Page 59 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

28 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

varied, do not dictate specific behaviors, and are not necessarily cyclic.
Consequently, seeing the emotions as our fundamental human motives
leaves tremendous room for individual variation. This may help us check
the impulse to assume we understand why a person behaved as she did,
when we may not have inquired enough about her feelings. We might be
better able to continue a curious inquiry when we think in terms of each of
us having a vast personal history of emotions, combinations of emotions,
and emotion-cognition patterns. Thus, I have a whole history of experience
of Sandra-being-angry. I bring that history to each angry moment I face.
Seeing emotions (rather than the older notions of drives) as primary
means to me that sexual and aggressive impulses express only two of the
many emotionally shaped motivational forces in human beings. Emotions,
such as fear, shame, guilt, curiosity, and many others, can make a sexual
or aggressive pull a very different experience. As is true for any other sig-
nificant aspect of being a human being, our interpersonal history (along
with our endowments) shapes our personal experience of these motives.
I will hear any human story differently if I hold a viewpoint that puts a
wealth of interpersonal emotional experience at the helm. My hearing can
then be more open-ended than if I believed in a closed system of motivat-
ing forces. Putting the emotions in center stage means that there can be
an infinite variety of emotion–cognition patterns, shaped partially by one’s
interpersonal history, at play at any particular moment. Thus, for example,
if I see both a patient and myself as driven, partially, by our loneliness, then
for each of us our history of being lonely is salient. A particular array of feel-
ings and feeling–cognition combinations comes more strongly into play, as
we make each other lonelier in how we interact. My own memory of being a
lonely seventh grader is more relevant than usual when I am hearing about
the loneliness felt by someone else. Furthermore, if loneliness has a history
of making one of us very anxious, that will have an impact on my ability
to empathize. On the other hand, if one of us tends to get very curious
about being lonely, that will have a different impact. How loneliness tends
to affect each of us cognitively may be particularly salient. For each of us,
has loneliness frequently evoked moments of intense, sharp concentration
or a confused, blank absent-mindedness or neither of these possibilities?
Understanding the emotions as the primary motivational system in
human beings gives me a very flexible, yet orienting theory. With this way
of thinking, I can hold all my motivational hypotheses lightly. I don’t come
into an interaction without any theory of what motivates people. While
some might argue that such a clean slate is best, I believe it is difficult to
perceive anything without some ready-made constructs. Just as it would be