Coaching with the Brain in Mind

PART IV

How Can We Feel Better?

In the search for a mutual body/mind that is emerging from the systemic paradigm shift, we have looked at bodily clues that can indicate when changes have pushed us outside the limits of dynamic stability and the formula that brings us back into that healthful state. In part III we compared explanations for human behavior that are based on mechanistic assumptions with those arising from a systemic worldview. We recognized the limits of conscious mental processing and became aware of how to listen to the quieter connections that flow from the back of the brain when we set up a context for insight. In this part we turn to a topic that has been seen, in turns, as the enemy of civilized behavior, an indicator of mental illness, a missing element in understanding cognition, the key to motivation, an indicator of happiness, or the secret of social success: feelings, emotions, or “affect,” as they tend to be called in research.

In the ideology that justified Western Europe’s exploration and “discovery” of so-called primitive peoples and their genocide or enslavement to support its expansion, “savages” (and women) were thought to be ruled by their emotions. Objective, rational thought was the mark of men who thereby had the right, even the duty, to make others their subjects. Emotional outbursts ought to be controllable by rational, scientific argument. Cases where that control failed were surely indications of mental illness, as with women who persisted ...