In Part 1 we looked at the biological process creating the cellular vibrations we refer to as ‘feelings’ and how feelings, once produced, need to be released through some form of expression or they store both as active vibrational layers in the body and also as layered maps in the brain.
Here in Part 2 we start focusing on the fact the sole purpose of having an emotional system (and a brain) is self preservation through effective territorial management.
To remain emotionally happy you need to focus on the cycle of:
… going where you are wanted and wanting where you go and then going where you are wanted and wanting where you go …
- which by default also means leaving where you are not wanted and saying no to going places that won’t meet your personal needs.
This isn’t a quickfire process to be carried out just by your thinking.
How you feel is the deciding factor - this is the source of human intuition and should be the best guide for your major life decisions.
The problem for those with emotional disorders is their intuition is interrupted and overwhelmed by a mass of secondary emotional responses. When it comes to making environmental management decisions they regard their feelings as an untrustworthy source; there’s a constant ‘is it me or is it them?’ battle inside.
A common thread running through most emotional disorders is that of sufferers failing, or refusing, at some early point, to mentally recognise, acknowledge and deal with the signals their emotional system is sending them regarding an unsuitable environment.
They either don’t understand what the signals mean, or attempt instead to try and switch off their emotional system by using self-criticism, or certain philosophies along the lines of ‘people are meant to sacrifice themselves for others’, as tools to suppress their reactions.
This enables them to stay in harmful environments for longer, even indefinitely. It also further intensifies their reactions and they become further sensitised; continuing to produce secondary emotional reactions fighting their initial responses.
Unfortunately there are just some environments, as individuals, we can neither change nor adapt to, while still in them, and emotional healing will only take place once we have left the environment for a long enough period (sometimes permanently) to come to an objective decision.
Emotionally ill people criticising themselves (or being criticised by others) for being ‘too sensitive’ are in fact suffering the consequences of not being sensitive enough.
A commitment to emotional wellness automatically requires a commitment to better environmental monitoring with ‘better’ meaning more in line with the individual’s own needs and emotional signals, rather than in line with what others believe those needs and signals should be.
Get More Selfish
What I’m saying here is that people with emotional illnesses need to become objectively selfish and stay that way. They need to step outside of themselves; looking in and asking about themselves ‘what does this person need to get back to happiness?’ - and then be willing to carry out the work subjectively; from within the condition, as the sufferer.
This in turn leads to the sufferer needing to make decisions they would never have made previously in regards to changing their environments.
We can find ourselves feeling ambivalent about such decisions for a while but should regard this as a sign of real change. Ambivalence (feeling opposing feelings about a decision) is caused because new thoughts are going against current unconscious belief systems.
The battle continues until the real-life evidence proving we and others are happier as a result of the new decision is so strong our belief systems are changed as a result.
To the Unconscious ‘seeing is believing’ and so we need to explore, test and experiment until the unconscious accepts the results it sees.
By deciding our personal happiness needs to be achieved primarily through a process of self-acceptance, a process we ultimately control; rather than through social acceptance; which we do not control; we change how we manage our lives for the better. You have to learn to like yourself and say yes to environments that like you.
It sounds simple, but a lot of people don’t do this consistently.
A person who learns to do this wants everyone around them to learn to do exactly the same for themselves too - even when you are the ‘environment’ they need to leave.
It’s surprising how, when you begin changing yourself in this way, you suddenly realise how those around you have been telling you they wanted you to do it all along.
Until we learn to make decisions in this way we get stuck because we’re forcing ourselves to remain in environments that don’t meet our individual needs.
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
In the late 1940’s and early 50’s psychologist Abraham Maslow produced a ‘‘Hierarchy of Needs’ model:
Mr Maslow’s Hierarchy explains our needs are instinctual and we all react emotionally to deficiencies in our environments when they fail to support those needs.
I’m a big fan of the model (it’s been developed quite a bit further since then and you can read more about it here).
As each layer of need is satisfied, starting with the Physiological needs at the bottom of the Hierarchy, we are able to start paying attention to the next level above. At the fourth level, ‘Esteem’, we begin to experience fewer and fewer periods of negative emotional stress.
If a lower level need comes under threat, however, we move back down again and start to experience those strong negative emotional responses designed to help us plug the deficiency (on the bright side if we’ve learned how to get up to the higher levels we may not need to have the same long drawn-out learning experiences as we did previously).
The model does have its critics - but those critics are usually people who’ve had the luxury of being high up on the hierarchy for a while - so long they’ve forgotten (or never even experienced) what it’s like to be homeless, unemployed or wonder where their next meal’s coming from.
We can aim for those higher levels, ignoring the more basic levels of need and denying we have to pay attention to them, but you pay a high price in the long term.
Up until about 10 years ago I had been trapped by my environmental deficiencies in layers 2 and 3 (Safety and Love/Belonging) since about age 7; I now see myself as being in the Esteem/Self-actualization layers and selfishly plan to stay there.
I achieved this by making, and continuing to make whenever the need arises, often painful decisions in regards to changing the ways in which I interact with my various environments - physical; situational; social and internal.
Categorising Our Environmental Types
An environment is anything from which you take things in and put things out into.
We can break our environments down into those four main categories I’ve mentioned above and take a look at how they each affect us in terms of emotional vibrancy:
- Physical (external non-living environment)
- Situational (a memorable life event occurring)
- Social (the combined long-term affects of our interactions with other people)
- Internal (our current vibrational state).
Then we can look at our levels of control over them; do we have:
- total control
- partial control (influence)
- no control.
Finally we have to make four main decisions in regards to our environments based on the balance between how much we need what these environments offer us and how much control we have over obtaining what they profess to offer:
- do we go look for new?
- do we stay and accept?
- do we need to adapt to or change them if we stay?
- do we leave?
In the next post in this series we’ll be looking at the extent to which we can realistically alter our Physical, non-living environments in order to improve our emotional vibrancy.
Regards - Carl
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