I had seen one of your kind one time, walking, in the Folsom Historical District. It was a male with black hair, very handsome, and set apart from everything around him. He appeared to be searching for someone. I had felt a paralytic conflict, an attraction to him, and a fear of him also. You know my powers. They are not as developed as they ought to be. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to follow him. It was a long time ago. I never forgot about it—knowing he was not human, and that he was not a ghost. I do not think I told anyone about him. Any human being who has had a life that enabled him or her to acquire beneficial, accepting, enjoying, sharing attitudes toward self and relatedness, in the fullest extensions of those terms, can enter into relations and bring to and gain from the experience a reaffirmation at every level of that selfhood. Many modern human beings feel alienated and lost, or feel they are living only a partial existence until they find a satisfying love-relationship with at least one other human being. We can best understand ourselves when we can get outside ourselves and into life of another person. However, when a person awakens deeply enough to embody one’s full-blooded humanity without any dissociation from what is tender, soft, and vulnerable in one, one is one’s own hero. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

Many people claim that people are nowhere near as noble, heroic, saintly, perfect, rational, pure, altruistic, or loving as they claim to be in the thousands of books, news reports, articles, art works, and speeches that people make about themselves. Humanists are supposed to extol human’s virtues, put human beings on a pedestal, see people as the be-all, end-all of existence, and to worship human beings. However, humanistic psychology is not interested in making gods of our men and women. It simply takes human beings as its basic unit of study and observes them, bases its findings on human-made rules and human-made goals, and puts human into their proper place in the nature of things. Humanistic psychology tries to correct the view that humans are worms, nothing, a zero with the ring knocked off. So in the attempt to see and describe human beings as they actually are, we have to pay attention to those who have been willing to tell it like it is, not like how we would like it to be. Victorian students were told that human beings were not the totally rational, reasoning, conscious, willing master of their fate (nor even much of their day-to-day behavior) that the Enlightenment thinkers portrayed. In addition to the individual’s mental abilities, the greatest number of people are dominated far more by emotions and underlying conflicts than they are by reason and will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

A great deal of emphasis should be placed on people really listening to each other, to what the other person has to say, because people very seldom (yes, there are other words to use beside rare) encounter a person who is capable of taking either you or oneself seriously. Of course, some people are not really like these; the foundation is there, but there is too much confusion and madness mixed in. Many people have a profound desire for communicating with and getting to know other people, but they are incapable of doing so. They do not know how. Getting to know someone, entering that new World, is an ultimate, irretrievable leap into the unknown. The prospect is terrifying. The stakes are high. The emotions are overwhelming. The two people are reluctant really to open up in front of each other, because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves to the other. How often they inflict pain and torment upon each other. Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep. No blood is hacked from the soul. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

Emotions. Feelings. Experiences that are incredibly difficult to communicate in words. Yet something happens. A person experiences something, a feeling, a change, something going on inside of one’s head, stomach, muscles. The individual tries to tell about it. One selects words, pulls from one’s verbal quiver the straightest, truest, arrows one can find, hopes one’s aim and strength are adequate, and shoots the shaft out toward a target—another human being, who might be listening, reading, hearing. What happens? Sometimes the arrows fall short: not enough strength—will, desire, intent—behind the pulling of the bowstrings. Sometimes the string is flimsy or breaks—the motivation is lacking or feeble. Sometimes the arrows overshoot or miss the target—the bow man or woman is too forceful, tries too hard, or is careless. Or maybe he or she just did not want to hit it. Often when we miss in trying to communicate an idea, it is really because we are afraid of making contact, of actually being heard or understood. Although interruptions in human dialogue may be very painful, at least they are clear-cut. Individuals may suffer acutely when they lose a loved one, but they usually realize they are suffering, and they know why. The vital force missing in their lives is recognized and acknowledged. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

In a communications-conscious society, where we have speech therapy, reading clinics, speed reading, sensitivity training, group encounter, etc., the person who cannot communicate is often considered odd, or is rejected. Yet not everyone wants to communicate, especially emotions. So we often find people going through the motions, saying “oops!” when a communication effort fails, but secretly meaning: “Thank God! I did not get through to him! Now, I do not have to give up anything myself. Deep feeling hurts too much.” There is, however, another dimension to human dialogue that is far more subtle and often quite difficult to recognize. For if dialogue can grow, it can also deteriorate, slowly and subtly, to the point where an individual can be trapped in a totally improvised relationship without even being able to recognize what happened or why. The process is very similar to the way the body grows and ages, on a day-to-day basis, without any visible change. The very fact a person can tolerate deteriorated dialogue and sometimes even encourage it is something that we would often prefer to deny, for reflecting on the implications is not pleasant. Since dialogue involves reciprocal sharing with other human beings, its deterioration must also be reciprocal, and each person must share part of the responsibility. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

An individual can only receive to the extent that he or she gives, and, in that sense, dialogue is a mirror of his or her personality. Think how many times you have heard or even used the expression: “He is too emotional.” What did this mean? For many it probably meant that the person was exhibiting emotions or feeling-states that were excessive or exaggerated. Others would interpret that description to mean: “He is using expressions or gestures or something that embarrasses others.” Some people simply mean, “He is showing feelings that I have never seen before, much less experienced in myself.” However, others mean, “He is showing feelings that I have felt all too often. I am uncomfortable because I am being reminded of those feelings. I identify with this and it hurts!” Underlying most of these statements is an assumption a lot of people make: emotions are strange, frightening, weird, odd. However, what are the facts? The facts, if we can rely on the work of those who specialize in the study of emotion, are confusing. Out of the various theories they propose, we can find only a few things that they all agree upon. However, we can begin with the place at which many of them end: Human’s nature includes a full range of emotional responses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

Each of us is equipped wit the glands and hormones and brain centers to experience al the emotions that there are. “Put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth,” Colossians 3.8. This is an important point, for it does not leave emoting to a few people whom we call emotional, nor does it relegate emotions only to ladies. Each one of us, young or old, male or female, is capable of experiencing any human emotion. The truth is we probably all do experience far more emotion than we admit or even realize. Some of us have fantastic defenses set up, enabling us to hide some of our feelings from even ourselves. This idea is neither particularly new nor radical. Psychoanalysts spend years in personal analysis trying to understand their own personalities, because they recognize that if they are not aware of their own anxieties, then their own insecurities will block them from listening to their patients. In the dialogue of psychotherapy the patient can only communicate those thoughts and feelings that the therapist is willing to share, and this reciprocity can be burdensome, anxiety provoking, depressing, or exhilarating. The psychoanalyst tries not to indulge in the delusion that all the difficulties in psychotherapy arise from the fact that patient has problems. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

 If the patient flees from the therapy or terminates the therapeutic dialogue prematurely, psychotherapists reflexively begin to search for their own unconscious contributions to this disruption. A similar situation exists in all human relationships. Take, for example, the erosion and dissolution that occurs in so many marries. Problems seldom emerge unilaterally from the behavior of only one of the partners; usually both contribute to the deterioration. This is not a particularly easy idea to accept, especially for those who have gone through the trauma of divorce, for it is always easier psychologically to blame the other person for problems than to search for one’s own contributions. The word emotion seems to come from roots in Latin that mean “to move out.” Here we get the idea that emotion is expressing or making manifest some inner experiences, which is definitely one aspect of emotion. Another important thing about “to move out” is that it points to the motive force of emotions. When you are feeling a particular way, you are going to do certain things because of that feeling, in spite of that feeling, or to avoid or change that feeling: emotions are highly powerful as motivating factors. Why do people who have comfortable material existences and physically stable environments suddenly abandon it all? #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

It seems that what they sense is that they are being slowly strangled to death in their current environment, that their very existence is being threatened. Dialogue has deteriorated below a critical threshold, until one of the partners can no longer tolerate the isolation. One way of looking at emotions or affective states is to view them as changes from normal to balanced physiological state of the body. This definition is very respectable and if found in a number of expert opinions. However, it creates problems: who can decide what is normal or balanced so that we can figure out by how much or how far the behavior is different? Are the differences quantitative or qualitative? Yet we have to deal with the fact that each emotional state is experienced as a physiological change. Tensions are produced, directions sought, movements inhibited or energized. So we cannot completely avoid the physiological factors, especially in the light of the importance of a human’s biosocial nature. Still, no one wants another human being to be totally predictable, totally programmed, any more than we would buy a dog or a cat that was totally programmed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

The joy, beauty, and power of human relationships reside precisely in the fact that the process of being human is unique. And dialogue is the process that differentiates us from robots and programmed machines. So we can look at emotional experiences this way: the body is capable of experiencing any number of changes. Some of these changes come about because of things we perceived in the World about us. Some of them are based on memories, ideas, or other people. Whatever it is that is triggered by these experiences is felt, often strongly. Because some of these emotional states enable the person to survive, we can assume that emotions, in general, persist in human experience because they have some survival value, whether we understand them or not. However, once we get there, no mater where God may place us or what inner emptiness we experience, we can praise God that all is well. That is what is meant by faith being exercised in the realities of life. God will turn what might have been into a wonderful lesson of growth for the future. Fill your mind with the thought that God is there. God is my Father, he loves me, and I will never think of anything that he will forget, so why should I worry? “And never could be a people more blessed than were they, and more prospered by the hand of the Lord,” reports Ether 10.28. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10