Whether your feelings can move through you
Emotions arrive whether or not they are convenient. You can feel disappointed when you think you should be grateful, angry with someone you love, anxious about something you chose or sad during a period of life that is otherwise going well. Much of emotional life involves holding experiences that do not fit neatly with how we think we are supposed to feel.
Bellamy uses Emotional Freedom to describe how much permission your emotions have to exist, change and pass through without immediately being suppressed, judged or treated as instructions. It is the ability to experience a feeling while retaining some choice about what happens next.
Emotional Freedom does not mean expressing everything you feel, trusting every emotion as fact or becoming highly emotional. It means having enough room internally for a range of emotions without needing to eliminate them simply because they are uncomfortable.
What is Emotional Freedom?
Emotional Freedom is a Bellamy construct informed by research on emotion regulation, emotional acceptance, experiential avoidance and psychological flexibility. Psychology does not have one established construct called emotional freedom that captures exactly what Bellamy measures, but several areas of research help explain why our relationship with emotion matters.
Emotion regulation refers broadly to the processes through which people influence which emotions they experience, when they experience them and how those emotions are expressed. Regulation itself is not a problem. Being able to regulate emotion is essential for everyday functioning. You may decide not to express irritation during a meeting, calm yourself before an important conversation or deliberately shift your attention away from something upsetting when you need to concentrate.
The important distinction is between having the ability to regulate an emotion and believing the emotion should not be allowed to exist in the first place.
Emotions are information, not instructions
Emotions can provide useful information about what is happening internally and around us. Fear can alert us to possible danger. Anger can draw attention to perceived unfairness or boundary violations. Sadness can accompany loss. Enjoyment can signal attraction towards an experience we value.
But emotions are not perfectly accurate assessments of reality. Fear can appear when something is objectively safe. Anger can arise from a misunderstanding. Jealousy can reflect insecurity rather than wrongdoing. An emotional response is evidence that something has happened within your experience, but it does not automatically tell you what happened externally or what you should do next.
Emotional Freedom therefore involves two capacities at once: allowing the emotion to be real and retaining enough distance from it to decide how to respond.
You can feel something without obeying it.
Suppression can be useful, but costly when it becomes the default
One of the most studied emotion-regulation strategies is expressive suppression, which involves inhibiting the outward expression of an emotion after it has already arisen.
James Gross and Oliver John's work on individual differences here found something more specific than "suppression has costs." Across five studies, people who habitually suppressed experienced and expressed less positive emotion while experiencing more negative emotion, alongside worse interpersonal functioning and lower wellbeing. Habitual suppression does not remove the difficult feeling. It removes some of the good one.
This does not make suppression inherently unhealthy. There are situations in which controlling emotional expression is useful, considerate or necessary. Emotional regulation is highly contextual and researchers increasingly emphasize flexibility rather than declaring particular strategies universally good or bad.
The issue is what happens when suppression becomes automatic. If sadness, anger, fear or disappointment are consistently treated as unacceptable, the person may become highly skilled at appearing unaffected while remaining internally affected.
Emotional Freedom is less concerned with whether other people can see what you feel and more concerned with whether you are allowed to know that you feel it.
Judging an emotion creates a second problem
People frequently experience emotions about their emotions. You feel anxious and then become frustrated that you are anxious. You feel jealous and become ashamed of the jealousy. You feel sad despite having a good life and conclude that the sadness is evidence of ingratitude.
The original feeling is now accompanied by a second layer of judgment.
Research on habitual acceptance has proposed exactly this as the mechanism. In a set of studies spanning a large survey, a daily diary and a longitudinal follow-up, people who habitually accepted their thoughts and feelings without judging them reported better psychological health, and the effect held even after controlling for reappraisal, rumination and other mindfulness facets. The authors' explanation is that acceptance keeps people from reacting to, and thereby exacerbating, their own negative mental experiences.
Acceptance does not require liking the emotion or wanting it to continue. It means allowing the experience to be present without immediately categorizing its existence as a personal failure.
This can substantially change the internal experience. "I am anxious and I shouldn't be" creates a different problem from "I am anxious right now."
The anxiety remains, but the argument with the anxiety becomes smaller. This is the same territory as Bellamy's Inner Peace Signal, approached from the emotional side rather than the mental one.
Avoidance can make life narrower
Another relevant concept is experiential avoidance, which refers to attempts to avoid, suppress or escape unwanted internal experiences such as thoughts, emotions, memories or bodily sensations. Avoidance can provide immediate relief, which is one reason it can become reinforcing.
The difficulty appears when avoiding an emotion also requires avoiding parts of life.
Someone afraid of rejection may avoid dating. Someone uncomfortable with embarrassment may stop trying things they are not already good at. Someone who cannot tolerate uncertainty may repeatedly choose the safest available option. Someone who fears grief may avoid becoming deeply attached.
In each case, the person is protecting themselves from an emotional experience, but the protection also limits what they can participate in.
This is where Emotional Freedom becomes larger than emotion itself. The more feelings you believe you cannot tolerate, the more circumstances you may need to control in order to prevent those feelings from occurring.
Emotional control can become a form of life control
If you need to feel comfortable before you act, a large amount of life becomes dependent on your emotional state.
You wait until you feel confident before applying. You wait until you are no longer afraid before making the change. You avoid the conversation until you can guarantee it will not become uncomfortable. You postpone something important because uncertainty remains.
Psychological flexibility offers a different model. You can feel anxiety and proceed carefully. You can feel embarrassed and remain in the room. You can experience disappointment without concluding that taking the risk was a mistake.
The objective is not to become indifferent to emotion. It is to expand the range of emotions you can carry while continuing to participate in your own life.
Expression and freedom are different
Emotional Freedom should not be confused with emotional expressiveness. Some people naturally communicate their feelings openly. Others process internally and prefer greater privacy. Neither style automatically indicates greater psychological health.
You do not have to tell everyone when you are upset for your emotions to be valid. You can recognize anger and deliberately decide that expressing it would be unhelpful. You can experience sadness without wanting to discuss it extensively.
Freedom means choice.
When expression is useful, you can express. When privacy is preferable, you can remain private. When an emotion requires action, you can act. When it simply needs time to pass, you can allow that too.
The opposite of Emotional Freedom is therefore not emotional restraint. It is rigidity in the way emotion is permitted to exist.
What stronger Emotional Freedom can look like
When Emotional Freedom is relatively strong, you can usually identify and acknowledge what you feel without immediately needing the feeling to change. Difficult emotions may still be unpleasant, but their presence does not automatically make you afraid of your own internal experience.
You can also separate feeling from action. Anger does not require confrontation. Anxiety does not always require avoidance. Attraction does not require pursuit. Guilt does not automatically mean you have done something wrong.
This separation creates room for judgment. You can ask what the emotion might be telling you, consider whether that interpretation fits the facts and then decide what response makes sense.
Stronger Emotional Freedom also makes contradictory feelings easier to tolerate. You can love someone and be angry with them. You can be grateful for an opportunity and exhausted by it. You can know a decision was correct and still grieve what you gave up to make it.
Human emotional experience is often internally inconsistent. Freedom includes allowing that complexity.
What lower Emotional Freedom can look like
Lower Emotional Freedom may involve discomfort with particular emotions or with emotion generally. You may quickly distract yourself when something difficult appears, intellectualize experiences rather than feel them or tell yourself that your reaction is irrational and therefore should disappear.
For some people, the restriction is selective. Anger feels acceptable but sadness does not. Anxiety can be admitted but disappointment feels embarrassing. Care for others is easy to express while personal need feels uncomfortable.
These patterns often have understandable histories. Families, cultures and environments differ substantially in which emotions are encouraged, discouraged or considered safe to express. Someone who learned that visible emotion led to criticism, conflict or rejection may have good reason to become highly controlled.
A pattern can have made sense when it developed and still become restrictive later.
Emotional Freedom does not mean emotional indulgence
Accepting an emotion does not require centering every decision around it. There are times when feelings need to be tolerated rather than accommodated.
You can acknowledge that you do not feel like exercising and still exercise. You can recognize anxiety about a presentation and give it anyway. You can feel angry with someone and decide to wait before responding.
This is an important boundary because emotional freedom without behavioral judgment can become impulsivity. Feelings deserve recognition. Actions still have consequences.
A useful emotional life contains both permission and discernment.
What helps emotions move
Emotions often become easier to work with when they can be named with some specificity. "I feel bad" provides relatively little information. Disappointed, lonely, embarrassed, resentful, apprehensive and overwhelmed point towards different experiences and potentially different needs.
This is not only a matter of vocabulary. Research on emotion differentiation found that people who described their negative emotions in more finely distinguished terms also drew on a wider range of strategies for managing them, and that the difference mattered most when the emotion was intense. Knowing precisely what you are feeling appears to be connected to knowing what to do about it.
It can also help to notice what happens immediately after an uncomfortable emotion appears. Do you distract yourself? Analyze it repeatedly? Reach for reassurance? Become busy? Tell yourself it is ridiculous? Try to solve it immediately?
These responses can reveal which emotions you have learned are difficult to tolerate.
The objective is not to sit indefinitely inside every feeling. It is to create enough space between the emotion and your usual reaction that another response becomes possible.
Something to consider
Think about the emotions that are easiest for you to experience and the ones you would rather not have.
Most people have preferences. Perhaps anger feels productive while sadness feels vulnerable. Perhaps anxiety feels familiar while anger feels dangerous. Perhaps disappointment is easier to admit than envy, loneliness or need.
Then consider what you tend to do when one of the less acceptable emotions appears.
Emotional Freedom is not measured by how rarely difficult feelings visit you. It is reflected in whether those feelings are allowed to arrive, give you whatever useful information they contain and eventually leave without requiring you to organize your life around avoiding them.
References
Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 15(6), 713-724. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930143000239
Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2018). The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts: Laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(6), 1075-1092. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
Hayes, S. C., Wilson, K. G., Gifford, E. V., Follette, V. M., & Strosahl, K. (1996). Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152-1168. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.64.6.1152
Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865-878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001