Equivalence

Pondering, it seems to me that if emotions and thoughts BOTH arise from primitive sensations–our gut alone, as Peter Levine noted in a quote I posted a few days ago, has the “intelligence” of a cat brain, and is thus functionally an animal within us that both is affected by AND affects our actual brain–then they are equivalent.

It may be that there is no difference in perceptual sophistication on this level between an unintelligent person who expresses trauma through recurring feelings and images, and a much more intelligent person who is able to dissociate the feelings entirely and instead think obsessively.

The former, actually, would be more advanced.  I am perhaps myself somewhere in them middle.  I remarked long ago that my thinking seems to be a way of running productively.

But if you NEED thought, it cannot have an end.  You do not work, say, the way you work to build a house.  Once a house is done, you stop building (unless you want an addition, and that, too, has an end).  With thinking as an aim, there is no limit to the number of words you can inflict on the world.  Trust me, I know.

And this linkage is interesting.  I wake up most days and the thought comes in my head “everyone hates you”.  I can and of course do dispute this cognitively, but that is not where it comes from.  What happens, I now realize, is that some primitive sensation in my gut gives rise to the feeling of disgust, and that in turn crystalizes as the thought.  Rather than interrogate the thought or the emotion, I am now focusing solely on bodily sensations, and it seems to be alleviating this problem greatly.  I am getting moments, and even hours, of honest calm.  It is a beautiful thing.