To know ourselves in an honest, non-judgemental way can help us to navigate the medley of emotions we all experience and can be key to our personal development. Knowing the signs and signals our body emits when emotions are rising, gives us the opportunity to work with those emotions, either enhancing them, or calming them, in order to move forwards and respond, rather than react. Using emotional intelligence as their inspiration, the children’s mental health charity Place2Be, teamed up with their charity partners at Here4You this week, to host Children’s Mental Health Week 2025, with the theme ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself’. Supported by The Walt Disney Company and the ‘Inside Out 2’ endearing characters, they are encouraging children to grow their self-awareness through understanding their emotions.

The underlying message expertly weaved into the ‘Inside Out’ films is that all of our emotions have a purpose, which combined together, form our core belief system and ultimately our sense of self. The main character, teenage girl Riley, finds that fear and anxiety help to keep her safe, anger helps her to speak out when something feels unjust, joy and sadness help her to process disappointment and then realise what true happiness feels like. As Brianna Wiest writes in her poem on the purpose of emotions, ‘“Your feelings aren’t random, they are messengers. And if you want to get anywhere, you need to let them speak to you and tell you what you really need.”

But how do we befriend our emotions? The Irish language uses a beautiful way of describing emotions, instead of saying, ‘I am sad’, they say ‘tá brón orm’, which when translated means, ‘sadness is on me’. In a similar context, the Latin expression of emotion is ‘emovere’, which means ‘to move out’. These translations point to emotions as transient, they move and change, they do not define and consume our identity, they are a sensation we feel in our body for a while, before making space for other emotions to arrive.

The connection between our body and our emotions has long been a point of scientific research. Darwin’s interest in the development of species, also sparked his lesser-known research into emotions, in his work titled, ‘The expression of the emotions, in man and animals’. Darwin wrote about the similarities in how humans and animals express emotions via muscle movements in our body and facial expressions as a way of communication and survival, a common language used across continents and species. In his groundbreaking book, ‘The Body Keeps the Score’, Bessel Van Der Kolk clearly demonstrates the importance of tuning into and working with our emotions via physical sensations in our body. He writes, “We do not truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations…while numbing may make life tolerable, the price you pay is that you lose awareness of what is going on inside your body, and with that, the sense of being fully, sensually alive.” Van Der Kolk describes how trauma can remain in our body, but with support, we can learn how to move this energy towards both emotional and physical healing. Whilst some emotions can generate a sense of unease within us, turning away from emotions may limit our capacity to live a truly fulfilled life. Mindfulness practices teach us to turn towards discomfort with gentle curiosity and compassion for ourselves, as noted by the renowned Mindfulness teacher, Jon Kabat-Zinn and his ‘9 Mindfulness Attitudes’. 

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Mrs Giordano
Wellbeing Practitioner