BCA Holistic Mental Health Therapy: Defining Emotions as Power

BCA Holistic Mental Health Therapy defines emotions as power. That is, starting from birth, we are motivated, inspired, developed and energized by our emotional powers, which include electrical impulses, urges, frequencies and interactions; chemical and neurotransmitters reactions, and the influence of hormones.

There are many supportive reasons for the BCA perspective of defining emotions as power. The main physiological reason emotions are defined as power is based upon our brain’s structure, functions and development process. The main behavioral reason is that emotions do not provide guidance or direction in how we act out and express our emotional powers. The main psychological reason is that emotions do not provide insights or guidance, they cannot learn, and when defined as power they have no intellectual abilities and are irrational and unaware of environment or time.

To adequately explain the reasoning of why BCA defines emotions as power would take a book, which I am currently in the process of writing, but I will try to briefly touch on some of the issues.

To begin, BCA is based on recognizing and addressing the distinct personal functions of our 1) behaviors, 2) cognitions or thoughts, and 3) affect, emotions or feelings. However, while our thoughts, feelings and behaviors provide distinct functions there is still significant interactions, often a dialectic triad of neuroception-emotion-thought, co-dependencies and some overlapping of functions, which can muddle the perspective, approach and interventions.

The quickest way to clearly explain the different roles and functions is using a car analogy. (Note: the car analogy is fully explained in a different post. I highly recommend checking it out.) The car analogy in brief: The gas is our emotions and gives us power. The steering is our intelligence and gives us direction. The tires are behavior and gives us movement. All three aspects of a car are absolutely essential and equally important, but also quite distinct.

Now, let’s compare current thinking and the BCA perspective in understanding our emotion of fear and our flight or fight response.

Current thinking usually describes our fear response as a singular monolithic approach to life threatening situations. That is, we get afraid and act out to fight, flight, freeze or fawn. It describes our fear response by combining emotion, thought and action or power, instruction and movement into one singular event that is based upon fear. When we are in a life-or-death type situation, the thinking is that having extreme fear causes us to react.

The BCA perspective looks closer at the whole process and describes our fear response as a distinct triadic approach to life-threatening situations. It separates our fear response into the unique roles of our emotions as power; thoughts as direction; and actions as movement.

The fear power prepares our body with increased energy and functioning to deal with a life-threatening situation. Such increased energy often starts with an adrenaline rush, increased heart rate and enhanced physiological functioning. Fear prepares the body to respond to any threat, but doesn’t provide any direction or guidance of how to express that power.

The fear thinking directs how the fear power will be expressed – fight, flight, freeze or fawn. That is, we need to decide how to react based on consciously or subconscious thoughts. The reason we may not always consciously decide how to react is because we can access the subconscious thought process created from our habits, memories, training, experience or skills that are already in place from having had previous similar events.

The fear thinking may also have started the fear power response based on a neuroception, which is a subconscious ability to detect threats, risks and safety. This subconscious ability is like having a hunch or intuition or some other sense of knowing.

Finally, our fear action is when we act and move to save our life.

Now, I would like to give a very specific example that fear does not direct us in any way, but rather is a power that we harness. If you look back at the graphic at the start of this post, it lists possible fear responses as fight, flight, freeze or engage. That wasn’t a typo and here is why.

Extreme sport athletes or adrenaline junkies actively build skills to consistently engage in life-or-death situations. Imagine a free climber 100 feet up on the side of a sheer cliff holding on with only one hand grip and one toe hold.

I don’t know about you, but if that was me … I’m a dead man. I do not have the skills or ability to handle such extreme life-or-death situation. Nor do I want to, but the free climber does. They have honed their skills and abilities to such a degree that they consistently engage in such life-or-death situations and harness their fear power.

Yes, they are afraid. Often, very afraid, but they have developed physiological and psychological skills and abilities and also neurological abilities to harness their fear power in a slow steady state to save their life. They have to, or they might die.

Other extreme athletes that active engage with their fear power would be rodeo bronco and bull riders, sky diving, BMX and mountain biking, free water diving and many more. Going beyond the extreme sport athlete, often our police, firemen and military personnel also end up have to frequently engage in harnessing their fear powers. Unfortunately, their training, skills and supports often aren’t adequate to deal effectively with their fear powers, which then may overwhelm them.

Emotions as power. It is time to re-examine and re-think our understanding and definition of what emotions really are, and how we deal with them.

The BCA Holistic Mental Health Therapy has defined emotions as power for over 15 years. And while it is fairly easy to understand the shift away from emotional intelligence and to emotional power, it is pretty hard and uncomfortable to fully comprehend the significant impact such a shift to emotions as power has on our lives. Significant impacts that will be explored throughout this BCA emotional powers website.