Emotional Chaos Theory is an explanation of how personal insights gained by mapping the complex emotional states that people may experience during times of change, disappointment or hurt can lead to dramatic improvements in their sense of personal identity, self-respect, and wellbeing. This transformative learning process of re-engagement with life emerges as a post-traumatic growth…
Energy we know. We feel energetic or flat. We feel warmth from a fire and relax, or the cold blast of a wind in winter and tense up. Many of us have felt small electric shocks by accident, and some have been sadly tortured by them. If we call out to someone in the distance,…
Most but not all theories of how to manage traumatised people take a psychological view, that emotions and feelings are one and the same. The research paradigm for emotion has been that they arise in a linear stimulus-response process, but with no clear psychological purpose. Traumatisation, in this view, seems to be the overwhelming of…
Prince William and Kate have delightfully announced that they are going to use an ‘emotion coaching’ style of upbringing for their children. They are picking up on John Gottman’s description of mutual responsiveness, which he contrasts with three other relational attitudes towards emotional expression – disapproving, dismissing, or laissez-faire. Brilliant. I hope the royals will…
Greed is a form of Denial that in the inner heart there is grief unresolved. Greed is saying publicly, to be heard and seen, “Expand to conceal the grief that hides inside.” That is why greed feeds and feeds on others, imagining that power and control will cure the inner misery. But only purifying the…
So often, pleas for unity and cooperation spread silence rather than enthusiasm. A YouTube video of a motivational speaker showed him raise the spirits of his audience by encouraging attitudes of self-empowerment in leadership, enabling people to face challenges with confidence. Vocal affirmations across the audience brought people to their feet, until he spoke his…
Is information a noun, or a verb? Can information sit in a computer’s hard disc? Or do we need to be clearer that data sits in a hard disc as static patterns of digits, while life goes on around it? This post, like the chicken-egg conundrum, challenges a misleading feature of information theory. It is worth writing about,…
A healthcare scientist once said, “There are facts, and there are feelings.” I doubt that it is such a clear distinction, and so I responded, “A free-thinking human being, including a scientist, chooses what counts as a fact! The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio showed that our power of choice depends on our feelings. It’s circular!” Which comes…
Feelings of illness and fatigue are not the same as the physical disease process. The disease is physical; the feelings are our information about the disease. Likewise, feelings of emotion are information about our physical emotions. Why is this an important distinction? As a medic, I understand emotions as preparation states of a person’s physical…
As a medic I was trained to think about the body chemistry of health and disease. It is now widely known that the body’s immune system and the body’s brain talk to each other chemically about what they are doing. When the immune system is very active defending the body against germs, it tells the…
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