a sufficient level of emotional strength and a comfortable level of unexpressed anger from daily recognizable and unrecognizable frustrations of the basic emotional need. As a result, a person can become more prone to becoming emotionally uncomfortable to a severe degree, even to the point of becoming suicidal. The error can then be too easily made by medical doctors and psychologists in believing that the emotional problem that a returning veteran might have, is directly attributed to having been in combat, rather than the induced stress from having had a “change of job” and a “change of address” with an abrupt loss of previous emotional attachments, and opportunities for extended talking that he, or she, might have daily had on active military duty. A sudden change of job and address may explain why a soldier in basic training can quickly become a psychiatric casualty, where he, or she, previously hadn’t been in civilian life. What can result from a change of job, or a change of address, for anybody, is a temporary loss of emotional strength and more stored anger. The remedy for this is meeting better the basic emotional need and getting rid of any uncomfortable amount of stored anger in the unconscious. That remedy can come about with talking more. It doesn’t come from being talked to, or being lectured to, or being, as many veterans have told me, “pumped full of drugs!”
Why people feel that “everything is all right,” or, with an even better met basic emotional need, “everything is more than good enough,” and why they have so many “good” feelings in what to others is a most stressful situation, may have a lot to do with the emotional attachments that are formed with any extended talking, and with the emotional strength gained from meeting well their basic emotional need from that talking. In contrast, why people can feel that “everything isn’t all right,” or why they feel “everything isn’t good enough,” and why they may be experiencing so many “bad” feelings in what other people might feel is a situation that doesn’t appear unpleasant, even if they can’t explain why they have these “bad” feelings, may have a lot to do with insufficient emotional attachments, from insufficient talking, resulting in a lessened amount of emotional strength, and too much stored anger.
People, in unconsciously creating a rationalization for feeling “good,” or feeling “bad,” unconsciously choose the facts of their reality to support the “good” or the “bad” feelings they already have. Those “good” or “bad” feelings often come more from how much their basic emotional need is being met, and its accompanying level of emotional strength, and less from the facts of their reality that people present as to why they feel the way they do. Their “I feel good because …,” or their “I feel bad because .…,” are more likely to be rationalizations for feelings that are arising, not as much, if any at all, from the reality facts that these people might give as causes for their statements, but more from the degree that their basic emotional need is currently being recognizably, and unrecognizably, met. Meeting well our basic emotional need, which can be predominantly done in our unconscious, as it can in our taking time to talk with others, generates those “everything is all right,” and “something good is going to happen to me – it’s only a matter of time,” anxiety-allaying feelings that then can be unconsciously rationalized as though they all have arisen from reality. Because people can only see their reality, they are often at a loss to give any logical sounding reason for feeling so badly, or showing a lack of emotional strength, unless to erroneously say there’s a genetic, or neurological, or a biochemical cause in the brain, or from some traumatic event of the distant past. We aren’t always going to know what is making us emotionally comfortable, or uncomfortable, when these feelings are being currently developed more from “part”-oriented perceptions in our unconscious. In fact, it’s probably more in our unconscious where the predominance of our day-to-day perceptions of what meets and what frustrates our basic emotional need takes place. Since we can’t ascertain what’s going on in our unconscious, like we easily might in our reality, we will tend to attribute any feelings we might have, as arising solely from reality for one reason or another. Our explanations to ourselves and others, for our feelings of being happy or unhappy with life, are more often rationalizations because they don’t address the component of feeling that is coming from our unconscious, which could be the predominant reason for our feeling the way we do. Because what might be engendering “good” or “bad” feelings may be predominantly contributed from our unconscious from unrecognized “part”-oriented meetings, or unrecognized “part”-oriented frustrations, of our basic emotional need, we unconsciously present reality-oriented rationalizations to explain our feeling the way we do.
Whatever we engage in that is enjoyable to us, increases the feeling that our basic emotional need is being better met. This, then, increases our feelings of having more emotional strength. We might theorize that eating what we love to eat can contribute to gaining an increased feeling of emotional strength. Perhaps this is the reason that a prisoner, condemned to death, is often given a “last meal” of what he, or she, likes eating the most. The person might then gain more emotional strength to endure what is awaiting that person. A WW2 combat veteran told me he always knew when a planned bigger than usual battle was about to take place, as he and his outfit would be served an unusually good meal beforehand. People feeling “down,” and feeling as though they have little or no emotional strength, often turn to eating more. Where eating excessively, or eating more “sweets” and desserts, might make a person temporarily feel better, while providing a feeling of increased emotional strength, over-eating is fattening and therefore detrimental to one’s physical health. Drinking alcohol and taking drugs may also be enjoyable and because it is, it can provide a false feeling of having more emotional strength, when in fact the basic emotional need isn’t really more met and a person doesn’t really have more emotional strength! The more people gain of that false feeling by drinking and “drugging,” the more impaired their brain functioning becomes. The advantage of our engaging in talking for meeting better our basic emotional need and increasing our emotional strength, is not only that it’s not going to add unwanted pounds to us, and that it’s not going to impair the functioning of our mind and brain, but it allows us to subtly rid ourselves of repressed anger. With our engaging more in talking, we really can become more emotionally comfortable people while truly having more emotional strength, and less repressed anger!
Having always our basic emotional need very well met isn’t always advantageous to us. Having it frustrated at times may be to our benefit. We have to have our basic emotional need frustrated to some degree, in order to live more comfortably in reality. We learn from the frustrations of our basic emotional need and with that learning we can better avoid much bigger frustrations of that need. We can learn from the mistakes of others that don’t frustrate our basic emotional need, but we learn best from our own mistakes that will frustrate that need. What we learn best makes it easier for us to later avoid greater frustrations. We learn better what’s “really good” to eat from having eaten things that were “really bad” to eat. We can more fully appreciate “heavenly” experiences and situations that meet well our basic emotional need when we’ve earlier experienced some “hellish” ones that might have greatly frustrated our basic emotional need. We can avoid pain better in the present and in the future by having experienced pain in the past. Frustrating our basic emotional need. so that we can later avoid greater frustrations. can be highly advantageous to us, but those lesser frustrations will still produce a degree of anger for us. When that anger is stored in our unconscious, a most fascinating entity develops that can profoundly affect each and every one of us every day that we exist. What that fascinating entity is, we’ll find out in the next chapter.
Chapter Four
What Hides In Our Unconscious
A frustration of our basic emotional need, which is consciously or unconsciously experiencing anything at all that is unpleasant to us, always produces anger. The bigger the consciously or unconsciously perceived frustration, the greater is the anger produced. Because of our having to live in a world that’s far from being perfect for fully meeting our basic emotional need, we’re unavoidably going to be engendering a lot of anger on a daily basis that can’t be all expressed as soon as it’s formed. When it’s not, our unexpressed anger is stored in our unconscious and, like a caterpillar
