👁️‍🗨️ Are You Too Emotional?

Hello YOU!

I don’t know about you, but “You’re too emotional” is a message I got from the world a lot as a kid. I wasn’t even a particularly ‘emotional’ kid. To be clear, it wasn’t that people were actually saying it to me, it’s just the vibe I got. Don’t be too loud, or too excited, or too rambunctious, or too weepy, or too soft, or too (insert any possible expression of emotion here) . . .

I think you get the picture. Maybe you can even relate. There was an unspoken rule that no one got to be too much of anything. No one got to take up too much space. For those in our life who did, well, they had problems.

A half a century, a fair bit of passing some of this junk on to my own kids, and a bunch of Human Design training later, I see all of this conditioning around who we’re ‘supposed’ to be and how we’re ‘supposed’ to show up through a completely different lens.

Let’s take a moment to really understand our Emotional nature from the Human Design perspective. At the highest level, it’s actually a really simple structure. You are either an Emotional being or not. Roughly 50% of humanity is Emotionally defined and the other half are considered Non-emotional.

To be an Emotional being means you have a defined Solar Plexus in your BodyGraph, giving you Emotional Authority. So for you, your innate, embodied wisdom comes from noticing and listening to how you feel about things over time.

Don’t know if you are an Emotional being? Find out here.

As an Emotional being, the Solar Plexus uses it’s dual role as an Awareness and Motor center to generate an Emotional Wave. This Wave runs inside of you constantly doing what all waves do—flow through peak and valley states moving energy. The energy shows up in myriad ways—the highs could feel happy, content, excited, engaged, prepared, open, curious, etc and then lows might feel sad, melancholic, flat, bland, annoyed, disinterested etc. This rolling continuum lives inside of you. All of the time.

Let me repeat that. All of the time. There is never any time that an Emotional being isn’t at some point along their Wave.

Let’s ground this in an example. Say you wake up in the morning and put your feet on the floor, but instead of the fuzzy warmth of your favorite throw rug, the nerve endings in the sole of your foot sense something warm, wet and gooey. Of course your leg jerks, your nervous system is activated and you look down to realize you just stepped into something your sick cat expelled during the night.

This is the moment where you get to learn about your Emotional Wave.

If you happen to be in a crest of the wave (because the wave never stops, it’s at work while we’re asleep as well) this unpleasant experience may be felt as a momentary bit of disgust and annoyance, but very quickly move to concern for the cat and a desire to go check on them. There may be little or no ‘emotional’ reaction.

If, instead, you wake up in the trough of the wave, this unpleasant, slimy foot may send you off into a frenzy. You may jump up from the bed waking your partner, stomp to the bathroom to clean off your foot, all the while cursing the stupid cat that—in this moment—you decided you never really wanted anyway.

It feels to us like stepping in cat gunk is the thing that put us in the mood. Yet that’s not at all what’s actually happening. The incident hits us while we are either high, low or neutral in the wave. THAT is what determines if it’s drama or not. It’s the outer stimulus that helps us recognize where we are in our wave.

Since most of us don’t know about this mechanical wave inside of us, it makes perfect sense that we would see our emotions as the product of something outside of us.

Think back to a moment when you were visibly upset as a child. I’m almost 100% certain that some caring person in your life asked, “What’s wrong?”

Maybe you remember why you were upset. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you knew in the moment what you thought was upsetting or maybe you were just doing what humans are designed to do—express the emotion that was flowing through you.

Our conditioned belief that there is an external reason for our mood has us—even with the best of intentions—passing this misunderstanding along to our children. Immediately the child is shifted from feeling and expressing an emotion into their ‘rational’ brains to try to explain the feeling and the reason behind it. It’s easy to see how confusing and difficult this could be for anyone, let alone someone who might still be struggling to learn language.

Having this new understanding of the mechanics of emotion and our conditioning around them, it’s kind of amazing to me that we’re able to navigate childhood at all.

Though there’s much more to share about how Emotional beings operate in the world and how the entire collective works with this Emotional energy, I’ll save that for a part two.

For now I’d love for you to experiment with noticing the Emotional Wave energy in your life. If you’re Emotionally defined that means paying attention to how you feel in any given moment, noticing if you ascribe your mood to something in particular and trying to discern any pattern to the ups and downs of your wave over a few days.

If you are a Non-emotional being, I’d love for you to pay attention to how you feel when you are alone vs when you are around other people. We’ll dive deep into this in Part Two, but Emotional beings are transmitting emotional energy and Non-emotional beings are receiving and amplifying it.

For sure let me know if you notice any of these mechanics in your world over the next few days. Often it’s easier to see them in others than it is to recognize them in ourselves. Play around with it and share your discoveries and questions in the comments.

Til next week . . .

Go be the YOUest!

PS: If you’re looking for an opportunity to apply and ground some of this Human Design knowledge, I'd love for you to join me and my good friends and colleagues Lauren and Lois for a supported, skill building journey along The Path to Coherence. Together we'll discover our innate strengths, nurture self-trust, and build more capacity for action, hope, and renewal.