Throughout the semester, our group participated in self-awareness sessions led by Lilla Becsei. We spent a lot of time talking about recognizing, expressing, and sometimes even hiding our emotions. We came to understand that everyone tries to connect with others based on their own emotional world. For example, when someone says something hurtful to me, it might not be because they want to hurt me—perhaps something bad happened to them, and that’s why they’re acting this way.
We observed ourselves and each other in different situations or thought back to moments in our lives, noticing how we change from feeling calm to becoming happy, bored, angry, or even tense. We explored the decisions we make when we’re calm compared to what we do or say when we’re very upset. We tried to analyze the emotional scale we go through in different situations—for instance, how we shift from calmness to fear, and how we can find our way back.
Often, we experience emotions in the present that actually belong to the future—we don’t know how things will turn out, but we imagine scenarios and become fearful of them, making ourselves more anxious even if those things may never happen. Sometimes we’re impatient or speak harshly to each other, which can cause hurt feelings. We get nervous or restless for no real reason at all.
That’s why it’s so important to understand our own emotions as best we can—this is the first step toward self-awareness. We had open and honest conversations about all of this and tried to find ways to stay calmer, to protect ourselves from things that don’t do us any good, even if we still have to hear or see them.
Barbara Bajzáth, Viktória Madarasi
Jászság, Group 1
