C02 General Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

You can control your feelings with rational thinking, willpower and mental discipline.

OR

The better you process your feelings into full awareness, the less you feel you must control them.

Anankelogy

Your emotions personally convey your needs. The more one of your budding emotions sufficiently and promptly resolves your need without your full awareness, the less you feel that emotion. You instinctively duck when sensing an object hurling toward you, for example, prior to feeling threatened.

To be specific, emotions and feelings are not the same thing. Psychology and anankelogy define a feeling as your awareness of an emotion. You can subconsciously experience a need-promoting emotion without consciously feeling it.

The opposite extreme often occurs. We often feel an emotion without following through to address and resolve the attending need. Instead of removing the unpleasant threat, we often try to remove the unpleasant feeling.

When perceiving a threat—real or imagined, underappreciated or exaggerated—your emotions warn you with a painful emotion. The more you feel powerless to remove the threat, the more you’re inclined to try to avoid the painful warning.

But the warning typically persists, soon prompting more pain you prefer to avoid. The more you ignore the reported threat, the less you can function. Which your body warns with increasing pain.

You must function. You’re built to continue functioning as long as possible and as much as possible. Your emotions serve your unchosen need to persist in functioning, as well as possible.

You either process the unpleasant emotion to identify and satisfy the indicated need, or your body takes over and forces you to act in some way in response to this ignored need. You either let your feelings serve your need for awareness, or you find yourself serving your feelings with some kind of compulsion.

Need-response

Need-response counters the imbalance sparked by our hyperrationality norms. The more we latch onto comforting beliefs that we can muster up the willpower or reason our way out of a bind, the more we end up serving our feelings instead of letting our feelings serve us. Need-response redirects us from such failed ideas into improving our responsiveness to our “irrational” feelings and their underlying needs.

The more we address the needs our emotions convey, the less we get pulled into compulsive behaviors. Responsivism—the belief and practice of responding to emotion-conveyed needs instead of habitually avoiding or opposing our feelings—enables us to resolve more needs. Which can remove cause for pain. And improve wellness.

Reactive Problem

It’s bad enough when we suppress our feelings on a personal level. But we now normalize our avoidance of uncomfortable feelings with cultural norms. We resort to evasive arguments. We debate more than listen. We oppose more than understand.

To avoid the unpleasant discipline of engaging the impactful needs of others, we oppose their needs. We normalize self-righteous denial while dismissing empathy as too much like false equivalency. We pit ourselves against each other in what can be called avoidant adversarialism.

Read any news report about recent world events, and you often find a pattern of indulgent side-taking. These incentivize you to serve your fears instead of letting your fears serve you. These goad you to compulsively take a side on some issue instead of supporting the collective wellness or resolving each other’s unchosen needs or unchosen priority.

Opposing what others need does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it. Opposing the reality of their needs simply opposes reality. Opposing reality almost always spells trouble. The more you oppose reality, the more reality opposes you.

Responsive Solution

Responsivismincentivizes us to respond to the needs our emotions and feelings exist to report. And to proactively address the needs of others that our laws exist to serve. Instead of settling for alienation and divisiveness, we then connect more deeply with each other.

Together, we transform our alienating norms with engaging mutual respect. A robust wellness campaign cultivates a safe environment to face each other’s feelings, no matter how initially unpleasant. We learn from each other to embrace the overlooked gift of our unpleasant feelings.

Need-response offers a free program for stretching your capacity to endure your less pleasant feelings. You replace any habit to avoid feelings like disappointment or anxiety or embarrassment with improved capacity to recognize the need such feelings exist to report. Either on your own or developed along with others.

Together, we can learn to distinguish between the unchosen needs that no one can change and the chosen responses that we can, with some discipline, effectively adjust. We can learn to affirm each other’s inflexible needs to earn the trust to address flexible responses, laws and norms. We can learn how to habitually get our feelings to serve our needs instead of feeling like we need to habitually serve our feelings.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• Sometimes my feeling hurts way too much to face.

• Rational thinking still has its place, right?

• Letting feelings serve you doesn’t mean acting on every feeling.

• I rarely can tell when I’m suppressing a feeling, it’s such a habit for me now.

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.