I. What is The Emotional Detective?
The Emotional Detective offers a dynamic model for understanding confusing feelings. Drawing from research in psychology, neuroscience and related fields, it can help you understand your inner world. Neuroscience has begun outlining the physical workings of unconscious emotions, clarifying much of what Plato, Shakespeare and Freud described long ago. Research has now proven, beyond doubt, that unconscious emotions propel much of human behavior. Experience shows that emotions are more influential when they are overlooked. Being blind to your feelings, though commonplace, can be quite damaging. When it comes to feelings, what you don't know can really hurt you. Ignorance or confusion about your past feelings often causes unnecessary pain. Not knowing how you really feel can send you down the wrong path, causing needless misery, wasted time and lost opportunities.
The Emotional Detective clarifies the mechanisms of conscious and unconscious emotional life. It explains the natural rules that govern emotions, describing how feelings develop inside your body. Most importantly, it offers an informed approach to introspection that can help you better understand yourself . Learning to read you emotional signals more accurately will help you make better choices, to create a happier life.
Greater self-awareness increases happiness. Self-understanding helps most people become more flexible, sensually aware and playful. We gain appreciation for beauty, art, movement and humor. Accepting your emotions, as they are, will ultimately help you feel more peace, pleasure, self-respect, gratitude and love. You may even gain access to intensely joyful 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 feel more pain and happiness. This can be unpleasant, of course. But, when you realize their function, emotions become easier to bear. After all, they are just trying to help you. Bad feelings are not intrinsically dangerous. So, with new knowledge, you may change your attitudes about certain emotions. And, with some practice, you can become less frightened and ashamed of your feelings. You can build "emotional muscles" that will help you develop inner strength. Painful feelings like guilt, regret and outrage may become mundane facts of life, like stomach aches and cramps. Becoming comfortable with your own emotional reactions clears the way for greater peace, helping you become faster and smoother at integrating your experience, thoughts and feelings. All this, so you can enjoy more of your life.
II. Why the Detective metaphor?
Detectives seek to uncover hidden truths. They work backwards, to discover the motives and events that lead up to a crime. They are notoriously patient, carefully considering context and history. They look past surface appearances, patiently gathering evidence from small incongruities that may seem meaningless at first glance. They look for clues to what went wrong, when problems began and who was involved.
Emotional Detectives differ from other detectives in their focus. Rather than looking for clues in the outer world, Emotional Detectives look within. An Emotional Detective shines light on parts of their psyche that operate "under the radar." The goal is to become more conscious of your emotional processes. And to learn how emotions and feelings work. This is an obvious first step to being able to work with those processes, to gain more self control, equanimity and enjoyment.
III. What is The Emotional Detective's Model or "Vision"?
Neuroscience has revealed that human mental equipment is a true Hodge-podge of evolution that reflects our different stages of development. Science has confirmed that our brains are diverse and layered, with some mental equipment that is reliable and some that is finicky. Some parts of our mind work quickly, others work more slowly. Some of our impressions and feelings are reliable and others are not. The model helps you distinguish between universal emotions and individual feelings. It will help you learn to determine which of your feelings to trust and which to merely manage.
The Emotional Detective presents a user-friendly model of emotional life, to make more sense of your feelings. The model describes three metaphorical aspects 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 experience. 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 incompatible urges are commonly known as inner conflict.
The Emotional Detective also describes three layers of awareness: consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness. These different levels of awareness operate consistently in all of us. Our emotional reactions can be conscious, subconscious or unconscious. The goal of an Emotional Detective is to increase conscious awareness of emotional life.
Three Aspects of Self
Primitive
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.
Social
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.
Reasonable
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.
Integration is the goal
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 is one of the most important neuroscientists at work today. Dr. D'Amasio posits a basic dichotomy between emotions and feelings. 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. A similar dichotomy was described by the philosopher Spinoza, the psychologist William James and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
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.
