Processing Emotions
willmeekphd.com
willmeekphd.com
Emotions are facts. This must be the premise. If you've felt them, they've happened already. The question is not "what are you feeling?" but rather, "what are you going to do about what you've felt?"
So as long as you're not confusing what you can change, you're good. You can prepare yourself and educate yourself for when you could feel something next time. But this is also already highly automated. Emotions tend to educate themselves. So I find a lot of this is just trusting yourself, and not overreaching into thinking you can change your past or twist the facts.
If you're sad you're sad. If you're happy you're happy.
It's not so much managing your emotions. It's more about managing the moment, and what you wish to do with yourself. It's about managing the things that make you feel things.
If you hate your job, quit your job. Don't manage the hate.
If you love someone, go for it. Don't manage your love.
And so on.
People are complicated. If you have an emotion, it's important to know that it doesn't have to represent who you are, and that you can do something about it. Processing emotions is a legitimate thing to do. EMDR therapy is a great example of processing emotions for traumatic experiences.
Maybe it's easy to confuse what I said with this, but I never said this. Equating your emotions with who you are is an act that you've done. It's a result of an action. But they already are two separate ideas with separate words. There is you, and there are your emotions. I am not able to equate them. There is me when I'm sad, me when I'm happy, me when I'm busy... I can become sad or busy if I know what triggers those states. But this must all be based on facts.
Same with your gut microbes example. Yes, emotions are caused by externalities, and that is precisely why they are facts. But thinking they are internal will have you fighting gut microbes with your mind. This is the dead end you want to avoid. You cannot accurately process the outcome of your gut microbes other than by accurately dealing with your gut microbes. Everything else is a workaround. They may still work in the end, but the most effective treatment will always be physically and accurately dealing with the physical cause of whatever effects we are looking to change.
"Processing emotions" is no different than dealing with facts. EMDR therapy is also a physical therapy. It treats emotions as facts, and deals with trauma factually. Whether it works is also a fact.
I mean, "be factual" is just another way of saying "stay scientific". There is nothing shortsighted about insisting on remaining scientific.
So what are you disagreeing with again?
> If you hate your job, quit your job. Don't manage the hate.
> If you love someone, go for it. Don't manage your love.
These lines appear to contradict the idea in your reply, where we seem to agree that your emotions of hate or love should not be taken at face value. Instead, these two lines suggest you should give into your id, based on the "fact" that you've experienced those emotions.
Face value does not mandate mindless reaction. This is juvenile. I'm not saying "fuck it, quit your job". I'm saying, you should not think you can alter how you feel about your job, which - as a matter of hard fact - you hate. So many people spew excuses and find outlets and vent when all that is doing is spreading the hate. The hard truth is in your face the whole time - you hate your job. And instead of doing something about it, we often live with it and spread it.
Quitting or changing your job is a tough but legitimate option. Reality is far more manageable than changing how you feel with mind games or "therapy". This is trying to change something that has already happen, and which you cannot prevent from happening. YOU HATE YOUR JOB.
Given how you feel, do what is most intelligent. Do what is right. Listen to your emotions, but don't obey them. But don't think you can change them either. Don't even try to. This is the very act of fighting with yourself. You don't want arguing with yourself to be part of your life's strategic handbook.
I may have strayed a bit, but the point is, my emphasis is on "don't manage the hate". If quitting your job isn't an option, so be it. But do something real about your circumstances. Don't try and manage your emotions.
Fight facts with action and with facts that you create, and never with your imagination.
That is all I am saying.
Feelings are facts. Emotions are labels we apply to those feelings. The Fine Article deliberately glosses over this rather key distinction in a way that cedes an opportunity to make the very point you're making here.
This is — or can be — a problem, because we tend to identify with the labels much more strongly than the experiences, which can be consequential for our long-term mental health.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_self-regulation#Proc...
Ideally, we should all be able to regulate our reaction to our own emotions, but in practice some people aren't as good at it as others for various reasons.
I agree that "managing" is a poor term here. In my practice I use the term "engage" with the emotion. Feel it. Surrender to it.
Action is very often a way to escape the intensity of an experience.
And also there is hardly ever anything wrong with our emotions... I don't buy into negative emotions either. They're what you make of them -- after the fact.
I randomly came across this a while ago, and it remains the best example I have:
https://medium.com/@sugarpirate/i-am-still-learning-f61c765d...
> And I’m going to keep being afraid.
She talks about being afraid, except, she's no longer afraid of fear.
At which point, what is fear to you? What is fear?
The emotions, and the facts, remain. What has changed is you. This would not be possible if you = emotion. And it demonstrates how even fear is not negative. It's only negative if it leads to negative outcomes, which require your action.
When we are young, emotions become us. Someone takes your toy, and you cry. Maybe in your teens you punched someone in the face. But as we age, hopefully, these things happen less often. But you probably still get upset. The difference is in the control you have over your actions. And with this, our emotions seem to mature and sort themselves out also.
Emotions are temporary, more temporary than our long-term goals. If we allow emotions to control our actions, we become unable to pursue goals which require any significant process. Sometimes you have to not pursue someone you love in order to preserve existing relationships. Sometimes you have to stick with a job you hate to build your career. Inability to pursue long-term goals is not the path to happiness.
Further, emotions may not even allow you to achieve short term goals. Love says go for it, but fear says rejection will be devastating. Hate says quit your job, but depression says quitting will change nothing. Obeying your emotions is not always a freeing action.
Of course sometimes the easiest way to process an emotion is to act on it, and sometimes that's okay. But let emotions fuel actions that take you in a direction you want to go, rather than letting emotions dictate the direction.
A good book on attending to feelings is Focusing, by Eugene Gendlin.
> For example, if you were trying to impress a new date who wanted to go to the zoo, you might have to find a way to play it cool in front of the gorilla enclosure by using a discrete breathing technique.
Instead you could simply say that you actually have an irrational fear of gorillas. Worst case the date is actual a huge gorillas nerd and that would be a deal breaker, best case the date helps you change perspective and at the end of the date, you're not afraid of gorillas.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RSEiWt4...