“The emotionally intelligent person is skilled in four areas: identifying emotions, using emotions, understanding emotions, and regulating emotions.”
— John Mayer and Peter Salovey (1990)
My book on emotion is a compilation of my thoughts on the topic. It contains ideas I feel my therapy clients need to consider for themselves. Most people have little understanding of emotion and think nothing of it.
As I survey the perspectives I’ve explored, I want to provide a holistic structure. I’ve not found such an approach in what I’ve read. Most of my criticism is directed at the disintegrated ideas that others espouse.
Exposing the shortcomings of small ideas is like raking the rocks out of the earth in the garden. It’s necessary, but it’s not the same as creating fertile soil. This piece is an attempt at fertilizing the garden.
Forget What You Know About Emotion
Emotion is not unintelligent, undirected, disconnected, or extreme. We think of emotion in these limited ways because we encounter emotion in these dysregulated forms. But just as blood is not a red liquid that flows on the ground after a murder, emotion is not an expression of inner meaning that pervades a relationship after a crisis.
Emotion is also not one thing. Our emotions serve different functions in different ways. Blood serves many functions, and we have other liquids: saliva, sperm, lymph, plasma, bile, stomach acid, mucus, and milk. Some of these are functionally specific and others are vehicles for nutrients, hormones, and chemical signals. Like bodily liquids, emotions are like mental liquids.
We once equated the body’s liquids with emotions. We called them humors: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. It was a poor system, and it didn’t work, but I laud the attempt at seeing emotions as fundamental.
Today, we deride the old theory of humors, but we forget that it was a great step forward from the theory of evil spirits that preceded it (Hendrie, 2021). As frightening as the theory was, it introduced the concepts of balance, nutrition, and hygiene that are foundations of today’s medicine.
Emotions In General
Emotions are not structurally fundamental, as the theory of the four humors suggested. They do not control the body’s functions, and they are not carried in separate substances. But they are fundamental to one’s attitude.
Reinterpreting the medieval theory of humors on a purely cognitive level gives us something better than modern psychotherapy. Today’s psychotherapy seems to overlook emotions entirely. To flesh out the territory, start with functional emotions such as feelings that are positive, negative, detached, or controlling. Add to these the interpretive emotions of anger, fear, love, and comfort. You need to have some map of the landscape of emotions before you can understand how emotions provide a map of your decisions in the world.
Today’s theory of emotions has led to attempts to find where emotions are localized in the brain. This is increasingly seen as unsupportable. The localization of emotions is a reasonable conjecture only if you overlook what they’re made of. They’re made of too many disparate things to have a single origin.
Few people examine what emotions are made of; psychologists who research emotions don’t seem to. Given the subjective nature of emotions and the objective bias of researchers, researchers may be the least qualified to understand emotions. We learn more about our emotions be watching a skilled actor.
Many people assume emotions have no components and see them as primary things. On that basis, it’s plausible that they are the product of some organ within the brain.
Emotions are complex signals. They are collections of associations that differ more in how they direct us, and less in what they are composed of. They’re all composed of associations, inclinations, urges, and ideas. Most are not singular things.
They serve the purpose of sculpting the landscape on which we build our thoughts. If that landscape provides a poor foundation, then you’ll have a difficult time organizing your thoughts. As hormones regulate our biochemistry, emotions regulate our thinking.
Some Emotions in Particular
Comfort, as an emotion, is a combination of physical and mental relaxation. This means both a lack of tension and attention. To be comfortable is to have a detached view of the past, a placid view of the present, and a relaxed view of the future. This kind of comfort is a cosmology that supports a happy conclusion.
Love is more complex than comfort, as it adds a feeling of satisfied attachment, support, trust, and intimacy. These general terms mean different things to each of us. It is embarrassing to recognize that the Greeks of 2,000 years ago had a better understanding of love than we do. Their eight words for love are hardly used in our language. We can explain them, but we don’t recognize them as separate and we generally confound them.
The eight words for love in ancient Greek are erōs for passion, philia for affection, agape for selfless love, storgē for family love, mania for obsession, ludus for playfulness, pragma for enduring love, and philautia for self love. These words were not used equally, and even though these distinctions were made they were not consistent or clear (Hurt, 2013).
“In Plato’s Symposium the most common word for love was erōs, and it denoted a kind of enlightened pederasty. One of the earlier speakers said there could be a good erōs and a bad erōs; the bad version was typical of a ‘Popular Aphrodite’ who merely loved having sex with a good body. Eventually, when Socrates spoke in the dialogue, he defined true erōs as the love of virtue in which no physical intimacy was ultimately necessary.” — Carla Hurt, philologist (2013)
Our culture would gain much by studying what love means to us. C. S. Lewis wrote an influential book called The Four Loves (Lewis, 1960), but that was sixty years ago and I just found it. Our fascination with love combined with our lack of interest in better understanding it, suggests that either our brains or our cultures are not sufficiently well developed to appreciate the differences.
Love and comfort play a relaxing role in our parasympathetic nervous system. Their components differ with each person and we do not have, and never will have, a consensus definition of them. This works against gaining control over our emotions. It also undermines our ability to understand ourselves and communicate with others.
Other emotions, like fear and anger, are more biochemical and neurological. These emotions are more a part of our sympathetic nervous system, the system in charge of activating us. They don’t tell us how to think or act, they just tell us that we need to think and act. They often lead to what we later consider to be poor thoughts and actions, but that’s a misunderstanding of their purpose. Fear and anger motivate actions and responses. They are filters that focus our thoughts. If we focus incorrectly, that’s because we understand them poorly and have failed to refine them properly.
I have a client who complains that she and her 30-year-old daughter always fight. She does not want to fight, she says she wants the anger to stop and get her “baby back.” However, the issues that arise trigger my client and she says she cannot control herself. It is clear that my client’s driving emotion is fear, and she admits this. She says she sees her daughter “stepping into the fire.”
I tell my client that she is in an emotionally violent situation. As in all violent situations, the first thing one must do is stop the violence. I point out that while she says she wants to regain a loving relationship, her actions are destroying it.
It’s likely that we can understand the fear this person is experiencing. We don’t need to know what she’s afraid of because we have a consensus understanding of how we’re motivated by fear.
We can’t say the same thing about the love my client wants to foster. I have made the point that her notion of love includes a great deal of control and righteous authority. One might exercise such control over the life of a 10-year-old, but if this kind of mothering persists into a child’s adulthood, then it may be no wonder that her daughter is rejecting her.
I tell my client that her daughter also wants her mother’s love, but it’s not the love that her mother is offering. The mother is stuck in a kind of love that her daughter sees as immature, unjustified, and unsupportive.
I find myself educating my clients about the emotions they feel. I ask them, “What does your anger mean?” “Do you want control or do you want alliance?” “Which part of you is yelling and which part of you is crying?”
A person should have some control of their feelings before they enter into a conflict, especially if that conflict is with someone who is close to them. Not only do many have no emotional control, but they have not even considered it. We erroneously think that our emotions are justified and true. We often examine our thoughts at least superficially, but we rarely examine our emotions. We are led by them, and this creates most of the problems that my clients’ encounter.
Another client is analytical. They have arranged their plans and resources. They say they feel change is happening too slowly. After concluding that they would benefit from better management of their time and resources, I asked them if they felt they might also be burdened by some personal problems they have not disclosed. To my surprise, they said, “yes.” I asked if they wanted to explore this further, and they said, “No.”
In contrast with the mother, who was possessed by her anger, this client could not act on their feelings. I reassured the mother that by recognizing her need to control her emotions, she would make progress. The client who could not recognize their feelings may not return. They need a crisis to force their recognition.
Reading the Signs
Emotions are not something you have, they are something you read. When we are emotional, we are enacting the sign rather than understanding it. My angry client is getting the message to be angry and acting it out. Instead, she needs to see why she’s getting this message and make adjustments to it.
My evasive client is not even getting the message. Like a person with a stone in their shoe, this person is not removing the stone. Instead, they’re walking in an unbalanced fashion in order to avoid feeling what their emotions are trying to tell them. In both cases, it’s not the control of the emotion that’s needed, it’s the understanding of why these feelings arise.
Similar situations occur with depression, heartbreak, and confusion. In each case, we mislead ourselves by thinking we must act as the emotional signals directs us. When the result of the emotion is distress, accepting its direction is probably the wrong thing to do. The right thing to do is to explore the emotion, and to understand why an emotional warning light is flashing red.
Exploring Emotional Change
Emotions are famously immune to argument. Analysis is generally the wrong tool, but it can be used to understand emotions if the analysis is deep enough. Most of our analysis is too shallow to affect our emotions, but we can learn to do better.
One way to use analysis to understand emotions is to regress into the past or conjure feelings into the present. In either case, you are recreating scenarios that support your feelings. These don’t need to be stories that are actual facts. In fact, they will never be actual facts any more than stories can be. The stories you create from regression or conjuration are symbolic. Their symbols are the triggers of your feelings. It is these triggers that you want to manage.
Part of one’s success in managing emotions lies in how you approach them. If you are confrontational and combative, then that’s the relationship your emotions will bring you. My angry mother client cannot escape violence because she is taking violence as her starting point. If you do not start from the correct frame of mind, which is the frame of mind which you want to build, then you won’t reach it by following those feelings that contradict it.
Your engagement with your emotions is the next step. You are not your emotions, you can only allow yourself to become them. If you can separate yourself from your emotions without suppressing them, then you can communicate with them without becoming them. My evasive client cannot yet do this.
The final step is integration: the bringing together of what you feel with how you would like to feel. Here, the conflict is in yourself. At this step, you stop projecting onto others and external situations. The integration step shows you a bigger picture of what is not working.
Something new needs to happen if you’re to form a new emotion. This may be part of the integration process, or it may be something beyond. Here, we’re entering unfamiliar territory both personally and therapeutically.
If you’d like to explore emotional change, join me for a free conversation.
https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/schedule15
References
Hendrie, A. (2021). The Four Humours: Understandings of the Body in Medieval Medicine, Retrospect Journal. Retrieved from: https://retrospectjournal.com/2021/05/02/the-four-humours-understandings-of-the-body-in-medieval-medicine/
Mayer, J., & Salovey, P. (1990 March). Emotional Intelligence, Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9 (3): 185-211. https://doi.org/10.2190/DUGG-P24E-52WK-6 Retrieved from: http://gruberpeplab.com/3131/SaloveyMayer_1989_EmotionalIntelligence.pdf
Hurt, C. (2013 Aug 17). Greek words for love, in context, Found in Antiquity blog. Retrieved from: https://foundinantiquity.com/2013/08/17/greek-words-for-love-in-context/
Lewis, C. S. (1960). The four loves, Geoffrey Bles. Retrieved from: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-fourloves/lewiscs-fourloves-00-h.html
Moore, C. (2022 Aug 15). If you can't always find the right words, these 8 Greek words for love will help you better define your closest relationships, Parade. Retrieved from: https://parade.com/1274015/charli-moore/greek-words-for-love