Summary
Growing up in the late 70's and 80s my world was so small. I could never have imagined there were people like me out there in the wider world. There was no wider world.
#FirstCoffeeThoughts
I’ve noticed about Jason and people like him is they do a lot of thinking about their feelings and not enough feeling about their thinking. I’ve observed this is most of the students here. They are so quick to talk about how they feel about every little thing, but they are unable to feel anything about how badly and ineffectively they think. He has no understanding of feelings but he believes that what he thinks is real and true.
This was the start of a very complicated idea that took me years to work out.
I don’t think I began focusing on really taking this apart until well into my college years.
I was a sophomore in college when I first started transcribing my childhood journals into digital and I ended up really reading them seriously for the first time and discovering these amazing nuggets of wisdom that I started really developing into theories and understandings about the world.
This one was complex.
Many people confuse thoughts and feelings which you wouldn’t imagine would be a thing but it is.
Thoughts and feelings aren’t the same.
Thoughts are cognitive processes that happen in the mind and are designed to help us make sense of the world. Feelings are emotional processes that usually begin in the body and represent responses we have to the world.
Emotions ARE chemical yes but remember that the GUT (enteric) controls a good portion of your brain. Bad gut, bad brain and vice versa.
In my Media Therapy class I talk about how media triggers feelings BEFORE it triggers thoughts which helps people understand this point more easily.
Triggers are emotional landmines that rarely involve any thinking … they are knee jerk reactions that stem from an emotional dysregulation. (They are also warning systems from the gut i.e. gut instinct)
People don’t think about their triggers, they are controlled by them and then they respond THROUGH them. No thought is involved at all.
Thinking is not usually a emotional or triggered action. It is something done purposefully and for a specific reason usually in a controlled state.
Most people can’t think WHILE they feel and this is usually because of dysregulation.
Such people are incapable of thinking and feeling at the same time. Thinking is only possible for these people when they have calmed down and have control over their emotions.
Thinking, for most people, follows emotional states. For stoics it’s the opposite.
