The subject of emotions seems so ordinary. Everybody has them all the time.  I bothered to write about emotions not because mine are any different than yours, but because years of thinking about feelings gave me an overview that made me understand emotions differently. I couldn’t help but wonder why. Why do we feel the way we do? Why do feelings change so easily? Is there an understanding that can reduce emotional suffering.

I think there is. The whole idea of an emotional system frames the feelings we feel in a different way. I’m less afraid of getting stuck feeling terrible when I know how fluid feelings are. I am more confident that I can move on, which helps me move on more easily.

I thought a lot about evolution. Since natural selection accounts for virtually every trait and capacity we humans have,  there must be a good evolutionary reason emotions exist. I spent a lot of time imagining the cave people, who lived pretty much the same for hundreds of thousands of years. They had a long time for natural selection to generate specific qualities. In other words, our feelings do not exist by accident. They came down through eons of evolution, a finely tuned system that serves our well-being and survival. That means no emotion we can feel is random or superfluous. They all fit. That’s what led me to the idea of an emotional system.

Individual emotions came from different places in our species history. Fear developed from the aversion to danger all animals had to survive. That’s the easiest to understand. Love is a little harder. It’s what binds people and communities together, also a key factor in survival. A tribe or clan working together was much more likely to deflect that attack of a predator.

There’s a lot more. Stay tuned.