I wanted to post an update regarding TheEmotionsDoctor.com Blog.
THE ORIGIN
Eight years ago, I started this blog with the intent of providing anyone who was interested in learning about em0tions including…
What emotions are
Why you have emotions
Where emotions come from
The functions emotions serve
How to strategically deploy emotions as tools to improve your life and your relationships
Debunking the myths about emotions
and
Information on specific emotions such as anger, anxiety, fear, guilt and shame
and more.
THE BLOG
Starting this year, 2025, I have basically retired from blogging on a regular basis.
I was thinking about going dark.
However, as a guest on a podcast, the host of the podcast noted that I had a very informative Blog and should keep it live as a public service.
I thought about her comments and agreed.
So, TheEmotionsDoctor.com is now a repository of over 225+ posts, all of which are evergreen in that the information they contain is both current and valid.
Every post can be accessed by clicking on the INDEX tab above and scrolling down to a category and, with another click, going to the specific post you want to access.
PODCASTS
I am still appearing as a guest on podcasts and you can access my past appearances by googling..
Ed Daube-Podcasts
GOING FORWARD
My hope is that you will return many times in the future and will access my posts to increase your knowledge about emotions.
AND
That you will tell your friends about my site so that they can become more adept as deploying their emotions as tools to improve their lives and their relationships.
The information is free, there is no log-in, and I do not collect any user data.
If you can squeeze it in between too much food and too much TV, take a moment to think about everything you have in your life that has made your life better and which, were “it” not in your life would negatively impact the quality of the life you have.
Whatever comes to mind for you, take a quick moment and allow yourself to be grateful for all you have in your life that makes your life what it is.
Express the gratitude as in “I am grateful for X, Y and Z.”
Once you’ve done this, feel free to resume overindulging.
Building, or nurturing, an important relationship should not be a competition!
In team sports, it is said that the best defense is a good offense.
While the ability to contain the other team (a good defense) is important, you certainly need a good offense to be able to put points on the board.
Team sports, by the way, are always a win-lose scenario.
One team in the contest must win and the other must lose.
If, in your relationships with others, you find yourself either on the offensive (in attack mode) or on the defensive (trying to prevent additional losses), then you have structured your relationships as as a…
win-lose proposition.
While it works in sports, viewing most relationships through the lens of a win-lose scenario can often be very problematic and in many cases most likely is neither sustainable nor healthy.
There are, of course, other ways you can look at resolving conflict that invariably arises in relationships.
These other approaches include:
compromise
win-win
agree to disagree
Compromise
Many writers look at compromise as a desirable outcome.
And, it is.
But, and this is often overlooked…
in reality, compromise is a basically a lose-lose scenario in which both sides give up a little of what they really want (an acceptable loss) to obtain an outcome that they can live with.
Yes, both sides end up ahead of where they were but they must forfeit something to get there.
There is nothing wrong with compromise and, when it is the best that you can accomplish to resolve the conflict, it is even desirable.
It just should not be your first choice.
Win-win Scenario
A better objective to start out with in resolving conflict is a win-win scenario in which both sides get what they really want without having to make major sacrifices.
The “how-to” and the Basic Relationship Rule
If you want to increase the possibility of resolving a “conflict” with a win-win, there are several assumptions I am suggesting you make..
First of all, you need to assess whether or not a conflict even exists.
A “conflict” involves an interaction between at least two parties in which the objectives of those parties appear to be initially irreconcilable. In a conflict, you are anticipating going to war.
Does a “conflict” exist or is there a “disagreement” (perhaps, serious or complicated) which exists which must be resolved?
Secondly, you have to assume that a win-win is possible.
Now, while it may not be possible to get a complete win-win because of the nature of the conflict, I am suggesting that you shoot for the win-win and fall back to a compromise when necessary.
And, finally you need to understand how the other person in the interaction views what is going on in your mutual situation. This will improve the way you interact with them in arriving at a resolution.
With the above in mind, initially approach all “potential” conflicts from a neutral perspective in which you observe, attempt to understand, and decide the most adaptive way to interact with your partner.
This does not mean that you ignore or downplay your issues. You merely need to put them aside for the moment to gain important information.
The Basic Relationship Rule (BRR) is helpful here.
The BRR states:
Everyone in every situation does the best they can given their Model of the World and their Skill Sets.
or to put it another way…
What a person does in any situation is the best they are capable (at that moment) of doing and depends on what they know (their knowledge of what is going on or their Model) and what they are capable of doing (their skill sets) in that situation.
One’s Model
In any interaction, there are at least two Models of the World…
Your “Model”
Their “Model”
Your Model of your situation is the lens through which you are viewing the situation.
This lens reflects what you believe or “know” about what is happening and includes both your own self-perceptions/assumptions and your perceptions/assumption about the other person.
In the context of interacting with another person, what you believe (or assume)to be true you accept “as true” and, therefore, you accept it as what you know.
This “knowledge” may be accurate in that it matches what is actually happening or inaccurate in that it reflects your prejudices, misunderstandings and emotional blindspots.
The second is their Model, or the lens through which the other person is viewing the situation and the same elements which define your lens apply to their lens.
In addition, both Models of the situation include:
how each of you view your relationship in terms of how adversarial (win-lose or win-win )
how you view conflict in general(engage/avoid) and
how you conceptualize the specific conflict situation you face (What is the threat?/ What is the risk?)
Skill Sets
There are also two “skill sets” that are impacting the interaction.
The “skill set” element of the BRR addresses the interpersonal abilities (skill sets) that you and the other person bring to the interaction. These skill sets include..
Intrapersonal/self-awareness skills (Do each of you know what you really want?)
Interpersonal/other-awareness skills (Can each of you empathize with the other person?)
Communication skills (Can both of you express your needs in a way that it is clear to the other person what you want? Can each of you “actively” listen to the other so that you hear and comprehend what the other is saying?)
It is important to note that the best action an individual can do, at the time, is not always the best action possible for the situation.
Agree to Disagree Scenario
You see this a lot in movies.
Two parties have an issue with eachother about which they disagree and about which they are unable to arrive at a mutually acceptable solution.
When this happens, they both come to the conclusion that…
the elusive resolution is less important than maintaining the (hopefully positive) relationship that exists between them.
So, they decide to put the issue aside temporaritly, acknowledge their current inability to resolve their differences and they agree to disagree.
If the issue continues to resonate with them, they can return to it later on or one or both parties can view the situation through the lens of an IWBNI and agree to move on.
In this post, I address the “flipside” of emotions.
Once you understand that you create your emotions and that some emotions have a “flipside”, you have greater options regarding how you effectively master your emotions.
Anxiety and Anger
I want to introduce you to a different way to understand some of your feelings. Emotions such as anxiety and anger, which may be experienced as hedonically negative and which focus on a threat to be eliminated have a flipside which has a similar message to the original feeling and provides motivation but which transmutes the original feeling into a hedonically positive emotion and focuses on creating a desired outcome rather than eliminating an unwanted outcome.
Think of the two sides of a coin.
On one side, you have “heads” and on the other side you have “tails”.
The two sides, while different, are not opposites.
There is no positive side and there is no negative side.
They are two sides of the same coin.
Now, let’s think of emotions. Each emotion…
conveys a message about how you perceive the situation in which you find yourself.
prepares your body to “deal” with the situation as you perceive it to be
can be mastered when you learn how to read the message and strategically deploy the energy of the emotion to the situation.
like a coin is neither positive nor negative.
Two widely experienced emotions and their “flipsides”.
Anxiety
Anxiety is a future based emotion the message of which is: There might be a threat out there which could be harmful to me.
Anxiety is an early warning emotion which alerts us to a possible upcoming event. Because anxiety is hedonically experienced as negative or uncomfortable, it motivates us both to choose how we might deal with with the threat and to take action. Note that anxiety, per se, is not negative (there are no negative emotions) but it is experienced as negative as you would want it to be.
Anxiety can become toxic and debilitating if..
you can’t easily identify the nature of the possible threat you think you perceive.
you can identify the possible threat but do not believe you can do anything about it
you procrastinate and do not use the “warning” as a motivator to prepare for action
you deny the validity of the warning
In all of these examples, anxiety can be labelled as distress. Anxiety in this form is debilitating and will tie you up in knots. Another word for anxiety in this form is stress. When chronic, stress can harm you physically. By the way, this is the anxiety that most people experience and want desperately to avoid.
If you choose to listen to the warning, use the energy of anxiety as motivation to take effective action, then your anxiety become eustress.
This is what happens when my students get anxious (nervous) about an upcoming exam and get motivated to study.
The “flipside” of anxiety.
Very few writers talk about the flipside of anxiety. But it exists.
The flipside of anxiety is an emotion that is.
future oriented
hedonically pleasant to experience
prepares you to look forward to a desirable future and take whatever action you need to insure that this future occurs.
This emotion is called anticipation or desire.
The energy of anticipation is the same as that of anxiety and, therefore, is just as motivating. However, you are upbeat, sitting on the edge of your chair waiting for the specific event to occur, and you are motivated to engage with and facilitate the desired future.
So, let’s look at an upcoming exam.
The good student notes the scheduled exam and gets anxious.
Choosing to master his (or her) anxiety, he heeds the warning of his anxiety as eustress and uses the energy of the emotion as motivation to study. The exam is still a “threat” and he is using his anxiety to prepare so as to eliminate the threat.
Doing all that he can, he knows he is prepared. He can now engage the flipside of anxiety and can effectively anticipate doing well on the exam. If there is any residual concern about what might be on the test, and there might be, it is diminished.
You don’t need to experience anxiety to engage anticipation. Whenever you are looking forward to an event such as Christmas, the arrival of a friend, taking a trip, you engage anticipation.
Anger
Anger is an in the moment emotion, the message of which is that you perceive a threat that you believe you can eliminate if you throw enough force at it. You are prepared for battle and believe that when you engage the threat, you will be victorious. The threat can be to your values, your family, your sense of right and wrong, your goals and so forth.
My second Amazon Best Seller book Beyond Anger Management: Master Your Anger as a Strategic Tool specifically focuses on the emotion of anger.
The flip side of anger is the emotion of determination. When you are determined to do something, you focus on the task or process at hand and you are highly motivated to succeed and get the task completed. It is the same energy that you experience with anger but there is no threat.
To put it another way…
Anger prepares you for battle. Determination prepares for engagement.
Anger is certainly energizing but it doesn’t always feel hedonically positive. Determination is both energizing and experienced as hedonically positive.
There is a lot of emotion being expressed today in America. We’ve got an election coming up in two months and emotions, blaming, harsh language and other less than worthy phenomena are featured daily in the news.
In my last post, I spoke about validating your emotions by using the process of asking questions.
In this post, I want to approach the topic of emotions from a different perspective.
I want to remind you that you create your own emotions.
What was your first reaction to the title of this post?
Was it…
“What does it mean that I create my emotions?”
This expresses a lack of knowledge.
or
“My emotions just happen to me. I don’t create them.”
While partially correct, this reflects a common myth about emotions.
My goals in this post are to help you understand both how you create emotions and the responsibilities that you have because you create your emotions and to clear up some common myths.
How do you “create” an emotion?
In order to answer this question, you have to understand how the emotional process works.
I’ve covered this in other posts so here is an overview…
You are constantly scanning your surroundings for threat. When you perceive a threat, your Amygdala unconsciously prepares you to REACT to the threat. Almost simultaneously, the thinking part of your brain is alerted which gives you the opportunity to evaluate and RESPOND to the the threat. Threats are not always what they initially appear to be. The choices you make determine the emotion you end up expressing.
There are 6 (mad, sad, glad, fear, disgust, and surprise) primary emotions. All of these primary emotions with the exception of glad and surprise function as primitive threat detectors and all have been around since we, as a species, lived in caves or on the Savannah. The purpose of these threat detectors was, and is, to keep us alive so that we could procreate and insure survival of the species. While our survival is no longer an issue, these primitive mechanisms continue to function today as they did eons ago.
Incidentally, you are hardwired to constantly scan your surroundings for and react to any threat.
When you perceive a threat, an unconscious message is rapidly sent to the Amygdala in your brain which prepares your body for:
battle (so you can confront and overpower the marauders who want to kill you),
running away (so that you can escape from your enemies and live another day), or
staying in place (freezing so that the saber toothed tiger can’t see you and will move on).
I call this the “fast track” reaction. It is also called the fight or flight response.
You do not control fight or flight. Nor, should you, if your life depends on it.
This unconscious reaction is linked to your very quick (and not always accurate) initial perception of the threat.
You haven’t started to create, yet.
At the same time that your body is reacting to the fast track message from your sense organs, a slower track message goes to the thinking part of your brain, the Cerebral Cortex.
Now, you start creating.
As soon as you become aware of your emotional reaction, you can choose to validate the nature of the threat and the appropriateness of the emotion.
This is where asking questions comes in. You want to assess…
how real is the threat,
to what extent does your initial emotional reaction fit the situation, and
to what extent does the action you were initially motivated to take match the situation in which you find yourself?
If you do nothing, go with your initial emotional reaction and do something you later regret, you, in effect, have chosen to let the initial reactive emotional process proceed. This is now your emotional response and you are now responsible because you have “created” (by choice) the emotion on which you are acting by doing nothing to change it.
If you take the opportunity to assess your situation and either strengthen the initial emotion (if the threat is valid) or change it (if there is no threat), you are “creating” an emotion and acting on it.
You are Responsible
The implication here is that you are always personally responsible for any actions (responses) you take which follow from the emotions you are experiencing. This is true because you are “creating” that emotion by the choices you make after the initial emotional reaction.
It is this personal responsibility that gets denied when someone acts out on their anger and says, “If I had not been angry, I wouldn’t have (x)”or “If I had not been so anxious or nervous, I wouldn’t have (y)”. Yes, your initial emotional reaction set you up for the action you took and you probably would not have done x if you had not been angry or anxious. This, however, is not the issue.
This is the same as saying that because the forward momentum of your car was taking you directly into the pedestrian in the cross walk ahead of you, the law of physics are responsible for the accident not you. If a child runs into the street in front of you, physics may be responsible. If you could have assessed your situation and chosen to stop or diverted the car in a different direction, it’s on you.
Not to choose is to choose.
Regarding your emotions, the truth is that you did not assess your situation and the appropriateness of the action you were initially moved to make. Had you done this, the action you eventually took most likely would have been different.
Think about the folks who participated in the January 6 insurrection and later, in court, regretted the actions they took.
The point here is that, while you are not responsible for the initial emotional reaction to which your perception is leading you, the slower track message to your cerebral cortex empowers you to make a decision about how you want to proceed. This is the point at which you “create” the emotion that elicits your behavior and puts the responsibility for your actions on you.
Mastering the Emotions You Create
Emotional mastery suggests that, as soon as you become aware that an emotional reaction is starting in your body, you need to create some physical and psychological distance between you and the perceived threat by taking a step back and a deep breath. In doing this, you give yourself the time and space to assess what is going on and choose how you want to respond to the situation.
You are responsible for any actions you take and the consequences of those action which occur after the initial emotional reaction.
Accepting this responsibility will give you the motivation you need to learn how to master your emotions by:
learning to read your body,
knowing the message of each emotion,
creating physical and psychological space,
assessing the nature of the the threat and
choosing an effective response.
The point is that you will create emotions. Now, you can choose to create emotions that work for you and improve your life.
Happy Valentine’s Day if you are reading this when it originally drops.
This is a link to a podcast I recently did with David Webb.
In the interview, I covered a wide range of topics including my being labelled a “non-drinking alcoholic” while I was a Psychology Intern.
This label opened me up to my own process of denying my emotions and was a precursor to my becoming The Emotions Doctor.
Also, in the interview, I discuss the topic of suicide, provide a workable definition of “failure” and add some light to the difference between being “divorced” and being “single”.
If you have survived the dissolution of a marriage and you are still “troubled” by your past interactions with your spouse, you should find this last discussion enlightening.
Over the next six weeks (one new post every two weeks), I will discuss three topics which could easily been included in this interview but were not discussed at any length.
Make a note on your calendar and come on back.
*Five Steps to Mastering Your Emotions as Strategic Tools. (2/28/24)
Note: As I am writing this, I just completed an interview with Bruce Hurvitz covering many aspects of the Mastering Your Emotions as Tools Model.
Here is the YouTube link to the interview. Enjoy.
My first post of 2024…
While my hope for you is that 2024 will be a productive, prosperous, and personally meaningful year for you, as I write this, the world is facing many situations including wars abroad which can both elicit significant emotional responses and might significantly impact the direction this country takes culturally, politically, and historically.
We are also facing an upcoming election which, because we are so divided in this country has already generated a tremendous amount of both emotional energy and emotionally driven maladaptive (my word) behavior including “mass” shooting events, death threats to public figures and, most likely, many personal, emotionally driven, interactions between friends and family.
With this as a background, I want to revisit some basic concepts regarding emotions. My intent is to inoculate you with information about emotions which you may know but which might not be readily available to you because you don’t use it on a regular basis.
The idea here is the same as getting a flu, covid, or RSV vaccine. Hopefully, you will not be exposed, but if you are, your body is ready.
While you may not encounter someone who is emotionally committed to one or more of the events facing us today, it is quite possible that you may experience some strong emotions in 2024 and be “motivated” (This is what emotions do!) to act-out or say something you later regret.
Hence, I want to emotionally prepare you to deal with these emotions if (When?) they arise.
If you are a “frequent flyer” on this blog, please consider this a refresher course. All re-posts have been reviewed and updated. Some posts are brand new.
If you are new to the blog, this will be a good introduction to and overview of the Emotions as Tools Model.
In today’s post, I will revisit a post from 2018 which addresses the relationship between emotions and logic. This is part 1 of that discussion. Part 2 wlll post next week.
Note: It is a bit scary that the words I wrote are as relevant today as they were in 2018 and we are still facing similar behaviors!
We live in a world in which events like school shootings, a lone gunman firing an automatic weapon into a crowd of people attending an outdoor concert, or a policemen beating up a person of interest or shooting and killing an unarmed individual pleading for his own safety strain our ability to understand what leads these people to act in this manner and beg for a reasonable explanation.
As these behaviors do not appear to be logical, the explanations often include some reference to mental illness and attempt to blame the behavior on emotions gone awry.
In other words, so the thinking goes, these people must be crazy to do what they did and they must be under the control of their emotions.
If they were “in their right minds”, they would control themselves and act more appropriately. The implication is that we need both more treatment for mental illness, and more logic (less emotion) in our country.
Yes, having logical, in control, people making good decisions is both helpful and desirable. And, yes, we do need more to make mental health treatment more available in this country.
But, is it possible that you can have logical, in control, people making what most people consider very bad decisions and engaging in equally egregious behavior based on those decisions?
The answer is, “yes”.
The issue here is neither about mental health treatment nor about emotions verses logic.
While I am in no way condoning the deplorable behavior listed above and it is possible that mental illness was a factor, I am questioning three primary assumptions that pop up every time some outrageous behavior appears in the news:
1. All human behavior is either logical or it is emotional.
If the behavior is logical, it is appropriate, controlled, and understandable.
If it is not logical, it must be emotional (erratic, driven, devoid of logic).
2. Any behavior that doesn’t seem logical to us must be the result of emotions gone awry.
If the behavior is illogical, it must be due to emotions which have hijacked the person and are causing the deplorable behavior.
3. Out of control behaviors imply the presence of mental illness.
So, you are either behaviorally stable or mentally ill.
The implication is that we need more logic and less emotion.
If emotions led to insane, out of control people, we’d be crazy to want more emotions.
Indeed, nobody wants crazed automatons running around doing dumb destructive things. No argument there, we all want to avoid dumb destructive behavior.
But, bad decisions and the undesirable behavior that follows from these decisions do not necessarily prove the presence of mental illness.
And, the unfortunate spin-off from demonizing emotions in the case of egregious behavior is that all emotions (when experienced and misunderstood) begin to be seen as “bad”, “undesirable”, “intrusive”, etc.
Let’s dive a little deeper….
While there may be a modicum of truth in each, statements 1, 2, and 3 are for the most part limited, misguided, incorrect and misleading.
Statement #1 is a false dichotomy.
Statement #2 implies that one’s emotions have become both autonomous and cancerous.
Statement #3 implies that anything we do not understand must be attributed to an underlying disease process.
So, the critical question that needs to be addressed is… if the issue is not the egregious behavior , what is the issue that we need to discuss?
The answer is not the emotions, per se.
Rather, the critical issue we need to discuss is how we, as a culture, and you, as an individual, view emotions. In other words, what do you think emotions are and how do believe they impact each of us?
If your picture of emotions is that they…
force an out of control road-rage crazed driver to shoot at another car, or
leave the out of control cop with no other alternative than to shoot or beat up a perpetrator, or
compel the out of control spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend to beat up their significant other, or
cause the out of control co-worker to get angry with and demean you, as a female, when you point out their inappropriate behavior in the office,
then, yes, less emotion is needed.
But, what if your picture is inaccurate?
“Out of control” implies that feelings….
have taken over,
are totally controlling,
are forcing and compelling a certain behavior while eliminating alternatives, and
are causing the individual to engage in the clearly unacceptable behavior they’ve displayed.
Take another look at these words…
taken over
totally controlling
forcing
compelling
causing
These words imply that the individual’s (male or female) emotions have transformed this person into a robot.
In this picture, emotions and logic are mutually exclusive.
You are either an emotional time-bomb waiting to explode with no logical fail-safe mechanisms in place
or
You are an unemotional, logic-only Vulcan (think Spock in the TV series StarTrek) who has eliminated emotion from his life.
I am suggesting that emotions and logic are mutually reinforcing and when used together can lead to better decisions and more appropriate actions.
As I am writing this, Chanukah has passed and Christmas and Kwanza are coming up.
This will be the last post of the year for me so I want to take this opportunity to wish you all the best of the Holiday Season.
I hope that it has been a good year for you and that perhaps something I have written has been beneficial to you as you continue the lifelong journey of mastering your emotions as strategic tools.
