Dealing with negative emotions

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): How can negative emotions be expressed healthily? Can expressing negative emotions like crying be maladaptive? Does gender have a relation to mental health?

Acharya Prashant (AP): It doesn’t matter whether you call the emotion negative or positive. The first thing to understand is that when you start calling or judging something as positive or negative, you already make it difficult for yourself to know what that thing really is about. How do you know that one emotion is negative and the other is positive? Positive for whom? Negative with respect to what?

So let’s talk of emotion itself; positive and negative can wait. All emotion that you experience is actually trying to tell you something about yourself, provided you are willing to listen to see. Even what you call negative emotions such as anger or grief, expressed in tears, has a story to tell. It is exposing, bringing to light what usually remains hidden in the lower layers of your consciousness. So it doesn’t merit condemnation; it deserves attention.

By condoning it or condemning it, you are just trying to assert that you already know what emotion is, and by implication that you already know who you are and what your inner mechanism is. Humbly, I would like to…