Theoretical aside

The serious mental ill health conditions to which Emotional Chaos may contribute (severe depression, bipolar disorder, paranoid thoughts, and psychotic states) all include delusional beliefs, false beliefs that are held in the face of contrary evidence. There can be grandiose false beliefs, but commonly they may include fears of oppression. It is a fundamental claim of Emotional Chaos Theory that self-beliefs, and then beliefs about the world, arise out of patterns of emotions, which themselves arise out of movement within attachments tugging on our values. Thoughts summarise, describe and arise out of, or compensate against, those background self-beliefs.

Emotional patterns are relationally driven, not having an existence in and of themselves (as the Theravada Buddhists say). They are preparation states, but people may not have named what they are preparing for. People reflectively try to understand their preparation states (dependent arising of thought), and it is this process that generates the sense of ‘I’ in a ‘Me-and-You’ context of adjustment that is festooned with ideas and illusions.

‘Me-and-You’ is a relational context for thought; sameness and otherness make a continuum within it. Connection (attachment) is a relative concept only if there are at least three independently self-organising continuous-creations in the same environment that interact (or interfere!) with each other. This allows one to observe the relation between the other two, and to compare this with its own movements in connection to each of them.

Three independently self-organising creatures interacting in the same environment creates sufficient unpredictability and variability for chaos. That’s Life! Higher order organisation emerges out of this chaos when each self-organising creature is sensitive to and learns from (adapts and changes its future responses to) the feedback from its environmental attachments with the others. That's Love!

An example of ‘higher order’ is consciousness. In consciousness, memory or ‘visualisation’ gives the ‘person’ a character with a choice of responses to a perceived risk of loss in its attachments. This higher order identity develops a life of its own ‘above’ that of the environment in which, for example, loss is perceived. That is not necessarily to say the conscious mind has existence in and of itself, but the choices that are its hallmark do feed unpredictably back onto the functioning of each creature’s inner parts in a shared environment. For example, the choice in Anger to exert effort to a purpose (whether clearly defined or not) moves muscles, heart rate, blood circulation, sugar reserves, and so on in a very different way to the withdrawal that accompanies self-questioning in a Guilt preparation frame.

Habitual whirlpools of emotion (described by Emotional Logic) seem to over-power that choice. Fleeting whirlpools of emotion remove the consistent framework needed to make the choices. Both affect that person’s sense of identity.

Therefore, understanding the patterns of emotion that drive all this can rapidly feed back into a renewed sense of identity, self-respect, empathy and capacity to make choices.