Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A., LMFT
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Thoughts And Emotions Are Partners.  They Are Not Enemies.

3/23/2018

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When you surround your emotions with a village of skills and abilities, your logical intelligence and your emotional intelligence will be able to work together.  When you can allow your emotions to flow, you will free your intellect from the impossible task of ruling your entire life without support.  Then your intellect will be free as the air itself, able to translate information masterfully becasue it wont be expect to actually ferry information from me place to another all by itself. 

Transporting information, skills, and energy---that is the emotion's job.  The logical intellect has its own job; it translates, organizes, stores, and retries information.  When the two can work together in your balanced psyche, you will become intelligent in deep and meaningful ways.

Judgement, in its truest sense, simply tells you what a thing is and whether it works for you or not.

Healthy judgement is a combination of your airy intellect and your watery emotions coming together to form a considered opinion. 

Healthy mature judgement isn't bad tempered name-calling or simple-minded categorization
of the world.  It is an internal decision making process about what a thing is and whether it suits
you or not. 

If you try to emote without thinking---without judging---you will likely fly off the handle. 
But if you try to judge without feeling your way through your decision, you won't ever be able to decide.

Thoughts and emotions are partners.  They are not enemies.

Healthy judgement helps us define ourselves in the world and it helps us separate the wheat from the chaff.  This process of definition keeps us focused and centered.  

Healthy judgement helps us decide between this idea and that, between this option and that. 
Healthy judgement does not need to trash the path not chosen, it just needs to be free to make decisions and engage with its environment. 

Trying to squelch judgement is futile, because we are active, reactive and responsive beings. 
We will always have our own thoughts and feelings about events, and we will always judge and process our environment independently---no matter how many rules we ingest or how authoritarian our teachers. 

Healthy judgement is a natural process of making intelligent and competent decisions with our hearts and mind acting together, and with our logical intelligence and our interpersonal intelligence respectfully communicating with each other.  This is very different from bad tempered name-calling or labeling.

Many of us have fallen into the trap of thinking that spirit and science, or logic and emotion, or physical life
and spiritual life are at odds with one another, but this is preposterous. 
None of our intelligences are at odds with one another, they are only at odds in lopsided and confused
  human psyches. 

Mysteries and beauties are abound in all parts of us, and true genius dances in the places where those parts intertwine.











The Language of Emotions - McLaren


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    Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A.
    Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist


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