Anatomy of Emotions
Apparently, and I only found this out a few days ago, I have a flat ass. After twenty years of marriage, my wife tells me she overlooked this short coming because I possessed enough other qualities for her to do so. Wow! There is much more to unpack in this one revelation than you can imagine, and because it is a bit funny I will use it to dissect emotions and discuss how they affect behavior and physiology.
Also, the reason I did not send this post timely on Saturday (a goal of mine is to send one post per week on Saturday) is because I was attending the Biohacking Conference in Los Angeles, which is focused on health and not computers. Many interesting talks and exhibits, and I was quite happy to see a lot of technology and pharmacology focusing on mental, emotional, and even spiritual health. I loved it. But something pretty significant seemed to be missing, basically the same thing those biohackers feel is lacking in conventional medicine, which is treating symptoms as opposed to the root cause. When it comes to emotions the root cause is the emotion itself and the beliefs that cause them, understanding what they are and how to deal with them appropriately.
Our mental, emotional, and spiritual health are fascinating and important topics for me, and the evolution of humanity is dependent on improving these parts of our humanity. These parts also affect the physiology of the body, you have experienced this when you are nervous and have butterflies in your stomach or gritted your teeth in anxiety or gotten red in the face from anger or embarrassment. You have likely heard of the notion that emotions can make you sick or even that an emotionally broken heart can cause death. Emotions do affect your physical body and they also affect how you behave. Let’s go back to my flat ass.
Having a flat butt is a simple anatomic fact and not any type of impediment to my health or wellbeing, but my wife, apparently, prefers men with tight butts. This makes me feel as though I am not giving my wife something she wants or that I am not quite what my wife likes or in the worst case “not good enough.” These thoughts, or beliefs, cause me to feel a particular way. The feelings they cause are fluid and change, and they are layered and must get unraveled. Many people do not know how to unravel emotions and there is a great need for more widespread attention on this important part of our humanity, which is another reason for my book. But for now, let’s go through the process I followed step by step:
Initially, I feel shock because this seemed like bad news, and because I have a belief that if I am not good enough for my wife she will find another mate. This one step could take months or more to contemplate because we are biologically setup to mate and there are actual cues that are programmed into our DNA, and because it is much easier to blame it on DNA or something other than ourselves. But some feeling is underneath this, and I must carry on and sit quietly and watch for them.
Then I feel anger at my wife for not liking me, this is a feeling that gets dismissed in most societies because it is deemed inappropriate but it is present and must get acknowledged. For me, anger is often what I feel when I am in fear, I know this from many years of working to become more aware of my emotions and how they operate in me, so I move quickly to that fear.
In the fear stage, I imagine I will lose my wife and be alone, or have to find another mate, and if I have a flat ass maybe nobody will want me. Sitting in that fear brings me to another feeling, I keep moving.
Then I feel sad, almost miserable, a failure as a human, possibly a mistake, and that could take me to depression. It takes time to honor these emotions and work through them but the more you work to become aware of how you process emotions and how your beliefs work to cause those emotions, the quicker you can move. Fortunately, I am able to move quickly.
Finally I feel humor because the whole thing is a bit crazy and funny. I mean if my wife has stuck with me for twenty years it must not be that big a deal. I also marvel at how a physical trait can be so big a deal, and for a fraction of a second wonder about getting an ass implant.
I am able to work through the stages very quickly because I have practiced. If I lacked awareness and knowledge about the process I could easily get stuck in anger, which I did for much of my life, or any other stage. Working through the layers of emotions takes a lot of dedication, training, and courage. It also requires an understanding of what to do with the emotions so they are honored.
Ultimately, we do not want our emotions to dictate our behavior, we want to choose our behavior without dishonoring or ignoring the underlying feelings. It is also important to recognize the feelings are never finished, I cannot assume that because I moved through these stages that I am done with the whole thing, out of nowhere one of the stages, or a new stage, could arise. I could get triggered. New feelings to be explored and honored.
The most interesting thing about my feelings is that they happen only because of beliefs that either I have, my wife has, or society and other humans have. Let’s run through what that means:
Some part of society believes we have to be attractive or we are less valuable than the attractive people. Another belief is that the majority of people are attractive and only a small group of us are not attractive. This last belief is easily dispelled with rational thinking and is not completely accurate but you get what I mean. It is ONLY because of these beliefs that any of the feelings I have exist, if society believed having a flat ass was attractive, if Brad Pitt had a flat ass, then my whole set of feelings would be different and I would magically become a superstar.
My wife believes my flat ass is less attractive than a bubble butt. I care what my wife believes and have a whole different set of emotions than if she thought my flat ass was the bomb.
I have hundreds of beliefs that cause me to feel the emotions I am inclined to feel, starting with childhood traumas that cause me to feel inadequate, and compounded by too many other beliefs to write down in a few paragraphs. But this should not keep me from becoming more aware of the primary beliefs and should only serve to keep me humble to future triggers and use them to improve my awareness. Primarily I have the belief that I will be unhappy if I am alone - I choose to let this belief stay in place because after much contemplation I happen to agree - and I believe that if I am not attractive to my mate I will lose them. This last part about losing my mate if I am not attractive needs work, it needs a bit more attention. It is not the purpose of this post to go into too much detail but I can tell you that after working on this belief for most of my life I have shifted my belief enough to recognize that being attractive is not finite and simple. Being attractive to my mate is a basket of many things and while I am unable to give my mate one hundred percent of what my mate and society believes being attractive represents, I am able to give my mate a healthy majority, enough to retain my mate. It is not rational to feel I am not holistically attractive to my mate due to lacking one particular trait.
Obviously this is a very high level overview of a complex topic, but it illustrates some basic concepts. Beliefs cause emotions and emotions cause behavior and physiological changes. There is a way to become aware of deeper emotions and then use that awareness to discover the beliefs that cause the emotions. We can then choose to adjust our thinking so that our beliefs shift completely, or at least enough to allow us to improve our behavior and physiology. Dealing with our emotions and beliefs is a major part of how we as humans can evolve to higher levels of behavior, and that is an important part of my book.