ANIMAL THEORY OF EMOTION
Emotion is Not a Disorder
When you’re emotional, you’re not mentally sick, broken, or crazy -- you’re just protecting yourself out of instinct: you’re on animal.
Emotion is not a disorder, it is a distortion that happens when your evolved mind is hijacked by your primal urges. When you have anger, you are just fighting. When you have shame, you are just fleeing. When you have disgust, you are just flinching. When you have sadness, you are just playing dead. When you are afraid, you are just freezing. Every negative emotion in your mind is an animal move that your ancestors needed for survival in the wild but have little use for you now, as a rational creature in a civilized world.
Too many people see themselves as having mental disorders when what they have is emotion for natural reasons. When more than half of the room has a psychiatric diagnosis of “abnormal psychology” then abnormality is not the problem. Intuitively and statistically, the norm cannot be abnormal. Yet somehow it is. A rich, firmly established culture of mental illness identification has made it something that you and everyone can have –and seemingly does.
But you’re not emotional because you’re sick, and you’re not sick because you’re emotional. You do not “have” ADHD. You do not “have” OCD. You not “have” PTSD. You don’t have it because no one has it, and no one has it because it is not something to have. You become aggressive, avoidant, disgusted, depressed, and anxious out a perceived animal need to protect yourself.
Regulating your emotion and knowing that you’re ok is a simple, existential undertaking that requires embracing the primitivity of being a person and accepting that, despite the evolutionary discrepancy between you and other living creatures on a cerebral level, you are still just an animal trying to survive.
Animal Theory is about shedding your animal and recognizing that no matter how important, legitimate, and meaningful your emotional urges seem, they are always exaggerated. So long as you’re not actually in danger, you’re fundamentally ok: you won’t benefit from your survival energy and are far more effective navigating your life with calm reason. Emotions don’t need to be indulged, investigated, or diagnosed — they just need to be tamed. The best thing to do when you’re on animal, is to get off animal:
Do Nothing (on animal), Stare Down (your animal), Don’t Seek (on animal) and, Accept your Animal (and everyone else's).
Challenging the harmful and unproven paradigm of mental disorder, Animal Theory offers a normal, primal explanation of what it is to have excessive feelings and, ultimately, what it is to be emotional at all. Animal Theory is for anyone that has managed their emotion with countless therapists, tons of addictions, numerous diagnoses, and a “sick” identity that is paralyzing their ability to feel better. It is also for anyone interested in being more effective, less distracted, less impulsive, and less compulsive. In theory, it is for everyone, because everyone has negative emotion, and everyone could benefit from having it less.
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Animal Theory of Emotion guides you towards the recognition that:
1. Anxiety is your basic, primal defense system working to overprotect you.
2. Your defense system is designed for survival purposes, but your life is not.
3. If you have “too much emotion”, it means you are overprotecting yourself with primitive reactivity, for evolutionary and developmental reasons, even though, fundamentally, you are ok.
4. The best intervention for anxiety is to stop your emotion, calm your reactive system and THEN manage your life.
5. You don’t need to regulate your emotion, you need to reduce it.