[Neurons] 2022 Neurons #41 RIDING THE WAVES OF AN EMOTION

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2022 Neurons #41

October 10, 2022

 

RIDING THE WAVES OF AN EMOTION

 

The original etymology of emotion is actually very telling.  What's most
obvious in the term is the idea of motion, something is moving.  And when
something is moving, it is moving out and away from something and
simultaneously it is moving toward something.  Accordingly, the word
"emotion" once upon a time, coming from Latin, was spelled "ex-motion" and
indicated even more clearly, a moving out of the energy within the living
system.

 

When you feel an emotion, you feel that something is moving out of you and
going somewhere.  But where is that energy going?  It is a push from the
rare, but not only that.  It is also a pointing toward something.  It is an
impetus that forms and creates something.  In this, emotions point to the
future and to the inter-personal field, that is, to relationships.

When you are angry, you usually feel that someone has violated some value
that's important to you and your energy goes out to try to make corrections.

When you are afraid, you feel that someone or something is threatening and
dangerous, and so your energy goes out to move you out of harm's way.

 

This is the case with every emotion.  It offers you energy and a direction
for that energy.  It's a myth and falsehood that emotions go round and round
in circles, either clockwise or counter-clockwise.  You can impose that idea
on them, but that is not how they function.  You can forcibly impose the
idea that emotions spin round and round as some are contending in NLP.  At
best that's a hypnotic induction and as far as I can tell, it won't take you
anywhere useful.

 

Now in speaking about emotions, I'm speaking about a complex combination of
feeling and thought.  We call the "feeling" part sensations or kinesthetics
and they can be internal and/or external sensations.  A sensation by itself
is not an emotion.  To have an emotion, you also have to have some cognitive
thought, memory, or meaning.

 

That's why when you have emotions (or emote) you are communicating with the
significant people in your life.  You are communicating about what's going
on inside of you and you are communicating as a way to reach out to shape
your way of relating to others.

 

In this way emotions combine the past and the future.  The past is in your
emotions because you learned them in your past; you learned them from
previous events and experiences where you thought, reasoned, drew
conclusions, and created meanings.  With that background, they are now
informing your current situation and bringing forth the emotions that you
have developed.  But there's a problem  The problem is that what happened in
the past, especially during childhood, is typically no longer relevant in
adult life.

 

Then to complicate matters, a second problem is that you often seek to
understand why you feel as you do by reasoning that "the past caused it."
But that's fallacious reasoning.  The "past" did not cause anything.
Instead, it was the source and context in which you learned something that's
still present.  Yet what was meaningful in your past may not be meaningful
any longer.

 

Your emotions also relate to the future.  That's because emotions are
intentional.  With any emotion, you are intending to do something.  The
question is what?  "What are you attempting to do in feeling and expressing
a given emotion?"  We now ask a different question from "why am I feeling
X?"  Now we ask, "What is this emotion for?  What is it seeking to do?"

 

Emotions energize us to move forward to achieve goals, ideals, and
possibilities of our future.  Now imagination goes to work and you end up
creating possibilities which you then try on emotionally as you experiment
with it.  It activates you with the energy to do something.  Here the
purposes of your emotions sends you forward into the future to possibilities
and to new choices for your life.  Here reasons would send you backwards to
the past trying to explain the source of where you learned how to generate
the emotion originally.

 

One way to think about your emotions is to imagine them as waves-waves
moving you out from where you are to somewhere that you could be that would
actualize the meaning that created the emotion.  If the emotion is healthy
and appropriate, then you can ride it on out actualizing your highest values
into your best performances.  This is the true usefulness of
emotions-energizing and empowering you to make your inside world of your
beliefs, intentions, understandings, etc. real in the outside world.

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net  



 

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