Summary of Karla McLaren's The Language of Emotions

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 Emotions are a source of great resourcefulness. If you can learn to focus and work with the information inside each of your emotion states, you can become intimately connected to the source of your intelligence and heal your most profound wounds.

#2 Empathy is a powerful tool that can help us understand others, but it can also be a double-edged sword. While empaths are very sensitive and intuitive, they can also get right to the center of any issue, but in a culture that can’t figure out what emotions are, empaths are difficult to understand.

#3 I missed the important early stage of turning off my preverbal empathic skills in order to develop the verbal skills of emotional subterfuge. As a result, I could not listen to the dangerous ideas surrounding emotions and accept them. I had to find my own way.

#4 Empathic skills allow us to see the world as alive with knowledge and meaning. They help us listen to the meaning underneath words, understand living things and nature, and connect with the world around us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669387640

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on Karla McLaren's The Language of Emotions

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Emotions are a source of great resourcefulness. If you can learn to focus and work with the information inside each of your emotion states, you can become intimately connected to the source of your intelligence and heal your most profound wounds.

#2

Empathy is a powerful tool that can help us understand others, but it can also be a double-edged sword. While empaths are very sensitive and intuitive, they can also get right to the center of any issue, but in a culture that can’t figure out what emotions are, empaths are difficult to understand.

#3

I missed the important early stage of turning off my preverbal empathic skills in order to develop the verbal skills of emotional subterfuge. As a result, I could not listen to the dangerous ideas surrounding emotions and accept them. I had to find my own way.

#4

Empathic skills allow us to see the world as alive with knowledge and meaning. They help us listen to the meaning underneath words, understand living things and nature, and connect with the world around us.

#5

When we look at things empathically, we drop down underneath the obvious, behind the merely rational, and beneath the surface of what seems to be going on. We must learn to listen to our emotions in order to use them properly.

#6

My family was a mix of intellectual, linguistic, musical, mathematical, and artistic genius. We always had a comfortable relationship with the idea of genius. None of us could envision an emotional person as a genius.

#7

I was a very empathetic child, and I could sense what others were feeling even if they didn’t want me to. I could blurt out the true words, point to the actual situation under the social banter, and find the absurdity beneath the seeming normality.

#8

I spent a lot of time with my cat Tommy Tiger, and I began to see the world through his eyes. I could feel his full-body experience of lounging on a soft lawn in a puddle of sunshine, and I understood where he was growling at the neighborhood dogs who had no manners.

#9

I had the security and quiet I needed to think about humans and their bizarre behaviors. I began to empathize with them, and came to view humankind and human interactions in a different way.

#10

My empathic skills were an ingenious survival response. I experienced the emotions of others as if they were my own, and I endured full-body contact with others that made me see and feel their emotions as if they were real, physical things.

#11

I had no social or sensory filters, and I was constantly perceiving and feeling people’s emotions. I was just on fire most of the time. I tried to process all the emotional content, but I worked almost completely in the dark because I didn’t know how to explain my perceptions to others.

#12

Dissociation is a natural response to overwhelming stimuli, but for many traumatized people, the tangent goes on and on. They have little connection to life in the everyday world.

#13

I could leave the world of suffering behind when I dissociated. I felt a sense of lightness and peace, and I met angels and guides who lived in an alternate, deeply meaningful spiritual world just beside this one.

#14

I became known as the animal girl, and I would go up to fierce dogs and pet them. I learned to be quieter and more still, and I let the living or the dying happen on its own. I learned to be calm and patient.

#15

Many forms of spiritualism and metaphysics exert a strong pull on dissociated trauma survivors, who form a significant part of our population. Dissociative, out-of-body spiritual practices can be very attractive to trauma survivors.

#16

I learned how to help people get reassociated into their bodies, and I focused on that aspect of my healing practice. I knew what to do, it was the same process as with traumatized cats, dogs, and birds. I created a safe, warm, and quiet environment, and I stayed with people until they were reintegrated.

#17

I learned that emotions are extremely versatile and healing. They help us survive and navigate our way through life. They are fluid, ever-changing, and they carry massive amounts of information with them.

#18

We must bring all parts