[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #25 THINKING YOUR EMOTIONS

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #25

June 10, 2024

Emotional Intelligence Series #24

 

 
THINKING YOUR EMOTIONS

 

Somewhere in your physical brain and somehow, your brain thinks-via neurons
and synapsis, and dendrites, and bio-electric charges that jump the
synapses, thoughts occur.  It is all a wonderful mystery which we are a very
long way from solving.  Yet when thinking is activated, a psycho-somatic
expression arises-a feeling which can later become an emotion.  The
sensation which is generated from the activation of millions and millions of
neurons sends messages throughout the whole body.  But the feeling, and
later the emotion, are not tools of cognition, they are tools of
integration.

 

The old proverb says, "As you think, so you feel."  What an emotion reflects
is an evaluation-it reflects how you evaluate your mental map about
something up against your experience in the world.  What you think or
consider important (your value), you register that value in your body and we
call the result an emotion.  The emotion only tells you that relative to
your evaluation, the experience is either for you or against you,
pleasurable or painful, good or bad, exciting or fearful, etc.

 

The feeling or emotion integrates into your body the evaluations that you
have cognitively chosen, they do not determine the cognitive value.  They
only say in essence, 'Your map is validated by this experience or
dis-validated.'  It only says, 'Something is right according to the criteria
you have set or something is wrong.'  It cannot and does not determine the
cognitive content of right or wrong.  That job falls to the purview of your
thinking.

 

Now as a somatic and physiological component of your neurology, a feeling or
an emotion contains an "action tendency," that is, an impulse to take action
and change things.  It is not the action and what happens behaviorally is
different from the emotion, but it does contain an action tendency.  What a
person does with that tendency or impulse falls to their
response-ability-their choices and decisions.  Well, that is, if they are
conscious.  If they default on being conscious, then it falls to their
programs-their habits or to some momentary reaction.

 

Love gives us the action tendency of making contact.  Fear contributes to
the impulse to avoid.  Sadness-the tendency to register loss and to grieve.
Anger-an impulse to aggress and/or fight.  Excitement-to approach.  Joy-to
smile and celebrate, etc.  Whatever the emotion is, the emotion creates
internal motion, motion to move out from whatever state we're in to another
state.  Hence, the word e-motion was once spelled ex-motion, motion moving
out.  It is this moving out motion as energy that we feel when we feel an
emotion.  The questions now become, "What are you going to do with this
energy?"  "What would be the best way to own it and express it in terms of
your life, your values, your relationships, etc.?"  "How can you monitor
this energy and channel it for your health, well-being, and effectiveness?"

 

Emotions, in and of themselves, are neutral.  Whether they are appropriate
or inappropriate goes to the thinking that created them.  Was the thinking
appropriate or inappropriate?  The use or expression of the emotion goes to
the choices that you make about what to do with that energy.  Now given that
emotions are neutral, the beginning place for how to manage them effectively
is first to acknowledge them and accept them, then you can monitor how you
create them and what you do with them. 

 

If you do not acknowledge them, accept them, honor them as emotions-you
repress them.  Yet in repressing them, you are not so much as pushing down
the energy, as you are rejecting them as aspects of your thinking.  In doing
both of these things, pushing down the energy so you do not act on the
emotion, you block the emotion and perhaps cause certain muscles to hold the
tension of that emotion.  The emotion goes away, but the muscular tension
remains-showing up as tension in the neck, back, jaws, stomach, etc.

 

The other thing you do is refuse to accept the emotion.  You taboo it.  You
reject it, you block it from entering your memory, your awareness,
knowledge, etc.  You condemn it, you censor it, you declare it bad, evil,
unuseful, unnecessary, etc.  You don't want to know it and you especially do
not want to feel it.  It feels unpleasant or even painful, so you set up
barriers to it.  Now the thinking that generates the feeling/emotion is
forbidden-this is what is repressed.

 

The emotion is the symptom of the thinking.  "I don't want to know that I'm
responsible, that I did something stupid, that I hurt someone's feelings,
that I did something unethical."  In repression you banish your thinking and
your awareness.  You forbid it.  Healthy thinking and emoting entails
embracing emotions as emotions calmly and choosing how to respond to it.
But with a frame of tabooing the emotion-you set yourself against it.

 

Once repressed, those thoughts and emotions are no longer available to you.
Consequently they work unconsciously and usually in irrational ways.  How
can you know if you've repressed certain thoughts?  You will find yourself
handling incomprehensible emotions, you'll experience a conflict between
your thoughts and emotions, there may be significant self-doubt, distrust of
self.

 

Your thoughts are "message" to your body.  What messages have you been
sending to your body?  Nathaniel Branden has said, "That which is denied by
the mind is thereby trapped within the body."

 




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

 



 

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