Free Who Are You Meant to Be? by Anne Dranitsaris Page A

emotions about the present as well as retrieve stored emotionally charged memories from the past. This quadrant decides what value something has or what the intrinsic attractiveness or aversiveness of an event, object, or situation is. In other words, it figures out whether we like something or not. It compares and judges what is being experienced and generates feelings about those experiences on the basis of those judgments. Because we are all attracted to and repelled by different things, this subjective valuing is unique to each person. For one person, hearing the song “White Christmas” can activate happy feelings of nostalgia, while for another, it can bring tears of remembered pain and sadness. The right emotional brain doesn’t know why the song makes us happy or sad (although this information may be held elsewhere); it knows only what it feels.
    The right emotional brain focuses on present moment experiences as they relate to past emotional memories. For example, if you do something to make me sad, I will connect with myriad memories that have made me sad, which will cause me to accuse you of being just like my mother. This part of the brain seeks to create harmony and is easily pulled off center by emotional conflict. It will focus on restoring harmony by adapting behavior or emotions or by expecting others to adapt theirs during disagreements or in emotional climates. This means that if I’m feeling happy and in my right emotional brain and then I come home to a partner who is angry, I will do what I can to make my partner feel happy or get angry at my partner for wrecking my mood. Whatever the behavior, we will both end up feeling the same.
    The holistic nature of this part of the brain doesn’t allow it to separate what is felt from itself, or feeling from fact. Feelings rule; in fact, they are experienced as more important than anything else that is going on. The right emotional brain can use imagination to create scenarios that produce certain feelings so that we can experience those feelings on demand. The actor who can cry on cue, the rebellious teenager who flies into a rage when a younger sibling picks up her diary, and the elderly grandparent who frequently chuckles when talking about old memories are all summoning past experiences or imagined ones to produce a feeling in the present. This quadrant tends to believe something is true because it
feels
that it is true, despite fact-based evidence to the contrary. It fulfills its mandate by re-creating feelings that were experienced in the past. If the past was fulfilling and desirable, this can be a tremendous asset. If it was not, the right emotional brain can continue to create negative emotional experience despite situations being different.
    The following are the activities that the right emotional brain is most efficient and least efficient at. They illustrate the function of the brain and what this looks like in the outer world, being acted out by the Socializer, and in the inner world, by the Artist.
    Socializer
Most Efficient
Least Efficient
Developing relationships
Doing solitary activities
Conforming to social norms
Technical or mechanical problem solving
Helping and supporting others
Establishing own authority
Networking and socializing
Accepting help
Achieving social status
Focusing attention or self-reflecting
Assigning value to people, things, activities
Tolerating conflict
Collaborative decision making
Applying logic or reason
Subjective, interpersonal reasoning
Independent thinking
Creating harmony
Using facts to support decisions
Doing cooperative activities
Asserting opinions and ideas
    Artist
Most Efficient
Least Efficient
Seeking to create perfection
Scheduling and organizing
Holistic, authentic living
Creating structure and limits
Assigning value
Practical or logical analysis
Doing solitary activities
Maintaining confidence
Alignment with personal values
Supporting decisions with facts
Attuning empathetically
Following rules
Creating