Choosing to Engage

Sometimes our bodies betray us. Despite intention, preparation, and even practice sometimes our emotional experience gets the best of us and we end up behaving in a manner contrary to what we deem acceptable. I am guilty of this, and I am in the business of understanding and teaching others about emotion! You may be wondering why I started this conversation with a statement about our body. Well, today we are going to dive into a discussion about emotional experience and how it influences so much of our daily living. 

Often, I hear folks make statements like, “I feel like…,” and then share a thought. Interesting isn’t it? It seems to me that culturally, at least among many of the people I interact with, our language has combined our thought-life with our emotional experience. And yet, I am here today to challenge this idea. Thoughts and emotion are separate, while at the same time closely connected and deeply influential to one another. Did you know that the part of the brain that initiates somatic sensations in the body activates before the frontal cortex can put meaning to the experience? Meaning, the sensation in our body that we call emotion occurs before our mind is able to define the reason. 

Emotion is activated when the limbic system triggers based upon information gathered by our senses. Unfortunately, our brains are primarily wired to protect us from pain, which is one of the reasons why strong somatic sensations motivating us to move away from something occur sometimes seemingly out of the blue. Our past experiences, (pain is remembered) influence current emotional occurrences. Our brain is constantly working to protect us from harm or worse, and doesn’t differentiate based on specific context. What do I mean? Have you ever noticed how sometimes a circumstance involving completely different people, places, or things somehow triggers an emotional response that doesn’t feel good and reminds you of a past difficult experience? This is because our memory, in many ways, is built as a means of reference to avoid future pain.

It’s almost like our brains automatically make the determination that once is enough. If I put my hand on a hot burner on the stove, it makes sense that my brain will remember this and work to help prevent it. Depending on how bad the burn was, my automatic emotional response when around a stove is going to remind me to avoid putting my hand on a stove burner.  Except, especially with people, things don’t necessarily stay the same. People change, circumstances change, I change and yet it can seem that sometimes my desired emotional experience doesn’t. And, at least for me, it can be very difficult to think positively about something if I don’t feel good about it. It’s kinda like my emotional experience is the music I’m dancing to in life. 

So what can we do about this? If we don’t get to pick our emotional experience, and it sometimes is more intense than we know what to do with, how am I supposed to live well when sometimes things can seem to be out of my control? First, it is important to recognize that while I may not be able to control what I feel, I can learn to identify and respond to what my body is telling me instead of automatically reacting. Often in my experience, at least at first, this isn’t going to happen in the moment, but after I have calmed down and begin to consider what’s actually going on inside of me. A powerful question to ask is, “What perceived threat is my body trying to protect me from?” This is important because sometimes there may be something actually dangerous that needs a response, while other times not so much.

When the rubber hits the road, many people eventually acknowledge that they actually hate certain emotional experiences and almost automatically have a meaning they have ascribed to them. Instead of allowing themselves to feel, they automatically react, usually with anger, in an attempt to shut the difficult feeling in their body down. So many relational conflicts are rooted in automatic reactions to somatic sensations in the body (emotion), with blame being assigned to the person or thing that, “made me feel,” a certain way.

It’s taken me a long time to come to grips with my own emotional experience, to learn what actually was going on, and perhaps most importantly how to respond well. I have learned that pushing the uncomfortable feelings aside only makes matters worse, and by doing so I am relinquishing my ability to choose. Most everyone would admit that yucky feelings aren’t their favorite. But, once we decide to seek understanding of what it is going on inside of me, the opportunity to grow becomes a reality. Emotion is there to guide, not to dictate our responses, if we are willing to engage rather than avoid.