EMOTIONS

Comes the question sometimes as to whether we want to control or restrain our emotions or whether we might want to give them free rein. Ordinarily, we might be willing to let positive emotions, if there are any, have free expression. However, we might question whether or not negative emotions, if there are any, should be freely expressed or controlled in some manner. We often do not give this much thought, yet it is our emotions that plague us with more troubles than our non-emotional thoughts.


An Emotions Schema
In this schema, there are really only three emotions experienced by humans: love, fear, anger. Love is the only desired emotion, the other two are considered undesired, that is, negative. Our schema now states that fear results from loss. Our schema further states that anger results from fear, therefore, indirectly from loss. Love is the only inborn emotion characterized by a human tendency to associate with and contact, first the mother, than related others. Bonding Theory and the resulting studies by others, suggests that the mother and child "fall in love" due to this inborn characteristic. This phenomenon is simply transformed into the adult feeling of "falling in love" with a desired partner. This makes good sense if you just accept it as that. Returning to the lowest level, let's look now at fear. Although infants may react fearfully, this is only a reflex that occurs at a discomfort stimulus. Discomfort is the loss of comfort, and we could go on from there. Fear triggers two basic impulses--an impulse can be defined as a reflex associated with a specific response. One impulse is flight, the other is defense (fight). This is because the bodily mechanisms are activated by reflex activity and produce secretions that activate our muscle and circulatory systems, both necessary for flight or fight. With this reflex action occurring, it is only the association with the specific response that can guide appropriate--or inappropriate--behavior. It is the association that produces anger. The more mature responder can put meaning, that is, make a more advanced association, and engage in feeling something about his fear while he flees or fights.
In our original work, we systematically explore the different qualities of emotions we can experience. By looking carefully inward at mind and body, one might see that directing and guiding his emotional experiences can be made easier simply by deciding which of the three emotions is affecting him, and why. Within this context, we are more able to understand our emotions and work at controlling them to our benefit. We try this here by examining some of the emotional quality of love. The love emotion is the strongest with regard to the well being of our psychological self, and perhaps, our physical self. It is primarily within the framework of relationships with others, that love has the most meaning.

Defining Love Needs
Love as a feeling, as a need, as an emotion can simply be translated as an expression of how one wishes to deal with others, or have them deal with him/her. Understanding the difference between these two viewpoints is crucial to fulfilling love needs. C. S. Lewis has stated there are four types of love: friendship, affection, passion, and charity. Understanding these differences is essential to avoid the confusion that results with love partners. (We help with this understanding in the original work.) The significant points that appear evident are that love needs must be gratified and the only choices we have concern the nature of the relationships we wish and the ways we develop these relationships. Once we are willing to start making the decisions that accomplish this for us, fulfillment of our love needs will naturally occur as a necessary and undeniable result.
Loving someone is highly dependent on the extent to which he/she fulfills the selfish needs of the loved person. Does that get anyone's attention? Love needs are highly personal and the central focus of our selfish nature, which has already been addressed in the attitudes page. Satisfying our love needs has a totally selfish basis. This leads us back to the questions already approached regarding attitudes of self and selfishness. To view that page, see Attitudes.
Loving, it seems, is an internal definition of the sum of one's love needs. For some of us, this is a clear picture. Others find the definition confusing, distorted, threatening, or, at least, vague. This definition is produced by a combination of the intrinsic components of our humanness, viz., inborn tendencies, cultural and societal forces that affect our learning and development, and the interaction of these forces and change tendencies. One lasting definition can seldom be verbally clarified to the satisfaction of another person because no one can fully experience the effect of anyone else's internal definition. What results, then, is not for others to understand how we feel, how we love, or what our definition of love means to us. They simply can't. More important though, is for each of us to heartily work at self defining what our love needs are. Then, by applying the understandings gained, to find better ways of meeting our own love needs. This will give us an improved position for relating to the expression of the love needs of others and encouraging them to want to respond to our love needs.

Fulfilling Love Needs
There has been a tremendous amount of effort expended in answer to the question concerning how to encourage others to respond to our love needs. Does that mean the question is unanswerable? No, not hardly, because the answer for that only has to be for yourself. At this point, you might need to start asking yourself--no, start telling yourself--whether or not you regard yourself as important, and how important you rate yourself. Because, if you are not the most important person in the world to yourself, then you have to answer the corollary question: Who is? Only by getting on a firm footing with this, can you expect to gain in importance to anyone else. And if you do not need to be important to anyone, you had better go back and start reading at the very beginning of these pages. You are missing out on some very essential ideas. Importance again, is one of those very relative terms. We, each of us, have to make some very summary judgments about the importance of things in all of the matters facing us. one of the most important judgments we make is how we feel about ourselves. Only by coming to grips with an understanding of our very elemental value of "self" can we promote and actualize the characteristics that make us important to anyone else. Who, in our environment, provides the most for us? Who, when all is said and done, no one else providing, will care for, encourage, sustain, and nuture you? Answer the question carefully before you proceed, please.

Revaluing Our Love Needs
Our love needs are the very basic building blocks for our esteem, self worth, feelings of adequacy, degree of satisfactions obtained from our life activities, and for fulfillment as active, purposeful, responsive, total human beings. That's a mouthful and deserves our complete attention while savoring it's delicacy. Our love needs do not occur in a vacuum. By being competent and complete we are more able to feel love and to act appropriately with respect to our love needs. Our feelings, impulses, and reactions toward meaningful others will be more in line with the type of satisfactions we desire with others. We are continually motivated to look at ourselves, we can't escape that. The first love needs we have to fulfill are our own. We are much more competent to help fill the love needs of others if we have experienced what is needed to fulfill our own love needs. Why not start with self?