With Albert Ellis’ REBT, a distinction has been made between healthy and unhealthy negative emotions. Healthy negative emotions are viewed as healthy or rational emotional responses to an actual adverse event, and helps an individual strive to change what can be changed realistically and accept constructively what can’t be changed.
What Are Healthy and Unhealthy Negative Emotions?
This helps the individual to move towards their own happiness producing goals, purposes, and desires. Unhealthy negative emotions are unhealthy and irrational responses to an inferred or adverse event. Instead of helping you, they interfere with your belief system. They interfere with what you think you can change and what you can’t change. This leads you to sabotaging your move towards happiness producing goals, desires, or purposes.
What are examples of healthy and unhealthy negative emotions?
Healthy negative emotions: concern, sadness, healthy anger or annoyance, and other negative emotions that may community and self-helping actions. Unhealthy negative emotions: anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, and any other negative emotion that may interfere with actions and results in destructive behavior or inaction.
Within REBT, negative emotional responses are a result of an individual’s rational or irrational belief towards an adverse event. Healthy negative emotions are negative emotions that can help an individual move towards what benefits them, whereas unhealthy negative emotions can sabotage an individual’s move towards what benefits them.
You experience grief as a negative emotion when you go through loss and death. Grief is healthy when something positive comes out of it. A good example is helping people deal with their own grief. On the other hand, when you use grief as an excuse, it becomes an unhealthy negative emotion. You then use this grief to avoid doing anything at all.
Separating Healthy and Unhealthy Negative Emotions
Healthy and unhealthy negative emotions can affect the way we think. If we are going to feel the effects of negative emotions, it’s better to experience them in a healthy way rather than letting unhealthy emotions control the way we think.
Here are some examples of healthy and unhealthy negative emotions, and how to separate them:
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- Concern vs Anxiety – felt when adversities threaten our personal domain. Concern is rational, anxiety is irrational.
- Sadness vs Depression – Experienced during an undeserved plight or event. Sadness is rational, depression is irrational
- Remorse vs Guilt – Experienced after hurting someone or an individual has broken his or her moral code
For negative emotions to be healthy and unhealthy, there lies a fine line between two distinct emotions for different events. You experience both concern and anxiety when faced with adversity. Anxious behavior is deemed unhealthy because individuals withdraw and avoid the threat. This would cause you to overprepare to help combat this threat. Concern is healthy because an individual comes up with realistic options to face the threat.
Depressive behavior is unhealthy because an individual becomes clingy and dependent on others. This often develops tendencies for self-destruction. Meanwhile, sadness allows the individual to express the emotion in a non-complaining manner.
People feeling guilty tend to escape it through self-defeating ways, like making unrealistic promises about never sinning again, or rejecting offers of forgiveness. Remorseful behavior is facing up to the pain that you have sinned. You ask for forgiveness but not beg for it.
You can check out this video from Bright Side to help you understand if you’re emotionally healthy or not:
In closing, negative emotions are part and parcel of our lives. How we experience them and how we make them can determine whether or not it’s healthy for us.
Related Links
What Is REBT? And Why Do You Need It?
Featured Image: Psychology Today
