What is Emotional Versatility Training?
The scientific study of emotions began with Charles Darwin who first taught that all higher mammals are driven by emotions that foster survival, reproduction and societal success. That means that all emotions help us succeed in our environment, even though over half of them feel more bad than good. In the twenty-first century, however, the ways we act on our emotions have made us a threat to our environment and ourselves. Our high intelligence has made us so powerful that we’re degrading our land, waters and air and spoiling our habitats. Also, our capacity for love has led us to vastly overpopulate the earth and drive many other animal species towards extinction. If we don’t seriously pursue our own evolution we may go extinct ourselves and take many other species of animals and plants down with us.
Shortly after Darwin included humans in the animal world Freud taught that much of what drives us is unconscious. But Freud thought that the vital unconscious drive is libido, a sexual energy. Then 60 years later (1962) Silvan Tomkins began teaching that some of our most important unconscious drivers are actually our emotions.
At the Love and Power Institute we are introducing people to the nine inborn emotions and studying how they work, separately and together, as well as with action and thinking. These emotions are interest-excitement, joy, surprise, distress-sorrow, anger, fear, shame, disgust and contempt. All of them support our survival and success in groups since we’re not just individuals but a herd species.
Each emotion has unique beneficial and challenging aspects, so understanding them helps us navigate the emotional landscape we share with others in our group and culture. Men and women normally approach emotions differently and are expressive of some and shy or unconscious of others. Exploring these differences carefully can improve our ability to relate with different sexes, cultures, generations and ethnic groups as well as people with different sexual orientations.
Though some emotions feel good, like interest, joy, contempt and sometimes anger, and others feel uncomfortable, like distress, fear, shame and disgust, surprise just amplifies the emotion following it. But studying emotions actually feels pretty good, since it is interesting, and that improves how any other emotion feels. Thus interest is our secret weapon to help us learn a lot more about each emotion and how to operate with them more intelligently with each other.
Our training begins with an unusual approach. Instead of focusing on common emotional situations or emotional problems, we study each of our inborn emotions individually to understand how each works. Then we can explore that emotion’s effects on many different aspects of life and how it interacts with other emotions. When we respect the value, benefits and challenges of each emotion, we can more easily accept its appearance in our lives–and respect ourselves as emotional beings.
For example, there are many fascinating pair-relations between emotions, such as interest and shame. For when we’re interested enough in a person to call or text them on our cell phone and all we get is an answering device or no response at all, we may feel awkward, a mild form of shame, and start second-guessing what might be happening. We may stay uncomfortable or just switch our attention to something else.
A different form of shame is “hurt feelings” that may actually warn us that a damaged personal connection needs some work. But if a supportive group is interested enough in understanding what happened to role-play the scene with the person involved, it might take notice of small moments of interest, disappointment, depression and irritation. and come to respect each of them. By slowing down this real-life experience the group could benefit from examining all four of these emotional moments in sequence with interest and respect. Then they could experiment with different feelings and ways to act towards the other person to begin the work of mending this relationship. Everyone involved could then consider and discuss similar approaches to their own comparable situations.
Another powerful interacting pair of emotions is joy and distress. When someone we like or love is gone for longer than we want, separation distress can, “make the heart grow fonder.” So when we get together again we’re “overjoyed,” and the person we have missed becomes more valuable to us. The balance between these opposite feelings regularly makes relationships more durable.
These are just two examples of the breadth and depth of emotional versatility we gain in this class. And much of the learning is experiential, through many methods, such as pair sharing and two-chair work as well as the dramatizing exemplified above. With the trust that develops from these encounters group participants can explore and resolve emotional problems in their own lives. They can practice working on damaged relationships in subgroups and develop the courage and language to restore them.
With these tools in hand, we can develop both the skills and courage to mend and enhance close family and friendship relations. Then we can then apply them to intergroup collaboration and conflict resolution between nations, ethnic groups and even the powerful industries, environmentalists and governments that hold the future of our planet between them.