Hello Again!
I’m doing lots of interviews about The Language of Emotions, and people are consistently asking me what makes my work different. First, of course, is that I don’t see emotions as problems to be eradicated. Rather, I listen to the emotions to discover what they’re for, what they want, and what they do.
And in the early days, I did that with what I call “place-taking,” or empathy, where I worked with each emotion as a distinct thing and tried to figure out how it worked in the psyche. As I became more knowledgeable about each emotion, I was then able to track it as it interacted with the other emotions and with other people.
This place-taking is something you may have done in the physical world. For instance, when I build or sew something, fix plumbing, or install a light fixture, I find that it’s easier for me to understand what’s supposed to happen if I take the place of certain things. For instance, I imagine how each piece will interact with the others, and work out the connections by physically imagining that I’m the wire, or the seam, or the pipe junction. It sounds strange, but it works, especially if you’ve got a wacky dyslexic brain like I do.
When I tutored other people with learning disabilities, I found that recruiting this place-taking ability really helped my students cement their knowledge of otherwise theoretical things like algebraic functions or biological processes. For instance, if you can act as the carbon molecule that gets knocked inward from a cell membrane when light hits it (this initiates photosynthesis), you can physically understand how plants make sugar from light. You don’t have to rely on memorization because you can actually walk yourself through it.
I do this naturally, or perhaps I learned to do it to keep up with my siblings who were not as clearly learning disabled as I was. You had to think fast in my family, so I learned lots of workarounds for my brain.
And so it was natural for me to take this place-taking approach with emotions, especially since people are so confused about them. For me, if there’s a really impossible problem, I just jump in imaginally and place-take with all of the different pieces so that I can figure out what’s going on.
Continue Reading ...
