Feelings
The information that we receive through all five of our senses, the hormones and chemicals that are released into our bodies in response, and the complex wiring of the brain as it filters, catalogues, and stores those experiences, are interwoven with Feelings. And because they are drawn from all five senses those feelings are not just intellectual, or emotional, they can be extremely physical.
I knew this in broad terms, and of course through lived experience, but I decided to look up feelings and the brain on the internet! I found some very potted definitions of brain anatomy on a website (https://my-ms.org/anatomy_brain_part2.htm#0 ) and something fell into place for me.
It helped me to understand the depth of the process that plays out for most humans when pretty much anything happens, and it gave me a possible map for the way that our brains might access our untrue and limiting assumptions, bringing with them the inevitable Feelings that are attached to them.
One sentence in particular really struck me. “The amygdala is responsible for determining what memories are stored and at what location in the brain. It's thought that this determination is based on how huge an emotional response an event invokes”.
An image sprang to mind of a filing cabinet with loads of individual files of ‘experiences’ divided into sections… but with some of them misfiled.
Like the time I ate Spaghetti Bolognese as a child, got ill and filed it under ‘things that make me sick’!
I could eat pasta on its own and Bolognese sauce on its own, but it took me years to be able to put them together again in a file marked ‘delicious’. I’m being a little flippant, but so much of our world view could be, or has been, skewed by the Feelings that stimulate our Amygdala when it is doing its admin!
When we hold the ten components of a Thinking Environment, we actively invite the exploration that uncovers untrue and limiting assumptions, the retrieval of those erroneous files? As we find them, or revisit them, I’m imagining that they have a little trip wire that triggers a VR clip that is replayed as we pull them out, reminding us of how it felt when we encountered that experience and made that assumption. The more extreme the emotional response from that time, the harder it will be to pull that file out, let alone open it up. And most certainly, in that moment, we will be dealing with the potential effects triggered by those feelings, meaning that Ease may be lost and by default the best conditions for independent thinking might be halted for a moment.
Whether we are going to move through the truth or untruth of the experience or assumption, or we decide to leave it for another day and go in a different direction, we will have felt it, whatever enough is for us, and we will need to let it pass in order to re-engage with our thinking. This may be an internal process of feeling, rather than an obvious external expression. Sometimes, just recognising that feelings are there, barely engaging with them, can help us to understand and inform our thinking.
Perhaps it only requires the first few frames of the recap of ‘what happened last time’ to be able to look inside that file, start our thinking afresh, reassess the evidence and then refile it… or shred it?
It makes two things extremely important in a Thinking Environment.
Firstly, that all ten components are in place so that there is enough psychological safety to explore emotional content and ‘welcome the release of emotion’. We need to believe that feelings and emotions are absolutely part of a natural thinking process and that when we express them, we will not encounter a response that minimises them or triggers someone else while we are trying to make sense of them. This is not necessarily something that we are supported to do generally, so it takes some time to trust that the space will just be ‘held’.
As caring people, we might be tempted to offer a tissue to dry a tear, or rush to hug someone to show our sympathy, but these could well be construed as interruptions and there are other potential hidden messages in those actions.
Are we saying finish up and put your emotions away? Is our fix telling the thinker that they are unable to work it through for themselves?
Are we honouring the Three Streams of Attention and recognising when our ‘response’ is taking precedence and we need to distance ourselves a little and rebalance?
And, secondly, as the giver of generative attention, without interruption, or as an independent thinker, we need to frame all this with the knowledge that there is no other person that can untangle those misfiles but us. The circumstances under which our Amygdala stores our memories is entirely circumstantial, subjective and unique. Only we can take full responsibility for ourselves, deciding when we want to explore and express… or not. Only we can choose to pull out those files and feel those feelings…. only we can release enough for our independent thinking to start again.