Chapter 3 - The Habit of Feeling
Like with all things in life that we learn, we learn them once; if they get our needs met, we automatically repeat them. Once; twice, and a habit is formed. We become victims of the habit of feeling a certain way, in spite of whether it “makes sense” in the present dynamic or not. In your present life, every feeling is a HABIT!
The Origin of Feeling Habits
A habit is defined as any human action or reaction that is unconsciously automatic and that we cannot change through an act of conscious will. When we review the information in the last two chapters, we can see that early life affect encodings do, indeed, form the basis upon which we can begin to develop our feeling habits and build that substructure that we call the “emotional (or affect) matrix.”
Much research has gone into the study of preverbal neuroencodings. We know that the proposition of the Actual Point of Origin (APOO) to our feeling structures and emotional learnings mimics the manner in which we learn anything in life; - that is, we experiment and experience an action or reaction, we ‘store away’ the response that works for us in the moment, and discard that which does not.
This, in effect, is the way in which we learn how to walk, drive a car, nod our head, tie our shoelaces – in fact any action or reaction that is automatic today. This, then, means that the way in which we learn our feeling reactions is an almost identical ‘point of origin’ dynamic to the way we learn anything. This notion that we learn our feelings, then make a habit of those feeling responses, is a fundamental concept supporting the study of affectology and its practical application.
Habit Development
The fact that our automatic actions and reactions that are a part of our lives now (the car-driving, the unconscious hand gestures, for instance) were encoded at some point in the initial learning is significant when we compare this to our ‘feeling learnings’. Just as we use the original encoding of just how to synchronize our feet with the gear-stick, and our clutch pedal with our accelerator pedal, to build an automaticity of action so that we eventually do these things without conscious thought, we use our preverbal affect encodings to build our emotional sub-personality.
Like with all things in life that we learn, we learn them once; if they get our needs met, we automatically repeat them. Once; twice, and a habit is formed. We become victims of the habit of feeling a certain way, in spite of whether it “makes sense” in the present dynamic or not. In your present life, every feeling is a HABIT!
The Origin of Feeling Habits
A habit is defined as any human action or reaction that is unconsciously automatic and that we cannot change through an act of conscious will. When we review the information in the last two chapters, we can see that early life affect encodings do, indeed, form the basis upon which we can begin to develop our feeling habits and build that substructure that we call the “emotional (or affect) matrix.”
Much research has gone into the study of preverbal neuroencodings. We know that the proposition of the Actual Point of Origin (APOO) to our feeling structures and emotional learnings mimics the manner in which we learn anything in life; - that is, we experiment and experience an action or reaction, we ‘store away’ the response that works for us in the moment, and discard that which does not.
This, in effect, is the way in which we learn how to walk, drive a car, nod our head, tie our shoelaces – in fact any action or reaction that is automatic today. This, then, means that the way in which we learn our feeling reactions is an almost identical ‘point of origin’ dynamic to the way we learn anything. This notion that we learn our feelings, then make a habit of those feeling responses, is a fundamental concept supporting the study of affectology and its practical application.
Habit Development
The fact that our automatic actions and reactions that are a part of our lives now (the car-driving, the unconscious hand gestures, for instance) were encoded at some point in the initial learning is significant when we compare this to our ‘feeling learnings’. Just as we use the original encoding of just how to synchronize our feet with the gear-stick, and our clutch pedal with our accelerator pedal, to build an automaticity of action so that we eventually do these things without conscious thought, we use our preverbal affect encodings to build our emotional sub-personality.
Let’s look at the early experience of the preverbal infant that we addressed in Chapter 1. We’ve established that any negative emotional arousal will cause an action or reaction that serves to “get our needs met” and is encoded as an unconscious memory that is taloned at amygdala level (see The ‘spark’ at the beginning – Chapter 1).
This creates the template for future response to discomfort, and so, when we experience any other discomforting stimulus at a later time, whether it’s an hour or a day later, our reaction will be identical to that which worked and got our needs met in the original encoding. And, like later life learnings (the “how to drive;” “how to walk,” and the like) we adopt an automatic remembering of the initial encoding. In other words, it makes no sense to not utilize that which proved to be a successful reaction initially, and probably proves to be similarly productive, at least for a while until it has been encased in the ‘habit categorization.’
Over a short period of time, perhaps only days, the adoption of this template of ‘what works’ becomes automatic, and has no rationalization attached to it. This, then, obeys and fits the definition of a habit, so insisting that we perceive the development of feeling (affect) response patterns as being habitual. It is for this reason, affectologists hold firm to the notion that all our feelings are learned, and that all our affect responses are indeed habits.
This fact is vital to the clinical procedures that characterize Clinical Affectology variants – that human beings have an undeniable capacity to relearn anything that’s been previously learned, and that feelings are not necessarily static concretions – that they are variable
Habit Establishment before Thought, Reason or Logic
An interesting (and perhaps frustrating) aspect of contemporary socio-professional culture is that the prevalence of preverbal affect structures is a given; has become accepted by the neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic community, particularly given the strength of the research that shows this to be true. But it’s also a puzzling scenario in that the acceptance of an emotional matrix – an affect substrate that is a part of every human being – is largely ignored in preference to verbal analytic approaches to therapy. Many of us simply do not understand the significance of the formation and existence of the emotional matrix as it affects our lives today. So, let’s investigate.
In order to make sense of the proposal, let’s use another real life example. We’ve established that science is telling us that prior to the verbal emergent stage when we learn to use words to tell self-stories, we experience our universe in non-rational and interpretive ways, thus building a ‘set’ emotional matrix that is not defined by words, nor able to be described using words. Can we propose that at verbal emergent stage, when our mind processing changes to the near-rational and verbal, that we suddenly assess our past years’ learnings and say to ourselves (rationally), “my earlier affect learnings don’t suit my way of processing any more, and therefore I must delete those learnings in order to grow up to my present age”?
Of course we do not; we simply proceed in our living experience with our earlier matrix largely intact and influencing in a non-verbal way, all that we continue to experience and learn. This is the nature of the human empirical process: – that all our learnings are influenced by previous learnings.
This constitutes what the affectologist knows to be an aspect of our emotional selves that still exists at unconscious level in either subtle or profound ways. Clinical Affectologists know the origin of the oft-heard comment from clients, “there’s something going on emotionally that I just can’t put my finger on!” or “I can’t quite describe how I feel.” Our emotional matrix is formed prior to thought, reason or logic, and pretty much exists in the same form today as it was learned at preverbal stage in development. It is a “feeling habit."
This creates the template for future response to discomfort, and so, when we experience any other discomforting stimulus at a later time, whether it’s an hour or a day later, our reaction will be identical to that which worked and got our needs met in the original encoding. And, like later life learnings (the “how to drive;” “how to walk,” and the like) we adopt an automatic remembering of the initial encoding. In other words, it makes no sense to not utilize that which proved to be a successful reaction initially, and probably proves to be similarly productive, at least for a while until it has been encased in the ‘habit categorization.’
Over a short period of time, perhaps only days, the adoption of this template of ‘what works’ becomes automatic, and has no rationalization attached to it. This, then, obeys and fits the definition of a habit, so insisting that we perceive the development of feeling (affect) response patterns as being habitual. It is for this reason, affectologists hold firm to the notion that all our feelings are learned, and that all our affect responses are indeed habits.
This fact is vital to the clinical procedures that characterize Clinical Affectology variants – that human beings have an undeniable capacity to relearn anything that’s been previously learned, and that feelings are not necessarily static concretions – that they are variable
Habit Establishment before Thought, Reason or Logic
An interesting (and perhaps frustrating) aspect of contemporary socio-professional culture is that the prevalence of preverbal affect structures is a given; has become accepted by the neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic community, particularly given the strength of the research that shows this to be true. But it’s also a puzzling scenario in that the acceptance of an emotional matrix – an affect substrate that is a part of every human being – is largely ignored in preference to verbal analytic approaches to therapy. Many of us simply do not understand the significance of the formation and existence of the emotional matrix as it affects our lives today. So, let’s investigate.
In order to make sense of the proposal, let’s use another real life example. We’ve established that science is telling us that prior to the verbal emergent stage when we learn to use words to tell self-stories, we experience our universe in non-rational and interpretive ways, thus building a ‘set’ emotional matrix that is not defined by words, nor able to be described using words. Can we propose that at verbal emergent stage, when our mind processing changes to the near-rational and verbal, that we suddenly assess our past years’ learnings and say to ourselves (rationally), “my earlier affect learnings don’t suit my way of processing any more, and therefore I must delete those learnings in order to grow up to my present age”?
Of course we do not; we simply proceed in our living experience with our earlier matrix largely intact and influencing in a non-verbal way, all that we continue to experience and learn. This is the nature of the human empirical process: – that all our learnings are influenced by previous learnings.
This constitutes what the affectologist knows to be an aspect of our emotional selves that still exists at unconscious level in either subtle or profound ways. Clinical Affectologists know the origin of the oft-heard comment from clients, “there’s something going on emotionally that I just can’t put my finger on!” or “I can’t quite describe how I feel.” Our emotional matrix is formed prior to thought, reason or logic, and pretty much exists in the same form today as it was learned at preverbal stage in development. It is a “feeling habit."
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FURTHER NOTES:
This presentation in this form and for this purpose denies us the logic of going too deeply into the neuroscience and complex workings of the hyperdimensional chaos that is the human developing mind. It may be enough to offer you here the fact that the progress of the continuum of learning that the emotional mind goes through can be described by the word PERSEVERATION. Perseveration in psychology is defined as automatically and unconsciously persevering (repeating) an action or reaction long after the original stimulus that created it has been forgotten or lost, or at least, no longer exists. So, affectology talks a lot about ‘perseveration’ as a determinate in the long process of growth of your hidden affect sub-personality. ‘STRANGE ATTRACTOR theory’ in Chaos Theory is an apt way of describing the progress of affect learning and its influence and may be read about here. The other detailed aspect is the notion of STATE-DEPENDENCY. This says that even today, the existence of initial affect learnings ‘live’ in the unconscious mind in the SAME STATE as when they were learned; that is, non-verbal. The ego mind thinks it should be able to know and describe, but it doesn’t and can’t. |
Unconscious Parts Drivers
One of the elementary concepts of Affectology is that which we call “Parts Drivers.” In advanced affectology theory, practitioners study at length the conceptual underpinnings of the large variety of ways in which we humans have learned tasks and responses at an early age that still provide functions that are essential for the maintenance of a stable state of emotional balance. The limbic brain has a strong tendency to protect initial affect learnings encoded in the amygdala as ‘the’ status quo of the manner in which emotional reactions should play out. Consequently, the automatic actions of the limbic system’s affect center(s) constantly tries for an equilibrium that refers to a time when such responses were learned, but have little to do with one’s existence in a present world. It can be said, then, that emotional learnings are most often OBSOLETE.
We have discussed the existence of 'parts drivers' and 'task drivers' in the "Mind Gremlins" page of this site, but it's important to remember that these are also aspects of the mind that develop within preverbal times.
They are locked into a non-cognitive, preverbal affect fight to keep the system ‘as is’ so as not to allow for disintegration of a mind system that was originally established as emotional-stability-based. And survival-based.
In the next chapter we will look at the mind-mechanisms that insist that we are still influenced today by preverbal infant learnings created at affect and parts driver level.
Chapter Wrap-up:
Chapter 4 - Pathways to your Past
The Affect Bridge
In previous chapters we’ve talked about initial learnings being ‘automatically repeated’ because those learnings got our needs met; they ‘worked,’ so we repeat them. They ‘perseverate.’ This is a commonsense proposition. But affectology theory is built around the fact that there’s a specific mind-mechanism that creates that repetition and perseveration. And our practical work, in turn, is built on the fact that that mechanism is a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon – something that we are 'doing', and is therefore variable and changeable, rather than something that we ‘are;’ unable to be changed.
Several decades ago, the psychotherapeutic world proposed (and defined) that the action of a therapist applying a technique in which a ‘regressive connection’ is established between current emotions and the first experience of that emotion, should be called the affect bridge. And psychology ‘invented’ the affect bridge technique.
But a commonsense look at this should reveal that this is not something that a ‘therapist’ can do to a client, but that an affect bridge exists in natural form in any event, and that this is how we automatically perseverate (repeat) responses, whether they are of an emotional nature (anger, panic, etc.) or of a mechanistic nature (driving the car, walking, nodding the head, etc.).
So, AFFECT BRIDGE refers to that process of naturalistic ‘calling upon’ predetermined response patterns in order to respond NOW in a way that we learned worked for us. We do this by ‘tracing memory,’ at unconscious level, to the original encoded material in regards to the dynamic of response.
This (affect bridging) is the system that we employ whenever it seems appropriate for us to respond in a feeling or emotional or affect-oriented fashion to any given new stimulus. And this goes for all of our positive affect responses as well. For example, the process of being able to relax ‘in the now’ is the product of unconsciously remembering (via the affect bridge) that we have at some time in our existence experienced that (relaxation), and we can call upon the natural trace-memory mechanisms to automatically re-experience the sensation – without trying, without the effort of consciously rebuilding the experience. And our body follows the process – and relaxes.
In spite of the complexities of explanations of whether hypnosis or trance exist in everyday life and how we operate as human beings, the fact remains that the process of affect bridging is, indeed, technically described as a naturalistic hypnotic phenomenon. We utilize it continuously – below awareness.
In the Present
But let us not run away with the idea that affectology proposes or utilizes classical regressive techniques that are akin to taking the client into their past. When we experience uncomfortable feelings or emotions, we have unconsciously bridged to encoded emotional memory that exists in the present! And this takes place every minute, every moment of our lives. It is constant and unconsciously ever-present within the dynamic of the emotional matrix.
Affectology operates from the practical concept that the past simply does not exist any more, and that all affect phenomena are present dynamics that are to be dealt with and re-learned in the present. While we adopt that as an operating principle that insists that there is no delving into that which we have established can be inauthentic and interpretive only (episodic memory of the past – see previous chapters 1 and 2), we accept ‘the past’ only insofar as its relevance to neuroencodings of all kinds.
So, this explains, in part, the disregard that clinical affectologists hold for attempts to revive past episodic memories and their narrative description. The EVENT, as traumatic as it may have been, simply exists no more, yet the learned affect encoding (of the response) and the process with which that encoding is accessed (the affect bridge) is having relevance in the present due to (1) affect perseveration, (2) the theory of strange attractor influence, and (3) the very nature of state-dependency of present influences.
The Limbic “Time Warp”
We have looked at the dynamic of preverbal neuroencoding and it may be useful to also consider the temporal* nature of that encoding. At the time of establishing initiator encodings, the limbic brain does not include a temporal dimension to its “memory.” It does not register ‘time’ and creates a memory ‘without time’ or more correctly, a memory that begins its path of perseveration through real life time without consideration for any relationship with time.
*Temporal: time-based or chronological
This atemporal memory – and its continuance through perseveration – ensures that this timeless encoding “lives on forever” – unless, like the introduction of a new strange attractor, it is relearned through affect-directed means, and so creating a new affect initiator that is removed from the previously trapped time orientation.
The Trapped Inner Child as a Problematic Metaphor
From an existential perspective, there is no inner child apart from a foetus* during pregnancy! Yet this – as a metaphor – has been used in many forms by many therapeutic approaches over the last few decades.
*Foetus: original English spelling of Americanized “fetus”
But we must understand that it is only a metaphor. The inner child movement has proposed all sorts of nurturing aims for the inner child that apparently resides in all of us. But, in his early book, The Dark Side of the Inner Child, Stephen Wolinsky proposes that an unconscious ‘part’ of us that is stuck in the need for original basic emotional stability, auto-hypnotizes us to experience early encoded discomforts. This is what he proposes as being the dark side of the inner child, and that this side should be removed – deleted – rid from our existence.
We affectologists understand that ALL of what we learn and encode early in development is useful and has positive intention. The complexity of our unconscious layers of ‘parts drivers’ (see Chapter 3) insist that IF we want to use the metaphor of the inner child, then we must see this as a matrix of inner children, all of whom are doing a predominantly good job, merely needing adjustment to the way in which they operate in the present, rather than needing extinction.
Affectology is about balance in our current lives, not the removal of ever-functioning and often useful parts.
Emotional Hijacking
We tend to take for granted that we can ‘work on’ an aspect of our emotional reactions at a cognitive level, perhaps, for instance, attending workshops or writing affirmations, yet when it comes to the crunch and the trigger comes along again, this working it all through at the rational level seems to have been to no avail.
Before we can blink an eye, the emotional rush appears out of nowhere and superimposes itself on our reasoning self. Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) calls this emotional hijacking, as the amygdala immediately signals the rest of the organism to react in the way in which the encoding originally occurred. It’s almost as if what we’d thought was months of good work simply does not count. That’s because, in the main, it doesn’t!
One of the elementary concepts of Affectology is that which we call “Parts Drivers.” In advanced affectology theory, practitioners study at length the conceptual underpinnings of the large variety of ways in which we humans have learned tasks and responses at an early age that still provide functions that are essential for the maintenance of a stable state of emotional balance. The limbic brain has a strong tendency to protect initial affect learnings encoded in the amygdala as ‘the’ status quo of the manner in which emotional reactions should play out. Consequently, the automatic actions of the limbic system’s affect center(s) constantly tries for an equilibrium that refers to a time when such responses were learned, but have little to do with one’s existence in a present world. It can be said, then, that emotional learnings are most often OBSOLETE.
We have discussed the existence of 'parts drivers' and 'task drivers' in the "Mind Gremlins" page of this site, but it's important to remember that these are also aspects of the mind that develop within preverbal times.
They are locked into a non-cognitive, preverbal affect fight to keep the system ‘as is’ so as not to allow for disintegration of a mind system that was originally established as emotional-stability-based. And survival-based.
In the next chapter we will look at the mind-mechanisms that insist that we are still influenced today by preverbal infant learnings created at affect and parts driver level.
Chapter Wrap-up:
- In this chapter I have aimed to help you understand that ‘feeling’ or ‘emotion’ just doesn’t HAPPEN.
- Deep affect memory is the beginning. APOO affect memories are stable and they remain largely stable.
- Through the dynamic of PERSEVERATION, they build as emotional habits, in much the same way as behavioral or operational habits do – by repetition. But repetition that is below our awareness.
- Initial affect memories influence to a greater or lesser degree, every reaction subsequent to them.
- We create hidden parts drivers (affect habits that can thwart any desired attempts to change the status quo).
- All emotions are habits.
Chapter 4 - Pathways to your Past
The Affect Bridge
In previous chapters we’ve talked about initial learnings being ‘automatically repeated’ because those learnings got our needs met; they ‘worked,’ so we repeat them. They ‘perseverate.’ This is a commonsense proposition. But affectology theory is built around the fact that there’s a specific mind-mechanism that creates that repetition and perseveration. And our practical work, in turn, is built on the fact that that mechanism is a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon – something that we are 'doing', and is therefore variable and changeable, rather than something that we ‘are;’ unable to be changed.
Several decades ago, the psychotherapeutic world proposed (and defined) that the action of a therapist applying a technique in which a ‘regressive connection’ is established between current emotions and the first experience of that emotion, should be called the affect bridge. And psychology ‘invented’ the affect bridge technique.
But a commonsense look at this should reveal that this is not something that a ‘therapist’ can do to a client, but that an affect bridge exists in natural form in any event, and that this is how we automatically perseverate (repeat) responses, whether they are of an emotional nature (anger, panic, etc.) or of a mechanistic nature (driving the car, walking, nodding the head, etc.).
So, AFFECT BRIDGE refers to that process of naturalistic ‘calling upon’ predetermined response patterns in order to respond NOW in a way that we learned worked for us. We do this by ‘tracing memory,’ at unconscious level, to the original encoded material in regards to the dynamic of response.
This (affect bridging) is the system that we employ whenever it seems appropriate for us to respond in a feeling or emotional or affect-oriented fashion to any given new stimulus. And this goes for all of our positive affect responses as well. For example, the process of being able to relax ‘in the now’ is the product of unconsciously remembering (via the affect bridge) that we have at some time in our existence experienced that (relaxation), and we can call upon the natural trace-memory mechanisms to automatically re-experience the sensation – without trying, without the effort of consciously rebuilding the experience. And our body follows the process – and relaxes.
In spite of the complexities of explanations of whether hypnosis or trance exist in everyday life and how we operate as human beings, the fact remains that the process of affect bridging is, indeed, technically described as a naturalistic hypnotic phenomenon. We utilize it continuously – below awareness.
In the Present
But let us not run away with the idea that affectology proposes or utilizes classical regressive techniques that are akin to taking the client into their past. When we experience uncomfortable feelings or emotions, we have unconsciously bridged to encoded emotional memory that exists in the present! And this takes place every minute, every moment of our lives. It is constant and unconsciously ever-present within the dynamic of the emotional matrix.
Affectology operates from the practical concept that the past simply does not exist any more, and that all affect phenomena are present dynamics that are to be dealt with and re-learned in the present. While we adopt that as an operating principle that insists that there is no delving into that which we have established can be inauthentic and interpretive only (episodic memory of the past – see previous chapters 1 and 2), we accept ‘the past’ only insofar as its relevance to neuroencodings of all kinds.
So, this explains, in part, the disregard that clinical affectologists hold for attempts to revive past episodic memories and their narrative description. The EVENT, as traumatic as it may have been, simply exists no more, yet the learned affect encoding (of the response) and the process with which that encoding is accessed (the affect bridge) is having relevance in the present due to (1) affect perseveration, (2) the theory of strange attractor influence, and (3) the very nature of state-dependency of present influences.
The Limbic “Time Warp”
We have looked at the dynamic of preverbal neuroencoding and it may be useful to also consider the temporal* nature of that encoding. At the time of establishing initiator encodings, the limbic brain does not include a temporal dimension to its “memory.” It does not register ‘time’ and creates a memory ‘without time’ or more correctly, a memory that begins its path of perseveration through real life time without consideration for any relationship with time.
*Temporal: time-based or chronological
This atemporal memory – and its continuance through perseveration – ensures that this timeless encoding “lives on forever” – unless, like the introduction of a new strange attractor, it is relearned through affect-directed means, and so creating a new affect initiator that is removed from the previously trapped time orientation.
The Trapped Inner Child as a Problematic Metaphor
From an existential perspective, there is no inner child apart from a foetus* during pregnancy! Yet this – as a metaphor – has been used in many forms by many therapeutic approaches over the last few decades.
*Foetus: original English spelling of Americanized “fetus”
But we must understand that it is only a metaphor. The inner child movement has proposed all sorts of nurturing aims for the inner child that apparently resides in all of us. But, in his early book, The Dark Side of the Inner Child, Stephen Wolinsky proposes that an unconscious ‘part’ of us that is stuck in the need for original basic emotional stability, auto-hypnotizes us to experience early encoded discomforts. This is what he proposes as being the dark side of the inner child, and that this side should be removed – deleted – rid from our existence.
We affectologists understand that ALL of what we learn and encode early in development is useful and has positive intention. The complexity of our unconscious layers of ‘parts drivers’ (see Chapter 3) insist that IF we want to use the metaphor of the inner child, then we must see this as a matrix of inner children, all of whom are doing a predominantly good job, merely needing adjustment to the way in which they operate in the present, rather than needing extinction.
Affectology is about balance in our current lives, not the removal of ever-functioning and often useful parts.
Emotional Hijacking
We tend to take for granted that we can ‘work on’ an aspect of our emotional reactions at a cognitive level, perhaps, for instance, attending workshops or writing affirmations, yet when it comes to the crunch and the trigger comes along again, this working it all through at the rational level seems to have been to no avail.
Before we can blink an eye, the emotional rush appears out of nowhere and superimposes itself on our reasoning self. Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) calls this emotional hijacking, as the amygdala immediately signals the rest of the organism to react in the way in which the encoding originally occurred. It’s almost as if what we’d thought was months of good work simply does not count. That’s because, in the main, it doesn’t!
We may then search around for someone else to blame. We perhaps blame the previous self-development program and think that it has sold us a broom that doesn’t really fly! But the real answer is that we did not yet get to an understanding of the workings of the affect unconscious. This is the very reason for the existence of this presentation. To become aware!
Attempting to change the way that you react emotionally must be dealt with at the emotional amygdaloid level, rather than the rational willful level. Computer buffs will understand me when I say that to do otherwise would be like trying to correct a basic anomaly existing in the DOS system or the CPS machine code by merely working at the Windows level. Can’t be done.
Affectology maintains that correction to the way in which we encode emotional material and access it through automatic affect bridging can only be effectively altered by accessing ‘feeling structures’ at the affect level rather than working with perceivable thought and cognition structures at a narrative level. This supports the affectologist’s ‘feelings not thoughts’ mode of approach and the descriptive axiom, ‘Mind over Chatter.’
The primary contention in affectology is that rational thought and reason and their cousin, conscious will, are relatively powerless compared to affect bridging and the emotional symptoms of this powerful and immediate phenomenon.
Chapter Wrap-up:
To Continue to be enthralled, go now to PART THREE
Attempting to change the way that you react emotionally must be dealt with at the emotional amygdaloid level, rather than the rational willful level. Computer buffs will understand me when I say that to do otherwise would be like trying to correct a basic anomaly existing in the DOS system or the CPS machine code by merely working at the Windows level. Can’t be done.
Affectology maintains that correction to the way in which we encode emotional material and access it through automatic affect bridging can only be effectively altered by accessing ‘feeling structures’ at the affect level rather than working with perceivable thought and cognition structures at a narrative level. This supports the affectologist’s ‘feelings not thoughts’ mode of approach and the descriptive axiom, ‘Mind over Chatter.’
The primary contention in affectology is that rational thought and reason and their cousin, conscious will, are relatively powerless compared to affect bridging and the emotional symptoms of this powerful and immediate phenomenon.
Chapter Wrap-up:
- This chapter has shown us that there is a cognitive dissonance about ‘emotional memory.’
- The human system remembers perseverated affect reaction and memory but not the content.
- The reactions in the present are truly automatic, while any analysis of their causal path (Affect Bridge) is impossible.
- The amygdala and primal affect brain centers simply hijack any conscious or cognitive efforts to moderate reaction.
To Continue to be enthralled, go now to PART THREE