The Emotional Self.

The Emotional Self

The Thinking Process 3.

What are our emotions? Many people will say, ‘Don’t be silly. That’s easy. They’re our feelings.’

Are they? I wonder if, in fact, they aren’t a lot more than that. How many emotions are there? Where do they all hide in the brain? How do they pop out on cue? Why do they vary according to the circumstances?

So, let’s examine the emotional side of our brain, the part I called our ‘emotional self’.

Why did I call it that?

Some time back, I was half asleep when a crazy idea occurred to me. My first reaction was ‘don’t be stupid’, but after only a few more seconds of thought, I began to realise the idea perhaps wasn’t that stupid.

We only have one physical self. What if we also only have one emotional self? The brain, perhaps aided by other cells throughout the body, forms a single emotional self. This emotional self would contain everything that affects us emotionally, including those things that may be classified as basic drives or desires. After all, aren’t they ‘emotional’ too? What about that most primal drive, the desire to stay alive. Surely that must be strongly linked to our emotions.

And the emotional self must interrelate with the other two features of our brain. For example, don’t hunger, thirst and pain also affect us emotionally. When we’re thirsty, we know we need to drink, but if there was no emotion involved, why would we care? If there was no emotional drive to satisfy thirst and hunger, would we just die?

Our physical needs affect us emotionally, and satisfying those needs gives us pleasure, satisfaction, or simply relief. And surely most of us recognise how our emotional state can affect what we remember and even how we might react to that memory. In turn, those memories can certainly affect us emotionally.

So, our emotional self includes all those drives that make us human, as well as it’s reactions to how we satisfy those needs. Something happens that makes us feel happy, sad, angry, nostalgic, etc. We feel those changes and call them our emotions. I believe they are also enmeshed with our ‘emotional self’ rather than being ‘emotions’ that pop out on cue. Our tendency to name all these ‘emotions’ no doubt supports the idea that they exist as separate entities.

Most, probably all, of these ‘feelings’ are more complicated than the basic emotion we have named. Is there such a thing as ‘pure love’? I would argue that, besides varying according to circumstances, there are always other emotions involved to some extent – lust, admiration, compassion, duty of care, sense of belonging, etc. I believe the same could be said for every other emotion.

This idea surely fits better with the concept of one emotional self rather than dozens of separate emotions.

Then we humans have this tendency to label almost everything, even emotions, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Yet surely those ‘bad’ feelings are simply part of our emotional self, in much the same way that the finger that pulled the trigger is simply part of the physical body. We can control our emotions to some extent, but it is the way we react that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ rather than the emotion itself. Managing that emotion is surely more difficult if we are dealing with one emotional self rather than a separate emotion that we can isolate.

Inevitably, the ‘good’ feelings have become desires in themselves, while we try to avoid the ‘bad’ feelings. Of course, the feelings are simply a reflection of our emotional self and to what is happening around us.

So, it is our emotional self that drives us, both physically and emotionally. Add to this the idea that it is our emotions that drive our thinking and it is apparent how much our emotions drive who we are.

I guess many people will scoff at the idea that thinking is an emotional process. Perhaps that’s evidence that thinking is an emotional process. After all, the idea that thinking is an intellectual process is based on a dubious concept that has become such a part of our culture and language that we have difficulty thinking differently.

Of course, those cognitive skills have improved over time and have helped us in many ways, but it is our emotions, rather than that mythical intelligence, that have driven humans to build our civilisations and cultures. It is our emotional self that has made us what we are.

And consider this. If our basic drives are emotional, they are not rigid attributes and can be affected by factors such as culture, perhaps, like those skills, even changing over time, as we have evolved.

So, the main thing we need to recognise is that we don’t need to ensure our emotions don’t affect our thinking. We need to ensure that our thinking uses those cognitive skills and uses them with as little emotion as possible. After all, if our thinking is emotionally driven, that explains why, so often, we even use those cognitive skills emotionally.

And while the idea may not help us improve, it surely makes human behaviour and human history just a little easier to understand.

Yep, Just my thoughts. Nope, not much research.