The negative experiences which are associated with a weakness in one of our Elements will affect the development of our personality. A Fire type, for example, will have weak Heart energy and be more likely to have many early experiences which come under the general heading of ‘not feeling loved’ and ‘feeling unlovable’. It is easy then to develop a personality with habitual emotional states which reflect these experiences. These experiences frequently turn into beliefs, for instance, that ‘I am unlovable’. This in turn begins to create our experience of the world. For example, if I believe I am unlovable, then I do not truly accept the love of others as, after all, ‘I am unlovable’.
Experiences of not being loved can then lead a Fire type to develop various ways of coping. These could include:
Behind these behaviours is a reaction to the negative experiences which arose from the initial constitutional weakness. ‘I felt unloved, so in the future I will protect myself by …’. In each of the chapters on the types, we will look at these basic capacities and the negative experiences which can easily arise and in adulthood cause us emotional problems.
WHAT HAS BEING HEALTHY GOT TO DO WITH OUR CONSTITUTIONAL IMBALANCE?
All types can be healthy or unhealthy.
So why does one person end up more healthy and the other more unhealthy? We assume that the common sense reasons are probably the true ones. Firstly, some people are born healthier than others. In addition, children who have their basic emotional needs satisfied will tend to be healthier. People who have sought insight into themselves and made choices based on these insights are also more likely to be healthy.
It is clear that as well as constitutional type, upbringing and personal awareness are the keys to emotional good or bad health. As we cannot go back and change our history, we need to change our awareness, make better decisions and change our beliefs about our history. That is where the exercises come in. The purpose of the exercises is to increase awareness and ultimately to help us to make better choices.
IS A TYPE ALWAYS BASED IN WEAKNESS?
Concentrating on the negative experiences which evolve from our constitutional imbalance suggests that it is just the label for an illness. This is not so. Most people have both the negative and positive aspects of their type in their personality.
Although each of the types does have a limited set of concerns it is also true that they will develop special sensitivities and special abilities. For example, the Fire type will have experiences around being unloved. Love and warmth become important. This can lead to a highly developed sensitivity to people and a capacity to understand and meet other’s needs as well as their own. When we discuss each type in detail we will refer to how, typically, a type will have certain good qualities or ‘virtues’.
Negative experiences do play a role in the formation of anyone’s personality, but having a ‘constitutional type’ is not the label for a sickness.
We have now come full circle through the Five Elements and our Constitutional type and back to the emotions. We have spoken about emotions as if everyone understands what we mean. Psychologists do not necessarily agree about what an emotion is. Experience has taught us to think of an emotion not as an isolated thing, but as having many parts to it.
An Emotion is Made up of Many Different Parts
1 Sensations: ‘a rush of energy moving up in my chest’, ‘a tightening in my stomach’, ‘a sinking in the chest, right down to my navel’.
2 Thoughts or spoken words: ‘I feel so good about you’, ‘I hate it when he does that’, ‘I am so disappointed’.
3 Expression: facial expression, gestures, body posture, voice tone.
4 Behaviour: reaching out to touch someone. Clenching fists, slumping and letting the head drop.
5 The situation and roles: we have to take into consideration whether we are on stage, in a classroom, with a close friend or talking to a shop assistant.
Because an emotion is made up of parts, it can occur in different ways and to varying degrees. The emotion associated with Wood is anger, but this really begins as a normal assertion of ourselves and then, when we are blocked, we can experience frustration, upset, irritation, anger, rage and finally we go, as people say, ‘ballistic’. As the emotion escalates, the parts combine in different ways. All these can be associated with the Wood Element. We do not, of course, have to be a Wood type to get angry.
HOW DO WE KNOW SOMEONE IS ANGRY?
The way we recognize that someone is angry is by their use of words, their expression, behaviour and the context in which they are reacting. We don’t know, however, what their thoughts or sensations are. For this reason, we can easily disagree about what someone is feeling. We can even disagree with the person who is having the feelings. For example, we can imagine the following conversation:
‘I am not angry. How can you be so stupid?’
‘Well, you are shouting, clenching your fists and saying you are going to wring his neck. And you look angry.’
‘You shut up.’ (Shouting) ‘I am not bloody angry. I am hurt!’
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FEELING ANGRY AND BEING AN ANGRY PERSON?
In everyday life we may look at someone and think ‘they are angry’. We would recognize this by using some of the ‘parts’ described above — especially, their words, expression and behaviour. Saying someone is an angry person is simply saying that they get angry a lot and maybe on occasions when others, in the same situation, wouldn’t. In this book, we are usually talking about a person’s tendency to have the same emotions, over and over again — like the angry person.
HOW DO EMOTIONS CAUSE DISEASE?
At the beginning of this chapter we said that the emotions are called an Internal cause of disease. Western research is supporting the ancient Chinese view that disruptive emotions negatively affect our health. So how does this happen?
In