I. What is The Emotional Detective?
The Emotional Detective offers a dynamic model for understanding complex feelings. Drawing from research in psychology, neuroscience and other related fields, it offers a new approach to understanding your inner world. Neuroscience has finally outlined the workings of the emotional unconscious, validating what brilliant thinkers like Plato, Shakespeare and Freud have long described. We are all largely blind to our own emotions -- mostly, without even recognizing our oversight. Ignorance about our own feelings, though commonplace, can be quite damaging. It turns out, what you don't know about yourself can really hurt you. Remaining blind to your mental processes and true feelings about past experiences can cause you to suffer unnecessary pain. Unconsciousness can cost you opportunities.
The Emotional Detective helps you understand yourself better, by clarifying the mechanisms of conscious and unconscious emotional life. The Emotional Detective explains the natural rules of human emotional life, presenting a body of knowledge that finally explains how feelings work. Most importantly, it offers an informed approach to introspection, one that can help you understand yourself more easily. To read your own emotional signal better, to make better choices, to make a better life.
Greater self-awareness will likely feel more happiness overall. You will become more flexible, sensually aware and playful. You may become more apt to enjoy beauty, movement, humor and joy; to find more peace, pleasure, self-respect, gratitude and love. You can even learn to enjoy explosively intense experiences of nature, intimacy, beauty, truth, and love. It's really amazing what you can do without drugs.
Not surprisingly, this approach takes time and effort. As you become more aware and tolerant of your emotions, you will likely feel more pain. This can be difficult at first, but, with practice, you can build emotional muscles. Over time, as you become less frightened and ashamed of your emotions, they will then become easier to bear. Painful feelings associated with guilt, regret, difference and inequity will become seem like another unpleasant, but mundane, part of life. As you become more comfortable with your own emotional reactions, you will experience faster and smoother integration between your experience, thoughts and feelings. You become more of your better, wiser self.
II. Why the Detective metaphor?
Detectives patiently seek to uncover hidden truths. They work backwards, to uncover the motives and events that lead to a crime. Emotional Detectives differ from other detectives in their focus: rather than looking for clues primarily in the outer world, they focus more within themselves. Like other detectives, they learn to look past surface appearances and to patiently gather evidence from small incongruities that seem meaningless at first glance.
An Emotional Detective's investigatory process shines light on parts of the psyche that operate "under the radar." Becoming conscious of the full array of your emotional processes is a critical first step to being able to work with those processes - to to gain inner calm, self control and enjoyment.
III. What is The Emotional Detective's Model or "Vision"?
The Emotional Detective presents a user-friendly model with a variety of maps, methods and tools. The model distinguishes between universal innate emotions and individual feelings. It describes a multifaceted Self (with three core aspects) and several levels of the awareness. The methods teach you how to use this model to explore and uncover more of your hidden emotional life.
Neuroscience has confirmed that our mental equipment is diverse and layered, a true Hodge-podge reflecting different evolutionary stages of development. Science has shown that some of our mental equipment is reliable, while some of it is finicky. Some parts of our mind work quickly, while others work more slowly. The Emotional Detective describes three metaphorical aspects, or parts, of the psyche: the primitive, the social and the reasonable. These three aspects are not biological entities in your brain, but rather different parts of your capacity and self. By personifying these three aspects, it may be easier for you to envision different inner forces -- impulses, wishes, fears -- fighting for control of you. These conflicting urges are commonly known as inner conflict.
-The Primitive Aspect
Neuroscience reminds us that the foundation of our mental makeup is ancient, and reflects the needs and abilities of our most primal evolutionary forebears, like survival and reproduction. Some refer to this as the "reptilian brain." The Emotional Detective refers to it as the "primal"or "primitive" aspect of our mind. The primitive aspect is speedy and reliable, but kind of crude.
-The Social Aspect
Evolution has stacked more elaborate and sophisticated tools and abilities on top of the primal. For instance, evolution rewarded the ability to make social connections and to operate in cooperative undertakings like hunting, farming and the earliest forms of commerce. The Emotional Detective uses the term "social" to refer to these aspects of our mind. The social aspect is very powerful, working steadily -- both above and below the radar of our awareness -- to maintain attachments and alliances.
-The Reasonable Aspect
Much later in our evolutionary development came the "reasonable" aspect, or "reason," which tries to operate as a manager of the other layers of the psyche. We often imagine that we are acting solely on the basis of reason, free from primitive psychic or social processes. But as Plato recognized more than two millennium ago, reason does not always occupy the mental driver's seat; while we may think reason is the master of our minds, powerful psychological forces, many of them unconscious, operate quite independently from reason. The Emotional Detective calls this executive master the "reasonable aspect," recognizing its many weaknesses. The Emotional Detective recognizes that the reasonable aspect functions at its best when it is made conscious of the activity of other aspects, and it seeks to help readers address this very point.
-Layered Aspects
How do these layered aspects of our mind operate together? Here's a loose visual analogy: the nested wooden dolls common in Russia, with one doll nested inside another, inside another, over and over again. One can look at the mind in the same way: composed of layer upon layer of differing psychological abilities and shortcomings, developed at different times to meet different needs, all nested inside one another, trying to coexist under a superficial impression of unity, like the single Russian doll that first appears to the untrained eye.
In fact, though, unity within your mind is often elusive, and separations between different aspects of our mind are not so absolute. Different psychological layers can conflict with one another and often coexist uneasily. Not all of them are well-adapted to modern life: as a film character recently observed: "we're trying to make sense of a twenty-first century world with caveman software." To continue the software analogy, it is as if our mind is an operating system formed by piling on layers and layers of conflicting software, some of which functions automatically even though it is largely obsolete and dangerous to use without understanding its limitations.
IV. What Are Emotions and What Are Feelings?
Antonion D’Amasio, one of the most important neuroscientists at work today, posits a basic dichotomy between "emotions" and "feelings." This same dichotomy, in various forms, has been proposed by philosophers like Spinoza, psychologists as diverse as William James and psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud. Emotions are physical reactions that occur in our bodies. They are automatic actions that happen inside us in response to change - we do not choose them. According to Paul Eckman, Ph.D., a well-renowned cross-cultural psychologist, we all have five basic universal emotions: fear, anger, sorrow, disgust, and joy. Each of these emotions has a distinct physiological signature and action tendency that includes globally recognized facial expressions and behaviors. Each one of the five basic emotions has predictable triggers, as well as more personal triggers.
Emotions often occur outside our conscious intent or even knowledge. We can even have secondary emotional reactions to our initial emotions (emotions about emotions) that capture our attention, while our initial emotional response goes missing and undetected. These secondary reactions often are all that come to our notice, often serving a defensive purpose.
In contrast, emotional "feelings" are the mental aftermath of our emotions. Think of them as the sense images, thoughts, and responses that accompany physical emotional reactions to change. Such feelings are the other side of the coin of emotions, the subjective experience of the physical activity in your body in response to change.
Emotional feelings include 1) perceptions of what your body is doing when it has an emotional experience, and 2) perceptions of the thoughts that you have associated with an emotional experience, and 3) perceptions of other bodily reactions and sensory impressions that accompanied a particular emotional experience. Your feelings are a response to your emotions in a particular context; they include your perceptions and judgments about your specific emotions at this time. Feelings are much more subjective, varied, and idiosyncratic than emotions; they are not universal. Your culture, family, and the particular circumstances of your life all heavily shape your reactions to your emotions and your subsequent feelings.
Regardless of their origin, our feelings about emotions will alter our experience and our expression of our emotions. But our origins are important: other people's reactions to our needs and emotions, especially when we were an infant, make a powerful impression on us, however, they usually do so without our becoming conscious of them. Feelings about our emotions happen so quickly, routinely and automatically that we often don’t know that we are having them. Nonetheless, they can change our experience of our emotions, causing us to have new emotions that then serve to mask our initial emotions. When our feelings about our emotions get us mixed up about the true nature of our underlying emotional reactions, we confuse our perception of our experience with our experience. This mix-up can cause everyone a lot of unnecessary confusion and pain.
