We need to talk about Emotional Systems.
Why?
Imagine you are hours or days away from dying, as one day we all will be. If you have the opportunity to be aware of this fact, what will you reflect on? Whether you had made enough money, worked long enough hours? More likely whether you had lived your dreams, loved and been loved.
This section is from a seven book series – designed to help you connect with the core emotional systems that you need to live well and thrive (Panksepp & Biven, 2013). It is a simple fact that you can’t create a life worth living if you avoid how you feel. People we most admire have connected with their feelings to achieve great feats, they have overcome fears and doubts and allowed what is underneath to triumph. We simply cannot achieve great feats or even ordinary things in the ling term when we ignore our feelings.
These are ancient and universal structures. Our basic emotions are evolutionary tools for living.
This book has a simple idea at its heart – get your most basic emotions on track and the rest sorts itself out. These systems are all absolutely necessary for emotional well being and resilience.
When I and people I have worked with get our ability to feel and appropriately express these emotions back on line, our ability to thrive and create a life worth living increases tenfold, and in some remarkable cases a thousand fold. In these cases, problems do not disappear; instead clarity, purpose and underlying capability are revealed, and difficulties are addressed and overcome.
There are thousands of books that help you think about more complex human struggles that do not concern monkeys and apes, lizards and kangaroos. If you’ve tried any of these and are still struggling a lot, it’s probably because the core emotions are off-line/ asleep, or causing havoc. It’s hard to use ‘thinking’ to calm us down when our mind is overwhelmed with anxiety or shut off to what we need to find. You may need more help than a book can give – but perhaps focusing on the ancient genetic inheritance of your emotional systems to craft a life well lived would be a good place to start.
Of course, this book is designed to be a valuable source of information as well as stories, videos and exercises which bring the information to life. But my passion for writing it is to help people to make phenomenal use of their emotional systems. This is not an easy task. We have more and more culturally acceptable ways of avoiding our feelings; the process of facing feelings is becoming harder and harder. We don’t always fully accept the importance of noticing our feelings and responding to them, as fundamentally as we accept the importance of noticing our hunger and satisfying it. But the basic fact for us human beings is that we live and breathe, therefore we have emotional systems!
Emotions make us move, evoking motion within us. So we move towards stuff we like and away from stuff we don’t like. If we squash and ignore our emotions, at a very basic level we squash and ignore what we need to move towards and away from. Whilst this may be necessary short term, long term this is simply self-destructive.
Our basic emotional systems are as important as our other physiological systems – some you are familiar with: digestive, cardiovascular, muscular, skeletal, reproductive, immune, nervous and respiratory – and some may be less so: renal, endocrine, etc. We wouldn’t dream of trying to permanently suppress or block our cardiovascular system on purpose and hope for a good outcome. And so if by bad luck or poor judgment, we find ourselves avoiding, negating, repressing, ignoring, squashing or bulldozing over our feelings, we will find the same thing over and over again – our true feelings are essential to full, purposeful lives and without them we wither up internally, and we fail externally – in our relationships with others and with our world.
And if you are doubting the importance of your emotional systems whilst valuing your digesting system, it is worth mentioning that it is pretty hard to digest food if your seeking system hasn’t guided you to find it.
It can be hard to re-learn what comes so naturally to us as babies, if we have either neglected our emotions or lived in a whirlwind of emotion for years. I have spent my career so far trying to help people be more effectively and healthily in touch with their feelings, which will give them back a sense of self, direction and clarity. I have seen the confusion when I ask, “As you tell me about your partner leaving you, how do you feel?” As therapists, we can label much of this confusion as avoidance but there is such a basic lack of clarity in our culture and discussion about how the most core feelings can be expressed that it can be very hard for people to put into words. This is similar to there being very little discussion in our culture for some decades about cooking basic foods – no one talked about how to boil an egg and so the message didn’t get passed on and skills got lost. Convenience food replaced cooking skills and we all got poisoned by salt and sugar overload; convenience feelings are also an ineffective replacement for our deeper underlying emotional systems.
“Recover the… freedom to love, to live, and to create a life that matters. At each moment… we have a choice; to face our inner life or run from ourselves; to engage… or avoid.” Frederickson, 2013
So this series of books is about our innate emotional systems. Helping us all to move towards the position that when our emotional systems are activated, we notice and experience what is happening, allowing our emotional systems to give us direction, motivation and clarity to respond to the situations you find yourself in; to enhance your “self-creative capacity to act” (Frederickson, 2013). How about that?!
Your self-creative capacity is on the other side of courage, play, care and connection, gritty assertion, leaning into what feels good and following your own curiosity. But it is nothing you can’t handle… you already have all seven emotional systems readying themselves for action. Take someone’s hand (mine, yours, someone present, someone past) and trust the process!
Ref: Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of Mind: Neurorevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. New York, NY W. W. Norton & Company
Frederickson, J. F. (2013), Co-creating Change. Seven Leaves Press.