Stages of Emotional Development - Emotion Series #1

Managing our emotions is maybe a short-term solution sometimes, but it's really not a good long-term one. And that feeling our emotions really actually brings us the freedom and the joy that we want. Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. Today I'm really excited to start a series that we're going to do on emotions, and I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and I'm very excited for it. And for this first episode to kind of kick off the series, I want to go into the process of emotional development that we all go through as we start to work through each of the emotions that we're going to discuss in the series. So Joe, I'd love to just start with, how do you see the process of emotional development in the work that you've been doing?

I do think that there's some pretty clear steps of emotional development. I think what's interesting to me before we even get into that is that, you know, I've been a student of human development a lot, you know, from Terry O'Fallon's work to the integral work to, um, you know, earlier stuff like Piaget and, and all, and And I think that almost all of that development work has been done around the intellect, and very little has been done around the emotions. And so I've looked quite a bit to look for, like, what I think are coherent emotional development, um, steps, and I, and I have a really hard time finding them. And I think some degree is that people who move more from their emotional experience, they're not intellectual writers, so they don't write it down, and vice versa. So I think that that's where a lot of the work is fall short. Also, I just might not have found it yet. Um, so I just want to start with that. But, but what's interesting to me is that the, the emotional development cycle, as I see it, is very, very similar to a lot of the cognitive development in the way that it's— it feels circular on some level. I, I kind of feel like it's like a spiral. So when you're at the top of the spiral, it feels like it's circular, but you've actually made progress. It's something to that effect. So the beginning and the end feel very similar there also seems to be a unifying thing that happens in the developmental cycle where, like in cognitive development, the sense of self unifies or the sense of time unifies. There's an emotional unification, I think, that also happens on the emotional development side. And there's also something about it's not just like a grand cycle. There's a— it's like lots of little iterations to get there, right? That you're, you're kind of going back and forth, you're pendulating. Through the cycle, through the growth development. And all those things seem to be really similar for emotions. But you asked the question, so I'll answer, uh, what are the stages of the emotional development? In my mind, what I would say is that you're first— you're an infant, and emotions are fluid and they're non-personal. Like, an infant can cry for 3 hours straight if they have colic, and they don't wear out their throat, right? They just literally— there's no contraction around it. There's no, I shouldn't be crying. You see humans cry and they're like, oh, right? And you see babies crying, they're like— the whole emotional openness is compared to constriction around the tears. So that's kind of the very non-personal, very fluid. And then emotions, we're taught to take them personally, and we're taught either just by cognitive development and/or just by the nature of the way that all of us are raised, we're taught to repress the emotions. And I'll make a distinction between repression— means, hey, don't feel that emotion— and management, which will come later. But it's literally something where we are told, um, it's not okay to feel sad, it's not okay to be angry, it's not okay to be scared, it's not okay to be jealous, whatever the emotional experience is. We're We're told that, and we're told it either by being punished for it or being bribed out of it, or it's just maybe so hardcore in our own system, we just are like, oh no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to feel that. And then with that, there's kind of muscular constraints that come with it. Or then the emotions start to control us. Like, we have these experiences, these big emotional experiences. I can't believe I said that when I was angry, or like, I lost control, or blah, blah, blah. And that's kind of where the world says that's what emotions are. They don't ever— emotions never really get out of that for most people, most languages. Emotions are there, they're, they're creating disruption, and they need to be managed, you know, apparently to make good decisions, which is complete hogwash when you look at the neuroscience, or so that I can manage myself, control myself. And then we start to try to manage the emotions, which is a form of repression, but there's an intellectual component to it where we're actively deciding that emotions aren't good and we're going to manage them by running a lot, or we're going to manage them by telling ourselves that we're not going to be emotional. We're going to manage them by ignoring them. We're going to, you know, repress them in, in a way that has more intellect to it. It's not like a body repression, which is the distinction I'm making there. And meditation, by the way, can be that. It doesn't have to be that, but Adyashanti, who I, who I adore his work, and he basically at one point said, um, most people, meditation is management and that's torture. Okay. Something to that effect. So it's like even meditation can be a way to manage the emotions instead of allow and feel the emotions, which is the next step. Then we start to allow the emotions. We'll feel the emotions. And we'll start expressing those emotions in a way that isn't at anybody, isn't manipulative, isn't part of a power-over struggle with somebody. And then we'll usually do anger and sadness first, then probably fear, and then joy and bliss, peace. All that stuff starts coming, and this is where the meat of the work is. And for some people, some emotions are easier than others. Usually the negative emotions, almost always I'm not even sure if I've seen a case where it hasn't been the case. The negative emotions need to move first and then the positive emotions. Oftentimes people don't understand that they're repressing the positive emotions.

And you're referring to negative and positive as the, like, the context in which we come to understand them through our repression?

Correct. That's right. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What society would say, sadness, fear, and anger were the negative ones, and bliss and deep love, joy, that kind of stuff, that's called the positive ones. And, uh, or like really excited, for instance, is another one. And yeah, you get to a point where neither are positive or negative for sure, um, but in that developmental process, it's coming— it's allowing the negative ones to move that then bring the positive ones up. And then the positive ones often have as much, if not more, resistance. So then there's that. And then all the emotions are fluid again, and somewhere in there they become non-personal again. So you don't believe the stories behind the emotions— they're true, partially true, or not true, but they're not the truth— and you don't believe the emotions is true. Then the emotions start to become, you know, in Art of Accomplishment, I think one guy said, it's like, now all my sadness is wrapped in love. And another story, I remember somebody talked about it and she said, I was doing the enjoyment exercise that we have, and which is, you know, enjoy yourself 10% more. And she was trying, she was crying and she's like, oh, I can enjoy this 10% more. And then all of a sudden that experience of joy combined with the emotion starts to happen. And that just becomes more and more like a unified thing where the distinction between the emotions fade away. So that's the developmental— that I've experienced— that's the developmental course of the emotions. Yeah.

Yeah. And that illustrates how it comes back around to sort of the beginning, you know, to kind of summarize what you've described. It starts out, you're, you know, you're a baby. Nothing has happened to you yet. You're just a blank slate. And the emotions are fluid, non-personal. It's just a process happening in your body. It's your body adjusting, you know, neural networks adjusting their weights, hormones shifting to match whatever's going on going on in your world. And then you start to get shaped. Certain emotions make people uncomfortable, those are repressed, consequences start happening to you. So then emotions that you have start getting linked to stories of what's going to happen to you. So then, you know, naturally, we just start to shape our behavior based on avoiding those stories. And it makes sense, because those stories were learned in the way that the world actually was responding to our emotions and we had no power at that time. So that's the only thing you really can do. And then that's a place where people end up staying often. It's just, they'll live their life based on the emotional context that they've learned with the particular pattern of repression that they've learned.

Yeah, just to talk on that for a subject. If you go out and you read emotional literature, it wasn't until recently that there was this idea of emotional intelligence, to even understand them. And the emotions might have some wisdom to them, and they have a tremendous amount of wisdom, and they are the cause of our decision-making process. But most of it is about managing emotions. Most of the literature, most of the self-help stuff out there is like how to be in control of your emotions.

Right, which seems like the next stage. If we start to recognize that stage 3 is happening, where emotions are controlling us, I think the first instinct is to try to control them right back.

That's right. You get in a power struggle with your emotions. That's right.

Yeah. Which is an attempt to break free of that structure and that patterning, but it's also an internal war with ourselves. We are creating new impulses to fight the initial impulses that are coming up within us. And you can get into a stable state with that and manage your emotions all the way through your life and have a story that that's actually helping. Eh, yeah.

I mean, stable.

Eh, yeah.

Yeah.

Stable-ish. Yeah. You could continue to be in this stage for the rest of your life. Life and it'll be meta-stable in some way.

Yes.

And so then the next thing that I heard you mention was this stage beyond where maybe this is where the stability breaks down in the management and you realize that it just doesn't actually work. Or maybe a heartbreak happens, just some tragedy occurs and something brings up emotions that are so powerful that you are unable to control them and they actually move through you despite your best attempts at preventing them. And you might recognize that this actually has a positive impact on your life, some kind of maybe post-traumatic growth event.

The thing that propels people into that stage, sometimes it's big emotions that they can't control, and then they find relief when they allow it to flow. Sometimes it's, I control my emotions, but I'm not happy. I notice that all the joy is out of my life. There's no, like, I can't play anymore. I don't have joy anymore. And so a lot of the people, when I'll talk to them, I'm like, that's because all your emotions are repressed. Or that saying that I have of joy is a matriarch of a family of emotions. She won't come into your house unless her children are welcome. That resonates with people because there's something in us that knows that we need to allow all the emotions for joy to be there. And so that also motivates people to get to allowing the emotional experiences.

Yeah. So that we reach this stage where we start to recognize that Managing our emotions is maybe a short-term solution sometimes, but it's really not a good long-term one. And that feeling our emotions really actually brings us the freedom and the joy that we want. And this then becomes a journey. Yeah, there's kind of a transition there to when you are, when you are living your patterns to when you are on the path of some sort.

So there is a distinction in this as well. And that distinction is interesting to me because There's forms of meditation that say, you know, feel your emotions and observe the emotions. And so there's— and I'm not saying that that's bad, I think that's actually really a great thing. There's also having the emotions expressed and move through your body, and that's an incredibly critical piece of it because the emotional repression is held in our muscles. You can see when you hold an emotion back, whatever it is, you have to constrain a muscle. And so the muscles aren't going to learn from just sitting in meditation position and allowing yourself to feel the emotion, though that's incredibly helpful. There is a need for the emotion to actually move your body, to allow it to, to move your body and move through your body. Hmm.

Yeah, it sounds like part of that distinction is that if you, if you go through this process of observing your emotions and not feeling them by having your muscles exhibit some kind of cathartic release, then you might find yourself less controlled by the emotions. You might be developing a technique to distance yourself from them, but you're not actually accessing the wisdom of them either. And you could still kind of stay off track and also feel disconnected from your joy.

Yeah, I would say not as deeply, right? I think there's benefit to it for sure. I did it for years. I still do it. I love it. And there's, there's just, we're human. We need to go to the bathroom and we need to cry. It's just how we are as people. And so yeah, moving those emotional states through the system is, if it's not critical, it's definitely something that expedites the whole damn thing. So yeah.

Yeah. And this is where some of that corkscrew wraps back around to the beginning, because when we're actually doing this, you look at somebody as, you know, society might think of the adult way to handle an emotion is just to Maybe close your eyes. Nobody sees anything happen. And then you open them again and you continue with your day. And the way people would associate a baby's emotions are, "Wah!" And a lot of the actually feeling them fully through our muscles and having that cathartic release like we're describing actually starts to look a lot more like we're returning to sort of the baby state where all of our emotions are welcomed and fluid. But there's a new layer in the context now, which isn't just our emotions are fluid and non-personal because we don't have any other way of being. It's our emotions are fluid and non-personal, and we still know how they had been repressed. We still know what kind of consequences can happen to us in society by expressing certain emotions in certain ways. And we have this appetite for, regardless of what society says or does, that our emotions are welcome and we know it. And we feel it in our body. And when that happens, this like 7th stage that you mentioned is that they all become wrapped in love.

Yeah. And become indistinguishable.

Yeah.

Yeah. It becomes really hard to know, like the emotions are so fluid. It's really, it's just like, it's just a movement that moves through you and it, and it, yeah. So hard to, to feel the distinction between joy and sadness. Or excitement and fear, or all of them actually is where it comes down to.

Yeah, I think that's a very relevant kind of piece to hold in consciousness as we go into this series, because we're going to be talking about individual emotions by name. And to recognize that this is, you know, these names are sort of the way that society and culture has clustered these physical experiences and named them and associated them with certain patterns and certain consequences and acceptance or denial or good or bad or positive or negative.

And what I would say there is that the, the idea of most of the emotions that are out there in the world are the way the emotion presents if it's, if it's resisted. So people don't want to feel certain emotions because, for good reason, because they hurt, right? But, but what you find out through this process is it's not the emotion that hurts, it's the resistance to to feeling the emotion that hurts. It's not like, I hate to use it again, but it's not like going to the bathroom hurts, but if you're resisting going to the bathroom, that's gonna hurt. And so it's a very similar thing. It's the clogging of the pipe that hurts. And when you unclog the pipe, it just becomes more and more enjoyable right through the whole process.

Yeah, and I think something that's interesting to recognize also is that when we, when we go through these later stages of emotional development, we start welcoming various emotions. You know, we might start calling them by name and be like, "Okay, you know what I need to feel right now? I need to feel anger." And then you feel the anger, but then something else kind of happens. Like, I've had this experience where as I'm just getting into an anger release, I'll start and I'm not really feeling it, and then I'll kind of find myself getting carried away into it. And then like at the very end of it, my voice will crack in pain. And it's like, "Oh," like, It was actually sadness under there, but really it was just a gradient of different emotion just moving through this rainbow of feeling.

Yes.

And this, like, as this comes back around to the beginning of this cycle, it really just, everything sort of fuses back together and it's just, my body's going to make whatever my, whatever movement it needs to make right now. And I trust that I'm going to become a reorganized reorganize human at the end of this and I don't need to even have a story for what emotion it was.

That's right. That's exactly it. So yeah, that's the way it moves. And just generally, that's the developmental process. You've recapped it really well.

So, okay. So we've got this process and there's ways that we can get stuck in it. And one of the things that you just described earlier is that it's not a single cycle. You find yourself spiraling around the cycle a number of times and you we might be patterned to get stuck in this management of our emotion stage. And then we start to recognize more and more subtle ways that we're managing. And sometimes the ways that we thought we were letting our emotions flow are actually managing. You know, we're aiming for an anger catharsis and we're using that to avoid our hurt, something like that.

Or we're naming our emotion as a way to not feel our emotion, though when we first started naming our emotions, they were a way to feel our emotions.

Right. So each epiphany becomes the next rut.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right. So I guess I have a question then is, as we're going through this process and we're doing this, we're on this emotional development path, how do we recognize when it's actually working for us? Is there, what are the signs that we can look for? What kind of impact does it have on our decision-making or on our cognitive development?

How do you know when it's working? Let's just start there. You're gonna start feeling more joy. You're gonna start feeling more love. Even if they're uncomfortable, that's going to start happening more. There's going to be a feeling of more aliveness. Like, it's— some people describe it as energetic release, and I think that's a fine description of it. It's also— it seems like it's like the musculature that you have been holding to prevent yourself from feeling that gets released, and therefore there's less tension, there's less effort required in a moment-to-moment basis. So you're going to feel that happening. Um, there's going to be moments, but not a lot of them, where you feel potentially lost in the emotion. And each of the emotions has their own story as to why you can't feel them, but you're going to potentially feel lost in it. And you know that you're believing the story when that's happening. Sometimes you'll go through something where you're circling on the same emotion over and over and over again. And if you're not dealing with an old trauma that you're healing over time that re-creation of the emotion means that there's an emotion underneath that you're not feeling. But in general, it's just going to create a lot more peace and a lot more joy in your life and a lot more fluidity and connection. And you'll know it, and it won't take long. It won't take long. I mean, people after their first anger release are usually like, holy crap, like they just feel so much. Not always, sometimes it takes 10, but Yeah. It doesn't take more than 10.

Yeah. Okay. So as we're kind of watching, we're going through this process where we're on this path of emotional development, we're looking for certain signs to see how this is showing up in our life. Am I feeling more joy, for example? And how can we tell the difference between being open to and wondering, in wonder about how much joy we're feeling or how much our emotions are coming back fluidly wrapping around into love. And, you know, notice the difference between, between that and, you know, artificially going towards feeling joy to feel that we've done the process.

Yeah. So you're mentioning like 3 things in there that are important. The first one is if you're trying to get rid of the emotions and you're not loving them, if you're not loving them, then they're not fluid. So if you notice that you're trying to get over an emotion, just the act of trying to be done with an emotion or get over an emotion will send you backwards in the process. So it's literally the emotions are invited like children in your house, like, oh good, my kids are home. Like, it's like when that's the feeling, when I can't wait to feel sad, when I can't wait to feel angry, when I can't wait to feel scared, that's, that's when there— you're not faking it, right? And even if you're faking it but it actually works, I mean, like I mean, if you can fake it enough to go, I actually want to feel angry when it comes up, and the anger comes up and you're like, cool, I want to do this, then great, fake it. But as long as you're doing anything to get rid of the emotions, then you know it. There's a seeming paradox here, which is, oh, if I love my emotions and I let them move as they want to without hurting anybody or manipulating anybody, and I love them and I welcome them, they change. And so it looks like I've managed my emotions really well, right? But the moment that I'm doing it to manage my emotions, it doesn't work.

Yeah.

It's an amazing little thing.

Yeah, it's like the idea of letting your emotions in with the agenda of things changing because they're coming in. I'm imagining, you know, you're preparing the house for all your emotions, your kids to come in and have a party. And so you're preparing the house and then one by one the kids start showing up and you're like, oh, welcome, let's put you to work over there and like continue preparing for the party. And then what you have is just a bunch of, you know, a bunch of your guests preparing for the guests to show up and you're not actually having a party.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that was one of the things that you touched on that like struck a chord with me is that you're not doing the work if you are at all not welcoming, not excited to feel the emotions. And, and with that, part of what happens is each of you start to notice that each of the emotions have a message. They have a wisdom, right? The anger is a deep form of care. It shows us when we have a boundary that has been crossed. It shows us when we're not taking care of ourselves. It shows us what we want to be determined for in our lives because we care so deeply about it. Fear has a way of telling us that there are ways that we're not asking for what we want, that we are most likely taking care of other people rather than putting on our own oxygen mask first. Is it like often there is fear, or that we've been taught that— it's another thing that can tell us that we're very excited, um, that fear can actually tell us that we're excited and we're not allowing ourselves to feel that excitement. And sadness shows like, it is like the, the other side of joy, right? It's like sadness shows us that there's a change that wants to happen or has happened. It, it shows us that we love and that we're in joy around things. And it's an amazing thing to think about why anybody would avoid heartbreak like that kind of sadness and grief, because it shows us how much we cared about something and that the transition is happening. But the stories that we tell about them are completely different. When, if we haven't allowed ourselves to be sad, then the, the story is sadness will last forever. And if we haven't allowed ourselves to be angry, the story is that anger will destroy everything. And if we haven't allowed ourselves to be fear, this story is if we allow the fear, then we are going to be crippled by it and we'll never be able to get anything done. And obviously when we do the, when we feel those things, none of that shit happens.

Right, right. It's almost the self-fulfilling prophecy is that if we fear that these emotions will last forever and we don't allow ourselves to feel them, then they're actually lasting forever because they're stuck in our body and we are feeling them. And you have to dissociate more and more to continue the illusion that you're not presently feeling them.

Yes.

And that just reinforces every time you go there, every time you go into it, it's like, okay, see, look, it's still here. And you end up kind of retreating into a trap of your own making.

Beautifully said. And then the weird thing is there's actually a little bit of truth to like our— we sense something when we think those things and we don't have the full picture. So we're describing it awkwardly. But as an example is like, if you allow anger to fully move through you, then there is a way it destroys everything, particularly yourself. Meaning being angry at people when it's repressed is a way that you create separation between you and other people. And when anger is fluid and you see that it's not about them or you, and there's no stories, and it's not personal, it's just something that moves through you, then life becomes impersonal. And therefore you are less that distinguished, hard-edged human. You're actually now this thing that you can see your relationship to all things. You can see the unity of yourself with everything. And so there is a destruction of you in there to some degree, and everything in there. It's just not the way that you think anger is going to destroy everything, right? Right. And it's this— and it's the same thing with sadness and fear, like that, that, um, fear makes us less capable. And there's a way that that's true in the fact that if you fully allow your fear, you're less capable to move from like an individual will, and you become more and more capable of being moved by something greater than yourself, right? It feels like you're being breathed instead of breathing. And maybe it's just a felt sense difference because you still— crazy stuff happens in the world and you do amazing things, but the feeling is that the gifts are moving through you, that they're not yours. And the more you feel that fear in a weird way, you are less capable. So as an example, as examples of that, but it's, it's not the way we think it's going to happen.

Yeah. And, and again, it seems like feeling the emotion is actually the grounding force that grounds us into the reality that's already the case. You know, if you, if you're in a codependent relationship and you're avoiding your anger and it's repressed, then the fear is actually that the relationship will be destroyed. But in reality, the connection already is being destroyed, right? And the facade of the relationship that is holding the thing together that makes you think that it's still together, that might actually fall apart if you draw a boundary. That might be destroyed. But you're only grounding into what's real by feeling the emotion.

Right. That's right. That's beautifully said.

So we're going to be starting this series talking about anger. We've got two parts of an episode coming up for that. And I'm really excited to get into this.

Yeah, that'll be fun. Yeah, that'll be fun.

Yeah, just get right into it.

That's the— yeah, because societally, angry, the most reviled emotion. It's an interesting thing to think about as we, we let everybody go, is like how emotions are unacceptable in our society. And I'll just give you the example, is you think about somebody at a cafe sitting by themselves having an emotional experience. I remember something like this happened to me. So there's somebody sitting by themselves getting angry Somebody sitting by themselves being sad, somebody sitting by themselves being scared, somebody sitting by themselves laughing hysterically, somebody sitting by themselves just like in absolute bliss. And the question is, which of these is most crazy, right? You can just— it's the stigma of emotion is so apparent when you think about somebody having these experiences in a cafe by themselves.

Mm-hmm.

You can think about how kinky emotions are societally, just thinking about that.

Beautiful.

Cool.

Thank you, Joe.

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks, Brett. It was a pleasure.

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