PLANETLightworker - July 2002

*EXCLUSIVE PLW EXCERPT* Overcoming Emotional Chaos Chapter I - Emotions – The next frontier B Y D O C C H I L D R E & D E B O R A H R O Z M A N

If each of us sweeps in front of our own steps, the whole world would be clean.
— Goethe

EDITOR'S NOTE: Overcoming Emotional Chaos provides insight into new research on the heart, emotions and health that can be applied to daily life. There are a number of new or unusual words used in the book to describe the techniques and tools and help people understand the language of the feeling world. New word combinations are needed because nothing in the common vernacular adequately conveys the feeling experience the authors are trying to give the reader.

FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF US, LIVING IS FEELING. Imagine spending time with a loved one, experiencing a beautiful spot in nature listening to your favorite piece of music, or viewing an exciting sports game without any connection whatsoever to the emotional experience. Feelings allow us to experience the textures of life. They are such a natural part of our existence that often we take them for granted; but life without feeling is a terribly empty place. In fact, when our feelings are numb or shut down, we’re just mechanically surviving. We shut down feelings as a defense when we can’t manage or handle the discomfort they bring us. Not feeling often seems the least painful alternative.

When we don’t understand the purpose of feelings or know how to interpret them, we can get anxious, angry and overreact. Feelings can complicate our life and lead us to heartache and heartbreak. Not that this is always bad. We often learn from heartache, but just as often we end up trapped for years in judgment, blame and resentment. Unmanaged feelings and unresolved anguish lead to a lot of misunderstanding and hate.

The next frontier of human advancement is the emotional frontier. The task is to learn how to intelligently resolve our emotions for our own and others’ benefit, to enrich our experience of life. While this sounds wonderful, many would think it idealistic for society, let alone for themselves. Hard as they might try, they just can’t control their anger, lift their depression, or move beyond fears and insecurities — their emotional chaos.

The world is faster and busier than ever. People have more pressures than they can handle and are more uncertain about the future. Emotional stress is not going to go away. We need to raise our emotional set point—our threshold of emotional overreaction—and we can, once we understand how.

Overcare, over-identity, and over-attachment are an emotional virus in our society. They are the unsolved mysteries behind much of our vulnerability to overreaction, anxiety, anger, hurt, overwhelm, depression, or fatigue. Yet we are unaware of how this virus functions in us and spreads to others.

Let’s look at a description of overcare, over-identity, and over-attachment, followed by a situation that illustrates how each one “played out,” and conclude with the emotional outcome it had on the people involved. Although overcare, over-identity, and over-attachment intertwine very intimately, the intention of these three extreme examples is to illustrate how each can become the dominant factor in a situation.

Overcare
When the basic human need to care is out of balance, we move into overcare or not enough care. We all know what not enough care feels like, but we may not be aware of how overcare affects us. Overcare about people, issues and things can pervade our feeling worlds and shape our thoughts and actions.

Illustration:
Celeste believed that she wasn’t a loving mother to her children unless she was constantly worrying about them. Even though they were 35 and 42, she worried when they had a cold, worried when they went on vacation that something might happen, and when they visited, she worried whether they were dressed warmly enough when they went outdoors, just as she had always done since they were little. After all, she was a mother and this is what mothers do. To Celeste, her worry (which translates as overcare) expressed her love for them. To the kids, who were now adults, Celeste’s overcare made them want to avoid her. As a result, they rarely called or visited.

Outcome:
Celeste has developed health problems that are stress-related, according to her doctor, but is unaware (in denial) of the stress in her life. For Celeste, worrying about her children is love and she sees it as an endearing quality. What she has been unable to recognize is that her overcare is more about her remaining in the role she has played all her life. The role is familiar and is what has defined her sense of who she is and her personal value. She doesn’t realize that everything could improve across the board if she would give herself permission to move into a more balanced type of care with her children.

Over-identity
When one’s own identity is overly invested in a person, place, issue or thing, then we have over-identity. Over-identity with ideas, beliefs and others’ values spawns anger, judgment and blame, ultimately placing us in the victim mode.

Illustration:
Don was so over-identified with his projects and performance at work that it took a toll on his people skills. Whenever Don’s boss would call and leave him a voice-mail, Don would anxiously redial his boss every two minutes and wouldn’t talk to anyone else until he could reach him. Don lost clients and his co-workers felt put off. He was overly concerned with his projects and performance and what his boss might think, because to him, his work was his identity. Therefore nothing could ever be perfect enough.

Outcome:
Don was never able to see that his over-identity led to a blind perfectionism that cost him his job. Angry and depressed after he was fired, he became fanatical about his religion and politics, and alienated all his friends. Don’s story illustrates clearly that when we don’t take the time to find out who we are (create our own value), we will continue to allow other people, places, issues and things to define us. This can only lead to blame and resentment.

Over-attachment
When our self-worth is low or lacking in some area, we overly attach ourselves to someone, some place, some issue or some thing that would send a message back that we were valued or ‘of value.’ Over-attachment represses those we love and suffocates our inner peace and security.

Illustration:
Joan and Brad had been married four years. Brad felt he couldn’t do anything without being under the ever-present watchful eye of Joan. As for Joan, she just wanted him to know she was there for him. When they went to parties, Joan would spend the whole evening trying to make sure that Brad was having a good time. She would constantly ask him if he wanted another drink or let him know who was coming into the room in case he wanted to talk with them. Brad felt so suffocated by Joan’s over-attachment that he insisted on going to a marriage counselor.

Outcome:
Because Joan felt so insecure about her own value and identity, she felt the need to create a reason (attachment) for Brad to keep her around and not “stray.” Brad was feeling stifled and choked by the obsessive attention. Brad and Joan eventually divorced, leaving Joan feeling rejected, betrayed and not understanding why.

In each of the above examples, overcare, over-identity, or over-attachment was an unconscious emotional habit. When our feelings cause us suffering, we often end up in overwhelm, anxiety or depression. Most of us don’t understand why and we haven’t a clue as to how to release our feeling world from the clutches of habit. We suffer silently, or we reach for solace from friends, religion, therapy or self-help, movies and stimulants. We often feel alone, yet we share the same feeling world with countless others today and throughout the ages. The outcomes are the same – repression, happiness interspersed with suffering, unbridled emotional expression, and endless conflict. If we take an honest look, humanity’s emotional advancement can seem no farther along than it was during the caveman days, even though mental advancement has soared far ahead. This isn’t wrong or some evolutionary mistake. It’s just that it is time now for our developed intellects to understand the most sensitive of human qualities – feelings.

Just as those airplanes ripped open the World Trade Center, so they ripped open our hearts. We were forced to feel things we never acknowledged before, and discovered a level of emotional connectedness with everyone in the world that we never dreamed we had. We also became more aware of our own emotional stress.

Even before those world-unhinging terrorist attacks, people were experiencing an unprecedented degree of stress that had become widespread. Numerous studies have consistently shown emotional stress is highest among the impoverished and repressed. It is also extremely high among executives, professionals, and fulltime working mothers, where nearly one out of five men and one out of two women feel high stress. In the United States, almost one out of five school-age children have behavioral problems as a result of emotional distress, more than double the number in 1980.1

Depression, eating disorders, adjustment difficulties, hyperactivity, and other “psychosocial” problems are increasing in children as well as adults, and are a disturbing reflection of the emotional stress of modern life. The questions we need to pause and ask ourselves, personally and collectively, include: How long can we keep up with the accelerating speed of life and uncertainty? What will be the ongoing emotional and health consequences? And the social consequences?

Nathanael West once said, “Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered.” Nevertheless it’s emotions that often control our lives, perpetuate our stress, and portend our future. Most of us do spend a lot of time keeping our house clean, our bills paid and our workplace in order. We have relatively happy lives, but we also have one or two scenarios that are a constant, nagging source of stress and emotional drain. Celeste’s unnecessary worry about her adult children, Don’s blinding perfectionism and Joan’s suffocating watchfulness were isolated situations that created all sorts of problems in their lives.

If you’ve been aware of nagging areas of stress in your life, odds are you’ve tried to deal with it. You may have told yourself to eat differently, to rest more, to see what you could change or to just get over it. You may have tried affirmations, prayer, and positive thinking, talked to friends or visited a doctor. But if out of control emotions and emotional drain are still going on, you have probably never recognized overcare, over-identity or over-attachment at the root of it. These are difficult to spot because they are so closely connected to basic human needs – to care, to have identity, and to feel secure. Because these needs relate to feelings, attempts at rational control alone won’t work. Answering these needs requires a power beyond the intellect. The answer lies in the power of the human heart.

It’s no coincidence that ancient cultures from Greece to China looked to the heart as a primary source of feeling, virtue, and intelligence. They felt that only through the heart could greed be replaced by charity, selfishness by compassion and fear by love. Religions all over the world talk about the heart as the seat of the soul and doorway to spirit or higher self. The ancient Chinese considered the heart as the primary organ capable of influencing and directing our emotions, our morality, our decision-making ability and the attainment of inner balance. It’s interesting that the Chinese characters for “thinking, “thought,” “intent,” “listen,” “virtue,” as well as “love” all include the symbol for “heart.”

Neither is it a coincidence that western languages also refer to heart both as a physical organ and as a metaphor for feeling, intuition, and the center of our total personality or being. After all, it’s in the area of the heart that we experience the physical feeling of many emotions, like joy, love, hurt and sadness. We talk of “losing heart,” “having heart,” “being heartfelt,” “playing with a lot of heart,” “going deep in your heart to find an answer,” and so forth. It was only in the 1990s that science discovered there is in fact a link between the physical and feeling heart – therein lies the secret to emotional management and freedom. This discovery may prove to be one of the most profound for us as individuals, and provide hope for humanity.

The process of feeling a feeling or experiencing an emotion is both biochemical and neurological. It involves the heart, brain, nervous and hormonal systems, and sensory organs. We use the words feeling and emotion interchangeably in society (and throughout this book) because the process is so complex. A combination of feeling sensations, associated mental thoughts and biochemical reactions shape human beliefs and emotional experience, in gradations from very pleasant to very painful. Emotions like worry, anxiety, hurt, anger, guilt, fear, sadness or depression are usually experienced as uncomfortable or distressing; whereas emotions like love, joy, forgiveness, compassion, appreciation or bliss generally uplift, release and energize us.

The world is more ready today than ever to learn about the ability and power of the heart to manage the emotions. With our very survival at stake, more people are looking deeper into their hearts for solutions. We see a more heartfelt quest for spirit everywhere. We are coming to understand that the heart is where we go when the mind has no answers. Now, science is verifying the heart’s role in feeling and intuition, at the same time as the global need increases for more people to engage their hearts. Being able to understand the language of the heart, the language of our feeling world is our next step. It’s heart time on the planet. As we learn how to manage our emotions with the heart, new intelligence and understanding can emerge.

The heart’s intelligence and power are seated in love, and the world is more ready than ever before to learn about love. Most of us feel that the meaning of life has something to do with love. That’s really why we’re all here—to learn how to love more and love better, and it’s becoming an obvious imperative. Everyone wants to love, but few of us have been taught how to love or be loved.

This lack of understanding of love is at the heart of overcare, over-identity, over-attachment and emotional chaos. If we multiply our own overcare, over-identity and over-attachment by six billion people who share the same feelings in different disguises, we can understand why the world is like it is.

Understanding brings hope. If we can learn to understand the language of the feeling world at the root of our beliefs and actions, we can better understand how to love and embrace hope for new solutions. The hope of the new millennium and this decade is that we will recognize that emotions are the next frontier to be understood and managed for personal, social and global peace and quality of life.

-PERSONAL EVALUATION -

1. Where in your own life do you feel you are not doing enough? Being enough? Giving enough? Or doing too much? Being too much? Giving too much?

2. Where do you feel you compromise yourself?

3. How do you feel about that? Any judgments, resentments, or blame?

4. On a scale of 1-5, with 1 as very low and 5 as very high, estimate your emotional set-point, your threshold of overreaction to things that trigger irritation, frustration, or anxiety in you.

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