Summary
Joe and Brett outline a developmental model for emotions that mirrors cognitive development models but focuses on emotional experience. The stages progress from infant emotional fluidity (where emotions are non-personal and flow freely) through repression (where we’re taught certain emotions are unacceptable), to emotions controlling us, to actively managing emotions (which is still a form of repression with intellectual overlay), to finally allowing and feeling emotions fully.
The key insight is that the developmental arc is spiral-shaped — the beginning and end states look similar (fluid, non-personal emotions) but the end state carries wisdom and choice that the infant state lacks. In the mature stage, emotions become wrapped in love and the distinctions between different emotions fade. Joe emphasizes that it’s not the emotion itself that hurts but the resistance to feeling it, comparing emotional repression to physically holding back a bodily function.
The episode also explores how each emotion carries wisdom — anger reveals boundaries and care, fear shows where we’re not asking for what we want, and sadness signals transitions and the depth of our love. The stories we tell about unfelt emotions (anger will destroy everything, sadness will last forever, fear will cripple us) are self-fulfilling prophecies that keep us stuck.
Key Concepts
- Emotional development follows a spiral from fluidity through repression back to fluidity
- It’s not the emotion that hurts but the resistance to feeling it
- Joy won’t come unless all emotions are welcome
- Naming emotions can become a substitute for feeling them
- Each epiphany becomes the next rut
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses all of them
- Emotions move through a rainbow rather than discrete categories
- Emotional management is an internal war with yourself
Key Quotes
“Joy is a matriarch of a family of emotions. She won’t come into your house unless her children are welcome.”
“It’s not the emotion that hurts, it’s the resistance to feeling the emotion that hurts. It’s not like going to the bathroom hurts, but if you’re resisting going to the bathroom, that’s going to hurt.”
“At the moment that I’m doing it to manage my emotions, it doesn’t work.”
“If you fully allow your fear, you’re less capable to move from an individual will, and you become more and more capable of being moved by something greater than yourself.”
“The stories that we tell about them are completely different — if we haven’t allowed ourselves to be sad, the story is sadness will last forever. If we haven’t allowed ourselves to be angry, the story is that anger will destroy everything.”
“You think about somebody at a cafe sitting by themselves having an emotional experience — which of these is most crazy? The stigma of emotion is so apparent when you think about somebody having these experiences in a cafe by themselves.”
Transcript
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 this 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’fallen’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 I 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 ask the question so I’ll answer uh what are the stage of the of the emotional development in in my mind what I 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 three 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 all 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 were taught to take them personally and were 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 experiences we’re we’re told that and 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 gonna feel that and then with that there’s kind of musk muscular constraints that come with it or then the emotions start to control us like that 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 gonna 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 ADI ashanta 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 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 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 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 an 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 that experience of Joy combined with the emotion starts to happen and that just becomes more and more like a unified thing where the this the distinction between the emotions fade away so that’s 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 is 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 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 you know 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 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 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 three is happening where emotions are controlling us I think the first instinct is to try to try to control them right back that’s right you’re getting a power struggle with your emotions that’s right yeah which which is uh it’s an attempt to break free of that structure and that patterning but it’s also a 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 yeah I mean stable yeah yeah yeah that was a stable ish yeah yeah you could continue to be in this stage for the rest of your life and it’ll be meta stable in some way yes and so then the the next thing you that I heard you mention was this stage Beyond where maybe 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 joys out of my life there’s no like I can’t play anymore I don’t 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 reached 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’s a distinction in this as well and that 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 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 I did it for years I still do it I love it and there’s there’s J 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 emotionals States through the system is if it’s not critical it’s definitely something that expedites the whole damn thing so yeah and this is where some of that Corkscrew wrapped 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 any motion is just to maybe close your eyes nobody sees anything happen and then you open them again and you continue with your day right and the way people would associate a baby’s emotions are and a lot of the the actually feeling them fully through our muscles and having that cathartic release though 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 there’s a new layer of 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 seventh 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 fluids really it’s just like it’s just a movement that moves through you and it and 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 uh kind of piece to hold in 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 feeling the emotion that hurts it’s not like I 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 going to hurt and so it’s a very similar thing it’s the clogging of the pipe that’s that hurts and when you unclog the pipe it 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 through these later stages of emotional development we start welcoming various emotions you know we might start calling them by 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 is going to make whatever my whatever movement it needs to make right now and I trust that I’m going to become a reorganized reorganized 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 and just generally that’s the developmental process you’ve you’ve recapped it really well so Okay so we’ve got this 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 it’s not a single cycle you kind of 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 a question then is as we’re going through this process and we’re 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 um if you’re going to start feeling more joy you’re going to 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 we Recreation 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 angry release are usually like holy crap but 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 as we’re kind of watching you know 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 how can we tell the difference between like being open to and wondering in in wonder about how much how much joy we’re feeling or how how much our emotions are coming back fluidly wrapping around into love and you know that 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 three 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 they’re you’re not faking it right and even if you’re baking 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 you and the anger comes up and you’re like cool I want to do this then great fake it but it’s 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 at 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 a 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 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’s that was one of the things that you that you touched on that like struck a chord with me is that you’re not doing the work if you’re if you are at all um not welcoming not excited to feel the emotions and and with that part of what happens is each 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 um 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 this is 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 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 happens right right it’s almost uh the self-fulfilling prophecy is that if we 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 to continue the illusion that you’re not presently feeling them yes and that just reinforces every 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’re 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 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 that 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 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 not the way we think it’s going to happen yeah 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 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 sad so we’re gonna we’re gonna be starting this uh this series talking about anger we’ve got two 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 get right into it that’s the yeah 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’s sitting by themselves being sad somebody’s sitting by themselves being scared somebody sitting by themselves laughing hysterically somebody’s sitting by themselves just like an absolute Bliss and the question is which of these is most crazy right you can just it’s the the stigma of emotion is so apparent when you think about somebody having these experiences in a cafe by themselves 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 thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com