The Language of Emotions (Revised and Updated): What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You

4.5 | 884 ratings

Price: 15.92

Last update: 09-08-2024

About this item

Featuring significant updates, the new edition of this beloved book takes listeners to the heart of each emotion’s powerful gifts and messages.

Every emotion—even shame, anger, and anxiety—brings us vital information and wisdom. Emotions—especially the unwanted and dishonored ones—hold a tremendous amount of energy. “Too often, we either repress our feelings or let them run wild,” says researcher and educator Karla McLaren. “What many of us were never taught are the fundamental skills for honoring and understanding our profound, powerful emotions.” In this new edition of The Language of Emotions, McLaren takes us much deeper than naming or managing our feelings—she teaches us to listen to the messages within each emotion, reflect on their questions, and incorporate their wisdom into our lives.

Enhanced through more than a decade of research and teaching, this edition offers a time-tested emotional guidebook, including:

How to safely feel and identify emotions—especially the most intense ones

Practices for working with feelings—including setting boundaries, grounding, and the healing power of complaining consciously

Building your empathy—five key skills for awakening your emotional genius

The role of emotions in the resolution of trauma

Decoding the unique messages, gifts, and insights carried by each emotion

New to this edition: insights and practices on anxiety, an exploration of loneliness, and much more

Learning the language of our emotions can deepen our self-understanding, improve our intuition, and enhance our relationships. “Emotions aren’t problems to be solved,” teaches McLaren. “If you learn their language, your emotions can become an indispensable source of vitality, personal growth, and profound healing.”

Amazon Customer

Wow! Just wow! ????

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2024

I always look at the negative reviews on everything just to kind of get a feel as you can tell and get the feel of something through the negative. Then I’ll look at the positive reviews and see what they say and kind of see if there’s a balanced perspective from both, I am glad I didn’t listen to the negative ones.

This book and I’ve just dipped into it here and there, so far, has completely validated a lot of my experience and she gives you a map for our emotional world! As someone who does a lot of internal work this is invaluable. As someone who helps others get in touch with themselves, this is invaluable.

Now, is everything completely right or true? No, but that’s part of being emotional intelligent and having the ability of discernment.

So far, I don’t agree with burning all your contracts. Some of what she says to put into your contracts doesn’t need to be burned they often just need space and presence(love) and will eventually fall away on their own without you knowing it or re-integrate back into the wholeness of our being. So, she may not be as fully educated or familiar with trauma work as I’d like to see, but it’s the map of emotions that is invaluable within this book for me.

I haven’t read very much of the first half of the book that negative comments point to going a bit to far yet(her experience). I’ve only gone to it to find more info that’s referenced in the breakdown of the emotions part and so far it’s been invaluable. Shes great at telling you what parts to go to in each part to look at the different branches of complexity she’s mapped out and I love it!

From my experience a lot of what she’s pointing to is really difficult to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced any of it or whom is highly disassocitive or distracted within book form.

It’s probably far more likely to throw people deeper into the experiences above and give them a bad or bland taste taste in their mouth, but if you’ve done a lot of internal work or are working with a trauma therapist or are a therapist interested in helping your clients delve into their emotional world I think this gives you a great map of it. Just remember you can’t help your clients if you haven’t done the work yourself. You can’t fake being grounded, focused and the ability to hang with others emotions/experience if you can’t do it for yourself.

I am profoundly thankful for this book that came to me with perfect timing. I hope it does the same for you.

Robin Landry

Excellent Book

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2011

All too often we categorize our emotions into good ones and bad ones. In Karen McLaren's book, the Language of Emotions, And What Your Feelings Are Trying To Tell You, we learn that all emotions are good, and each and every one of them is trying to tell you something. To push down any emotion will only bring it up in ways that can be less than helpful. In the end, our bodies and our psyches will pay the price.

In the fascinating book, McLaren goes through each emotion, one at a time, and it's sister emotion, to show us what each emotion is trying to tell us, and what healing that emotion will bring to us if we allow it. I'll show with one emotion, how McLaren goes through each one, delving deeply into each emotion to show us exactly what she means.

"Grief--the deep river of the soul
Gifts--Complete immersion in the river of all souls
The Internal Questions--What must be mourned? What must be released completely?
Signs of Obstruction--Unwillingness to accept or honor loss, death or profound transitions.
Practice--Stop, drop everything, and ask your internal question. When the river of the soul takes your weight until itself, you can
release that which has died into the next world so that you may live more fully in this one."

It's so easy to get stuck in grief. Our western society doesn't have wailing and renting of clothes, 3 day funerals, the body in the parlor, as some other cultures do where grief is a full-on contact sport. We keep children away from death, and as McLaren points out, if we don't grieve properly, with enough tears to send our loved one off to the other world, along with rituals that give us closure, we might end up being haunted by our dead.

I've read in some books that our dead might not know they're dead if it's sudden, maybe a big production of grief and then closure, can help our dead be on their way. Maybe we wouldn't need a uniquely American show like Ghost Whisperer, if we knew how to show our ghosts that they truly have left us.

McLaren also points out that if we don't go through all 3 steps of an emotion, we can become stuck. With grief, we can get stuck and want to relive death over and over again with horror movies, which might explain our fascination with death. And if we don't make room for death in our lives, we can't make room for life. We can't welcome in our children to this life because it's too crowded with our ghosts. Our society certainly doesn't make a show of honoring children when we don't put their welfare, and schooling as the number one things on our national agenda. In fact, we spend more on our national defense than anything else.

Is this because we're so afraid to die? If we could know that death is not dying, but a doorway to another world, maybe we could lose our fear, and start taking care of the living amongst us. We would honor our elderly who are soon to make the transition to another world. We wouldn't spend millions keeping bodies alive beyond when it's wise to do so.

This is a truly thought-provoking book, and wise beyond its mere words.

ginger

Good self awareness book

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2024

I thought this was a good book to reevaluate how you deal with your own and other people's emotions. Made me realize some things about myself.

Amazon Customer

Great book that has helped me tremendously with ironing out ...

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2017

Great book that has helped me tremendously with ironing out my emotions. The best part of this book is how she normalizes the "bad" emotions and helps you gain a more positive perspective on their function. I love my anger so much now because I know it helps me set my boundaries. I welcome my sadness with joy because I know it's there to help me let go of what's not serving me. I removed one star because it is a little long winded and written in a very methodical way. I enjoy things like this but it was hard to follow some of the analogies. I had to re-read certain parts a few times to understand what she was trying to say. I have the book and the audio version of this book and I've listened to certain parts multiple times, getting something new out of it every time. Thank you Karla!!!

Caprica

A Must for Everyone!

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2021

I have given away more copies of this book than any other. It makes sense and use of all emotions, especially the ones we tend to shy away from, creating a sort of utility to work with. And for anyone who has ever struggled with suicidal idealization, no book has every mattered more. A topic that so many individuals, even mental health professionals, have no idea how to move beyond, is given purpose and meaning, and with that, a greater understanding of things in one's life that are in dire need of our attention, focus, and change. Recommended to everyone, though do note: trigger warning in the introduction of childhood abuse. This brilliant and insightful book carries meaning beyond it's word. Highly relevant, and very well studied and written. Karla McLaren is profound.

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