We are enamored of our ability to think. We exhort ourselves and others to use "common sense," as if everyone has the same ability to develop it, or as if every one's idea of common sense will be the same. We are pleased when we use our intelligence to make sense of something, to figure something out. We convince ourselves that we are making the important decisions of life with the pure power of reason...and we are smug about it.
We struggle with emotions, they cause us pain and interfere with our carefully laid out plans. The new exercise schedule we set up... abandoned, the healthful diet... scuttled, the vow to be patient...forgotten, the promise to not procrastinate... ignored yet again. We have been captured by raw emotion and we feel out of control.
It feels like a battle. One sides wins one time; the other side triumphs the next. It is only now with the new awareness of the role of emotion in human life that we have the ability to fully appreciate and
work with our emotions.
Most of the early research in human behavior focused predominantly on how we thought and were able to reason. In fact, there was precious little research in the area of emotions. Emotions were an embarrassment; they were a part of the human subject that could confound the data. They were also difficult to identify and, were also impossible to quantify.
In the last 20 years, however, many researchers have gone into this uncharted land and have come up with a view of emotion and reason that challenges the traditionally held beliefs about how reason and emotion play out in our daily lives. In the 19Th century the dominant story in academic circles was that humans were at the the apex of rationality. We, as the most developed and advanced form of life, had the ability to make rational decisions and not be swayed by primitive emotion. That was the story.
But recent neurological research does not support that premise. Emotionality has been observed at the neural level to be necessary and critical for the concept of self and even for decision making. Subjects who have a brain injury that affects the seat of emotion have an impossible time making decisions: If one has
no preference, likes something no more or less than another, how can decide between them? Therefore, emotions are now seen as an integral and necessary part of functioning well and effectively in life. But the research does not stop there: It suggests that emotions underlie a huge part of our contact, our awareness of the world and ourselves...and that some of that contact is unconscious.
Reason and emotion are warring siblings that have not yet learned how to cooperate...nor have learned to appreciate how each functions. In order to make peace within, we must undertake any of the mental training practices, including therapy, to integrate the two warring sides. When we are able to do that consistently, that is, work with the best that human evolution has devised, the transformation we seek is ours.
