Working in Movement

Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes confused, sometimes this or that. We all have emotions. But approach any serious discussion and the common wisdom is to "keep emotions out of it" and stick to rational thought.

Maybe that's not such a good idea, according to something called affective neuroscience. A Washington Post article, Emotional Rules summarizes an approach to using, but not abusing, the emotional component, in this case in couples therapy.

According to Brent Atkinson, the Chicago-area marital therapist profiled in the article, separating emotional processing areas from other areas of the brain can produce some bizarre and unproductive behaviour. He cites the famous case of Phineas Gage, a solid citizen nineteenth century railroad worker who survived having a three foot long iron bar thrust through his skull. Although Gage survived, his personality changed from pleasant-enough guy to one of an abrasive, foul mouth sonofabitch. (What would you do if a crowbar crashed through your frontal lobes? Atkinson also mentions that similar behavioral shifts can occur with strokes, head injuries or other brain insults.

Turns out you gotta have those emotional processing centers intact. Antonio DaMasio, written about earlier in Working in Movement, goes even further: "If that [neural connection to emotional memories] is broken down, you're at the mercy of facts and logic, and that just is not enough."

So if no emotion is bad, but too much emotion isn't optimal either, what do you do? Atkinson has been introducing clients to a simplified lesson in affective neuroscience, borrowing heavily from research pioneer Jaak Panksepp. He gives clients written instructions to "self-soothe," in situations where they find their emotions getting in the way. The trick is using awareness. And it does seem to be a bit tricky, since, like unrecognized movement habits that can cause all sorts of physical problems, "we're driven by neural states our brains are not set up to make us aware of." But once clients can learn to recognize these states during self-soothing, they can learn to change to states more conductive to solving the problem at hand.

The next time you hear "let's keep our heads and not get emotional," you'll know that's only part of the picture.