Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 18, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
You’re only as smart as your emotions
Wisdom has built her house and calls out to us, “Forsake foolishness that you may live, and advance in the way of understanding.”
When I think of emotions I think of them as consequences of thoughts. A lion roars, I think the lion might attack me and I feel afraid. If I think the lion will not attack me, I feel something else again. Not fear, but fascination perhaps.
When I change my thought, my emotion follows, and in this way I manage my relationships with people and things better than I could otherwise. So I strive to know my thoughts.
Thus rise the ABC’s of RET (rational emotive therapy):
A = Activating event
B = Belief (or thought)
C = Consequential feeling
Even as this makes sense, it doesn’t make enough sense. Feelings catch me off guard with their strength, and though the therapist in me struggles to back up and identify the belief that began this tumult, the feeling is clearly in charge. What is going on here?
Most of the time emotions guide reason and make us more rational. It’s an exaggeration, but maybe a forgivable one, to say that this is a turnabout to rival the Copernican Revolution in astronomy.
Hmmm. So if emotions are not derived from our thought life, where do they come from? Where do they go? What do we do with them?
A lot of people are estranged from their own inner lives because they don’t know how their emotions function.
Our brains are not even the physical center of emotion, this most important source of intelligence and energy.
Below conscious awareness, your body is constantly reacting to the events around you: heart speeding or slowing, breaths getting shorter or longer, your metabolism purring or groaning. Many of these reactions happen in the enteric nervous system in the gastrointestinal tract, which is sometimes called “the second brain.” There are upward of several hundred million neurons in that system; 95 percent of the neurotransmitter serotonin is there.
Serotonin! This is the source of much/most great joy in our bodies. And it is in our gut. Didn’t we always know this? Don’t we get sick and feel well first in our gut?
And there is far more work for our emotions to do. Just take a sampling of feelings we all experience from time to time, and how they help us live well:
Indignation helps us focus on injustice. Awe motivates us to feel small in the presence of grandeur and to be good to others. Euphoria put us in a risk-taking frame of mind. Happiness makes people more creative, more flexible in their thinking. Disgust primes us to reject immoral behavior. Fear helps amplify our senses and focus attention. Anxiety puts us in a pessimistic state of mind, less likely to take chances. Sadness improves memory, helps us make more accurate judgments, makes us clearer communicators and more attentive to fairness.
So it’s true that our thoughts influence our emotions, but it’s more true that our emotions influence our thoughts. Emotional self-awareness makes us clearer thinkers and more decisive actors.
O taste and see the goodness of the Lord. Glorify the Lord with me. I sought the Lord and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Look to him that you may be radiant with joy.
I have a favorite acronym NANCY: Notice, Acknowledge, Name, Confess, and Yell Yes. Yale emotion scholar Marc Bracket terms his acronym RULER: Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate your emotions. These behaviors exponentially improve our relationships, with others, with God, with ourselves.
How important is this understanding of emotion to our lives?
We’ve always known that emotion is central to the art of human connection (which is not to say that we’re always good at it). Now we understand that emotion is central to being an effective rational person in the world.
And yet most of us are emotionally inarticulate.
This wrecks relationships in often at first incomprehensible ways. And even sometimes our work life. When people get fired, Brooks says …
… it’s almost always because they’re uncoachable, they have anger issues or they’re bad teammates. In other words, they lack emotional skills, a fact often undetected in the hiring process.
Mr. Brooks, essayist, political theorist, friend of the intelligentsia and also the rest of us, wants all of us to live in a better world.
I’d love to live in a culture that could talk about emotions with the appreciation, sophistication and granularity that they deserve.
As Brooks has done for himself, we can do too. We can start at home. There are countless feeling word vocabularies on the internet. Put a list of emotions on the frig and get to know those words, and what they mean. Use them over and over in your I-messages which are usually replete with thoughts but virtually empty of emotional words. And use your body to feel things. Sit still, and be sad. Stomp your feet and be angry (as Paul says, and do not sin). Dance and sing, and be happy.
This is just plain smart, and I think part of what it means to live in the Garden of Eden.
Be filled with the Spirit, giving thanks always and for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.
(Proverbs 9, Psalm 34, Ephesians 5, John 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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