Emotional Power: Chapter 1

No? Well, it didn’t help me either. In fact, it hasn’t helped anyone I’ve ever talked to. The reason that it doesn’t help is because it isn’t useful advice. Those well-intentioned comments and suggestions misunderstand emotions. They blame you for simply being emotional and suggest that something is wrong with your feelings. Your anxiety. Depression. Anger. Fear. Yet, when we look closer, we discover that absolutely nothing is wrong with how you are feeling. Even feelings you don’t want to have, but still have, are a normal part of life. To be emotional happens.

Sometimes, we avoid, hide or stuff down our feelings because that seems safer. We develop habits to repress emotions that feel socially awkward or unacceptable. We have been taught to blame and avoid strong feelings. We fight against feeling too much or being too emotional or vulnerable.

So, I would like to ask, are you ready to move beyond fighting your emotions? Are you willing to look at the disappointing belief that you can learn from your emotions? To question the wisdom and insights of your emotional guidance? To challenge your thinking that strong emotions can be harmful or destructive? Are you willing to stop fighting the emotional hard wiring of your brain? To learn what our emotions really are? To embrace a gentler and validating, yet also more assertive and powerful, you?

No fancy words, special intelligence or complicated skills are required to make the change. All it takes is a shift in perspective and willingness to look at just one myth about emotions. That myth is that emotions have wisdom and you can learn from them. A myth that says emotional intelligence can be insightful and with skill can be used as wise and passionate guides in our lives. That emotions can inform us about the world and be used to improve relationships and guide our choices, decisions and actions. That emotions can be positive or negative.

When you look closely, you will discover that the reality is emotions aren’t any of these things. We are not driven or guided by emotional instincts. Emotions don’t tell us what to do any more than our breathing does. Emotions are irrational, unpredictable and often horrible guides. Research has consistently revealed that emotions give us urges and impulses, but not guidance or direction.

In looking closer, we discover that emotions are power based, and will mindlessly power us in any direction we choose. The fact is emotions cannot learn. They are not guides. They do not provide insights. They do not engage or dialogue. They do not even care about time or reality.

Yet, emotions are universal for everyone, integral to our lives and unconditionally power us from the day we are born. The challenge is to learn the skills to recognize, manage and harness our incredible, innate, normal and natural, God given emotional powers.

Once we recognize the truth that emotions only give us power, we can stop fighting our emotional power, which often is a painful and losing battle. We can stop following and trying to learn from our irrational emotional powers.

We can then start learning how to accept all emotions. How to develop effective skills to manage all emotions. How to effectively reduce or comfortably express unwanted emotions to improve the quality of our lives. We start this perspective shift to acknowledge and validate all of our emotions when we say: “I’m depressed and that is okay.” “I’m anxious and that is okay.” “I’m scared and that is okay.” Then, in accepting all of our emotions just as they are, we can learn better skills to manage them and start to explore and discover the real causes of our emotional distress.

When we recognize that emotions are there to unconditionally support and power us in any direction we choose to go, and not the cause of our distress and struggles, we can start seeing, often for the first time, the significantly impact of how our values, beliefs, trauma, memory and focus influence our vision and approach to creating the life and relationships we want. We begin to understand that our emotional powers are neither good nor bad, but our thinking makes it so. Thinking that is intimate, complex, unique and biased because it is based on your own personal history.

To recognize that emotions only give us power is a radical shift from current thinking.

In this book, I will clearly show you how emotions give us power and not insights, wisdom or guidance. You will understanding why that distinction is so important, and not semantics, related to your self-esteem, personal development and relationships. How that distinction leads to a whole new set of building blocks for creating the quality of life we want for ourselves, our relationships and career, as well as the communities we live in.

We will start this journey by using two basic brain facts, a car analogy and a question.

Brain Fact 1: The amygdala is the emotional center in our brain, the cortex is the thinking center.[1]

Brain Fact 2: The amygdala is fully developed at birth; the cortex takes 25 years to be fully developed.[2]

These two facts point out that starting from birth, our amygdala is providing emotions which are innate, fully developed and universal, while our cortex is providing intelligence which is undeveloped, and almost non-existent, as if it is a tabula rasa or blank slate. While our emotions are automatic without having to learning them, our intelligence takes concentrated effort to develop and learn from individualized experiences over a lifetime. We are born fully emotional but can barely think or move.

For everyone, our emotional amygdala is fully myelinated and hardwired at birth. Even our whole brain isn’t fully developed, as it takes two more years just to become fully myelinated, and another 25 years to be completely hardwired. Our bone and muscle body takes about 18 years to be fully developed. It is this emotional power from birth providing impulses and urges that we harness for our intellectual and physical growth and development. As we grow and develop, our actions and intellectual understanding guides and directs us with ever increasing skill of how we can harness our emotionally powered urges and impulses. In our personal development of growing up, power and intelligence are absolutely necessary, yet completely different things. Here is a car analogy to clarify the distinct roles.

Analogy: Imagine in very basic terms a car and it functions. The tires move the car. The steering wheel directs where the car goes. The gasoline powers the engine. Now, let’s compare a car’s functions to how people function. The car’s tires are like our behavior and make us move. The car’s steering is like our thinking and provides direction. The car’s gasoline is like our emotions which provides power.

Driving the analogy a little bit further, the steering is under our direct control, active and engaged in our unique and individualized approach to adjusting for each driving situation and style of vehicle. We can also improve our steering skills and abilities to drive through more complex situations. Steering is very much like our own unique thinking process.

On the other hand, gasoline isn’t under our direct control, active or engaged with the road or driving conditions. The gasoline just sits in the gas tank until it travels to the engine to be used for internal combustion, and remains unaware and uninvolved with the outside world. We cannot improve our gasoline burning skills or abilities, but we can make the gas more powerful. Gasoline is universal and basically the same in all cars and situations. Gasoline is very similar to our basic emotional powers, such as happy, sad, angry, scared, surprised and others.[3]

So, clearly the roles of gas and steering are different. Emotional gas gives us power. Intelligent steering gives us direction. This leads us to a question of how a car’s functions can be used.

Question: If the car starts heading off your desired road and towards a cliff, what would make it better?

     A: Change the gasoline.           B: Change the steering direction.        C: Change the tires

If you said, “B: Change the steering direction” that is effective, clear and useful advice. It redirects where you are headed and keeps you on your desired road of life. That is also viewing emotions as power. You are not trying to change the gasoline, learn from the gasoline or use gasoline as a guide. That is, you are not suddenly feeling comfortable in your gas tank perspective of driving over the cliff. Instead, you are aware of the gasoline powering the car, but are thoughtfully changing the direction you are headed.

If you picked, “C: Change the tires” that could be slightly useful if the tires or behavior are in really bad shape. However, the impact of bad tires can be easily corrected by adjusting the steering direction. This answer also recognizes emotions as power and steering as an intelligent guiding direction.  

If you answered, “A: Change the gasoline,” that is the popular, polarizing and rationalizing answer of viewing emotions as intelligence and that you can learn from emotions and they can be wise and insightful guides. That there is good or bad gasoline, and that the gasoline somehow can learn to understand situations and be taught to steer better, or at the very least, how to not power bad steering or wobbly wheels.

In focusing on changing the gasoline, the steering process is ignored and skills are underdeveloped. The impact of bad wheels is unaddressed. Also ignored is the essential and complex process of how gasoline is harnessed by the engine which interacts with the transmission to move the car. The challenge of learning more effective and efficient steer abilities of the car is also unaddressed. Furthermore, thinking of emotions as intelligent is like letting go of the steering wheel, which creates drama and loss of control, as we believe we are following the insightful guidance of our gasoline. Letting go of the wheel impacts our relationships. Letting go of the wheel is like shutting down and withdrawing from dealing mindfully or intelligently with an approaching difficult situation.

To be honest, I don’t think this approach really works. I don’t understand how it could actually work – steering by gasoline – using emotions as insightful passionate guides, or learning from our emotions. But, I kind of understand how we got there. It is related to several things starting with the ease of blaming emotions.

Blaming emotions is kind of fun, exciting and powerful, but misguided as it often increases drama and decreases control leading to shutting down or blowing up. Everyone at times enjoys the passion and freedom to not care or think about anyone or anything and just go with their emotional flow. Releasing our powerful emotional flow with few constraints can be highly inspirational or very destructive. With mindful planning, we can harness and enjoy the positive emotional outburst which inspires us to be “in the zone”, but more often we suffer the unintended consequences of poorly handled impulsive and thoughtless emotional explosions.

Other reasons for trying to steer by gasoline are: 1) confusing thoughts with emotions and not clearly understanding their roles and functions; 2) discomfort and avoidance of overwhelming emotions, like driving too fast, which leads to inadequate skills and structure to manage those high speeds; 3) intellectual hubris that the world should adjust to our desires or theories, such as creating gasoline that can drive; and 4) using cognitive distortions, such as catastrophizing to create drama and conflicts, or emotional reasoning that it feels good being in the gas tank while driving towards the cliff.

Thinking of emotions as guides, we often drive where we don’t mean to go by blurring the nature and function of gasoline and steering to suit our desires and then blame the crash on the gasoline. While letting go of the steering wheel may be thrilling and give us an adrenaline rush, steering by gasoline doesn’t work and often leads to unintended hurtful and destructive consequences. Especially if you like nice cars. Especially if you care about yourself or other people in the car.

Now, while the brain facts are universally agreed upon, you may ask, why is the analogy true? Ah, well that is complicated and will take this book to fully explain it. But briefly, some core issues to consider are 1) the historical scientific confusion between thoughts and feelings when studying the human brain; 2) overlooking the complex processes of how our thinking interacts and impacts our emotional powers; and 3) misinterpreting emotional discomfort with dysfunction. Let’s briefly explore each issue.

Study of the human brain has been going on for over 2,000 years, since the time of the Roman Empire.[4] But, only in the last thirty years, with the development of the fMRI in 1990’s, has science really been able to actually see and explore the neurological process of emotions.[5] And only in last year has science been able to start seeing and exploring our synaptic interactions and the neurology of memory.[6] Prior to that it was impossible to see the distinct neurological impact and process of thoughts, memories and emotions, so scientist guessed with theories based on what they could see, but often there was confusion, politics and assumptions. Re-evaluating research, from a shifted perspective and using the latest technology, reveals new insights regarding the significant differences between the neurological process of thoughts, memories and emotions. Using these new insights, research consistently reveals that our emotions don’t provide any direction, even in a life-or-death situation, but they do give us powerful urges, impulses, hormones and chemistry. Power that provides improved options that can save our life. Options that may or may not require our conscious intellectual input.

Consider the complex process of how we experience fear and our fight, flight, fawn or freeze response in dangerous situations. Instead of thinking of it as one integrated response, considerate it as two responses – power and thoughts. Our emotions give us power to have a physical reaction, while our conscious or subconscious thoughts consider various options for managing that reaction and expressing that power. We recognize the danger. We get fear power. Our body reacts. We think what to do. Almost all research presents our fear response as one monolithic response, and yet at the same time, interprets and describes it as two – “Our response to fear.” or “Our reaction to fear.” So, there is fear [power] and our awareness, reaction or response [thoughts] of expressing that fear power. Research doesn’t say fear makes us run, it says that fear powers us to do something, and then we consciously or subconsciously think and pick an option, and act on it – Run!

Fear powers can start in an instant. Our heart rate can jump up 20 beats more per minute in a single beat.[7] Sometimes we subconsciously sense danger even before we are consciously cognitively aware of any dangerous situation, such as when we have a hunch or intuition. This pre-cognitive, subconscious awareness is often referred to as neuroception.[8] Other times we may have previous memories we can draw upon and can react without thinking as we remember being there before. We can sense power, react with power, before we even have to access our conscious thinking. Yet, in all fearful situations, there still seems to be fear [power] and our response [conscious actions, conscious or subconscious thoughts or memories] to it. Even if that response is a pre-determined, automatic, subconscious, direct-to-action, save our life response.

Another interesting aspect of fear power is that it is our thoughts or perception, whether real or imagined, about a situation that often triggers or creates our fear. This idea is well expressed by Gavin de Becker in The Gift of Fear when he said, “True fear is the presence of danger based upon something perceive in your environment or circumstance. Unwarranted fear, like worry or anxiety, will always be based upon something in your imagination or memory.”[9] So, knowing that our memories, values, beliefs and more all play a role in triggering our fear, we can start to realize that fear isn’t a good judge for danger. One person’s fear might be another person’s joy, such as hang gliding, snakes, a first kiss, a freckle, farting, or public speaking. However, the power of fear is real, regardless of what thoughts or awareness may have triggered that fear power.

I would like to digress for a moment to briefly discuss what I mean by “power.” I am mostly using power related to giving us physical energy. Energy of urges, impulses and reactions, such as a synaptic or electrical impulses or chemical, hormonal or neurotransmitter reactions that power changes in our brain and body. However, the term “power” carries different connotations than “energy.”

To explain what I am trying to say, I think it would be useful to use the quote “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I think this quote is mostly wrong. Wrong because it implies that “power” is what is corrupting. That power can be a bad thing. I would suggest that “power” just like “emotions” doesn’t tell us what to do or give us directions and is not good or bad. It is just power.

If that is the case, saying “Absolute energy corrupts absolutely.”  is a truer reflection of what is being implied. However, it misses the point of being corrupted, because there is a personal aspect of power that is not reflect by the impersonal aspects of energy. Power seems to imply an aspect of personal choice that energy does not. So, an aspect of the corruption influence seems more possible related to expressing power, and less so in expressing energy.

Corruption is defined as being a selfish act that implies the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.[10] I think that related to emotions, which give us energy, the concept of corruption is how our values, belief, memories and other cognitive influences corrupt or hijack that emotional energy for our own selfish purposes. I think in this case, I am using corruption in a modifying sense, not of abusing power, but of using our cognitive influences to adjust, harness and direct our personal emotional powers for our own use. I am not saying that our emotional powers are corrupting, but rather that we can imagine and blame our emotional powers when we want to use them as an excuse to harm ourselves or others. Using an irrational belief that our emotional powers are responsible for our hurtful actions.

In this case, actions that reflect corrupted values and irrational beliefs can become abusive when people act selfishly, and think only of themselves without consideration for others. When they act abusively, to some degree, they are living in isolation. Isolation that allows them to create and embrace negative and harmful beliefs and values and such that are not challenged, evaluated or influenced by others. Isolation that disrupts the connection with others or their environment.

Now, it seems most accurate to say, “Absolute isolation corrupts absolutely.” That is, when someone doesn’t have any connections or engagement to anyone or anything outside of themselves or their own tribe; when they stop caring about others, the community or the world, that is when they start acting excessively selfish for their own interest. When someone has no empathy or respect outside themselves or their social circle, that is when the isolating corruption begins.

Isolation corrupts regardless of power. However, power itself can be an isolating force. And, bigger power makes a bigger impact of the corruption which is then much bigger and easier to see. That is, we can see the corruption of absolute power more easily than we can see it in miniscule power.

However, when we start blaming power as being bad and a corrupting force, we miss the point that power is mindless and doesn’t give direction. And while isolation may lead to corruption and using power in an abusive and corrupt way, isolation also doesn’t give direction. Isolation doesn’t have a mind of its own, but isolation does impact the creation of our values, morals, beliefs, focus and connections.

In isolation, we can lose our connections to others, our environment and even to ourselves. That is why powerless, isolated people can become incredibly corrupt. We see this when isolated adults become abusive towards kids, when domestic violence happens, when management exploits employees, or police use excessive force with criminals, when democrats and republicans argue and blame each other. In being isolated, one tribe can stand against another, even when both are doing the same thing. Unlike the corruption of social, political or material power where motivations can be more easily seen in isolation, our emotional powers are more complex, integrated and contextual. When we move past blaming power, emotions or even isolation, that is when we start seeing opportunities for personal growth and skill development in managing our own values, beliefs, memories, focus and perspectives that can lead us to seeing and embracing our higher, more connected, engaged, and thoughtful selves. 

In trying to really understand our emotional power, it can easily become overwhelming seeing the diversity within complexity within context. Our emotions are diverse in how they can be experienced, combined and conflicting. Our emotional powers are complex in their creation and can be hormonal, chemical, electrical, visual, physiological or cognitive.[11] Then to put everything in context, we need to look past the emotional power, and start exploring our self-awareness and relationships and how our irrational beliefs or cognitive distortions impact our self-expression in various diverse and subtle ways. In trying to harness and direct our emotional energies, we can use our cognitive or behavior choices in many ways, such as to ignite, enhance, resist, redirect, manage, change or suppress our emotional powers.

For example, with fear power, we sense or recognize a real or perceived danger and our mind and body reacts with physiological power and then we cognitively direct that power. Our fear power sparks a neurological impulse that triggers an enhanced hormonal response, such as adrenaline which causes increased body functions, like faster heart rate, increased vision and oxygen intake, opening of the arteries and getting more blood to our muscles, and increased nerves firing. Fear power gets our body ready to react, to deal with a perceived or imagined danger.

Now what? Fear hasn’t told us what to do. Fear just gives us power.

At this point, we have to decide how to express that fear power – fight, flight, fawn or freeze. This increased body functioning from our fear power response requires skills to manage how we address the fearful situation. With skill and experience, fear can increase cognitive focus and clarity – we become the hero. Or sometimes fear overwhelms our skills and we lose focus and clarity – we become the headless chicken, or the willing victim. The key to understanding how our fear power is harnessed to respond or react is based on our skills to recognize, manage and express our emotional powers.

However, while the emotional power process begins fairly consistent and universal by starting with neurological urges and impulses, how we interpret and express that emotional power, those urges and impulses, is not consistent or universal. Our emotional power expression is influenced by our neurological development, thoughts, values, beliefs, memories, focus, perspective and experiences which are unique to each person.

Regarding a neurological memory hijacking of an unquestioned irrational belief, one example is what occurs when neutral interactions are interpreted as aggressive. Imagine that you are walking on a crowed street or hallway, and someone bumps into you. Most people will think it was an accident. An unintentional interaction. However, someone who was physically abused will interpret that innocent bump as an intentional act of aggression and disrespect. Their neurological process is to interpret neutral events as aggression, which creates an emotionally powered physiological response. They feel angry and then may release that power by acting out aggressively towards you. This action makes sense to them, based on their brain neurology and personal history, but it might not make sense to you based on yours. Road rage occurs in a similar fashion, when a neutral driving action is interpreted as being done with a malicious, aggressive and disrespectful intent. Even when that is the case, how you choose to react and think is still your valued choice.

Intellectual hijacking, memory hijacking and emotional explosions will be further discussed in later chapters.

Mainstream thinking assumes that emotions provide direction by giving us urges or impulses to act, but looking closer reveals that emotions give us those powerful urges and impulses that push for action without providing any specific directions. We decide, consciously or subconsciously, based on our personal history how to express our urges and impulses based on what we have learned and how we have become neurologically wired. As babies, we are taught and learn what to consider fearful or painful. For example, when a baby falls down, they usually look at their parents to determine if they should laugh or cry. Or, a baby doesn’t understand the concept of money.

Many issues impact our individualized thinking environment and process. When thinking about something fearful, is it a known or unknown danger. Was it expected or not? Are we alone or with others? Have we dealt with the fearful situation before? Imagine if a grizzly bear is charging at you … are you hunting for bear, at a circus, or enjoying a family picnic?

To use another analogy, say a sheet of paper is your brain, and fear is fire and anxiety is wind. If the wind blows on the paper to make it anxious, nothing really happens. However, if the paper is on fire, then the blowing wind does have a noticeable impact. Having fear and anxiety makes it burn hotter and faster. If it blows hard enough the fire goes out. As the paper is burnt to ashes, the wind blows it away. The wind doesn’t change. It is not bad for blowing on the burning paper and good for blowing on regular paper. It is that the impact of experience, goals, focus, values and memory on our thinking environment that greatly influence our ability to recognize, manage and direct our emotional powers. This book will explore many ways to improve skills to recognize and manage our emotional powers, even when we have mixed emotional powers, as well as skills to react to others’ emotional powers directed towards you.

Another confusion related to using our emotions as guides, is overlapping discomfort with dysfunction. That is often expressed in comments such as “I feel uncomfortable standing up for myself.” “I feel like a failure.” “I want to get rid of my depression.” “I don’t want to be anxious.” “I know it was wrong, but it felt right.” or “I feel worthless.”

Blaming emotions for poor decisions or feeling uncomfortable is a very common and universal habit. A cognitive distortion habit of emotional reasoning and blaming that becomes a dysfunctional pleasure of being powerless. A process of using blame to pass control and responsibility for making changes to something beyond your control. It is fun to blame our emotion for poor choices, but in doing so, we fail to develop the structure and skills to manage difficult emotional powers. We stop owning our power and try to let it own us, resulting in more chaos, partisanship and drama. It is more fun to say, “mistakes were made.” than “I made a mistake.” However, research has consistently shown that poor skills to manage our emotions can negatively impact our life, relationships, career and community.[12] That is, when we say, “mistakes were made,” the first mistake is giving away our personal power and control to fix the situation to the mistake. We blame the mistake. In blaming the mistake, we become powerless that gets us stuck in situations that will not end well, like driving a military tank into the lake.

One more analogy – imagine a baby’s brain as an unexplored forest. Each time they travel through the forest, they create a new trail. That is how they learn and represents their thinking and memory environment. Once a trail is made, it is easier to take the same trail again, and to have the same thought, memory or thinking process. If the trail is paved, such as when nerves are myelinated, they become much quicker and easier to travel. Their emotion powers are the vehicle they use to travel through the forest to make a trail. They can crawl, walk, bike, drive, boat, fly or anyway they want to travel. If the trail is too small, it will quickly grow over and disappear. Small, powerless trails are often forgotten. So, they use a military tank to power through and create new trails.

Using a tank works great with a nice wide trail and moving forward easily by pushing over the small trees and bushes, until they get to a large lake. Now, they blame the bad tank for being heavy and not floating. Any vehicle you pick can be good or bad, functional or dysfunctional depending upon the environment. So, blaming the tank for not being a boat, is like blaming fear for not being brave. Emotional power is just what it is, and fighting the power creates problems. Thinking that our uncomfortable emotional power should be different is the dysfunction. Discomfort is not a dysfunction. All power is okay. How we create it and use it is not. Our challenge is choosing thoughts and actions that build positive and empowering connections to our emotional power. Driving a tank into the lake doesn’t work and blaming the tank for not being a boat doesn’t solve the problem.

So, as the world gets angrier that tanks don’t float and emotions aren’t wise and insightful guides, it becomes even more important to recognize the existence and importance of our universal emotional powers. We need to change where we are headed, but not how we feel about it. To build effective skills to face the challenges of making better choices when moving forward, while validating our emotional powers that get us there. Because not all thoughts or actions are acceptable, respectful, healthy or appropriate, but all feelings are okay. Let me repeat that – all emotions are okay. The unexpected ones. The unwanted ones that won’t go away. Even the uncomfortable and hard to manage ones that overwhelm us. All emotions are okay.

So, are you ready to move beyond the confusing myth of emotional intelligence and into the humane enlightened world of emotional power? Are you willing to look at and understand a shifted perspective? I hope you are, because we are already there.

[1] various sources, wikipedia

[2] various sources, wikipedia

[3] Emotions Revealed. by Paul Ekman 2003

[4] various sources

[5] various sources

[6] Where are memories stored in the brain? Don Arnold    1/11/22

[7] various sources

[8] various sources, Polyvagal Theory: Neuroception, Stephen Porges

[9] The Gift of Fear Gavin De Becker 1997

[10] Dictionaries – Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Wikipedia

[11] Various sources, 

[12] various sources, Handbook of Emotions 201