I was working with a young nonverbal man who was proudly demonstrating his iPad version of a communication device. He was smiling and happily showing me all the different categories available. I noticed a section called "Emotions" and said what's this and touched the screen which opened up a whole variety of emotional options. The guy looked at the array before us an immediately shut that window down with a frown on his face. I laughed and called him a typical man. I wanted to explore the emotion section and he shut them down. His smile returned with a big laugh. Never was the emotion section opened again.
All jokes aside emotions are overwhelming and we don't really explore them until we find ourselves needing to. Just trying to describe an emotion can be confusing. However, we all have emotions from a very early age. Anyone who has spent a night awake with a crying baby could tell you just how early we experience emotion. The contagious nature of laughter of really little babies are all over YouTube.
Our emotions are developed as babies our relationship with ourselves is very much determined by your relationships with your parents. The attachment that we form with them can affect our world view. If we have a secure attachment to our parents we then enjoy secure attachment across life time. However, if we have an insecure attachment style we may always be wondering if people really love us. If we have an anxious ambivalent attachment we may avoid intimacy altogether and avoid any kind of close relationship throughout our lives. We can work on relearning these emotional responses to the world and make ourselves learn to be secure. It will take a lot of work and often people choose to avoid the difficulty involved in developing secure attachments. The emotional work is often just too hard.
Our emotions are developed as babies our relationship with ourselves is very much determined by your relationships with your parents. The attachment that we form with them can affect our world view. If we have a secure attachment to our parents we then enjoy secure attachment across life time. However, if we have an insecure attachment style we may always be wondering if people really love us. If we have an anxious ambivalent attachment we may avoid intimacy altogether and avoid any kind of close relationship throughout our lives. We can work on relearning these emotional responses to the world and make ourselves learn to be secure. It will take a lot of work and often people choose to avoid the difficulty involved in developing secure attachments. The emotional work is often just too hard.
Psychologist categorize emotions in three groups Positive Negative and Neutral. Positive Emotions are those things that we want to hold on to gratitude, love, happiness. Things we know is if we have a physical response such as smiling we feel better. A while back there were laughing groups, people would get together and start laughing just the act of laughing improved people's feelings. Neutral feelings such as pensive and passive. The negative emotions such as grief, sadness, anger and frustration. Emotions are what make us human some would argue that emotions are awful things that hold us back from really getting on with life.
The feeling of love is a good example of the three components of emotions. The physical feeling of your heart beat increasing, your thoughts of our object of affection are racing through our heads and our behavior is off the charts in terms of what we do when we are in love. Fear is another emotion that has all three elements we appraise perhaps a dangerous situation, like seeing a snake, our hearts beat faster the flight or fight or freeze response hits in and then our behavior will be to either run away, kill the snake or freeze until the snake moves away. Those who have an insecure or an anxious ambivalent attachment style may have the feeling of love mixed with the feeling of fear and anxiety. As you can imagine if a child is regularly abused by a parent they love their parent yet at the same time feel fear. A person with an insecure attachment style in a relationship with a loved one as adult may be waiting for a fearful event to occur. They may leave relationships when intimacy is beginning to develop to avoid the potential of being hurt. The world view of the person is distorted by their early life experience of love. They have developed an instinctive response to love and attachment that limits their ability to experience intimacy without fear.
Is that all we are just a set of instinctive emotions. No we are not, we are complicated creatures. Take for example Anger it can be all encompassing once described in a book from my childhood as a vine that wraps itself around a tree and straggles the life out of it. What lies beneath anger is pain, perhaps sadness and grief. What lies beneath Anxiety might be anger, insecurity, deep sadness. Depression beneath depression may lie unresolved grief or anger about past wrongs done to us. That is the job of psychologists and counselors to go beneath the surface emotions and face the core of emotions and help us resolve the unresolved feel the feelings that we are not acknowledging and move forward with our lives chop down those strangling vines that a preventing us from growing to our full potential.
Is that all we are just a set of instinctive emotions. No we are not, we are complicated creatures. Take for example Anger it can be all encompassing once described in a book from my childhood as a vine that wraps itself around a tree and straggles the life out of it. What lies beneath anger is pain, perhaps sadness and grief. What lies beneath Anxiety might be anger, insecurity, deep sadness. Depression beneath depression may lie unresolved grief or anger about past wrongs done to us. That is the job of psychologists and counselors to go beneath the surface emotions and face the core of emotions and help us resolve the unresolved feel the feelings that we are not acknowledging and move forward with our lives chop down those strangling vines that a preventing us from growing to our full potential.
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