In this short Ask Dr. Miller segment, Dr. Emmett Miller explains that human emotions are evolutionarily designed to flow through social interaction, much like animals greet each other. He argues that when emotional systems are isolated—when fear, anger, or depression dominate without the balancing influence of trusted relationships—the result is a range of chronic emotional states that can develop into clinical disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, dysphoria, cyclothymia, dysthymia, and major depression. Using animal behavior as metaphor, he illustrates how natural greeting rituals provide the "exercise" emotions need. Miller emphasizes that trust, goodwill, and the willingness to share with others create an environment where emotions can be expressed freely, preventing the emotional “freezing” that leads to disease. The segment closes with contact information for listeners to submit further questions.
Welcome to Ask Dr. Miller, where Dr. Miller answers your questions about mind-body health.
We're designed to flow emotionally with our environment. There are experiences our emotions are designed to have because they've been having them since time immemorial with family, with community, with tribe, the interaction, the connection, the love, some of the— yeah, some of the social anxieties, some of the need to sort of assert yourself and some of the need to care for another. All of these are natural. But when our emotions, when the emotional system is not doing the dance with the environment that it's designed to be doing. If instead it's being afraid, or if it's being angry all the time, or if it's feeling like it wants to be isolated all the time, or if it's feeling depressed all the time, or on edge, whatever it might be, Again, these are all states, various states of getting ready for something, suspiciousness, fear, anger, defeat. So they're all things that we should be feeling emotionally. But within the context of loving relationships and connections with other human beings, And something happens. Bees know how to talk to each other. Rabbits know how to talk to each other. You ever notice you're walking down the street with your dog and another person's coming walking their dog? The dogs pay no attention to the masters at all. They see the other dog and they know exactly what to do. "Hi there, do you mind if I smell your—" It's like— now every animal doesn't do that. So every animal has its own way of greeting. Parakeets don't do it that way. They have another way of meeting each other. So if we relate with each other in such a fashion as to allow our emotions to be free to interact, and if we have the kind of attitude toward each other the willingness to trust the other person in a certain way, to know that there's goodness in that other person, to know that what you share with the other person is far greater than what separates you. Then a certain kind of interaction takes place. The environments we live in split apart, our families are split apart, the old people are sent off to an old age home, the kids are sent into— off to school or jail. And there is so much isolation. The emotions don't have the interaction they're designed to have. They're not getting the exercise like the body not getting the exercise. And so we end up frozen in one of these emotional states that we then will call anxiety, and that may grow to where it would be called a generalized anxiety disorder. Or we could have dysphoria, which means sort of chronically feeling sort of crummy. You know, or maybe we— some days we're up and other days we're down, and so we're cyclothymic. Uh, you know, if that gets a little bit worse, then we go from dysthymia, we go into what's called a major depression. And so at a certain point, we call these things diseases. But as you see, each one is simply a symptom of not having enough water getting out to your leaves so that they can grow. And receive the love that's around you, to receive the sunshine that nurtures everything within you.
Thanks for listening to this segment of Ask Dr. Miller. Send your questions by email to drmiller@drmiller.com. For more information on mind-body health and Dr. Miller's CDs, DVDs, and books, go to drmiller.com. That's drmiller.com.
