KNOW ABOUT EMOTIONS & SKILL BUILDING
ABOUT EMOTIONS
———————
Much like the weather changes in different ways, so do our emotions. Sometimes they carry excitement, vitality and meaning, and at other times, they can feel uncomfortable, painful and challenging.
Emotions influence our lives in a myriad of ways yet it is very common to know very little about them. Without some understanding of our sentient nature, many of us just want to feel the emotions we love, and avoid all the rest. We end up missing out on the many gifts that our emotions bestow on us.
The free-flowing nature of emotions can make it somewhat slippery when we first begin to learn ways of relating to them. It is not obvious to know where and how to start engaging with them constructively. Neither is it necessarily easy to understand what approaches can best serve to heal, release or transform the emotional issues we struggle with.
The content offered on this website is meant to serve as a starting point
for those who seek to become emotionally skilled
Similar to our other human senses, emotions have a purpose: to communicate useful information to us. Emotions are expressions of a finely tuned information system there to guide, protect and support our wellbeing. They tell us where we are and what we need. Our emotions are companions, protectors and enhancers of our quality of life. Imagine what life would be without them!
How we perceive our emotions greatly amplifies the experiences we have in life. We see this in the way we emotionally colour the stories we tell others about life and ourselves. The good and bad stories have happy or unhappy endings. What we have felt about our life events has mattered the most.
The slow evolution in the human collective of understanding and appreciating emotions is understandable; very few of us have had the benefit of an emotional education. Instead most of us have unconsciously absorbed ways of coping with them.
Common beliefs are that emotions pre-exists inside—they happen to us—and that we are powerless over them. It is quite typical in contemporary cultures to feel at the mercy of our emotions rather than empowered by their fine-tuned guidance and support.
When we believe ourselves to be victims of emotions, it is only natural that we come to fear the more difficult emotions and put much energy into keeping them at bay. The coping mechanisms we pick up during the early years of conditioning could be anything from repressing, numbing or dumping them on others, or obsessively chase those emotions we believe we must feel.
A strong ideal in contemporary cultures is to be in control of our emotions. It is rare to be encouraged to explore a fruitful collaboration with a wide range of them. As it turns out, emotions are neither good nor bad; they simply serve as master teachers of navigating life and subjects like becoming interpersonally intelligent.
Looking closer at the fascinating world of emotions reveals many surprising details. Who would have guessed, for instance, that emotions are so much faster than thoughts? Emotions are truly formidable in their power and influence:
Emotions literally change the chemistry of every cell of your body, and affect the world outside your body.
— Candace Pert
When we constructively engage with our emotional nature, we have stepped onto a life path of liberation and empowerment. There are many skills we can grow while exploring, discovering, understanding, hearing, expressing and cultivating emotions.
We learn to experience our emotions instead of avoiding, fearing and feeling at their mercy. We become more skilled at picking up the messages that emotions carry and benefit from their intrinsic wisdom. We can begin to cultivate emotional states into being and change how we feel in various situations. We learn to respond creatively to our emotional reactions and discover safe ways to release the charge of emotional baggage. With skills it is way easier to also understand our own and other people’s emotional needs, and how to communicate them cleanly. Everyone wins when emotional skills become an intrinsic part of who we are.
To identify the tools that work for us, we simply experiment with different methods, techniques and ideas. Those are added to our tool box and put to practice in daily life until they have become second nature.
Some tools and techniques have immediate effects, some are more subtle and others build their beneficial influence over time. We can work on our skill-building while emotions are actually happening or by briefly remembering an emotional experience from our past. If dwelling in emotional states is something we do out of habit, we need to approach our past in other ways and this is addressed under ‘releasing emotional baggage.’
Some of us find it difficult to connect with emotions at all. If this is the case, connection can be supported in different ways. Simple physical gestures can stimulate connection to our emotions. We can, for example, put our head down, lower the gaze and bring our hands to the chest or solar plexus and feel into the inner world for a moment before engaging with skill-building practices.
Emotions communicate for our benefit, and with the willingness to listen out for their communications, we also discover beneficial responses for different situations. We change our lives for the better when we become receptive to the messages our emotions communicate. Then feeling good becomes more a question of remembering to pay attention to those communications in everyday life, and to cultivate emotional states we enjoy as well.
Becoming emotionally skilled not only benefits our own wellbeing, but others as well in our circle of friends, family and community. Sharing our knowledge of how to wisely relate to our emotions is a beautiful gift to share with others.
Helping others become emotionally skilled enriches our lives exponentially!
A BIT OF HISTORY & SCIENCE
———————
…in most case, the emotions are still being alternately demonized and exalted. —Karla McLaren
Humans have tried to figure out their emotions for a very long time. Well over two thousand years ago Plato named them passions and described them as something separate from the rest of the human psyche. He advised people to turn away from their emotions as they were irrational, disruptive and confusing.
Since that time many other brave explorers have diligently tried to bring order to this unpredictable aspect of human life. One pursuit that has dominate the research throughout the centuries has been to establish the distinct physiological patterns of each human emotion so they could be distinguished from one another. Classifying every existing emotion was thought to make it straightforward to predict, read, manipulate and control them.
This long-lasting quest for the exact number of human emotions has led to countless controversies along the way. It has been informed by a reductionist approach where emotions simply become just another mechanical, fixed and predictable component of our biology, much like reflexes that are wired in and triggered by external events. The premise has been that human emotions must be universal and therefore identifiable. What we have ended up with from these lines of inquiry remains theoretical. We now have some ninety different definitions of what constitutes and differentiates human emotions.
This reductionist approach to the study human emotions has been steadily crumbling under the weight of more recent research. We are now undergoing a great paradigm shift in how we view them. In several meta studies of the field, neuroscientist Linda Feldman Barrett concluded that “Despite tremendous time and investments, research has not revealed a consistent bodily finger print for even a single emotion.” 1.
Contemporary research has clarified that a simple system of feelings in our physiology is always active, much like the other senses are, but when we feel an emotion, it is an event that is uniquely composed at that particular time, and reflects many additional influences and circumstances.
Surprisingly, emotions are created on a case to case scenario. They do not arise prefabricated in reaction to the various predicaments and triggers in the outside world.
What makes today’s discoveries so valuable to take onboard for us personally is that they confirm that we are not at the mercy of our emotions but instead co-creators of them—whether we are aware of this or not.
According to Barrett, a working relationship exists between feelings and emotions. Feelings “are actually with you every waking moment of your life. They are simple summaries of what is going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer” and they come “from the physiology of your body: calmness, agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort.” They are not, however, emotions. 2.
Emotions are created through complex neurological processes that involve predicting what to do with those feelings when they are felt. It is the core systems of the brain which try to make sense of the information and link it to a vast array of past and present data and influences. Scanning immense amount of information, the brain makes guesses and predications, and this takes place in milliseconds, out of our awareness.
Individual emotions do not pre-exist as universal templates but are created on the spot.
The neurosciences have long studied the influence of emotions on human behaviour. Using brain imaging technologies, the research has now determined that, for instance, we act far more upon our emotions than we do on cognitive processes. Our emotions show their powerful influence again and again in such research.
The vast constellation of past and present influences that the brain contends with during its prediction processes is not only coloured by our personal history but also by the “shifting social, political, cultural forces that have shaped what we we believe about our emotions” according to Tiffany Watt Smith, a historian whose research is focused on human emotions. 3.
In her view, our emotional languages are most likely to be communications about those matters we most value and care about.
Her research has found that emotions are not predictably universal but that people not only vary greatly in how they relate to their emotional experiences, but that these differences vary from era to era, culture to culture, place to place, person to person and experience to experience. Because of such a wide variety of emotional expression, what used to be seen as an emotion is now best perceived as an ‘emotional category’ in her view.
So emotions do not have predetermined characteristics nor are they events with predictable physiological signatures. They do not rise ready-made from within but are created on a case-to-case scenario. They are the result of an extraordinarily sophisticated neurological process of reading huge amounts of data and predicting what should come next. There appears to be nothing simplistic about emotions whatsoever. They are definitely not the primitive reflexes that they were made out to be in the previous millenia.
Emotions are not primitive instincts but the result of highly sophisticated neurological processes.
What the new paradigm is telling us is that we are not sitting ducks when it comes to our emotional nature. We have in fact been influencing it in many different ways already but can also learn to do so intentionally. There is plenty of room for exploration and discovery of options when we want to co-creatively engage and influence our emotional wellbeing.
The take-away from the contemporary research is that we feel our emotions but we are not at the mercy of them. When we feel hurt we are having an experience composed of numerous influences, known and unknown, that we have come to understand as “being hurt.” And this can be changed. While we might feel anger, the anger itself is not carved in stone inside; it is expressed through filters of many different influences from our personal history, cultural conditioning and even inter-generational legacies.
It can take some getting used to such radical new perspectives. Many of us have become so identified with emotional states that we inherently believe, and behave, as if we are an emotion — I AM so angry instead of I feel so angry.
This could be one reason why it is so common to fear becoming overwhelmed by emotions. We even end up lost in reactiveness against them rather than focusing on being receptive to the information they seek to convey to us. If this is the case, we essentially also give up our freedom to respond constructively to the messages that are imbued in emotions. Emotions communicate, and have been found to be a form of pre-action.
None of the new findings mean that we won’t experience emotionally coloured states that feel very familiar and seem to resemble one another. As we grow more aware of such ‘go-to’ states, it becomes easier to experiment with constructive ways of relating to them. Whenever new information is added to the way we typically relate to our experiences, the brain will note it and consider it when making those predictions of ‘what should come next.’
These cultural shifts in understanding human emotions are revolutionary and Barrett extends her sympathy to us all as we get used to all this “These ideas do not match our experience in daily life where emotions seem to emerge like little bombs to disrupt whatever we were thinking or doing a moment before.” 4.
Science today describes the strong influence we already have unconsciously on our emotions.
We can consciously create our emotional wellbeing.
There are innumerable benefits that stem from these new understandings. On a personal level they support our liberation from the fear of emotions that the human collective perpetuates, and there is also an implicit encouragement to collaborate with this highly intelligent sentient nature. As we take onboard the ramifications of engaging intentionally with our emotions, we also benefit from the protection it offers us from the relentless fear-mongering going on in the world culture today.
We live in an era of history where the knowledge of human emotions is considered an extremely valuable commodity. Knowing how to manipulate other people’s emotions is a huge industry now, and vast investments are made to turn it into a fine art. The key idea behind the commercialisation of human emotions is that we can be unknowingly targeted and played on emotionally to feel, think and behave according to agendas that serve interests that we are not aware of.
When we liberate ourselves from feeling intimidated in the presence of uncomfortable emotions, and learn to relate to our emotions in whole new benevolent ways, we also free ourselves from the shackles of being fear-mongered and manipulated emotionally in the innumerable invisible and visible ways that take place in our era. This emotional freedom is not only empowering and creative but also invaluable for our overall health and wellbeing.
With a few skills, we can liberate ourselves from the collective fear of emotions
and instead become empowered in our relationship with them.
The first step to liberating ourselves is to gently begin engaging with our emotional nature. We explore and learn about it in order to discover our own emotional profile, go-to states and typical stumbling blocks and issues. With some understanding of these, it is easier to identify the skills we have been lacking and need to develop. The bottomline of all skill-building is to practice. With willingness and open-mindedness it is easier to get into the habit of practicing the relevant skill-building in everyday settings. This is how skills become second nature.
All of this becomes possible when we begin to honour and give value to our emotions. It can be very interesting to get used to being present with our emotions; to learn to validate them, allow them to do their job of delivering messages and move on instead of perpetuating the exhausting habits of repressing them. It is more than possible to get used to the sensations of different emotions, discover their particular languages and grow to appreciate even the messages of the more difficult emotions. There is a rich and rewarding field of exploration beyond grasping only for our favourite emotional states.
It really is a liberating experience to allow the free-flowing nature of our emotions instead of trying to capture and take as hostage the emotional states we prefer. It becomes deeply meaningful to be comfortable around a wide range of our emotions and discover how we take good care of our emotional wellbeing. It can be utterly fascinating to discover the many ways in which we can influence the quality of our thinking, self-talk and beliefs, and grow confident in having the skills to access peace of mind whenever we want.
Becoming emotionally educated contributes greatly to our quality of life. Just imagine the relief of knowing how to easily interrupt a downward spiralling of difficult emotions and see them release. Or be freed from the charge of emotional baggage that has been weighing heavily on us for years. Or to voice how we feel, and see this heard and respected. To both listen to our emotions as well as influence our emotional wellbeing.
When we collaborate constructively with our emotional nature, we also contribute to the wellbeing of others. There can be great joy in speaking the language of emotions and see the effects showing up in the relationships with others. It is liberating to know how to assume responsibility for our emotional responses in life and no longer feel compelled to blame them on others. Being emotionally intelligent makes us interpersonally intelligent.
Today there is a wealth of resources available which support all of this and much more. On this website you can explore more aspects of relating to your emotional nature and also learn a few basic emotional skills.
Emotions “have an intelligence unto themselves, not when they are dominated but when they are free-flowing.
— Candace Pert
Emotional flow is not about letting it all hang out and acting in whatever way we are impelled,
but about tolerating the energy….. in the body and allowing the wisdom of the emotion to unfold.
—Miriam Greenspan
What we think and what we feel is connected. Emotions are not reflexes but immensely complex, elastic systems that respond both to the biologies we have inherited and to the cultures we live in.
—Tiffany Watt Smith
Is an emotion a mood, a feeling, an impulse, a neuro-chemical event, or all of these? Do emotions come from thoughts or instincts, or do thoughts and instincts arise from emotions?
—Karla McLaren
It is really common to fear some of our emotions. Many of us believe they are confusing, scary, overwhelming or hard to pin down.
EMOTIONS ARE MESSENGERS
———————
Now contemporary science has confirmed that emotions have a purpose: to inform and guide us. They weave in and out of life to support and mobilise us through the maze of influences we experience as human beings. Their function is to help us navigate the world around us, interact with others and remember what really matters to us. They also happen to be central to the quality of life we have. After all, how we see and experience the world around us depends largely on how we feel.
Emotions deliver messages as they move through us. When we begin to consciously pay attention to them, they tend to offer insights about our current reality. This is true for those emotions we like as well as those we don’t—all emotions carry information. We can look at them as information energy that moves through us and communicates. When the information is delivered, they depart. When we don’t pick it, they stick around.
All emotions communicate; those we like and those we don’t.
When we begin to observe our emotions, we might find that they seem to be singularly dedicated to point things out that really matter to our wellbeing—-it could be something benevolent, undermining or otherwise. They speak of the relationship we have to the world and others and could, like anger, be telling us that a boundary has been crossed or that something needs to be put right then and there.
The language they speak can take a moment to learn, also because emotions differ from one another in the ways they communicate. They can be composed of different qualities at once.
Emotions express their individuality much like a temperature, colour or sound would. Their characteristics are conveyed in sensations and can also be sensed in different parts of the body, for instance, the gut, solar plexus, heart area, throat, shoulders, back, but other areas as well. They speak in body postures, and how the head is tilted, the mouth is shaped and the eyes are cast. They show up in tones of voice. Emotions communicate their signals in remarkably varied ways.
Take the eyes, for instance. To describe various emotions they will change from being closed, downcast, avoidant, hazed over, wide open, flicking, tearing up, tenderly gazing to staring straight ahead into the distant horizon. The eyes reflect pain, fear, shock, anger, joy, delight and love, and all the other emotional states we experience.
The range of emotional communications is breathtaking.
The human face has forty-two muscles and the majority of these have long been assumed to serve the expression of human emotions. Claims exist that the face is capable of some 10.000 facial expressions. Often key facial signals combine with one another to create the wide variety of emotional expressions that we can pick up on non-verbally.
While a message can be communicated in extraordinary detail, the emotional states we are most familiar with also tend to interact, overlap and converge with one another. It is as if they are used to dance together. They might appear to move into the background of one another, combine or be in the forefront. We can also feel several emotions at once in situations, say, guilt and anger, curiosity and fear.
When we feel our emotions, they might be indicating that something we are pursuing is pointless or very important to get on with. They could be warning us not to rush into something, encourage us to move ahead or to proceed in an entirely different direction. They likewise bring life and movement to our lives by inspiring us to adventure, explore, create and cultivate, all of which serve our wellbeing.
The mobile, changeable quality of emotions can make their individuality hard to grasp but individuality is not what matters. It is the felt-sense we get from our emotions that provides us with guidance. It becomes ever easier to pick up on the finer aspects of their messages the more we observe them in action and engage with them.
When learning to read the messages of emotions, it can be helpful to simply notice whether we feel contracted or expanded. Inner contraction indicates a signal of no whereas expansion of agreement.
Our emotions are created from a wide range of factors, and they are strongly influenced by what we think, believe and tell ourselves. These are areas where we yield a lot of influence as co-creators of our emotions.
When messages are delivered, emotions depart. When they are not, another attempt at delivery is likely. Most emotions actually have their own release mechanism; sadness has tears, stress has shuddering, happiness has laughter and so on, but if we are used to repress emotions in different forms, we might not allow their free-flowing expression. Then the trouble starts. The energy of unexpressed emotions tends to lodge in the body, so beyond the basic skills of engaging with emotions, another skill-set to acquire is knowing how to release unexpressed emotional charge from the body.
If you trust and attend to your emotions they will take care of you.
—Karla McLaren
When we become able to hear and respond to our emotions effectively,
we become able to understand the deepest language of our souls.
—Karla McLaren
OUR FILTERS OF CONDITIONING
———————
We are deeply affected by the influences that surround us from the moment we come into the world. During infancy we absorb like sponges the most critical information in direct experiences with our caregivers and also the expectations of our surroundings and culture. As we are growing up, ever more data is added to what we may call the inner ‘how and when to get emotional’ data base.
All this conditioning takes place outside our conscious awareness, and continues to be acted on unconsciously until the time comes when we are ready to bring our conditioning into light. Some of us discover that we have mostly been taught what not to be emotionally. Maybe we discover that we have always felt a lot of emotions but trained to show very few. Or that we were taught to hold others responsible for our emotions and therefore believe that we have the right to dump ours on others.
Growing up, many of us also learn to distinguish between emotions that are rewarded and those that are ridiculed. Some we come to judge as irrational, unacceptable or risky. We reject them in ourselves and in others as well.
It becomes stressful to always control which emotions are allowed. Unconsciously we try to stop, repress, redirect or numb an emotion as it makes itself known. Repressing emotional energy translates into biochemical stress on the system.
Many of us manage this inner pressure by keeping busy. We divert our attention with mood altering coping strategies. This might work for a while, but rarely indefinitely. With pent-up emotional charge lingering in our systems, we end up with new issues to tackle. Signs and symptoms appear as a result that eventually oblige us to deal directly with the underlying stress.
Beyond our personal conditioning and its side-effects, we are inevitably invisibly influenced by what the ancestors of our lineage underwent, as well as what has happened historically in the human collective as a whole. Humanity has a collective unconscious that is shared by all the members of its species. Hence we are born into and formed by various invisible but powerful collective and ancestral influences.
While it is quite the norm that many of us end up with one or more seriously limiting emotional habits and behaviours, such as the use of public and private displays of our emotions, reactiveness, emotional baggage, undermining beliefs, critical self-talk, repeating conflicts and self-mythologizing, we know that healing and transformation is possible for most emotional issues today, including severe trauma and PTSD.
The journey of transformation of our emotional issues calls for a willingness to discover and learn. We need to be willing to discover what is involved in having a constructive relationship with our emotions, but it doesn’t have to be complicated to engage with it.
Emotions aren’t your tormentors, they are your tools, your guides, your protectors, and your allies.
— Karla McLaren
This journey of discovery is helped by becoming curious about our emotions. Today we have access to simple approaches that are effective as well.
It can be helpful, for instance, to see our accumulated conditioning as having become filters of conditioning instead of trying to understand every bit of it. It can be easier to relate to something as vast as our early conditioning in symbolic ways. It is an easier task to name our most influential filters of perception than unearthing every influence we have been under.
These filters of perception add meaning, energy and direction to our emotional responses in life and this is information we need to know about. When, for example, the core systems of the brain is gathering information in milliseconds to be able to predict an ‘appropriate’ emotional response to something, it is effectively dealing with a barrage of these filters.
But since the discovery of neuroplasticity, we also know that the brain not only considers existing factors but includes new information in such prediction processes. Say we have recently responded to something emotional very differently than we used to in the past. The brain will form new synaptic links to reflect this new information and also reorganise links accordingly.
While we are not responsible for having emotions, we are responsible for how we respond to them.
It is heartening to know about the brain’s neuroplasticity when we are keen to consciously influence the “how and when to get emotional” scripts that we live by. By intentionally practicing new responses to situations, people, experiences and settings, we can rest assured that these new filters will be factored in by the brain. We can quite literally ‘make-believe’ our way into the creation of new filters of perception and emotional responses. By using them over and over they will steadily be entrenched as the new neural pathways that grow in influence.
We also encounter common emotional themes in early life. Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psycho-social development are still used as reference points that describe what these themes might be, and the challenge of integration that they impose on us.
Were we able to integrate the emotional maturation themes at different ages, or not?
What are the consequences when we didn’t?
Erikson’s research suggests that the very first psychosocial theme that we are exposed to in infancy is whether to trust or not. The theme of this first stage is known as ‘trust versus mistrust.’ At the later toddler stage we are more likely to encounter situations that reflect the theme of autonomy versus experiences of shame and doubt. During the pre-school age the theme revolves around learning to take initiative versus experiencing guilt. The school-age highlights the theme of industry versus feeling inferior, and in adolescence, the probable encounters are with themes of identity versus identity confusion. Young adulthood explores the theme and issues around intimacy versus isolation.
As we can see in Erikson’s model, themes of trust, shame, guilt, inferiority and isolation among others could show up as filters of perception in adulthood.
Much as conditioned responses to our emotions are learned, they can also be unlearned. The point of discovering some relevant information about our typical filters of conditioning is that this can help us liberate ourselves from those that do not serve us. But filters show up in imperceptible ways and involve many details so it can take concerted effort to identify them. They exist as deep rooted beliefs, coping strategies, roles we play and invisible scripts that inform many of our decisions.
This is why a helpful approach to relating to our filters of conditioning is to personify them. They simply become different ‘parts’ of us that we can relate to. There is no need to understand every detail of our emotional challenges to see change happen. When we choose to work with models of the psyche that make it straightforward to relate to the different parts of our internal system, we are more likely to undertake these journeys or healing and transformation.
There are excellent approaches available today that help us achieve such emotional freedom.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) — we can, for example, work with an experienced IFS therapist
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) —- learn the technique or work with an experienced EFT practitioner
Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families (ACA) — join a 12-step mutual support group that is focused on recovery from childhood legacies. https://adultchildren.org
HeartMath Institute —- discover relevant research, tools and techniques that support our emotional wellbeing https://www.heartmath.org
.. emotions contain indispensable vitality that can be channeled toward self-knowledge, interpersonal awareness, and profound healing. Unfortunately we don’t treat them as such. Instead emotions are categorized, celebrated, vilified, repressed, manipulated, humiliated, adored and ignored.
Rarely, if ever, are they honored.
— Karla McLaren
Notes
1. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (London, Pan Books, 2017), 15.
2. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ted Talk, (2018).
3. Tiffany Watt Smith, Ted Talk, ( 2017).
4. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (London, Pan Books, 2017), 40.