The Tinman

Since my final semester of school has no actual class meetings, I have rejoined my Monday night bible study/women's group. It is primarily an "authentic community" group, where we can go to be completely honest about everything, and be accountable to each other, in a safe and secure environment.

No matter how much my faith waxes and wains, I've always enjoyed attending. The love I have for these women, and they for me, runs deep. I missed them terribly when I was in school.

The beginning and the end of the meeting consists of checking in/out with a word to describe the emotion you are feeling. With my new problem of a complete lack of emotion, these are now hard questions to answer!

Last Monday, at checkout, someone commented about another woman having a heavy heart, or that it was full to overflowing, and my immediate response in my mind was the lyrics "if I only had a heart....", and I dubbed myself The Tinman when it was time for me to check out.

Last night walking into the meeting, that song played itself over and over in my head. Well, not the entire song, since I can't remember it, but just that phrase. I think it's fitting!

I have another therapy appointment tomorrow morning. The saga continues.

Emotions

I know I mentioned this in a previous post, but I've been thinking quite a bit about emotions. I have not started on my quest to find them, but the quest itself, and the possible outcome has been on my mind.

So, according to Dr. Laura Berman, if you suppress one or more emotions, you suppress them all, since they all come from the same center in the brain. I know I've mentioned that before. I think I'm going somewhere with this...

The five emotions, as described in ysmarko's blog, are: Anger, Hurt, Sadness, Fear, and Joy. I think he was saying that all others are a subset of these. This sounds about right to me, but not being an expert on emotion, I'm willing to take his word for it.

My question is... Why are 4 out of the 5 unpleasant?