Thought, feelings and learning
Our conscious thought and capacity to analyse, predict and learn from experience has evolved in response to the unpredictable environment we live in. Whilst our primary emotional drives may form the foundation for our conscious thought, their narrow range of responses requires us to expand this range via learning — a process which is governed by feeling and memory.
Feelings are a hybrid of thinking and emotion. Whilst emotions arise as sensations within the body, feelings arise from our thoughts about these emotions. Feelings are how we have learnt to interpret and respond to the emotions moving through us. Feelings can be thought of as a compass that guide our approach to problems, bringing what psychologists call valence to situations. Valence is how we evaluate and value certain kinds of experience (does this feel good or bad?) and is the basis for voluntary decision making. The defining feature of voluntary behaviour and subsequently of decision making is choice — choices grounded in values moulded over time by feeling.
Learning, Long-and Short-term Memory
The choices we make then are heavily informed by what we have learnt. To learn, we need to remember what did or didn’t work in the past (and how we felt about it) and predict what might work in the future. It is here where the instincts of our emotional drives meet up with the expectations and predictions of the analytical faculties we have accumulated through learning. The better our predictions of the environment, the less uncertainty we experience and the more likely we can meet our goals — something that feels good. The unpleasant feeling of making a series of wrong predictions or choices, provides the impetus for us to learn from our actions and seek what other alternatives may help us reach our goals. Whilst this long-term memory of the past is how we try and predict what may work in the future, it is our short-term or working memory where we monitor and evaluate whether or not we are on the right track.
Suffering from our Feelings and Memory Reconsolidation
What is interesting for the coach is that these short-term memories can become more labile when our evaluations trigger an emotional response. As these memories haven’t been consolidated into the stickiness of long-term memory, they are less automatic and more susceptible to change.
If we are continuously predicting correctly, there is very little reason for us to change our approach. It is when things are not going well that we begin to, in the words of Solms, suffer from our feelings. Feelings that arise from conflicting emotional drives and the defences that emerge to protect against this negative experience — defences that can keep us stuck in patterns of self-sabotage.
Like the example above, this person’s need for self-efficacy may lead to a drive of SEEKING being prioritised in the mind, but it may also lead to RAGE or FEAR, and the subsequent inner conflict that causes anxiety. The role of the coach would be to reactivate the emotional memory of the client, creating new experiences in the ‘now’ of the coaching session that re-consolidate that memory as something less restrictive. In psychotherapy this process would be referred to as lowering a patient’s defences, a process that enables a client to learn a new way of experiencing their emotions — rather than acting out of habit.
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