State of Mind: Emotional Mind

I'm going to start by talking about emotional mind.  Why?  Because that is the place where many of my patients start.  They are wrestling with depression, anxiety, or anger.

In emotional mind we are taken hostage by our limbic systems and midbrain.  We ARE our anger; we ARE our anxiety, our depression, and so on.  It has taken us over lock, stock, and barrel.  We are now thinking through a primitive part of our brain.  We can be taken hostage by our anger, by our depression, by our fear, and so on.  These are all built into us for good reason.  But many of the original primal situations from "cave man" days, which required these feeling states, are rarely present.

Emotional reasoning is not advanced.  It is very instinctual and primitive.  It does not think rationally.  It may generate thoughts, e.g., "I'm going to fail this test," but the thoughts are not being generated logically.  The thoughts are being generated by the emotion, or more accurately, the thoughts are being generated by the emotional part of the brain.  They are thoughts in bondage to emotion, rather than emotions being subservient to logical thinking.

The experience of strong emotion is somewhat like a spasm.  Indeed, panic attacks have been likened to an anxiety spasm.  When we become enraged, we don't want to be calmed down.  In fact, telling someone who is enraged to calm down may be a sure way to make them angrier.  They don't want to calm down.  They often want to take out their rage on someone or on something. 

When we are in a panic state, we may not want to stay in a panic state, but we may feel absolutely frozen and stuck in it.

When we are mired in depression, we may want to get out of it, but we can be constantly bombarded by more and more negative thoughts which seem to prevent escape.  Even the thought of getting help may be batted down with a negative thought that "getting treatment won't help; my case is hopeless."

Emotions lead to negative thoughts, which lead to more painful emotions, which lead to more negative thoughts, and so on.  In negative emotional states, it is easier to remember incidences of shame and failure from our past.  It is harder to remember positive events from our past when we are depressed, and it is harder to anticipate positive events in our future.

When we are engaged in emotional mind, we believe that we are being realistic.  There is a feeling of certainty which comes from our emotions.   If we are angry, we believe that we are justified in our anger.  If we are panicked, we are sure that there is catastrophic danger.  If we are depressed, we believe that we are only being realistic.  Emotional mind does not want to "yield the floor" to other aspects of mind.  It does not want to admit to other possible ways of looking at situations.

Of course, not all emotions are negative.  There are very positive emotions, and joy is a positive aspect of mental health.  Joy does not coexist well with anger, depression, or anxiety.  Enhancing joy in our lives is one way of dealing with our negative emotions.  I have not included a mental state of "joyful mind,"  although that would certainly make sense.  It would make sense because we know that it exists.  We know that it is distinct from our negative emotions.  It is also relativelydistinct from our logical mind state and our observing mind state, although I would tend to associate it somewhat with sensing mind.  I will write more about joy in the blog on sensing mind.