Emotion is moving of the mind or soul; excitement of the feelings, whether pleasing or painful; disturbance or agitation of mind caused by a specific exciting cause and manifested by some sensible effect on the body.The word emotion itself means to express or get out.-article :healthy emotion by Kevin Roberts.For an example the baby fell down and it emotionally express by crying which produce the sadness feel that can be look from the face of the baby.
And here we come to three levels of emotionally-relevant experience in humans: routine emotions, situational emotions, and felt meaning.
Level one - Routine emotions
There is a ‘generalised’ or ‘routinized’ part of anger that, in a sense is ‘wired’ into us or ‘handed down’. In anger, for example, this ‘explosive’ felt quality comes to us in many different situations and is very similar, in essence, between us. So anger, at this level has much ‘sameness’ about it in the way that it implies a narrow set of physical fight-readying chemicals and behaviour. This level of emotionality is closer to a universally patterned relational structure.
Level two - Situational emotions
We have an inner life. To quote Gendlin (1973) : “We can take the situation which rouses our fight-readying home with us, and become fight-ready even when the opponent and context aren’t present.” p. 376. We thus ‘carry’ a historical sense of various situations around with us as background contexts to new situations. Also, as our situations differ in different cultures, so do our emotions. Gendlin refers to an example of the American anthropologist, Geertz, who did not recognise a kind of feeling that Javanese felt in the presence of a spiritual saint (the closest Geertz could come to the word was ‘awe’ and ‘respect’, but this wasn’t quite right either). So, situational emotions can build a lot of complexity and subtlety into them. They imply particular kinds of personal and cultural history and meanings, and are the culmination of a developmental sequence of modifications to both shared and bodily-feeling life.
As humans, we have developed many words that refer to a great diversity of subtle emotional qualities beyond the ‘general’ emotions of fear, anger, and sexual and parent-child love. Even coming to so called ‘romantic love’, we have elaborated and experienced many distinctions. So the complexity of situational emotions in human history have ‘emerged’ and we have developed a more complex vocabulary to attempt to do justice to the subtlety of these emergent experiences --- such as a ‘sense of poignancy’, a ‘bitter-sweet feeling’ or ‘an ironic humorous feeling’. Often, we don’t have words for many of these and may say “ I feel as if I were…” Such complexity is multi-layered and may move beyond the so-called clarity of one thing or another, either fear of anger. As poets understand, human existence is full of ‘mixing’, and emotional consciousness is wide enough to allow these emergent, and even novel, emotional qualities to come.
Level three - Felt meaning
Beyond routine emotions and situational emotions, Gendlin sees a further, more complex, emotionally-relevant experience that human beings have developed. This is the capacity to broaden one’s attention to notice the felt qualities of a whole situation that contextualises a series of specific situational emotions or feelings of routine emotionality. Here, attention is widened to find a ‘felt’ quality to ‘what we are in’. Implicit to this is that a felt quality can form that tells us more about the relational/functional background that is ‘before’ and ‘larger than’ the delineation of specific situational emotions. This felt background can be directly sensed as a quality in itself, and then reflected upon, to differentiate a number of situational emotions. as well as routine emotions, that may interact and change from one to another. One is then not focused on a particular emotion, but focused on a broader, felt quality that encompasses a number of emotionally-relevant experiences and situations. Such a focus brings a more fluid experience. This dimension emphasises how our experiences are holistic and interrelated. Such interrelated and holistic dimensions can themselves have felt qualities larger and more complex than particular routine or situational emotions.
Gendlin uses the example of ‘being in’ a situation with a policeman. One may simply get ‘sucked into’ a routinized emotion such as fear or anger, or a specific situational emotion such as a sense of quiet caution. Being simply moved by the sense of quiet caution may result in a particular trajectory of behaviour, one possibility being, to act in an excessively unquestioning way. So, in such a situation, getting ‘sucked into’ the situational emotion may become a habitual pattern that reduces the likelihood of responding in other possible ways that require novelty. A felt meaning is a broader focus. In noticing and feeling the quality of the whole complex experience, it first comes as a feeling of “all that”. As human beings living with language, we are able to symbolise and describe “all that”. “All that” turns out to be much more than just one routine or situational emotion to which we may automatically react (either by repressing or expressing). In attending to felt meaning, the interrelationship of a number of emotion-implying meanings may emerge. To quote Gendlin(1973) , this level of felt meaning comes when “I put myself into this whole situation I am up against, rather that just this already thinly defined routine patter.” p389.
A number of different levels of personal meaning and context may become more explicit when this broader ‘having’ of ones situation is attended to. So, for example, “in” attending to a broad felt meaning that may first look like a ‘feeling of threatened constraint’, a number of different feelings, levels and meanings may emerge: the felt importance of where I was going, the feeling that I have allowed others to control me too often in the past, that it is important for me not to stereotype the policeman, that there is “all that” about my need to keep the peace ( a long story which seems to resonate with many other personal stories). “All this” and more is “in” the felt meaning and contains endlessly more facets than can possibly be separated out.
Yet one can have “all this” in the immediacy of a felt meaning as a whole, even though it may take time to articulate and symbolise what is “in” it. Such felt meaning comes in wholes rather than parts. Gendlin thus sees this level of attending to experience as a particularly human emergent capacity, one that announces an ability to ‘stand back’ and feel the quality of the “all that” that enters into the constitution of specific emotions. He would say that the felt meaning of an “all that” is different than, and more complex than, routine and situational emotions. The main differences are that it breaks the routine between feeling and action, and can find a more specific ‘next step’ that takes account of the personal complexity of the situation. This may allow the possibility of a form of emotional intelligence that does not rely on mere general logic and rationality, but which can be informed by the more holistic intelligence of one’s uniquely situated, emotional context, in relation to one’s personal identity and history.
No comments:
Post a Comment