Emotion can be understood in a variety of ways, each emphasizing an aspect of the idea. We have to change how we see emotion. At the start of the RP journey it is hard to determine the difference between these ideas and a man is left feeling a lot of things all at once. Breaking this down into what you control and what you condition yourself against is key. The problem is that most see emotions as the feelings attached to them—the subjective experience of being happy, sad, or otherwise. When people are sad, they feel sad.

It’s a subjective state of mind, nothing more. Consider the love struck fool. Most of what is understood as love is in the head. nausea hits the stomach, hearts pound, palms sweat, and cheeks blush. There is little to no control over this. There is, however, a way to control how we act out. Do we rush head over heels into false judgements or do we take measured steps to make sure past mistake are not repeated?

The biological response is not in error. The reaction, or overreaction is.

A true student of stoicism is not going to find anything new in this dynamic. What is new is linking it to the MRP process. Newly arrived men have a hard time sorting out the emotional aspect. It may help to understand what is happening and why.

Emotions can be broken into three aspects.

  • An excessive impulse/overreaction.
  • A false judgement or opinion.
  • The physiological response (biological outside reason and the mind).

The first two are the run away aspect of emotion. They are what you allow to happen to you not how you feel. The most common emotion of a RP man is anger. We can allow the feelings we have, the biological responses, to overtake our reasoning and we literally act out anger. Be angry as opposed to feeling anger.

These first two can be considered passion. Often that is how we describe someone who gets carried away with what they are doing. They are passionate. Often times when this is misdirected they are maniac and wildly out of control, and there are times when being passionate is the appropriate response but by and large it is not. Allowing passion or these two aspects to take over is completely illogical. We have control over this. Acting out is childish. over time the reflexes you are honing at the early stages will be more natural and you will respond accordingly, you will act the way you want to. Just as a martial artist hones reflexive responses you are honing yours in response to your wife.

Recognize that when done improperly this is an impulse reaction. You literally feel as if you can’t help yourself, but realize that you can. Through repeated engagements and interactions with your wife or LTR you begin to learn and understand what is happening to you. What need to do is learn when to leave in order to hide the biological responses until you have conditioned yourself to not react in such away. Take time get control of yourself. Work off the biological responses.

The third aspect deals with the biological response. Flight or fight if you will. You have little control over this but it’s more conditioning then anything else. You increase your tolerance for the level of bullshit. You learn to handle it better and gain a base of experience to draw from, building confidence along the way. Most times the biological response is uncontrollable. But it is manageable. This is different for each man. Some feel the level of stress far greater then others. This also deals with the logical side of emotion. Emotions are unruly and contrary to reason. They are based on mistaken thinking or false opinions. Even still emotions are real. It is probably one aspect of life that cannot be reasoned away.

They can be errors produced by a rational mind. Being rational does not imply infallibility. Science operates the same way. When scientists make errors, they do not appeal to a non-scientific part of their mind. They instead look back and find an error in their thought process.

Any emotion will have these factors happen. It’s the point of following the process that MRP lays out. While it does link to so many other things the main purpose is to get you out of negative environments and focus for just a little bit of time each day on your emotional state. It allows you to understand what is happening to you and how to deal with it.

Epictetus had a great saying about this.

“It is not things themselves that trouble us, but our thoughts about them.”

The one danger in this is loosing empathy. Empathy is a great tool as long as you don’t get carrie away with passion (lack of impulse control). Just as you can destroy too much of your ego (this nearly happened to me), you can destroy too much of your emotional abilities. You can still feel as long as you are not ruled by them.