Emotions impact our thinking more than our thinking impacts our emotions. When our emotions are out of control, in other words, so is our thinking. And when we can't bring our feeling and thinking into some sort of balance, our life and our relationships show it.

In order to maintain our emotional equilibrium, we need to be able to use our thinking mind to decode and understand our feeling mind. That is, we need to feel our feelings and then use our thinking to make sense and meaning out of them.

Balance is that place where our thinking, feeling and behavior are reasonably congruent; where we operate in a reasonably integrated flow. We are not “off the wall” and at those moments when we do fly off the wall, as all of us do and probably need to now and then, we can find our way back home again. We can “right” ourselves .

The Limbic System

Emotions are processed by something called the limbic brain system also referred to as our “emotional brain”. Our limbic system, which is where we experience and process emotion, actually sends more inputs to the thinking part of our brain, i.e. the cortex, than the opposite. (Damassio)

Science now can describe in comprehensive detail just what goes on in the body when we experience emotions. To take it one step further, how our body works with our mind to experience, process and create our emotional world.

But how do we achieve this living in balance? Is it something we can train ourselves to do? If we didn't learn adequate skills of self regulation in childhood, can we learn them in adulthood? And how do we fall in and out of balance?

We learn the skills of self regulation primarily from those who surround us when we are young. As children, if we get frightened or hurt, for example, we look to our mothers, fathers and close people to sooth us, to help us to feel better, to bring us back into balance. Gradually we internalize these mind/body skills as our own.

Our cortex, which is our thinking brain, tends to shut down when we get scared but our emotional or limbic brain keeps operating. This means that we lose, momentarily our ability think clearly, to reflect on and make sense out of what we're feeling. The animal brain takes over and our more human, thinking brain shuts down. It's protective, nature's way of keeping us in our survival brain with no distraction. But if we're too scared, for too long, this breakdown between our thinking and feeling selves can interfere with our ability to self regulate, to use our thinking mind to organize what we're getting from our emotional mind. It is for this reason that we want to slowly expand our capacity to feel safe within ourselves, safe feeling what we are actually feeling; so that our thinking brain can stay awake and functional while were feeling. So that we can use our thinking brain to understand our feeling brain.

How We Learn Self Regulation as Kids

As children, we are entirely dependent on adults around us for our survival. Because of this, because they have such power over our well being, what goes on in those primary relationships affects us a deep level, at that survival level. Who am I? Do I please people? Am I loved, safe? Do I have a place in the world? These are the kinds of fundamental issues that are part of early life.

Much of our brain development as children occurs outside the womb. This incomplete brain development of the child makes us vulnerable and dependent for much of our childhoods on the adults that surround us. A barking dog, fireworks, or a thunderstorm can terrify a child. The child is completely dependent on their parent to act as an external regulator because their internal regulators won't be fully developed till they are around twelve or so. The child looks to the parent to learn whether or not they should be scared and how scared they may need to be. This is why the small child is so vulnerable to emotional and psychological damage when the home is chaotic. Not only is what's going on frightening them and throwing them out of balance, but, if the parent is the scary person, the child loses access to their source of comfort and regulation. They're scared and no one is telling them it's ok, cuddling them and reassuring them that life will soon return to normal or that they will not, in any case, be abandoned to manage all by themselves. It is this vulnerability that can put a child at risk if they live in a chaotic home.