How Emotions affect Thinking

How emotions affect thinking depends upon how much repressed emotion there is in our emotional bank for us to process. The more repressed emotions, the more distortion to our reality.

Welcome to our website, and we thank you for visiting us. We can examine How this happens if we think of our emotions as a water tank we carry everywhere over us. Wherever we go this water tank follows. Under normal conditions, this water tank is light and carries enough water to replenish our thirst for feelings throughout our daily activities. When we experience an event or circumstance, our emotions flow forth on their own, and provide us feelings and guidance for us to live out our lives. Our emotions lead us to the things in life we do like, and help us to avoid the things in life we do not like.

How emotions affect thinking when we are emotionally healthy is to act as our connection to our higher order selves within, and to lead us to our spiritual destiny and our ultimate success. Our emotions lead us to the vocation we choose, the loved ones we marry, and to our choices of relationships in which we engage.

Our emotions help us choose between creating intimate relationships with others, or to choose non-intimate and distant postures with people. Our emotions at their quantum level are our deepest connection to God's will for our lives. It is at this stage that our emotions affect us very positively and act as a tool for our guidance to our good and enjoyment of ourselves.

For some of us, early in life, a hostile childhood changes this natural flow of spontaneous emotions. Dysfunctional parents punish us for showing our natural feelings and sharing our sometimes-unrealistic wills with them. Their violent retaliation and threatened rejection of us teach us incorrect lessons about ourselves. We learn that our emotions are bad, we learn that their love is conditional, and that our loveliness is conditional as well.

The bottom line to all this is we learn that the world is a conditional place and that we need to please the environment to survive. How emotions affect thinking changes from here on as we encounter the emotional dilemma. For our inner selves, that means changing to survive. This is where we send our inner wonder child into hiding, like Moses in Egypt. From here on out our critical thinking process begins to change, as does our perception of reality.

What this necessary choice does for our psyche is that it starts the water tank over us to begin to fill up. With each repressed emotion, and with each unspoken feeling that we do not allow ourselves to express, the water tank becomes a little fuller and a little heavier. The water pressure at the bottom of the tank becomes higher and harder to control. Over time, we have to shut the valve off completely because the pressure is too great to release gently. This is how emotions affect thinking when we need to start compromising our selves to survive.

The first way it affects our thinking is we gain a harmful perspective of ourselves we call terminal uniqueness. This can come into being in our teenage years at about eighth grade or so. We as teenagers at this age are just learning our role in the adult world. We are feeling the strong herding instinct and are learning the skills of jockeying for position in our social hierarchy.

Extroverts are learning aggressiveness, and introverts are learning how to defend our social space against them. At this stage our teenage self-esteem will be put to the test by many ungraceful failures socially, and engagements with aggressive individuals within our group. It is at this point that the shame based young person now has two obstacles to overcome.

Not only do we have the obstacle of establishing our place within our group, we have the added obstacle of feeling different from all the other persons in our group as well. No matter how good our friendships, or how good a time we have, we always feel like the shadow, and never the person making the shadow. These feelings build up, along with the previous emotional burden, to increase the water pressure even more in our water tank.

The critical thinking process and emotions now changes relationships from one of complementation to one of canceling out each other. Their buildup of emotions causes their critical thinking process to distort into territoriality and arrogance in perspective, and defense to aggression in their choices.

The next fork in the road for the emotionally repressed person comes when they shut off their feelings as much as possible. How emotions affect thinking increases in scale. This next change in our thinking comes when we repress all emotions from our reality. We seek to live in a cerebral state of logic and pretend maturity.

We assume what we call the Mr. Spock profile, in an attempt to find a realm of life where we feel comfortable. We will withdraw into an inner world where no one else can reach us, where for us it is safe. At this point, we may demonstrate the beginnings of the tendency to know everything. Any attempt to give us advice or instruction will go unheeded.

In our relationships, others may sense a wall we have put up through which no one else can reach. This can be especially frustrating for loving parents seeking to make amends for their, or previous adult’s abuses. There is a way to reach us, and we will discuss that later at the end.

We will also adopt what we call a grandiosity perspective, in which we will see that what is right for one is right for all. Everything is absolute and there is no variation for individuality. We will see that only our observations and conclusions are correct and everyone should look at life as we do.

As time goes on, this backup of water pressure in our emotional water tank creates another change in our thinking. Over time, all organisms seek to heal, and the tendency for us in quiet moments is to reflect back on the hurts of our past, and is part of the natural healing process. As we become aware subconsciously of some of the things that hurt us, we will develop an agenda based thinking pattern. It will become evident to others around us that we have a pattern in our thinking that will be pro-this and anti-that. What we are pro and what they are against will depend on the nature of our abusive experiences.

An example of how emotions affect thinking here is; suppose a woman’s father sexually abused her as a child. When she grows up, she may develop an agenda against men, and find work as a social services worker so that she can take children from their parents. From such a lofty perch of authority, she will sit in judgment of all men for the transgressions of her father.

Being a social services worker is one popular avenue that dysfunctional persons take to get even with their parents. Other areas include the sacred halls of religion, or in law enforcement. There is where they can they always be right and the world be wrong.

We have known many highly religious leaders who are in religion for all the wrong reasons. Elementary education and childcare are other places where many persons find work to act out their unresolved childhoods. The problem is that with this approach, they solve nothing and the painful cycle of hatred continues within them.

While dysfunctional persons seek to be distant from their feelings, their feelings do emerge in catastrophic ways on rare occasions. Like the water tank that springs open uncontrollably because of high water pressure, so too do the emotions of the hurt individual.

They may be prone to temper tantrums, or worse yet, the pressure may build until they explode in a display of fatal violence, often taking their own life in the process.

The more extreme the emotional content within, the more disconnected our thinking becomes. We may become fanatical, we know everything about everything, and we paint all circumstances in the terms of our agenda. We become emphatic about being right on our matters, while not noticing the outside interest that concerned others may share.

The road home from such a painful state lies in the processing of our past pain. If you are a parent or loved one of someone lost from his or her emotions, there is help. We have a saying in therapy, which is ‘the only way out is through’. The first step in the recovery process is to take back the permissions, which we gave up.

The beginning permission we must give ourselves is to embrace our justified agenda. What that means is to allow our selves to hate the thing that hurt us. If you are the parent of an abused child, or wife of an abused husband, it may mean listening to a lot of hatred and rage as they talk in the beginning. The most important thing you can do for them is listening as they express what ever they need to get off their chest.

Thank your self for getting them to open up, for that is a real milestone! Do not be too critical of their first attempts at communication, for they might be clumsy and extreme at first. That is to be expected.

The healing process does not follow a regular schedule, for the psyche has its own timetable. Healing may come quickly for a while, and then it will go more slowly, and then may speed up again. Remember, emotional healing is spiritual healing.

The main thing is for you the listener to be there and understand what it was like for them when they were young. If you were the abusive parent, let them have their anger against you until it is all over.

Thank you for facing yourself and wanting to make amends to your victim. That is a mark of honor to face yourself as you are doing. Few offenders have the courage or character to seek change as you are. God bless you as you start down this new road, the road we call ‘the road less traveled.'

We can learn to be aware of how emotions affect thinking by noticing how we are feeling throughout the day, on a daily basis.

As the backlog water of emotions comes out of the faucet of our feelings, the weight of the tank will lessen over time, and the pressure will become gentler. As the pressure becomes smaller, we will begin showing more of our current feelings in our everyday lives. As water pressure relieves, the critical thinking process returns to normalcy. As our water tank level drops to what it should be, we will forget our grandiosity and our agenda based thinking.

We will become patient and understanding and others will feel comfortable approaching us in relationships. Upon our gradual recovery, all the pain will be gone, but the lessons and the growth will remain. If we focus on how emotions may affect our thinking at this point, it will be as a tool to lead us to our personal success. We will be stronger and capable of deep intimacy in relationships due to the wisdom from our past hardships.

For more on this please consider our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. In it, we take you through your spiritual journey back home to your Original Self. We talk about God's purpose behind that soul’s journey, as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We share much about boundaries. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch.

Thank you for visiting us and please keep in touch, sharing your trials and your victories with us. We promise to answer personally every Email that we receive.

Shayne and Lori North in Aurora, Colorado

Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind The Book

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