Our Pathway Home - From the Archives: Problems Facing the Emotional Processor

VALUE...
Some of our most valuable people are being lost. People cannot survive and function if they have no sense of their own value.

There is a fundamental difference between an Emotional Processor, and a Mental Processor. But the difference is not one of VALUE. It's merely a difference of how experiences get processed.

The Mental Processor views the world primarily through the mind. Thought is their natural medium. They evaluate all experiences FIRST through their mind. If they are in balance, they will communicate with their emotions as well, they will ask and listen, and incorporate the emotional response into their process.

The Emotional Processor views the world primarily through the emotions. Feeling is their natural medium. They evaluate all their experiences FIRST through their emotions. If they are in balance, they will communicate with their mind as well, they will ask and listen, and incorporate the thought response into their process.

If a person is an E.P., and knows intuitively who he is, he will identify his personal value by what the world and those around him think and believe about emotions. If his belief says that emotions should be denied, suppressed, controlled virtually out of existence, he will believe not only that he should suppress the primary part of himself, but that he himself should be abolished.

This belief is operating at a core level, and is experienced by the individual at a very early age. The E.P.'s value is in question at a fundamental level. And since, as long as he lives, he cannot abolish his emotions or satisfy the requirements of his family and society to BE less emotional, he responds to the wishes of the world by trying to abolish himself.

He can do this in small destructive steps, or all at once and completely.

Fight or Fall

If we look further into the problem, we can see that some E.P.'s fall into more of a yin pattern of submission, where they truly are trying to destroy themselves. Some, however, fall into more of a yang pattern of fighting. These are the E.P.'s who cause problems in the world and seem to outpicture everything the M.P.'s expect. They can become violent, a pot bubbling over with rage, and because they believe they have no value or place in the world, they don't care about the world or who gets hurt by their actions.

Knowing What's True

E.P.'s can feel what others are feeling. They will often know what people are feeling better than they do, especially if the feelings are being denied. However, if the E.P. can be made to believe that all the feelings they "sense" are their own, or are an abberration, then the E.P. can be made to doubt their perceptions and feel crazy.

Functioning in Public

One of the biggest challenges for the Emotional Processor in our current society is how to get along in situations where one's natural way of functioning is unacceptable.

The E.P. child at home before the age of 5 or 6 can be nurtured and allowed to cry. He will naturally and spontaneously express his feelings, and the only challenge for parents is guiding the child to develop his spirit/mind to gain balance. By this, I don't mean overriding the child's emotional expression, or cutting it short to "explain" situations. Giving information or rationalizations before the emotions are completely done expressing is actually putting a stop to the natural process. But waiting until the tears have stopped by themselves, and then talking with the child, perhaps even asking the child to re-evaluate the situation, is appropriate and helpful.

But what happens when the E.P. child starts school?

They will find out, the hard way, that most of the world does not like them. For the E.P., this is how the judgments against their emotional nature are received, as stated above. They hear "stop being such a baby" from their teachers, and "crybaby!" from their peers, but their hearts receive the words as judgments not on their behavior, but on who they are.

Their experiences at home - being allowed to cry and express - can not prepare them for the ridicule and pressure of their peers at school, nor the rigid structures they now have to walk within, enforced by both teachers and the system at large. There is no escaping the pressures of this system.

I watched as my brothers and cousins started school and were completely smashed down by it. For these sensitive boy-children who had been used to crying whenever they felt hurt or angry or frightened, starting school was a terrifying experience.

Children can be exceptionally cruel to each other. There is no comparison in the adult world to the cruelty of children on a playground. The sensitive ones, who cannot help but feel, are usually the ones left out, the ones most tormented by their peers. Some may learn to put on a stiff face, pretend they don't care, and only collapse into tears of hurt and rage when they reach the safety of home. Some may never learn coping skills. Some just crawl through their school days, crying at the drop of a hat, teased, hated, never finding acceptance with either peers or adults.

An interesting side note -- my youngest brother's response to his peers was to turn in rage on my mother. He blamed the emotional healing process for making him a "wimp", and refused for many years to have anything to do with crying. He became tough, learned to play the macho game at school, and at home as well. He began to express the view that we women were secretly man-haters, who wanted to emasculate him and all men, and that's why we did what we did. This was a pretty angry viewpoint for a 12 year old, but he was always precocious.

Perhaps he was not a natural Emotional Processor. It's possible that his natural mode is mental/spirit. In that case, perhaps the experiences he had as a child growing up in a household where emotional processing was accepted might make him more balanced in the long run, if he can get past the rage he felt during that most crucial time - when he was developing his masculine self-image - when he received such ridicule and pressure from his peers for being able to cry.

Finding (*Giving*) Acceptance

What we need to know is that people who are Emotional Processors are valuable and important in the universe. Without these people, creation would be dry, sterile, uncreative, unimaginative. A world of lock-step computers, controlled and dead. The extreme Mental Processors might imagine that this kind of world would be more desireable. They might fear the E.P.'s lack of control and the seemingly chaotic world of wild emotions. But what they fear is unhealed emotion.

This is a problem that can be solved, only if the M.P. will look at the problem for what it is, and stop judging the E.P. people. Judgments hold a reality frozen in place, and stop change from happening. And lip service given to emotions on the surface of things will not be enough. ACTUAL acceptance is needed.

A Word To the Mental Processor:

There is nothing wrong with being an M.P., there is no greater or lesser value on being an M.P. vs. an E.P. -- only believing makes it so. And we have believed that E.P.'s are less-than for a long, long time. It's time for you to take the step to find real acceptance for people who are fundamentally different from yourself. Not wrong. Not less-than. Just different. It's time for you to see, really see, that the E.P. way of healing is different from yours.

At the bottom levels of perception, an E.P. will know if there is real acceptance for their feelings or if the acceptance is only lip service. So if you are seeking to heal with an Emotional Processor, start with listening. The biggest problem the Mental Processor has, which stems from having always been in a position of dominance and "rightness": They don't know how to listen. They only know how to dictate and tell others what to do, what is wrong, what should be, etc. etc.

Learn to listen. No amount of mental or spiritual wisdom is as valuable as this one piece of advice I give you. Stop thinking you know all there is to know, and just listen.

As you listen, feel all the feelings that you have against the E.P., find all the reasons you don't want emotions to express freely, all the judgments you have about the process of tears. Once you heal those, you will find true acceptance for the process of emotional healing and open the door for healing with others.