How to understand and work with emotions so they benefit more than disrupt

Probably all of us don't like certain kinds or levels of emotion, and want to get away from them, sometimes in self-destructive ways.

In this episode, several psychologists and others talk about what emotions are.

"As an actor I have a tendency to skitter along the top of emotional things. I'm Lutheran, I don't like being emotional." William H. Macy

Psychologist Cheryl Arutt: "Creative people do tend to be highly sensitive and an exquisite sensitivity is an asset when it comes to creating art...but that same sensitivity can often make the painful experiences that they have even more so."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says "You might believe that your brain is prewired with emotion circuits, that you're born with emotion circuits, but you're not."

Emotions researcher Karla McLaren thinks "It's important for our joints to have a complete range of motion, but it's also important for us to have a complete range of emotion." 

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Related Creative Mind Videos playlists:

Emotional Health 

Trauma Healing 

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Sources for this podcast episode:

Image is from article Artificial Intelligence: Why it Can't Detect the Correlation Between Human Emotion and Facial Expression, Ron Jefferson, The Science Times Aug 24, 2021.

William H. Macy quote from video

Psychologist Cheryl Arutt from my video Artists are highly sensitive and need skills to use their emotions safely

Lisa Feldman Barrett from TED Talk video in my post Are emotions hardwired and just triggered? No - our brains build them.

Karla McLaren from her video Do You Have a Full Range of Emotions? in my post How To Gain Better Emotional Health By Working With Feelings.

Dr. John Demartini from his video "How to Manage Emotions" - see it in my post How to upgrade your financial health and life success – NeuroGym programs

Pema Chödrön from video The Noble Journey From Fear to Fearlessness

Note: the narration is a clone of my voice, text-to-speech, via elevenlabs.io.

See more Show Notes pages with active links:

Main episode page https://creativemindaudio.buzzsprout.com/1898067/14287151

Newsletter page https://thecreativemind.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-and-work-with-emotions

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Transcript

How to understand and work with emotions so they benefit more than disrupt

0:00 William H. Macy: Every once in a while I have to remind myself to dig deep in some scenes. It's appropriate. But that's been my thing as an actor. I have a tendency to skitter along the top of emotional things. I'm Lutheran. I don't like being emotional.

0:15 Douglas Eby (cloned voice, AI text-to-speech) Those comments are by actor William H. Macy.

Probably all of us don't like certain kinds or levels of emotion and want to get away from them, sometimes in self-destructive ways.

I like his reference to being Lutheran. I grew up with Presbyterian parents who did not like emotions if they were too strong or the wrong kind.

In this episode, several psychologists and others talk about what emotions are.

Psychologist Cheryl Arutt specializes in trauma and creative artist issues.
This is a very brief excerpt from one of our interviews.

0:52 Cheryl Arutt: Creative people do tend to be highly sensitive and an exquisite sensitivity is an asset when it comes to creating art.
I mean, after all, they're their own instrument.

But that same sensitivity can often make the painful experiences that they have even more so.
I think respecting the sensitivity regarding oneself as a creative artist, as someone who uses that sensitivity to communicate something back about the world, that allows that sensitivity to be framed as an asset.

And the caveat about painful stuff, which I think...Everybody can feel pain but the part about the painful things for artists is that they need a really good skill set to be able to take care of themselves and to be able to navigate the painful feelings so that they don't get trapped in those and in that way they don't need to either get flooded on the one hand by those feelings or need to numb out and avoid and shut down against those feelings so that way they have.

2:03 Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett: Emotions are not what we think they are.
They are not universally expressed and recognized.
They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable.

We have misunderstood the nature of emotion for a very long time, and understanding what emotions really are have important consequences for all of us.

I have studied emotions as a scientist for the past 25 years, and in my lab, we have probed human faces by measuring electrical signals that cause your facial muscles to contract to make facial expressions.

We have scrutinized the human body in emotion.
We have analyzed hundreds of physiology studies involving thousands of test subjects.
We've scanned hundreds of brains and examined every brain imaging study on emotion that has been published in the past 20 years.

And the results of all of this research is overwhelmingly consistent.
It may feel to you like your emotions are hardwired and they just trigger and happen to you, but they don't.
You might believe that your brain is pre-wired with emotion circuits, you know, that you're born with emotion circuits, but you're not.

In fact, none of us in this room have emotion circuits in our brain.
In fact, no brain on this planet contains emotion circuits.

So what are emotions really?
Well, strap on your seat belt, because ...
Emotions are guesses.

They are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together.

And you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine that you do.
Now if that sounds preposterous to you or you know kind of crazy, I'm right there with you because frankly if I hadn't seen the evidence for myself, decades of evidence for myself, I am fairly sure that I wouldn't believe it either.

But the bottom line is that emotions are not built into your brain at birth.
They are just built.

4:32 Author and researcher Karla McLaren is an emotions and empathy expert.

If you're a writer, if you do any kind of repetitive motion, you've probably learned how to take care of yourself so that you don't hurt yourself, yeah?

And I said earlier, I said a complete range of emotion because that's what I've been thinking about.

That it's important for our joints to have a complete range of motion, yeah?

But it's also important for us to have a complete range of emotion.

And I'll tell a story on myself.
When I was very young, I experienced a tremendous amount of childhood assault and it sort of set me up for many of the difficulties that I would have later in my life of hyper empathy of kind of extreme emotional explosiveness.

And I did not have a complete range of emotion. I also was pretty dissociated.
So I didn't really have a complete range of how to live in a human body either.
I figured it out. But
One of my big things was I used anger a lot.
And thankfully, my family just sort of let me do it, which is very unusual.

Most women, most girls are not allowed to be angry or show it.
So I was a little rage machine.

But I felt strongly that sadness and grief were signs of weakness.

So I refused to feel them, and I refused to let sadness come into my life.
And this was for years and years and years where I didn't cry.

And what would happen was interesting is, have you ever hit yourself in the nose in such a way that tears just, you know, like explode out of your eyes?
I would hit my nose regularly or drop something really heavy on my toe.
And have you done that where you drop something so heavy on your toe that just your tears come out?
So my body was clearly trying to get some of those tears out.

But I kind of realized in my late teens, like, You're going to break your toes and your nose if you do not learn how to cry.

And so for a period of time, I cried at everything because I had so much, you know, unshed tears, right?

To develop that range of emotion, I had to make the decision that I didn't want to be so enraged all the time, so sarcastic. Such a jerk.

And I wanted to learn how to be more of a whole person.
It was like I wanted to be a better emotion owner.

And so I developed the capacity to feel sadness and grief alongside anger and eventually learned all of the different emotions.

We work with a model of 17 emotions in four families, right?
The happiness family, the anger family, the fear family, and the sadness family.
So I use myself as an experimental field of how do we develop emotional range.

And then I began teaching others.
And then that's how the work that eventually became Dynamic Emotional Integration began.

It began on a very broken, traumatized, messed up, stubborn as hell person who
didn't want to live with adhesive capsulitis of the soul and wanted to see, you know, is trauma the only story in my life or is healing and becoming a wounded healer and, and living as fully as I can going to be the story of my life.

And so that's where I went with it.
But I wanted to talk about this full range of emotion, because in the olden days, in the bad days, people thought that emotion was like, down here, you know, down there, just blah.

And then rationality was up here, you know, and spirituality were up here and emotions were like, no,

Luckily, we understand more than that now.
And it turns out that rationality and emotion are here.
They're working together and spirituality and emotion are here and they're working together.

That emotions are a fundamental aspect of cognition, social intelligence, your capacity to think and decide and act.

Emotions are everywhere in everything you do.

So developing a full range of emotion means you become a more intelligent, social and emotional and cognitive and spiritual and rational and logical and musical and right.

You become more able and you develop more capability in this job of being human.

9:43 Dr. John Demartini is a human behavior specialist and international speaker.

One of the things that I'd like to share with you today is how to manage your emotions.
You probably had all kinds of swings, really up, really down, all over the place.

And we're designed to have emotions where they're there for a purpose.
They're there to let us know when we're in survival mode.

An emotion is a polarized perception.
So if you meet somebody and you are conscious of their upsides,
and unconscious of their downsides and drawn to them almost impulsively.

And you have an infatuation and you seek them out and want to be with them.
That's motion towards something.

Energy put into motion towards something. That's an emotion.

So we have what is sometimes called positive emotions, which are attractive, like a pull of a magnet.

And we also have things that are negative emotions that are repulsive, where we're conscious of the downsides and unconscious of the upsides.And we have an instinct to withdraw.

Both of those are survival responses.

Imagine you're like an animal in the wild and you're looking for prey.
When we infatuate with somebody, we kind of look at them as prey.
We want to consume them.

And you probably actually wanted to consume the person you were infatuated with.
At the same time, when you really resent somebody and you're conscious of the downsides, not the upsides, you want to avoid them.
You want to get away from them, escape them.

So emotions are basically designed for seeking and avoiding, for searching for that which we seek and try to avoid and escape that which we're trying to, we resent.

So emotions serve a purpose, particularly when you're in survival mode.
Now we could perceive that individual really high, all positive, no negative, and be completely subjectively biased and go into an absolute radical perspective on it and become almost addicted to them.

Or we could do that in reverse and be subdicted from them where we're so all bad, no good.

I was asked by a lovely lady in Africa one time, do you believe in absolute good and evil?
And I said, no.
She says, well, I do.
And I said,
Well, your career of involving in negotiations may be hindered by that.
Because if you think they're all good or bad, you've got a very broad, general black and white view.

And whenever you see all good and no bad, you fear its loss.
Anytime you see all bad and no good, you fear its gain.

So anytime you have a highly polarized perception, you're going to have a highly polarized emotion.

The ratio of your perceptions determine the ratio of your emotions.
Each emotion has a cocktail, you might say, of neurotransmitters, neurohormones, neuromodulators, neuroregulators, chemistry in the brain and physiology that let you 
know it.

And we literally create symptomatology that we recognize.

When we're really infatuated with somebody, we want to rest and digest.
And when we're really resentful to somebody, we want to fight or flight.

So there are parasympathetic and sympathetic autonomic responses and epigenetic effects in our physiology because of these polarized emotions.

So the emotions are there to let us know whenever we have an imbalanced mind and imbalanced perception, if all of a sudden we see just as many positives as negatives, we're fully conscious of both.

We're not infatuated, but we see both sides.

Now, if you've been infatuated with somebody, you know, the first months or so, you take a while before you start to see some of those downsides.

But after a while you see things you like and dislike.
So you can have the wisdom of the ages without the aging process or the wisdom of the ages with the aging process, whatever way you choose.

The quality of the questions you ask will make you aware of both sides.
And then you are not so vulnerable and gullible to how infatuated you became.

The same thing on resentment.
You could ask questions and become cognizant of the upsides to the thing you think are downsides and be less, you might say, evasive to somebody and cautious about somebody.

But as long as you have an imbalanced ratio of perceptions, you're going to be seeking or avoiding, and you're going to have the fear of loss of that which you seek and the fear of gain of that which you try to avoid.

And you're going to be run by emotions and you're going to be in your survival mode like an animal.

But we have the capacity to balance that and bring that into complete neutrality and see both sides of people.

Because the truth is people have both sides.
I'm not a nice person.
I'm not a mean person.
I'm a human being, an individual human being that has both.
You support my values.
I'm nice as a pussycat.
You challenge my values.
I can be mean as a tiger.

So looking carefully and really wholefully at somebody and seeing both sides allows you not to be impulsively gullible and infatuated or skeptically cynical and evasive, allows you to be present.

And when you're able to do that, you are not fearing the loss of it or fearing the gain of it.
You're just present with it.

And whatever you're present with, when you have that neutral perspective, you have self-governance.

Self-governance can allow you to manage your emotions.

15:25 Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun and author, teaches that mindfulness can help us accept emotions.

And an important part of mindfulness is dropping the speech balloon, which is to say all the comments on what we observe which generally speaking could be characterized as always dualistic, which is to say they always are something about good or bad, right or wrong, on the track or off the track.

So a lot of the process of mindfulness is beginning to relax with the present moment, touch the immediacy of our experience, our thoughts, emotions, the quality of experience as it is, and trust that. That is trustworthy.
We can stay with it.

Many, many of us, maybe all of us, find it extremely difficult to just stay with the moment.

And maybe all of us, to greater and lesser degrees, dissociate continually.
But mindfulness is a tool for bringing us back to the actual sort of tactile, taste, smell, quality, feel of the present moment, whether that's emotion or things.

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