Daily Excerpt: Learning to Feel (Girrell) - Emotions drive the bus!
excerpt from Learning to Feel (Kris Girrell) --
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Emotions Drive the Bus!
Sarah catches me over the dinner table with what occurs to me as a random—out of the blue—question, but which for her is a continuation of her inquiry:
“How did it feel when your first wife broke up with you?”
“Honestly, I don’t remember how I was feeling. I guess I felt numb.”
“Well, you must have had a conversation or something when she made that
announcement. Can’t you remember any of it?”
“I remember feeling sad and I remember one day riding the train into work and—it
was a rainy day—and the rain rolling down the window seemed to map onto the
reflection of my face as I stared out. But really, that’s all I can recall.”
“I find it hard to believe that you didn’t at least talk about it.”
I would be willing to wager that while most of us know we have feelings, being able to access those feeling is somehow altogether different and more challenging. When we were children, feelings came over us and we didn’t know why they were happening—just that they were happening. And as children, we experienced them, and then they were gone and done with. I am quite fond of Dr. Brené Brown, who has spent her career studying emotions and, in particular, those of guilt, shame, and vulnerability. During an interview she had about her latest book Atlas of the Heart, she had this observation about emotions in general. “Let me be clear: Emotion is at the wheel. Thinking and acting are not in the front seat, riding shotgun. They are hogtied in the trunk. Emotion drives. We are emotional beings.” If emotions are the lead drivers, then what should we learn about them and how do we go about this task?
Maybe a better question is what good are emotions and why are we humans “blessed” with them or the ability to “feel” in the first place? The answer to that question is a tad more complex than the scope of this discussion allows, but the short answer seems to be that emotions were part of the survival system we developed through evolution. In essence, the function of emotions is to drive our actions—they tell us what to do. Emotions want to drive quick responses as survival techniques, but often our initial emotional reaction (which, as we will see, is filtered through our beliefs and self-concepts) may not be as optimal or accurate as we may wish. For example, you leave a message for a friend, and your friend does not return the call. Your initial reaction may be hurt, frustration, or anger and may result in your snapping when your friend does call you back, when in actuality your friend could have had some serious challenge and just couldn’t get back to you immediately. You had an emotional reaction, but it was clouded by your thought, your self-concepts, and your previous experiences of your friend.
Thus, since that function is not just to feel but to act, listening to our emotions and learning to skillfully experience them so that we have a clearer sense of what action we should take are much different than just feeling them. This book, Learning to Feel, is really about how to experience our emotions on a clearer and deeper level such that we begin moving in a more emotionally connected direction.
But the bigger, overarching purpose of this book focuses on one goal—enabling readers to find some tools to tap into their own feelings and understand the messages and power of their own emotions. To accomplish that objective, my fervent hope is that readers will draw lessons from understanding the issues that have blocked my emotions and made them less accessible to me.
In order to do that we need to look into how our emotions are made (from whence they come) and then be clear enough with our own personal developmental path that we can trust that the emotions are unfiltered and giving us clearer messages. I am not going to go into the neuroscience of how emotions occur and how the brain and central nervous system produce them. For an in-depth but clearly articulated answer, I would refer you to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. What Barrett and her colleagues in the field of brain research have found is that emotions are manufactured by the brain. What goes into that process comes from a variety of sources ranging from genetics to bodily sensations, experiences, social learning, and the continual deep functioning of the brain’s operating system.
As a broad generalization, psychology has held that there are regions of the brain that are responsible for various functions. Each function—hearing, seeing, smelling, along with planning, motivation, memory, and so on— was associated with a given region of the brain that then was processed by what was referred to as the limbic brain and amygdala.
However, most of that physical mapping of the brain was conducted on brain injuries in live patients (we really couldn’t learn much from a corpse). So, when a patient would come in with an injury to the side of the head and be unable to speak, the obvious deduction was that the area controlling speech must be in the region that was injured.
But now that scientists and researchers can monitor activities of the brain using live imaging technology, these live scans show not only that all parts of the brain are actively engaged in all aspects of sensation and perception, the entire brain is also active in creating emotional responses as well. What research is uncovering is that there is continual activity going on in the brain at all times. This immense volume of activity, called the intrinsic brain activity or the intrinsic network, is a continual cascade of neuron firings on a massive scale. Much of that activity is just keeping us alive by causing the heart to beat and our lungs, diaphragm, and upper body to keep breathing. But it is also the source of our daydreaming, imagination, reverie, and mental wandering off on tangents. And our emotions.
To oversimplify this part of the discussion, essentially the ongoing, intrinsic system is continually taking new information received through bodily sensations and external stimuli, comparing that with the billions of stored memories, experiences, and sensations and then “predicting” or projecting that on the next moment and out into the future. If the compared database contains scary memories, the projection includes the possibility of fear. If the associated information was pleasurable, our brain will predict goodness or happiness. However, Barrett writes, “Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action.”
She continues a few pages later, “Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.”
But let’s get back to the discussion of why we have emotions in the first place. How this all evolved is the source of another great debate. Evolutionists contend that our emotions evolved as a function of our need for survival. Back in prehistory when we upright hominids coexisted with predators that could easily be our undoing by consuming one of us for lunch, we needed to know how and when to fight, flee, feed, or freeze on the spot.
These, among other sensations associated with survival, became our core emotions and then the brain went to work on refinements on those basic feelings. Cognitive theorists contend that the evolution of emotions derive more from the ability of the brain to think of itself. That introspection and self-perception resulted in further evaluations which moved us into the realm of emotions and emotional development. But both of these theories smack of emotions being the source; that is, emotions spontaneously evolved and happen as a result of our evolution and worldly situations—somewhat contrary to the findings of current brain research. Whether our emotions come from one of these roots or are simply the evolved functions of an active processing system held somewhere between our ears, we have come equipped with these emotive gifts. Evolution has hardwired our brains to become accurate and efficient prediction machines.
That’s nice, but it is only one part of the story. Our brains are continually monitoring somatic data of both gross bodily movements and internal organs and systems. Despite our powers of prediction, those predictions are continually integrated with information the body is generating. If and when all of these line up, the prediction stands. But that is the rare occasion. More likely what occurs are a series of prediction errors immediately followed by corrective actions, predictions, and further corrections.
Take, for example, walking on a moving sidewalk in the airport. Your body is moving at the rate of speed of the sidewalk plus your walking rate of speed. You have the somatic perception of going faster than those people walking on the floor next to you and of your conveyor belt. So cognitively, you are aware of the fact that there will be a rate change and an adjustment to your pace when the moving sidewalk comes to an end. But it’s a prediction (if your experience is anything like mine) that is usually inaccurate: The surprise of your bodily adjustments to that rate change sent back to your brain causes you to have to adjust more than you had predicted. The consequences of making slight (and sometimes much larger) prediction errors feed back into the brain’s self-awareness function as a new set of beliefs or as confirmation of your inferiority (I’m not ____ enough).
So what? What are the implications of being emotional creatures? All of these predictions, sensations, corrections, and re-predictions continually loop through the intrinsic system as a backdrop to your conscious life, conscious predictions, and the emotions that those produce. Despite this new research, most of the field of psychology and sociology still cling to a mechanical model of brain functioning which includes emotions as more spontaneously generated by the limbic brain. So, when we begin a discussion of emotions, self-concepts, limiting self-beliefs, and so on, we must take caution in assuming what our feelings mean before we are able to reverse-engineer them in our attempt to change or alter the substrate concepts we hold onto in our minds.
I was trained originally in behavioral psychology, and the bulk of my work as a consultant has been in creating and interpreting behavioral assessments and behavioral/competency models for corporate clients. What that translates into is that most of my professional work has been looking at, inspecting, and interpreting only the parts of the person that shows up. But behaviors are like the tip of an iceberg, and the parts we don’t see, like the 90% of the iceberg that is beneath the surface of the water, is a little harder to discern.
That was fine for me because working with executives and corporate types, I didn’t have to go into the world of “fluffy” emotions and personality traits. Part of my training also included the use of those personality assessments, and I feel that I have a great deal of mastery in their use and interpretation. Irrespective of that, I still would port that back to how they made a person behave. So, I am neither avoiding the topics of emotions and personality nor am I afraid of their murky meanings. It’s just that I related more to the behaviors and found reinforcement for that interpretation in my clients.
The truth of the matter is that despite new breakthroughs in brain research, we know very little about how the brain does its work of creating emotions—only that it does. Delving into emotions is science-based guess-work at the best. My intellectual snobbery perhaps held some disdain for going deeper on my own quest to understand them in the way I am now learning how to understand them and to extrapolate those experiences into self-concepts and referential foundations for future interpretations.
This book is an effort not only to inspect the way in which we go about finding and uprooting our limiting self-beliefs, but it is also an investigation into how doing so altersour awareness of emotions, our emotional states, and our emotional intelligence. The bottom line is learning how to take all that into account in a way that reports in on how I learned and am learning how to feel. Amy Bladen-Shatto is an industrial-organizational psychologist whom I have been mentoring in the art of coaching for several years. Now it is her turn at the wheel as my coach. I was stuck on how to write about myself and yet not have it be too strangely autobiographic in nature.
Me: I am having a difficult time getting started with this project.
Coach: Have you ever tried free writing?
Me: Yes, in fact several times quite successfully, I might add.
Coach: Might I suggest that you start writing without knowing what your plan or
outline is and see what comes out?
Me: I’m not sure what you mean.
Coach: Take one of these conversations from the past that you have difficulty
recalling, and just start writing out what you might imagine was the conversation.
Perhaps that process will jog some other memories that then resurrect others.
Me: Hmm, well I have never written a book or essay that way, but I’m willing to give
it a go and see what turns up.
As I write this, I am aware that I am the laboratory in which much of what I believe and feel can be and will be inspected and analyzed. However, my challenge to you will be to apply these little expeditions into the realm of recalled feelings for yourself through a set of questions at the end of each section. I do not assume my experience to be yours, yet I also know that 99.9% of our DNA is identical, so we most likely have many experiences and emotions in common. Additionally, because of my profession, I have the luxury of having worked with thousands of others and will at times be bringing those conversations and their experiences around emotions and emotional intelligence into the narrative. Just as a sidenote, with the exception of myself and my wife, whom you have already met by name, I will change elements of the conversations and descriptions of those other people to protect their anonymity. But, trust me, they are all very real people.
As I have said, psychology teaches us that our emotions are the result of our thoughts that are derived from and based in our beliefs about ourselves and the world in which we live. Throughout, the book will be investigating how emotions are formed and what their internal message is. We will pull apart what emotional intelligence entails and look into how to develop a stronger and more functional emotional intellect. And we will look at how we can access our full emotional experience, learning what it can provide and how it benefits us.
One last thought on why we should learn about emotions: My friend Dr. Stacy Feiner calls emotions our superpower. It’s not just our emotions that are the superpower—it’s the ability to recognize them, know them, respond appropriately to them and to be able to do the same with others. That is the simplest definition of emotional intelligence, and I will dedicate an entire chapter to EI later in the book.
But Stacy’s point is about more than just having emotional intelligence. It’s all about becoming emotionally mature. She says it is a basic knowing—an understanding of oneself, a visceral knowing. The trick to this knowing, however, is that we must learn how to trust our core emotions. I use the term “core” emotions to distinguish them from those emotions we have as a result of our thoughts and worries. Most of us spend way more time in the past (agonizing over what we could have, should have, and would have done) or fretting over the future (anxious about what might happen and the wondering about all the what-ifs).
Those are the thoughts, as Feldman describes them, that produce the bulk of what we experience as emotions. But there are also emotions that stem from our physical being. We know that our medulla (the inner part of our brain stem that controls all autonomic systems) is perpetually monitoring what is going on in our body. It perceives, for example, that when we are in the embrace of our lover, we are safe and loved, and as a result, we relax and feel calm. Conversely, when we put on our work attire, we prepare ourselves to handle the onslaught of things that work throws at us, and the body is slightly more tensed. That happens irrespective of the past/future machinations of our cortical brain. When we get to a point of emotional maturity, we can trust our inner emotional gyroscope to guide our actions in an appropriate direction—one that serves our soul, our values, and our life goals. Digging in the fertile soil of our past, we may be able to remove what clogs the system (like negative self-talk, limiting beliefs, guilt, shame, and the rest of those learned but buried thoughts), shift our ways of being, and learn to feel in a clean, clear and unencumbered way. You may not feel the need to write a book—that’s just my way of doing the work. But the questions I provide at the end of each chapter may help you in your quest.
Questions to ponder:
1. Would you consider yourself to be emotionally mature or emotionally
intelligent?
2. Of the emotions you are most familiar with, which would say you have fully
experienced and which would you consider that you only “know about”?
3. Where do you experience your emotions physically—where in your body do
you feel?
AWARDS (FIRST EDITION)
Independent Press Distinguished Favorite Award
Literary Titan gold award
For more posts about Kris and his books, click HERE.
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