Controlling Your Emotions

In between the extremes of being a slave to your whims and trying to master every emotion, there must be a middle road. Psychology Today talks of a “probabilistic approach” to expressing emotion. “Total Control Theory could also be called the jukebox theory of emotion. You get to pick the tune. And clearly, to some extent you do, or else in the scenario above you couldn’t turn a low probability of calm into a high probability of calm,” writes author Jeremy Sherman. “Competing with the Total Control Theory there is another bit of conventional wisdom about emotional control that is also quite prevalent. We could call this the No Control Theory: You feel what you feel and there’s nothing you or anyone can do about it.”