As I’ve been working with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s definition of emotions as action-requiring neurological programs, I created a flowchart to help you understand the difference between feelings and emotions. This is my simplified flowchart: An emotionally evocative stimulus occurs → The stimulus evokes a specific emotion → You utilize your ability to feel that emotionShiver me timbers →
Archive for the ‘ Emotions AT Work ’ Category
The Emotion Cards are here!!
Woot! The new 24-card deck of the Language of Emotions Cards arrived this week, and they are awesome! See them live! In color!
The Emotion Cards: Each of the seventeen emotion cards contains a detailed list of the gifts each emotion brings you, questions you can ask yourself when each emotion arises, signs of obstruction or trouble in that emotion, and a focused, hands-on practice for working with that emotion in your daily life. Includes Anger, Fear, Sadness, Happiness, Apathy, Guilt & Shame, Hatred, Grief, Contentment, Jealousy, Envy, The Suicidal Urge, Joy, and more … every emotion is presented as a necessary aspect of your cognitive and social skills.
The Empathic Skills Cards: Each of the seven empathic skills cards were created to help you bring focus and mindfulness to your emotional life. These skills utilize one or more emotions in their “free-flowing” states so that you can begin to articulate between differing levels of emotion and integrate your mindfulness practice and your emotional awareness. These skills will help you maintain your focus, understand appropriate boundaries, address internal tension, and work with your strong emotions with grace, humor, and intelligence. Includes the five Empathic Mindfulness skills from The Language of Emotions, plus Stress & Resistance, and suggestions for using these cards as a part of your daily empathic practice.
The Language of Emotions Cards will help you quickly identify, understand, and respond to your emotions — and they’ll act as reminders of the empathic mindfulness skills that help you integrate your emotive life, your intelligence, your ethics, and your empathy. Thank you for bringing your emotional awareness and your empathy to a waiting world!
Cost: $11 per deck, plus shipping and handling
How much emotion is too much? (revisited!)
When I talk about The Language of Emotions, one of the central ideas I try to get across is that all emotions are useful. If you can approach them with care and ask them the right questions, there aren’t any “bad” emotions. Every emotion has a specific function, and all of them are important and instructive. Some very intense emotions (such as hatred and panic), which I call the “raging rapids” emotions, need to be handled with care, but in most normal cases, you can understand and work with your emotions on your own.
However, there are times when you’ll need assistance with your emotions. The way to know when you need help is simple: When your emotions repeat continually and do not resolve, or when they overwhelm you or the people in your life, it’s time to find out what’s going on.
When things are going well, all of your emotions (even the raging rapids ones) will respond to you and will resolve when you’ve paid attention to them and made whatever corrective actions they require. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, “emotions are action-requiring neurological programs.”
From that post: So, for instance, fear requires that you take action to orient to change and novelty, or to avoid physical harm. Anger requires that you take action to protect or restore your sense of self or your standpoint (or the selves and standpoints of others, if your anger is related to social justice). Shame requires that you take action to avoid injuring others or yourself (if the shame is authentic to you. It’s important to first identify whether the shame has been applied as a control mechanism from the outside). Sadness requires that you take action to let go of something that isn’t working anyway, and grief (which has a very different purpose from sadness) requires that you actively mourn something that is lost irretrievably. And so forth.
Each emotion is an action-requiring neurological program, and in The Language of Emotions, I explain what each emotion is for and how to work with it as itself (rather than trying to pretend it’s something else, or that you don’t have it).
With this action-requiring construct, we can be a bit more precise in our understanding of how much emotion is too much: If you’ve got an emotion that repeats continually and will not resolve itself, no matter how many times you try to perform the action for that emotion, that’s a clear sign that you could use some intervention. Let’s look at one of the emotions above so you’ll know what I mean.
The importance of Fear
From its healthy, flowing state (where it is your instincts and your intuition), your fear is evoked into what I call its mood state (this is when most of us can feel it) by change, novelty, and the possibility of physical danger. The actions fear requires are uncountable, because fear is the emotion of instinct and intuition. When your fear signals you, you might need to hold your breath, freeze, run, laugh, recoil, move forward, orient yourself, strike out quickly to avoid an incoming hazard, lower your head and studiously ignore something, or any of a hundred other actions.
When you and your instincts choose the right action, you’ll resolve the reasons for your fear, and your fear will recede naturally.
Why did you believe in the end of the world?
I’ve been thinking — or more honestly, feeling — a great deal about this weekend’s purported Judgment Day, when there will supposedly be huge, planet-wide earthquakes, a rapture into heaven for 200 million true believers, and the beginning of the end of the world. The Apocalypse, Armageddon, Judgment Day.
Of course, none of that will happen. It never happens. Hundreds and thousands of Judgment Days, Armageddons, cataclysms, end times, and planet-wide disasters have been prophesied for centuries, but none of them has ever come to pass. For instance, just two months ago, an astrologer predicted that worldwide catastrophes would be set in motion by the Supermoon, and of course, that didn’t happen. And come Sunday morning, we’ll add yet another failed Judgment Day to this endless list.
Yet there’s something much more important than just another failed prophecy — and that’s the people who believe in it. Right now, these people are praying hard — for themselves, certainly, but also for you and me. They’re worried about us, and most of them don’t want us to suffer.
But come Sunday morning, we’ll have yet another devastated group of people who were promised an end to their suffering, a victorious place in the afterlife, and a reward for their faith and diligence. These people are what interest me (far more than failed prophecies do), because I care about their welfare — and because I can empathize with them.
Preparing for the cataclysm
I grew up as an agnostic atheist, but when I was ten years old, my mom discovered a group that believed in all sorts of fascinating paranormal things like reincarnation, spirit guides, magical healing diets, karma, positive affirmations that could bring you whatever you wanted, and psychic powers. It was a blast at first, and I really enjoyed the things I learned in that group.
However, many of the group members also believed in a New Age prophecy about a worldwide cataclysm, where — due primarily to the imbalances caused by human greed, callousness, and a lack of spirituality — the poles of the Earth would shift, massive earthquakes and volcanoes would be activated, and many land masses would be destroyed or deluged with water. In essence, the Earth was going to shake us humans off her back.
It was going to be the end of the world as we knew it, and it was supposed to happen at the end of the Mayan calendar, first in the late 1970s, and when that didn’t happen, in 2003 or 2004, depending on whom you asked. Most notably, California (where our group was based) was supposed to crack off and sink into the ocean.
I’m not sure why, but the cataclysm never felt plausible to me. It just seemed preposterous somehow, and I sort of ignored it. I remember joking that if it did happen, I would be on a small floating piece of destroyed California, which would contain a fully-stocked Nordstrom’s department store (this was my idea of luxury at the time. I mean, come on — a grand piano in the lobby of a department store? That’s mad swanky.) People in the group thought I was too young and too silly to understand the importance of the cataclysm. Perhaps they were right.
I remember some people in the group who left their beloved California for many years, because they were afraid of the cataclysm. Of course, the cataclysm never happened, but those people who left California — I think about them a great deal. How do they feel now, looking back? Do they understand more about the world and the way these prophecies hook powerfully into very specific psychosocial and emotional needs, or are they now preparing for the updated 2012 version of their cataclysm?
A holiday gift for your emotions
Holidays can be wonderful, but they can also be difficult if family or work relationships are strained. During the holidays, I see many people respond to difficult relationships by isolating themselves (or wishing they could), and I’d like to suggest a different tactic: gossip.
Hold on! I’m not talking about any old gossip. I suggest ethical empathic gossip.
There’s a little back story here. In a previous audio set called Becoming an Empath, I spoke out against gossip, because I saw it as a very unhelpful thing. I thought it contributed to crappy relationships, because that’s what I saw all around me. However, when I returned to school and studied the social sciences, I learned that gossip is an extremely important social skill — especially in areas where direct communication is hindered in some way. Gossip helps us figure out the social world: the rules, the relationships, and the secrets. Gossip is an irreplaceable form of (often) indirect information gathering.
Gossip is very important, especially in relationships that are troubled. However, gossip can be toxic if all we do is whisper about other people as we try to build allies for “our side” of the conflict. Luckily, if you know how to gossip ethically, you can attain new information about a person you’re in conflict with, and you may be able to get new ideas about how to deal with that person. Skillful gossip can exponentially increase your social awareness, and ethical gossip can help you repair troubled relationships (or at least get a fresh outlook on them).
