Being Emotional Is Being Alive
In the previous section we looked at degrees of freedom.  We often assume that someone who is at the top of their chosen profession must also be emotionally at the top of the world.  How can this successful actor or professional sports hero be anything but happy?  And yet we hear over and over again how miserably unhappy these people often are.

Degrees of freedom help us understand this paradox.  If you have become “The Expert” because that’s all you can do, you may well feel trapped and isolated.  Emotional  labels become attached to these extreme conditions.  You’ll describe yourself as being depressed, frustrated, anxious, unhappy.

Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz offered us another gem, a reminder, from his discussion of regression and resurgence.  Often when people talk about “emotional behavior” such as aggression, they are forgetting that we are always emotional. It isn’t that now we are happy, and then a switch turns off and we feel nothing.

“Living is being emotional.”

The nature and intensity of the emotions fluctuates.  We experience different degrees depending upon conditions and our reinforcement history.  But thinking in terms of “emotional behavior” is too simplistic. Emotion is part of all behavior. It is not separate from it.

Traveling helps you to understand how much our emotions are a product of the habit patterns that have formed within our familiar environments and how true it is that emotions are always present. Perhaps you are one of the huge number of people who have more to do than you could possibly accomplish in one day. You have a family to care for, a house and barn to maintain, horses to feed and clean up after – not to mention ride.  All that and then there’s also an overfull schedule at work.  You’re always under stress, but it’s become so the norm, you don’t pay much attention to how you’re feeling.  A mildly stressed state is just the normal emotional background “noise”.

And then you treat yourself to the Five Go To Sea cruise where everything is different.  You still have a full day, with more to do and see than any one person could possibly squeeze into a day, but your normal triggers aren’t there.  The phone isn’t ringing.  You aren’t on the internet with the constant influx of work-related emails.  Your co-worker’s voice coming through the office wall isn’t annoying you.  All those triggers are gone and now you get to experience who you are and how you feel without them.  You become acutely aware of just how stressed you’ve been now that you’ve stepped out of your normal habit patterns. You’re still emotional, but now the environment is set up to trigger the kinds of supportive, pleasant emotions you want to experience.

So the next time you find yourself saying that your horse, your dog, your fellow human is being emotional, remind yourself that that’s an ever present condition.  “Living is being emotional.”  The question is, how can you influence conditions so the emotions that support a JOY FULL experience are the ones coming to the fore?

Coming Next: Building Unlikely Behaviors with Resurgence

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

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theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com