The Development of Affectivity

Affection is the relationship of affection or care that the person has with himself or with someone who is close or dear to him. It is a psychological state that allows human beings to show their feelings and emotions to other people or objects. It can also be considered a bond of feelings that feed back into relationships that may or may not contain sexual characteristics, being considered as friendship.

In psychology, the term affectivity is also used to designate the susceptibilities and affects that human beings experience in the face of changes that happen in their inner world. This sensation is often called "Affective Disorder".

The most common affective disorder is depression, which presents characteristic or variable situations, such as: panic-type anxious conditions, phobias, somatizations or the same generalized anxiety, which also have affectivity changes as a background.

To understand affectivity, it is necessary to understand some elements of the psychic world first: representations, experiences, experiential reactions and feelings.

Representations

Throughout our lives, the facts or events lived by us will be our life experiences and will become part of our consciousness, including creating neuro-functional records as memories that settle in our physical body, linked to emotions. From the facts and events, we will have memories and feelings, as well as memories of those feelings. Therefore, we will remember not only our life experiences, but we will also remember whether they were pleasant or not, pleasant or not ...

Although different people may experience the same facts and events, they will experience those facts and events in a different and personal way. Losing the same object, suffering the loss of the same family member, going through the same assault, listening to the same music, eating the same food, etc., can cause different feelings in different people. The loss of a loved one, for example, is usually a bad thing for everyone, but even so, it will represent something different for everyone. The loss of a father of five children, although he is the same father for the five children, will be a different loss for each of them, it will represent something different for each one. In fact, then, more important than reality itself is the representation of that reality. That is, what the facts represent ends up being more important than the facts themselves.

The experiences

The different representation that each one of us attributes to facts and events transforms these facts and events into personal experiences. This means that these facts and events are personally valued and represented, solely and exclusively by us. Each one of us gives these feelings a feeling and value. Two people cannot experience the same experience, although they can experience the same fact or event in a personal and different way.

Feelings

The experiences, which are the facts or events represented particularly by each one of us, cause different feelings: anxiety, fear, joy, anguish, anger, apprehension, etc. Experimental feelings or reactions are reactions of our psyche to experiences, just as allergic reactions are reactions of our organism to stimuli that sensitize us. Just as allergic reactions produce different types of allergies in different people, so experiential reactions determine different feelings in different people, different in type and intensity.

Experiential reactions, feelings, will always be proportional to the meaning that the facts have for people, will depend on what the facts represent for the person. The same fact or event can determine different feelings in different people because they also represent something different for different people.

Normal and Non-Normal Reactions

An anxious person, for example, is actually experiencing an experiential anxiety type reaction. You are reacting to something with anxiety. Let's imagine the anxiety we experience when we learn that there is a snake inside our room. The fact itself is the snake, the experience that results from that fact will be exactly what a snake in our room represents to us. Evidently, a snake in the room will have a different representation between a person who is very afraid of snakes and one who is not so afraid. In any case, this experience will result in an experiential reaction; a lot of anxiety for those who are very afraid of snakes and less anxiety for those who are not so afraid.

This makes it clear that the type and intensity of the experiential reaction will depend on what the snake represents for each of us. The anxiety-like experiential reaction in this example of the snake can be considered normal. Why? Because it is a response to a fact statistically capable of generating anxiety. The snake is universally feared and, although it represents a greater or lesser threat, depending on the person, it will always be a threat to the expressive majority of them. On the other hand, this experiential reaction would not be normal if the person experiences anxiety just by imagining a snake inside his room. It would be a non-normal experiential reaction, because there is not really an objective and concrete cause to trigger it. The snake, in fact, does not exist, except in the person's imagination, and this is not an objective cause, but a subjective cause. Let's also imagine that the person, upon learning of the existence of a snake in his room, experiences anxiety and fear so intense that he ends up fainting. This type of experiential reaction is also not normal. Why? Because we know, statistically, that the vast majority of people do not faint upon learning of a snake in their room; they may be afraid, anxious, terrified, but fainting is not common. Passing out in these circumstances may be understanding, but that does not mean that it is normal. It is not normal, because fainting is medically considered a non-normal occurrence and also because most people would not pass out under these circumstances. This type of non-normal experiential reaction, which is fainting, is due to the disproportion between the experiential reaction and the causative experience, that is, fainting is disproportionate to anxiety without fainting, which would be expected for most people.

Finally, if the person knows about the existence of a snake in his room and then that snake is properly removed, but the anxiety persists for a week after the event, this will also be a non-normal experiential reaction, as there was no relationship in the time of the reaction with the cause. It means that the person was not able to overcome what happened after a certain time, during which the majority would have already overcome. Therefore, we saw the three elements necessary to define an experiential reaction as normal or not: the objective cause for the manifestation of the experiential reaction, the proportion between the causative experience and the experiential reaction and the temporal relationship between the causative experience and the reaction experiential.

Non-Normal Feelings

Exaggerated anxiety, panic syndrome, phobias, depression or pathological distress are examples of non-normal feelings. The lack of objective cause, proportion or relationship in time between the experiential reactions and their causative experiences provide these non-normal feelings.

Of course, there are causes for panic, phobia, depression or distress. However, they are not objective and concrete causes, but subjective causes, which exist particularly in the intimacy of each one and not in the concrete world of facts and events. These subjective causes will be the object of most interest here.

Let's imagine a case of social phobia, where the person feels bad (excessive anxiety) when he is in front of many people, in crowded environments, etc. For that patient, other people pose a threat, just as they pose a threat to the snake in the other example. In this case, however, crowded environments simply do not pose a concrete and objective threat to most people, but an imaginary threat to the person with social phobia. In this case, we can say that people and crowded environments represent a subjective cause of threat to patients with social phobia. The malaise caused by this subjective and imaginary cause, characterized by extreme anxiety, sensation of fainting, suffocation, shortness of breath, cold hands, sweating, etc., will be a non-normal experiential reaction.

We can say the same thing about panic syndrome, where the person reacts emotionally as if, suddenly, he was going to die, feel sick, lose control or something bad happens. These people are taken to the Emergency Room and nothing that may be threatening their lives is found. There is nothing objective and concrete. Therefore, the facts and events for such fear, that is, thinking that they suffer from the heart, that they are about to have a stroke, etc., exist only in the imagination, therefore, again a subjective cause, a non-normal experiential reaction.

In cases of typical depression, the patient feels sad and distressed, thinks he is worse than he is, thinks that life is meaningless, thinks that nothing is worthwhile and things like that. All of these ideas are judgments that exist only in your way of thinking, therefore, they are subjective causes that do not correspond to concrete and objective facts. It is also a non-normal experiential reaction.

In short, feelings will not be normal whenever they are determined by intimate, personal, imaginary causes or that do not correspond to concrete and objective reality. These subjective causes come from within the person, from his emotional intimacy and, often, inexplicably.

Affection

Seeing an old photograph of a deceased loved one, some people experience tender, soft, homesick and even pleasant feelings. Others, in turn, may experience feelings of anguish, sadness, a sense of loss, grief, in short, unpleasant feelings. What, really, within people makes this photo valued (represented) in this or that way? It is about affection. It is affection that gives value and represents our reality. This affectivity is also able to represent an environment full of people as if it were threatening, it is able to make us imagine that there may be a snake inside the room, or it is also capable of producing panic by making us imagine that we can suddenly die.

Affection values ​​everything in our life, everything that is outside of us, such as facts and events, as well as what is within us (subjective causes), such as our fears, our conflicts, our desires, etc. Affection also values ​​the facts and events of our past and our future perspectives.

The best example for understanding affectivity is to compare it to a pair of glasses, through which we see the world. It is these hypothetical glasses that make us see our reality this way or that. If those glasses aren't right, we can see things bigger or smaller than they are, more colorful or grayer, more distorted or out of focus. To deal with affectivity means to regulate the glasses through which we see our world.

Why does a person suffering from Panic Syndrome think they may suddenly die or be sick? Why does she think she has a heart condition, or is about to have a stroke, or is so out of control that she loses control? Now, none of this is part of the objective and concrete reality. It is a pessimistic judgment, a negative assessment that the person makes of himself, an affection that represents his own self negatively to himself. If the person is looking worse than he is, then affectively he is not well.

Typical depression, in turn, also makes you feel and feel worse than you really are. This produces insecurity and lowers self-esteem. Here again, affection negatively represents the person to himself. Negative self-evaluation, feeling that life is not worth it, that reality is suffering, feeling exaggerated fear, feeling sick and all sorts of bad thoughts result from altered affection.

To summarize this issue of affectivity, let's look at an illustrative example. Let's imagine ourselves in the middle of a street fight. Our fear (or anxiety) will be directly proportional to the size of our opponent; the bigger our opponent, the greater the fear. And how do we assess the size of our opponent? Your size will always be evaluated against our own size, as our only comparison parameter will always be ourselves.

It doesn't matter if our opponent is bigger or smaller than anyone else, it just matters to be bigger or smaller than us. And how exactly do we know our own size? Whoever says whether we are big or small, strong or weak, smart or not, superior or not to the opponent is our affection, this psychic device that gives value to everything in our life and, above all, gives the value of ourselves.

If an altered affectivity makes us think of ourselves as small, weak, little smart and worse, then we will be afraid to fight even with a child; we will be frightened and anxious about everything in life; crowds, closed environments, traveling alone, loneliness, the idea of ​​being sick and so on.

Intimate Conflicts

Knowing about intimate conflicts is important to understand feelings arising from subjective causes, that is, from anxiety, anguish, depression, panic, phobias that appear without an objective and concrete apparent cause.

The human being has always lived in the face of the dilemma between what he really wants to do, what he must do and what he can do. We are not always doing what we want, often we do not want to do what we should, other times we want and must do what we cannot. Anyway, we are constantly facing this conflict.

This situation is not just about the issues of our practical life, it is also about our feelings. Whether or not we should like a certain person, whether we like a certain attitude or not, does not always obey whether we want to like it or not. Sometimes, we hate or like it even if we don't want to, sometimes we don't even owe it, other times we still, even if we owe it and want it, we can't.

Now, a person who cannot love his mother even though he knows he should like it (after all, mothers should be loved simply because they are our mothers), or their sister, or their father, will be experiencing a conflict. Whoever experiences the drama of wanting to date someone, although he should be with another person, also lives in conflict. Whoever wanted to be an actor should remain a lawyer, same. Or she wanted to have a son and only manages to produce women, she wanted and should be respected by her husband, but she is not managing, she should work more, but she doesn't want to, or wants to stay at home, but she must go out to work and so on. .

As we have seen, we are all subject to conflicts, as we are not always fully happy with our current situation. In fact, it is almost impossible for a conscious person to live without any conflict.

In emotional health, we manage to live well with our conflicts, we manage to live well despite our conflicts. However, if affectivity is compromised, we can succumb to these conflicts. In depression, for example, a conflict, with which we have lived peacefully for many years, becomes unbearable.

Sometimes, we are not fully aware of conflicts; they can be unconscious. This usually happens in very active people who never stop to reflect on their lives, people who support everything because they believe themselves strong, people who consider emotions a trivial thing. Even these people are exhausted. Affected or exhausted affectivity can make unconscious conflicts capable of causing such anxiety, to the point of producing a panic syndrome, phobia, etc.

At other times, depressed or exhausted affectivity moves and moves in the trunk of our psyche. Facts, experiences, conflicts and traumas practically forgotten come back to the surface, bother and torture. It is as if a scar that we had for years and for which we did not care so much, started to bother us a lot, making us feel ugly, discriminated against and hurt because of it.

Intimate conflicts, together with present and past frustrations, present and past traumas and complexes make up what we call subjective causes for non-normal experiential reactions. They will always be non-normal because they originate without a concrete and objective detectable cause. And subjective causes will cause the more discomfort and the more non-normal experiential reactions the more altered our affectivity is. Therefore, the correction of altered affectivity is the first and most important step in the treatment of all these emotional conditions.

Dealing with altered affectivity

Affective emotional disorders can exist in two ways: a) the person is affected emotionally or b) he is affectively problematic. It is the same relationship that can be made between being allergic and being allergic.

People who are affected emotionally are usually those whose original personality has no natural traits of exaggerated affective sensitivity, but who, for momentary and circumstantial reasons, end up having affective problems. Among these circumstantial and momentary reasons, the most common today, are continued stress, losses and disappointments, the demands of daily adaptation, among others. This type of affective disorder appears at some point in the life of an affectionately normal person, and can be understood as a kind of exhaustion due to the overload of tense and traumatic experiences.

The second type, the one that is affectively problematic, occurs in people with personality traits of exaggerated affective sensitivity. For these people, life is usually felt with more emotions and experiences tend to be experienced with greater feeling. They are anxious by nature, naturally sentimental, people who are easily hurt, suffer from excessive responsibility. They are usually more withdrawn and do not let their emotions show.

The difference between being and having affective problems is of fundamental importance for the treatment of recovery of affection. If the case is to be emotionally problematic, the treatment tends to be more lasting and, in some cases, even definitive. It is the same as being hypertensive, being diabetic, being asthmatic, being rheumatic, in short, these are cases that characterize a way of being and not being. Prejudices about a longer treatment for these affective problems are due to our culture, because the prolonged treatment for the other diseases mentioned here does not arouse the same dislike as treatments of a psychological nature, although they are practically the same thing.

However, if the person is experiencing affective problems resulting from momentary circumstances, the treatment is also temporary, that is, for a period of time sufficient for the person to restore their emotional harmony.

Affection according to the Tantric Vision of the Way of Love

The meditations and experiences of Tantra, offered in individual works and in the Tantra Groups “O Caminho do Amor”, in Communion Metamorphosis, present excellent results in the recovery of self-esteem and personal appreciation. People who use psychiatric drugs should not withdraw their medication without the assistance of their doctors or psychologists.