If you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, why do we have emotions? Okay, so what's the function? Okay?
The first function of emotions is that they motivate behaviors needed to solve common problems in evolution, essentially, that's what it is. So they motivate the behavior.
Second, emotions communicate, they communicate to others.
And the third thing they do is they communicate yourself, which they say to you check this out. In a sense, they're a rapid fire system.
So for example, if you have something dangerous coming towards you, if you have to sit around and analyze whether that's danger, what should I do in danger? Should I run? Or should I not? should I hide? Or should I not?
By that time your dad or thinks of tsunamis that came when the ocean came up, and you see your children down there?
And you know, right away, you're motivated highly to give those kids off out of there. So they live, however, you go down and you say, okay, children, I think we should run.
Okay, that's not communicating an emotion and you're unlikely to get him to run. What gets him to run as we say, Rod. So it is an automatic communication system.
And then the other is, you know, parents have this all the time. They look at a room with their kids, and they start thinking, Okay, something's going on here. I don't know what it is, but something and they start checking everything out. So emotions do that for you. So this gives you a lot of information, though, about why it can be so hard to regulate emotions.
If you've got an emotion that when you go to communicate it, no one listens to you, or you get invalidated. You have dashes and what would you do? What you do if you think it's important is you escalate. But the other person, if they don't agree with you, when you escalate, what they do is they also escalate their invalidation.
So you end up in these situations where emotions start going up, mainly because they're not getting validated. Parents always think if I validated, you'll go up, I'm reinforcing you. But it's exactly the opposite. If you validate, they go down, and they go down because of this evolutionary function of emotion.
