Emotions

A nine minute talk presented at the symposium “Working With Feelings: Affect and the Practice of Everyday Life”, St. John’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (March 12, 2010). BEF we_are_all_alexithymic_v5

I “discovered” these nine core feelings after three years of data collection with my clients (presented at the 2010 Integral Theory Conference).  After I arranged them into this table their relationships and meanings became much clearer and this table became the foundation of the Bio-Emotive Framework, giving rise to the three-step sequence of emotional processing: Interpersonal feelings elicit core feelings which in turn elicit emotions (and their behaviours) The video series goes into detail about how and why these are such powerful words and yet ask a person how they are feeling and very few will actually come up with any of them (see cultural alexithymia).   If you want to get a sense of how potent they can be, try sitting quietly and saying “I feel X” (where X is one of the core feelings) out loud to yourself or a partner two or three time.  Go through all nine of [...]

I hope you enjoy the site.  For many people, the material here will challenge the way you see the world and, I hope, the way you see mental health. For the last 50 years or so psychology has been dominated by the cognitive-behaviorism and psychiatry has been dominated by the bio-medical and pharmaceutical philosophies of mental health. What this means is that our cultural understanding of mental illness has been "externally oriented." From the bio-medical perspective Depression is a chemical imbalance that can best be addressed by chemical intervention, while from a cognitive-behavioral perspective, depression is the result of "incorrect thinking processes" or "dysfunctional environmental rewards" and contingencies. In the last 20 years however we have come to see the limitations of these ways of conceptualizing mental illness: the chemical-imbalance theory has been completely discredited (and was never empirically supported in the first place), the [...]