Understanding Affects, Feelings, and Emotions
Have you wondered how feelings are different from affects and emotions? Within Affect Theory, these three words have very distinct meanings. Affects explain the nine biologically-coded affects as short-lived biological responses to the stimulus we receive from the environment.
Feelings let us know if an affect activates. For instance, anxiety is the feeling indicating your fear affect has activated. Becoming aware of feelings and bodily sensations connected to an affect as it activates allows us to develop our awareness and consciously apply tools to alter the impact of negative affects.
Emotion combines the current activated affects and feelings with stored memories of unresolved affects, feelings, and emotions from the past. As a result, emotion becomes more charged and keeps us living in the past rather than allowing us to adapt to the current experience.
Do you ever find yourself overreacting to a current situation where you know your response is over the top?
Want to release the effects of past trauma to live anxiety free? Don't hesitate to learn about Affect Theory and its concepts through this personal narrative explaining specific interventions to live a full and engaging life without past trauma and anxiety controlling your life.
Testimonials
From the Author of The Upside of Shame: Therapeutic Interventions Using the Positive Aspects of a "Negative" Emotions
Ellen McShane sensitively and insightfully integrates affect psychology with a personal narrative in Conquering Trauma and Anxiety to Find Happiness. She incites an awareness in those who work therapeutically with people who have experienced trauma, urging them to attend to the nuances of affect that may influence the lives of their patients. Within her book, Ellen McShane, elucidates the ways in which an understanding of affects is imperative for therapists who endeavor to help patients who have suffered from a traumatic past. I truly applaud her work! Mary Lamia Mary C. Lamia, Ph.D.
Mary Lamia, PH.D.
From A Trauma informed psychotherapist & EMDR practitioner
"Conquering Trauma and Anxiety to Find Happiness" offers both sufferers and clinicians a useful roadmap for alleviating the emotional constraints of fear-terror; anger-rage; distress-anguish and shame-humiliation. Ellen McShane is not just a detached & dispassionate academician but weaves her personal struggle with trauma & anxiety into her research on the topic. This adds humanity to the science of interpersonal neuro-biopsychology. Any human being who reads this book will benefit from its insights if they apply Ellen's strategies of affect regulation & expression.
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Joseph A. Izzo, M.A., L.I.C.S.W.
Finding Happiness
Our brains want us to be happy and safe. We foster a state of happiness as we understand the biology of emotions through Affect Theory. We come to understand our life narrative through our scripts and the nine affects. We learn when an affect activates by paying attention to our bodily sensations, which increases our consciousness.
The Central Blueprint for Intimacy and Communication increases our happiness since it encourages us to maximize our positive affects to increase pleasure. Through this process, we become engaged and find meaning in our lives. We enhance our happiness when we maximize our positive affects, minimize our negative affects, and find meaning within our lives.
Have you developed ways to enhance your happiness?
Knowing your Life Narrative Enhances Integration and Happiness
Through stories we share our culture, values, and mores from generation to generation. At the same time, our social brains use the narrative to link us together. A positive self-narrative allows us to maintain emotional stability. If you have a negative self-narrative, our lives focus more on fear, foster anxiety, encourage low self-esteem & pessimism.
The more we foster integration within our lives by building and reflecting on our friendships and social relationships, the easier it is for us to develop emotional intelligence. Through relationships, we foster the integration of our left and right brain hemispheres allowing us to fully function as humans and find happiness.
Do you have a clear life narrative that accurately reflects your experiences?
Steps to Constructing a Coherent Life Narrative
Our voice and language skills allow us to move unconscious memories to conscious ones creating a coherent narrative based in self-reflection. Storytelling heals and changes people in therapy. Our ability to communicate our story to others allows us to establish relationships, practice self-reflection, build self-esteem, and regulate emotions.
Abused and traumatized individuals who share their narrative can distance themselves from their direct experiences. As they get feedback from their friends and family members, they can use their voice to name their affects allowing the amygdala to release any stress or tension as the person remains in the present moment.
How often do you share your story with others?