Historically, emotions have determined who lives and who dies, by shaping our genes and making the human race what it is today. At the interpersonal level, emotions are the force that shapes our relationships and hence our personalities. At the personal level, the unemotional life is not worth living (Guerney 1994).
No aspect of our mental life is more important than emotions in improving the quality of our lives and clarifying the meaning of our existence. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain events of concern to a subject that trigger bodily changes and typically motivate characteristic behavior (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008).
While experts in human behavior tended to neglect the subject of emotions during much of the twentieth-century, in recent years, emotions have become the focus of interest, not only in philosophy but also in the areas of cognitive science, neurology, evolutionary biology, interpersonal studies of human interaction, the treatment of adult love-relationships, and even economics.
In recent studies, there has been a shift from qualifying emotions as simply disruptive to seeing them as an essential part of evolutionary adaptation. Emotions are now considered essential and invaluable in problem-solving and in orienting people to their external world.
Particularly relevant to inter-personal issues (and even more specifically to marital relationships, the area of my work) is the role of emotions as being the central essence of these relationships. In the area of couples therapy, Dr. Susan Johnson is one of the pioneers who, in 1988, offered a new and powerful approach in using emotional experiences to help couples in overcoming their problems so as to reconstruct intimate bonds. The same approach has since been the basis of my work with couples.
The following points are a few important functions of emotions in intimate relationships (Johnson & Greenberg,1994):
Emotional experience and emotional expression is the primary building block of adult intimate love relationship. The people around us and the relationships we have with them provide a primary source of emotional experience. As humans, we have a need and an innate capacity for attachment to our significant others. For a child, the attachment to a care-giver is necessary to provide security for a child’s healthy development. Children who do not have this secure attachment often experience many emotional and behavioral problems later on in their adult lives and relationships. Adult love attachments form a secure base that help us adapt to the external world and protect against stress while giving us an overall sense of well-being.
Emotions are a primary signaling system and emotional expression is a regulating mechanism. Human emotions serve as a communicative function which plays a primary role in social interaction. Upon birth, an infant’s ability to communicate their needs nonverbally, through sound and facial expressions, is already highly developed. In adult love relationships, the emotional expression of one partner changes the emotional experience and the behavior of both partners! The way we express our emotions can regulate our emotional experiences with a significant other and result in a more heightened sense of security in the relationship.
Felt emotions provide access to needs and desires. The experience of your emotions connects you to your deep emotional and mental needs and wants. To be unaware of your emotions in your intimate relationship is to be cut off from an essential source of information and motivation necessary for a satisfying bond. Awareness of your needs is certainly necessary before presenting the needs to your partner.
The emotional experience is not a primitive, irrational response but a high-level information processing system. It integrates innate biological and emotional needs with past experience, with your perception of the present environment, and with anticipated interpersonal consequences.
Do not ignore your emotions, respect them. Let yourself experience them fully, and be mindful of them. This process will help you see that what your emotion are communicating to you so you can choose an appropriate response.
Until next issue, wishing you a happy relationship with your loved ones,
Dr. Khazrai
