Emotions R Us

Emotions are everywhere.

They are part of our biology and our very makeup.

We curse them.

We try to deny them and pretend they don't exist, or try to use our thinking and "intelligence" to overcome them.

But in the end without them we become robots and machines, and the emotions come back with a vengeance to haunt us.

Emotions are us.

About This Site

This Website is a collection of my thoughts and theories about our emotions and how they seem to work in our lives. I believe our emotions are just another brain process that can be learnt to be modified and utilised in the same way we learn to use our vision to observe, our taste to become a gourmet or our hearing to appreciate musical harmony. This takes practice and conscious work, but some find the skill easier than others. I have tried to develop these ideas to teach basic emotional principles that some find so easy, to those who want to learn.

Many of the articles here are from a diverse source and designed for many different audiences. Hopefully over time these differences will be smoothed over.

Warnings

Before we begin, we need to outline a few of the basics before we start:

1. Rule Number One: Keep it safe. We must first try to begin to be constructive and creative, wanting to grow, and agree not be destructive to ourselves or others. Without this, accessing our emotions can be very dangerous

2. Watch the language. When discussing emotions, I try to keep my language common, simple and perhaps even "chatty", as this seems to be the only was we can understand emotions together. If I succeed, you will begin to think in your own tangents and develop your own ideas drawing you down many paths - maybe even to violently disagree. If I am not succeeding, please let me know.

3. I am a doctor - a family general practitioner, and my job is usually to translate medical jargon into normal speech for the person in front of me. I am a student of human biology and so my ideas are based on how the body works, and from my discussions with my patients. Many emotional theories are based on the study of language and so will often have a completely different meaning. Please be patient and try to understand.

4. Emotions are largely unconscious and so often missed or ignored. Most importantly, they are not rational. It is hard to use rational terms to describe the irrational. Thinking is rational and learning to develop our rationality and thinking is the bulk of our education. However learning to use our emotions requires us to combine both the rational with the irrational, which can only be done by moving into a new dimension (PS Sorry for the mathematical pun).

5. Emotions can be learnt. Our emotions are part of out body and brain functioning. They can be learnt as we can learn to develop any function - such as the art of music, observation, gourmet, or even athletics. In life, once we have learnt the theory, we need to then learn to do it all over again - this time with feeling!

6. Learning is always two ways - teachers can only teach if they are learning at the same time. The contents of this web site is not only what I have used to help my patients to understand and learn about their emotions, but also contains what I have learnt from my patients. They have taught me far more than I have ever learnt from any books. This process can also be repeated in this forum, by both of us learning together. Emotional learning is also two sided.

7. This site is continually evolving and will depend on healthy and constructive feedback. Please be imaginative so we can all develop together.

8. Spot the deliberate errors. Not all the mistakes written are here are in error.