In a fascinating article you can read in full by clicking on the link at the end of this blog Sharon Begley relates some recent research that shows that, despite it being six million years since apes and humans split from our common ancestor, they are still able to understand our emotional expressions. even more amazing is that they seem to understand how our expressions relate to an internal state that leads to an action.
I see Cognitive Hypnotherapy as sitting comfortably beneath the CBT umbrella (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), but where most in this discipline think that emotions arise as a result of our thoughts, our practitioners hold the view that emotion comes first and the thoughts we have are an interpretation of an existing state, so both have to be given attention. This makes more sense from an evolutionary point of view, and this research appears to support the primacy (in terms of age) of the emotional system .
