It was the summer of 2003, I happened to stumble over Aristotle’s book of Rhetoric, where he explains how we influence each other emotionally through the way we speak and act. This gave me the idea that maybe all emotions where intertwined in one big system, which makes us subconsciously act and react without really knowing. With the help of Adler and Jung, I created the balance framework and spent the following years turning this idea into a vision shown beneath and the book there lies behind it. This work has especially been influenced by my time working in teams, where I noticed that emotions and conflicts often would arise within four fields of social interaction. 

The system shows the strength between emotions and their counterpart, within a particular field of survival. First, an emotion makes us act superior, whereafter another emotion reacts. This reaction causes the superior emotion to be neutralized and the balance restored. Same goes if we are inferior, because the emotions of social life is always about being in balance and not about being good or bad.

Emotions can be difficult to define, because they are based on a very simple foundation of either being, negative or positive. It is not unusual that some use anger to explain any negative reaction, although this doesn't really tell you anything. In order to understand emotions, you always need to include the context, if you want to know what sort of negative or positive feeling, we are talking about. It is the context which determines the emotion and not the emotion itself.  

Each field represents a certain paradigm in which we perceive life, and what interest to maintain. It is this paradigm which forms us emotionally and makes us act, think and talk accordingly. This is particularly formed depending on the relation and position we are holding in a given social situation. One tends to act very differently whether we perceive ourselves inferior or superior to others, eventhough we may not see ourselves that way.

Socrates never acknowledged any of his mistakes, because he didn't believe to be doing anything wrong. However, when other people get really mad, you cannot avoid the fact that they think you are doing something wrong, even though you don't believe in it. From here there are two paths, one is to see the situation from one's own perspective and the other is to try and perceive the situation with the eyes of the other. Most people tend to choose the first, because that is how the situation makes us feel. However, one can also choose the latter by remembering how we once felt being in the other one's situation.