If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers
The Emotional Logic Centre (EL Centre) teaches that all your unpleasant emotions are parts of a single, integrated, genetically-inbuilt, and healthy adjustment process. These survival emotions empower you to respond constructively to disappointments, setbacks and hurts, with improved physical energy to move either towards or away from challenging situations and people. Emotions are not just ‘all in the mind’, and not just ‘feelings’. E-motion is energy in motion.
Each emotion has a different useful purpose as part of this integrated process. Understanding where they fit within it gives your unpleasant emotions genuine meaning and value, so people no longer feel ashamed of their emotional experience. Instead, you will know how to harness the useful information of those emotions into naming what’s important (your personal values being challenged in this situation), and agreeing an action plan with others to preserve just one of those values.
As a result, during times of change you can come through stronger! You won’t hear that teaching anywhere else about unpleasant emotions like anxiety, fear, anger, guilty self-questioning, depressive emptiness, and sadness. Emotional Logic will safely take you deeper than those feelings, however, to name your personal values. It is challenges to these that drives many small loss reactions during a normal day. Naming them empowers you to think through how best to make reasonable responses that build a future on your named values. That dissipates all the emotional unpleasantness into effective and more enjoyable social living. Unpleasant emotions then no longer accumulate and built up into overload, stress, distress, and illness.
That’s your inbuilt Emotional Logic getting activated by understanding your emotions in a new way.
You can email the Emotional Logic Centre on their behalf: hello@emotionallogiccentre.org.uk. The administrator will ask a personal tutor or EL coach to contact you confidentially and arrange the best way forward. Generally speaking, the more people involved in a situation who understand how to activate their Emotional Logic, the better. So we encourage more than one person to learn EL at the same time to help ‘creative conversations’ at home afterwards. Emotional Logic is NOT therapy. It is a personal development method using lifelong learning feedback to work out the best solution-focused ways forwards. Children are quick to pick up this way of thinking also. That makes it an ideal method to help families and households get on better during times of change. Emotional Logic can greatly help some very disturbing problems that people hide, such as self-harming, suicidal thoughts, compulsive behaviours, recurrent depressions and anxieties. It is a gentle and safe way to develop inner strength and greater adaptability, opening a brighter and more honest future.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy identifies habits of thinking that disable people’s ability to do things, then uses behavioural methods to break those habits. It is a Stoic approach to problem-solving, claiming that emotions are merely side-effects of thinking that will disperse when the unhelpful habits of thinking cease and normal activity is restored. CBT explicitly excludes considering the effects of difficult relationships in its assessments, focusing on the individual’s experiences.
By contrast, Emotional Logic maps habitual patterns of emotional processing that may trap the body’s internal chemistry and external social messages in unhelpfully distressing or confusing cycles of tension and behaviour. People’s self-beliefs and beliefs about the world develop from these learnt emotional habits. Babies and children can grieve even before they have language or any ‘cognitive frame’ in a way that adults have. Accumulated pre-verbal grieving can affect a person’s wellbeing and social adaptability well into adult life. However, unhelpful emotional patterns can spontaneously transform on feedback of new understanding about the healthy emotional adjustment process. The subsequent healthy release of emotional energy trapped in unhelpful patterns can then be harnessed into rational, logical values-based action plans that achieve uniquely personal goals in life.
The Emotional Logic method is therefore a lifelong learning approach to personal development, not a targeted therapy. It equips people with ‘trauma-responsive conversational skills’ based in a ‘systemic’ approach that adds confidence to responsiveness and self-respect in new situations, not only problem-solving specific behavioural difficulties.
In adults, CBT and EL address different halves of the same adjustment process. CBT helps adults to limit the behavioural impact of their recurring unpleasant memories. EL reframes those unpleasant memories in a more socially-constructive and potentially empowering light. CBT is focused, while EL releases energy and insight to choose how to adapt when facing new situation. They have complementary roles, particularly in recovery from depressive illness and preventing its recurrence.
Since the 1970s a ‘new science’ has developed. It uses powerful computers to informationally model changing natural environments and life, developed first for weather forecasting and then generalised to understand living systems of relationships. The ‘old science’ of the previous 300 years had to control and limit life to identify linear strings of cause and effect. The new science looks at patterns on the move instead, seeing how patterns of activity transform each other. It is truly a science of life.
Studies have shown how feedback learning within these ‘dynamic non-linear systems’ brings order to life. This happens even when these relational systems have been in turmoil or chaos. The old science had no way to study that emergent effect. Much 20th Century psychology and its therapy methods developed in the old ‘linear cause-effect’ attitude, resulting in the need to diagnose an illness and then treat ‘it’. In the 21st Century, however, feedback learning is seen as a more effective way to transform life.
A medical doctor who understood emotions as physical features of our survival mechanisms developed Emotional Logic as a lifelong learning method to transform patterns of grieving when multiple personal values have been challenged by life’s circumstances. Emotional Logic has unique tools that map inner emotional turmoil. He noticed patterns of unhealthy or traumatised habits emerging in these maps that were repeatedly associated with distress and specific stress-related illnesses. Most people have experienced times when their emotions are in turmoil because of overwhelming changes. The lifelong learning programme he developed released people from these patterns and transformed their inner and social life experience. People became less self-critical, more empathic, and more engaged with transforming the root causes of problems early, before they build up into crises.
That’s why emotional chaos is more than a theory. Understood in the right way, it is a seedbed for personal growth.
A book group needs a host who has been inspired by their experience of Emotional Logic, and wants to put some time to facilitate informal discussion between others who are curious to know more. A host manual can be bought from the Emotional Logic Centre shop, which would guide you through the process, and suggest various discussion questions for each chapter. The Emotional Logic ‘casebook’ is written so that new ideas are introduced progressively through the chapter stories about how emotions can be helpful to build inner strength.
We recommend that a potential host completes our 8-week Foundation Award course before gathering a reading group. This will ensure you have a balanced overview of the healthy adjustment process, so that you can encourage the less confident members of a group to feel safe and express their views. A group of perhaps up to a dozen people might meet for five consecutive weeks to read and discuss chapters and themes. A qualified Emotional Logic tutor can be invited into one later session to answer questions that the host has gathered from the group.
Transformative learning can follow for group members to enrich their lives and those they relate to. Some may want to go on to further learning, so you can make a local mutual support group to influence your local communities. For more details, please contact the Emotional Logic Centre office: hello@emotionallogiccentre.org.uk.
There are low cost ways to have an introductory overview. Firstly, for only £10.00 you can buy an Online Introductory Course (OIC) of eight 5-8 minute videos and downloads. This additionally gives you access to our unique online ‘card pattern generator’, a powerful tool for self-reflection, which vastly helps relevant learning. Several other options can be viewed after that here in the Shop. The more people who understand this basic language of emotions, the better families, workplaces, and communities will adapt to change with less stress. Private learning appointments (PLAs) for individuals, couples, and small family groups can be arranged also by contacting the Emotional Logic Centre office: hello@emotionallogiccentre.org.uk.
The aim of our 8-week Foundation Award course is that anyone can become a skilled helper in family, workplace, and community life, having the conversational confidence to have something helpful to say when anyone is facing life difficulties. Being able to handle disappointments, setbacks, and hurts constructively prevents challenges from escalating into illness and relationship breakdowns. As a registered Charity our prices are kept low, so only £290.00 covers the cost of a tutor who gives individualised feedback in a 1:1 sessions on the group webinars, online materials, and coursework. This is ‘transformational learning’. It will alter the way you understand your own emotions, past present and future, and equip you to share your new understanding with others. Allow on average 4-hours per week for eight weeks to complete. When people have qualified with the Foundation Award, follow-up peer support webinars are also provided by the Emotional Logic Centre to get feedback on how to apply the method in the practical situations that people face.
Anyone who is in a ‘people role’ of professional, support, or carer-type work, can benefit from the 10-month EL Coaching Award. This equips people to integrate the Emotional Logic method into their established ways of working with people who have life problems. EL coaching skills add the ability to guide someone else’s self-help learning to make sense of their unpleasant emotions when facing life’s challenges. Clients become better equipped to untangle their inner chaos or lack of energy. It is a transferable personal development method, not a therapy. It normalises grief emotions, and develops self-respecting emotional awareness to aid healthy adjustments. It therefore cannot conflict with any specialist intervention skills, because EL’s main outcome is to improve responsiveness in relationships and adaptability in any life setting. Monthly payment schemes can help people to cover the £1500 fee. Allow on average 4 hours per week for study and practice over a maximum ten months, during which your personal tutor will guide you on a reflective learning path with practical casework, online resources, interactive webinars, buddying conversational skills development, and practice ‘personal learning appointments’.
Children can be so quick to learn. That means they can also learn bad habits of emotional processing quickly. Children’s illustrated books can help them quickly to unlearn bad habits and relearn healthier ways to make sense of their emotional experience. It then helps them to make sense of the emotions they see and feel others express. Teachers were telling us time and again that it is the transition from primary (elementary) to secondary (high school) education that is the tipping point for a lifetime of problems. They asked me to help smooth that transition. Fortunately, two former head teachers realised the power of Emotional Logic to equip teachers who could spread this health promoting understanding without calling in health specialists. They developed age-appropriate materials for school teachers, and our ‘whole school community’ programmes are now thriving in scores of schools with excellent outcomes throughout the entire schooling age range.
I then wanted to equip parents, grandparents, and foster parents to help their children at home, aged 4-9 particularly. My aim is to improve quality time in families early on by reading together in ways that improved emotional understanding and playful craft communications. The Shelly and Friends illustrated book series was fun to write, and it is fun to share. Parents and carers can join ‘Shelly Clubs’, where they learn the basics of the Emotional Logic method in ways that support their reading to their children and creative activities. All this can help to normalise and make sense of unpleasant emotions as parts of healthy living. This reduces self-criticism and shame. New understanding helps children to move on reasonably and grow stronger with their emotions, not denying them. Self-respect and empathy grow.
