Psychological Problems and Their Big Deceptions. David W. Shave

process alone that is oriented only to our reality. Though both processes are important, the conscious intellectual process in resolving emotional problems most often needs the underlying emotional process, while the emotional process that can resolve emotional problems, doesn’t need any overlying intellectual process. That emotional process alone can change uncomfortable feelings about ourselves that we don’t want, to comfortable feelings about ourselves that we do want. That hidden emotional process can do so with any reality-oriented overlay of “good advice,” or with none at all. When that hidden emotional process does change feelings we don’t want, to those we do, we’ll always think we did it solely by an intellectual process. We might think our having become more emotional comfortable was because of the knowledge we possessed, or because of the “good advice” someone might have given us like, “think positively, not negatively!” While that conscious intellectual process may be important, it might surprise many people when we tell them, “emotional problems are essentially resolved by an emotional process.” It’s an unconscious emotional process that’s rarely recognized by anyone, including many mental health professionals, and not a conscious intellectual process, that most often does the resolving. Our ability to “just straighten up and fly right” in life, might be more determined by an unrecognized unconscious influence within us, and much less the result of any intellectual endeavor to do so. Strange as it may seem, that curative emotional process that can resolve our emotional problems, can hide in any talking we might be spontaneously making with others, regardless of who they are, where they are, or what the subject of the talking is! That curative emotional process can even hide in our “small talk” which is talk that seemingly has no importance, whatsoever, to us, or to anyone else.

      To understand that hidden underlying emotional process that might occur in any talking that we might be doing that can change our unwanted feelings to wanted feelings and, in doing so, resolve our emotional problems, we must first recognize what our basic emotional need is. Simply put, it is the need to be emotionally comfortable. Being emotionally comfortable is our basic pleasure. That’s the fundamental pleasure that our basic emotional need seeks. It’s the pleasure of not having to contend with anything at all that’s unpleasant, which is to say anything at all, whatsoever, that might make us in any way emotionally uncomfortable. Anything that is additionally enjoyable that we might experience, or that we anticipate enjoying, above and beyond that fundamental pleasure, can further meet our basic emotional need. The more we experience pleasure, the more of what’s unmet of our basic emotional need will be met. Our basic emotional need is our most important emotional need from the day of our birth, to the day of our biological demise. The importance of this emotional need to be pleasurably free of any unpleasantness whatsoever, and to experience whatever else is pleasurable to us, rivals the importance of our need for food, water, and oxygen. Like any mammal, sufficiently meeting our requirements for food, water, and oxygen, is essential for life. When it comes to humans, we have one more essential requirement for life that other mammals don’t have, and that additional requirement is the necessity to meet our basic emotional need sufficiently enough to feel that our lives are worth living. Yet that most important emotional need often isn’t recognized. For instance, it’s the basic emotional need, with its desire for us to be pleasurably made “special” above all else, that can make the sexual act of humans so remarkably different from that of any two mammals mating. What is involved beyond that which is instinctual with the mothering person of an infant, is essentially the basic emotional need. That mothering person, in completely meeting the basic emotional need of her new-born infant, meets no small share of her own basic emotional need in that mothering experience. The mothering we received as infants was our first experience of our desire for someone special to pleasurably help meet our basic emotional need.

      It is from the basic emotional need that our different religions arise. The origin of any religion is the desire of people to meet more fully their basic emotional need on a never-ending basis. It’s the basic emotional need that down through the ages that humanity has existed on this planet has demanded a religion of some kind that will give significance to human existence while allaying the unpleasant anxiety from the knowledge of an inevitable biologic death, with a promise of immortality. Without religious beliefs, how else can one explain a creature of no importance whatsoever to the universe, having an infinitesimally small existence in solar time, and who is on a trivial planet going around an inconsequential star, in an unremarkable galaxy, where there are trillions of other stars in billions of other galaxies, believing that he or she is the greatest creation in nature, the “grand finale” of biologic evolution, and is standing on the very center of the entire universe, the boundaries of which can’t even be comprehended by the human mind? It’s our religion, whatever it might be, that gives significance to human existence, and promises us continued life with a more fully met basic emotional need, just as all known religions of the past have always done. To not believe in the significance of human life that religions can give, is a frustration of our basic emotional need. It’s no wonder people didn’t want to look through Galileo’s telescope to see that the sun, and not the earth, is the very center of our solar system. It would have greatly frustrated their basic emotional need by diminishing the significance of this planet and its human life! It’s meeting our basic emotional need that makes our emotional world go ’round, and not what we might have been erroneously told, such as sex, money, or power, that only hide the more underlying basic emotional need. Desiring to meet to a greater degree what is unmet of our basic emotional need, is the hidden motivation for much of what we want to believe about our existence and about our future. Wanting to meet better our basic emotional need is our very reason for living!

      Some might dare to speculate that the present-day religions of the world have themselves come about by an evolutionary process where “survival of the fittest” is how well they can meet the basic emotional need of people, and how convincing they are in regard to a promise of immortality. For instance, the last word in the Bible may have evolved from the name of the ancient Egyptian supreme god, “Amun,” who was believed to be the “creator of the world,” and who always held in his hand the “ankh,” which was a cross with a ring at its top that could bestow the “breath of eternal life” to any lesser deity, or to any befitting human. The cross, as that which can impart the gift of eternal life, didn’t then originate with Christianity, but originated much earlier. Some might speculate that the ancient Egyptian religion, with its pyramids as unsurpassed monuments to a belief in immortality, had evolved from still earlier religions long before recorded history. Since evolution is always an on-going process, our present day religions, like we ourselves, may not be the “grand finale” of any evolutionary process. It is an indisputable fact that religions have always played a major role in meeting the basic emotional need of humans. They can remove the unpleasantness of what reality can show as our insignificance in the universe. There has never been known a civilized, or an uncivilized, population of humans, that didn’t have a religion, which gives good evidence for the importance to humans of the basic emotional need and its desire for a never-ending fulfillment of that need. We might conclude that Homo sapiens has always been associated with some kind of religion, and we might also conclude that some earlier hominids too might have been associated with a religion. We don’t need a “God-gene” to explain our belief in God, as some psychologists now tell us, any more than we need a “Tooth Fairy” or an “Easter Rabbit” gene to explain children’s beliefs in a Tooth Fairy and an Easter Rabbit. Those beliefs begin with wanting to meet more of what is unmet of the basic emotional need.

      To meet more fully our basic emotional need, we would want to have everything we might feel we need to be contented, and would want nothing, whatsoever, that would be unpleasant to us in any way. Our basic emotional need is a desire to pleasurably experience that all-inclusive “good” feeling that everything is going well, and, most importantly, will be going well for us. That “will be going well” implies no finality in sufficiently meeting our basic emotional need. Our basic emotional need is a desire to pleasurably feel that everything, including ourselves and everything in reality that impacts us, is just the way we want it, for us to be emotionally comfortable, if not additionally pleasured, and that it will continue to be this way without interruption, or end. That’s the feeling first engendered in us as infants, when we had a very limited view of our reality, by the emotional closeness we had with our mothering person as she physiologically and emotionally fed us, that pleasurably made us feel