Want to develop emotionally?
What does it actually mean and how can you do so.
Have you ever experienced something that you didn’t have words to express? Have you felt something unable to describe and make sense of?
I have. I have quite a few times. But those are hard to remember freshly as they had happened. However, I can now describe and explain those occasions with meaning when I revisit them. How is this?
Over time, I have been metabolizing the experiences, trying to make sense of them, fitting them with similar ones, and differentiating from others. This might have happened consciously and unconsciously. And now, when I go back to those occasions, I know how to describe, categorize and label them. I can say how I felt.
Does this make sense? Can you relate to a similar experience? What does this have to do with emotional development?
In this article, I share what I learned from the theory of constructive emotions that helps me explain this phenomenon.
How is it that I did not have words to describe that experience? And how I may have them later on?
In my last story, I presented how new developments in neuroscience led by Lisa Feldman reveal a new way to approach and understand what an emotion is.
“An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world”.
What it means to be emotionally developed:
“is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation. (And also when not to construct emotions but instances of some other concept)”.
The importance of this new perspective on emotions is that it offers us a greater responsibility and possibility towards how we feel and how we surf through this experience of feeling.
The theory of constructed emotions argues for the malleability and flexibility of the aspects that constitute our emotional experience. That we are not at the mercy of old and primitive brain circuits that evolution has gifted us with, but that we have more control…
