Dr. Sharon Gerstenzang - Unified theory of Emotions

1. Relationship with self

To know your emotions requires both verbal and physical expression. The word ‘emotion’ appeared for the first time in any language (English) in 1867, when psychology researchers needed a word to describe this thing they were studying in humans and animals. Human beings have many habits of physical suppression of emotion that keep them from knowing how they truly feel and think. Therefore, everyone needs conscious practice at expressing emotion physically.

Ambivalence is critical for all activity. It is internal cuing of reluctance and hesitance on any issue and corresponding internal cuing of pushiness and assertiveness on the same issue. Human beings need to be aware of their ambivalence on everything AND that ambivalence is ‘just’ a feeling, meant for keeping intuition and passion alive on any issue.

Pain is the beginning of all things, and the source of prayer for help. Pain feel like breaking: a broken bone, a broken heart, broken skin. The sensation of breaking helps to understand pain, right down to the cellular level. Think about how, at the 'micro' level, a cell wall breaks open in injury, and how that physical break stimulates activity to repair the break: summoning help in the form of biochemical activity. At the ‘macro’ level, it is the same: your pain summons help.

Hate is a by-product of love and life like poop is a by-product of food and water. Every day is filled with ‘toxic’ situations, wasteful moments, icky thoughts, and non-win-win actions...i.e., hate. You need to figure out what exactly is toxic about hate-full situations, because that toxicity affects not just you, but everyone else involved in the hateful situation.

Shame shapes success, by telling us the rules even when we don’t know them. You need to admit and experience your shame even when it is ‘toxic’ shame, meaning shame at violating toxic rules, as in being ashamed of wanting sex. You need to admit and experience shame even when it occurred in a wrong situation into which you were entirely forced, as in being molested. Without experiencing your shame, you cannot fully move forward into better rules.

Confusion is necessary for learning. Its activity shakes up the brain. This pure energy of shake up and shakedown energizes brain tissue so new neural pathways can form.

Jealousy is the emergency glue of destiny. When you’re jealous, there is something that you should have in your life, should master, should be a part of. The lust and pain in jealousy indicate how important the issue is, and the hostility in jealousy indicates the power, or pressure, within you to do something about it.

Love is the beautiful process of balancing unbalanced emotions into virtues; love is needed in order to figure out the tricky clues from jealousy.

Madness is anger in its least manageable form. It’s important to know when you’re mad, because feeling mad means you’re down for the count, and in need of major internal sorting. We all get mad multiple times in a day, but many of us are so good at managing it in socially acceptable ways that we deny our madness. Trying to take constructive action directed by madness is like trying to hit a small target, and only that target, from 100 yards away...using a shotgun.

Laughter is the best outcome of madness. Try laughing at how lousy your marksmanship is when you think it’s great, which is when you’ve gone mad. Bad outcome equals bad marksmanship, which indicates you were mad, even if you thought you weren’t.

Conflict between you and your true love is necessary, like gravity is necessary. It helps you to grow together if you exercise in it together.

Initially true love involves automatic perfect and manageable balance along an unimaginably huge number of dimensions.

Attraction in true love is to a mate who is exactly as mature, and exactly as immature, as you are.

Victim-villain roles are what you’re caught in when you’re doing badly with your partner, and they work both ways between you. Each of you alternates in who’s the villain (no matter how subtly) and who is the villain (no matter how obnoxiously).

Your complaints about your lover, and theirs about you, provide important clues to one another's potentials—ways to get out of villain and victim behaviors.

One amazing balance is that always one of you is overall emotionally self-controlled and the other is overall emotionally self-expressive.

Even when the balance looks ugly between you two, it is absolutely complementary.

Questing for happily ever after is about making ugly balance into beautiful balance.

When you feel an EMOTION, your partner feels it too.

When your partner feels an EMOTION, you feel it too.

When you wrestle with an EMOTION, your partner is wrestling with it too, whether or not she/he is conscious of it.

When your partner wrestles with an EMOTION, you are wrestling with it too, whether or not you are conscious of it.

RELATIONSHIPS