited in some way. We can learn from these situations and work to protect ourselves so we are not repeatedly in situations where we feel taken advantage of.
When we feel sad we’ve received a signal we feel the loss of something important or valued to us. Knowing what we value and working towards finding that in our lives (in other ways beyond the loss we just endured) offers us the opportunity to make more and more meaningful experiences moving forward. Sadness also helps us know and recognize how important something or someone was to us (which means we can sometimes feel surprised when we didn’t realize it until we lost it).
When we feel guilt we’ve received a signal that we’ve made a mistep. This signal helps us know when to make a mends, and helps us protect our sense of integrity and self respect.
When we feel fear we’ve received a signal that there is something to be afraid of. We want to work towards finding safety and security for ourselves.
When we feel joy we’ve found something that brings us pleasure. We want to (responsibly) keep that in our lives in a way that’s sustainable with other goals and priorities.
When we feel pride in ourselves or others we’ve received a signal that we or someone important to us has accomplished something of significance.
I mention your “authentic self” in the post. Many of us are confused about our authentic self because culturally, societally, and sometimes by our families we’ve been given messages about how we “should” feel, what we “should” think, and what “should” be important to us. These messages, some of which are well intentioned can confuse our ability to be in touch with how we actually feel, what we actually think and believe, where our limits actually are, and what is actually important to us. I talk about this further in my post on judgments and in my post on “should’s vs wants”.
Anxiety and depression can heighten emotions, and sometimes we can feel intense guilt, sadness, or fear that is not in proportion to the situation we are in or how we authentically feel about something. Feeling a lot of guilt CAN mean you really did something you feel is wrong, or it can mean your emotion is on over drive. While we can still learn from these emotions, the strength of the emotion does not directly match the strength of the lesson. Often times when we are anxious or depressed it’s not that there’s no reason for the feelings we are having, it’s that we don’t understand the reason – and the process of finding the reason can take a lot of reflecting and professional help. We also may need to learn when to listen to emotions and when to to challenge emotions, and figuring out when to do which is a complex process that is best done with a professional.
The premise of this post is that our emotions serve a function; we have them for a reason. Inside Out, the Pixar Movie is a great introduction to this concept, and explores how all of our emotions (including anger and sadness) serve functional and useful purposes for us. If you’re wrestling with this idea, or looking to introduce it to a child, consider watching the movie.