Emotions: A Code Book
tidyfirst.substack.com
tidyfirst.substack.com
From what I've seen Anger is rarely ever 'justified' (and if it is, it's usually a primal self defense) - so let's call this "Emotional Anger" to remove the murkiness of imminent danger. At a high level, EA usually pairs deep helplessness with an inadequacy.
A profound shift in my life has to been to ask questions aimed at the locus of change w.r.t. EA, 'so what exactly is the harm here? what am I trying to defend internally? why am I not calmly moving through the steps as a master who has seen all this before? if it's truly urgent, what are the ways to protect myself from the fallout should the change not arise? if it is truly helpless, why am I not changing my life? Am I addicted to this feeling? ...'
So when an aggressor throws bomb and it is falling near by merely killing a person then one should not interpret it as intentional and should not become angry on those who through such things, right?
According to your description of the basic idea one should not interpret falling bombs on his head as directed against him. It’s just a neutral event and probably some boys just having fun with throwing heavy things … including bombs.
Perhaps people in Ukraine are unfamiliar with great works of this ‘most influential psychologist of our time’ and thus managed to survive and fight back.
You've been breaking the site guidelines in other places as well, unfortunately. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The concept is that most negative day-to-day occurrences are not ill-intended so your anger is probably misguided. Putting this into practice can improve your quality of live.
Learning about my emotions is the only other thing that has changed my life for the better comparable to learning about computers. 10/10 would recommend trying to understand how to deal with you 'inner monkey'. You've been rooming with it in your mind since the day you were born and how you relate to it shapes every aspect of your life.
‘Why’ I’m feeling is interesting, whether I should act on a feeling is obviously necessary to consider - but really just those two things, “what is this and what does it make me want to do” is usually enough to move me into a position where I have agency, sidestepping emotional outbursts and ill-considered or unhelpful behavior.
It’s incredibly empowering to find yourself coming out of a situation, thinking “when I was a teen this would have been awful, but now as an adult, it’s just something to roll my eyes at and move on.” Not everybody gets to do that so easily, I feel very lucky to have figured at least this little bit out for myself.
I don't know if they're technically signals or states or something else; there seem to be conditions by which some are triggered, and circumstances by which some just become True/False when other conditions are met/unmet.
So your theory seems to work. The only exception is anything depression-related, because what are you supposed to do about it (it's a nebulous emotion whose drivers we cannot fully articulate, which makes "find joy" as useless a directive as "overthrow capitalist society," "take SSRIs" and "touch grass").
It's sort of like a computer down-clocking when it is overheating.
The problem comes because there are a lot of different mechanisms that can trigger that set of circuitry. So when depression is triggered by grief over a death, for example, no amount of time and energy and not eating is going to bring them back. And sometimes it wasn't kicked off by anything in particular at all, or our brain gets stuck in that mode even after whatever kicked it off gets solved. At that point there is a tendency to look for a problem that is so overwhelming it can explain why we ought to stay in that mode, whether or not it is being useful to us.
I like this explanation because it matches my experience. Personally my depression was because I had undiagnosed ADHD: I was constantly grieving my inability to accomplish things I wanted to do and enjoyed for no conceivable reason. And in this case it even actually kind of did its job: I stuck with the medical profession through an unbelievably long journey to getting that diagnosis and the easy and extremely effective treatment, because I had trouble caring about anything including my repeated failures to get any help at all from what medical professionals offered.
Take the example of grief. What is the rational interpretation? "My mother was there, and now she is not". Or worse, "it shows how much time I lost when she was alive, and now it is gone". Absolutely useless insight, probably just makes the pain worsen. Maybe it makes you feel guilty and intellectually decide to "engage deeper in my relationships with the living", but in the few cases of this decision I witnessed it did not really work, because this was just abstract and filled with guilt and shame.
But allowing yourself to feel the grief and be sad can open a sense of devotion and respect to the dead. This intense pain can feel like the universe paying respect to the person that is now gone. And out of it can come a new way of interacting with the world and others, and maybe a newfound perspective on life. But the important part is that this kind of happens by itself, as currents and sensations in the body, over time, bottom-up, rather than as the result of solving an intellectual puzzle and coming eith a top down solution a out how you ought to live your life and feel from now on.
Obviously, this is just my own conclusion out of my own journey, and YMMV and all that sort of things.
In particular for grief, I remember I was very moved by that quote from the show WandaVision: “But what is grief if not love persevering?”. I believe it helped me cope, even if just a bit.
What the article gives is a very formulaic correspondance table between emotions and "messages": anger means this, fear means that. This reminds me a lot of "dream dictionaries": things of the kind "if you dreamt of a tree, it means that you want to sleep with your mother", and "if you dreamt of a dog, it means that you have repressed memories of abuse by your father". This, in my experience, is not helpful. Even adopting a more nuanced approach to dream interpretation, purely intellectual analysis of dreams tends to fall flat: you can build a very plausible interpretation of a dream, but (a) it does not mean that it is "true", and (b) it is often quite hard to know where to move from there. What is helpful is to try to reenact the dream in imagination, be attentive to resonances in the body, and see how things evolve.
Now to Buddhism: I am quite familiar with several Buddhist traditions and studied quite a large portion of the Pali canon, and I am not aware of any advice of intellectualization. Note that there is not even a word for "mind" in Pali: the closest is "cita", which is often translated as "heart-mind" - it is the rational and the emotive/feeling together. The Tibetan tradition also places the center of the mind in the heart, which is where you _feel_ things. So if you have some references to explain what you mean, I would be interested. There are broadly two main ways I learned from Buddhist (or Buddhist-inspired) teachers to work with emotions, and they are the following: - classical Vipassana insight meditation: feel the emotion, and decompose it in smaller components. Look at how impermanent it is. See how the various elements (the resulting papancca ("mental proliferation"), the feeling in the belly, the agitation, etc) really are not bad in themselves, see how there is no such thing as "the emotion", just an ever changing flow of sensations and thoughts. See how the emotion and sensations change when you stop resisting them: in big part, they are fabricated through your aversion, greed and ignorance (the "three poisons"). If you do this long enough, you realize that the emotion is "empty": it has no independent existence. - Rob Burbea's version of insight meditation, based on "ways of looking": based on the insight that emotions (and all phenomena) are empty, actively look at the emotion through a variety of lenses: see the emotion as a message from the divine. See the emotion as a biochemical process. See the emotion as a aggregate of impermanent sensations. when you do this over and over, you again deepen your insight into emptiness.
The core of those approaches is to _feel_ the emotion in all its complexity, not just the intellectual interpretation of it. Of course, there is a skillful use of concepts involved: "looking at the emotion as impermanent" is a concept. But what you do NOT do is to solve the emotion like a puzzle, a stay content when you realized that it is due to your father abusing you as a kid.
Note that I also did CBT with a trained therapist for a while, and it did not work at all for me: I am already a lot "up there in my head", and only when I dropped it and switched to approaches that focus on the body did things start to unwind.
For me, actually allowing me to feel without necessarily having a fixed interpretation, allowing a multiplicity of meanings, is what really unstuck things. Which does not mean that I do not interpret or use concepts, just that I do not reify them anymore.
One useful thing is to distinguish between emotions and needs. I believe they're different colors on those cards (red vs. yellow).
Also distinguishing emotions from judgements/perceptions is good (eg: "I feel ignored" is not really the feeling so much as a guess about _why_ you feel a certain way).
Some other good resources from the same people: https://groktheworld.com/products/feelings-needs-body-sensat...
[1] https://groktheworld.com/collections/all-grok-products/produ...
1. Somatopsychic phenomenon is a thing. In other words some medical conditions have mental/emotional fallout as a side effect. Anxiety can be due to high adrenaline. Causes can include low blood sugar, allergic reaction, withdrawal.
2. Jealousy is not about what other people have. It's about what I lack.
3. Righteous anger is a force for good in this world. Anger is energy for action and depression is either exhaustion or a response of hunkering down to ride out the storm. Depending on the type of threat, sometimes hunkering down is the best practice and sometimes girding your loins for battle is the best response.
Obviously this is an article, not a friend, so the message should be "go talk to a friend".
But second and more importantly, your conception that before people used to talk about mental health issues seems very romantic and unrealistic. People from older generations, at least in the two cultures in my family, tend not to talk about emotions at all. The most striking example is that of my father's grandfather, who fought in the first world war and could not enter a forest for the rest of his life and get very pale and shaky in the vicinity of one (what we would today call PTSD). So what did his wife do when she wanted to collect mushrooms? "Just drive me there and stay in the car, if you do not want to man up. It's just trees, you idiot". You cannot talk about your weaknesses when you are expected to be strong and unbreakable. What a therapist can offer is a space where those expectations of society do not hold, and where the fear of looking weak or dumb can decrease a bit.
I suppose this is why we distinguish between wives and friends. Also, compassion is not a new invention, nor is the absence of compassion in people. It sounds like your great-grandma was a jerk, even for her time. They called it "shell shock" back then, btw.
For example, we interpret this neutral arousal as anger if we think that another person did something intentionally, not by mistake/accident/because of tiredness... If we think that it was our mistake - we experience sadness.
You thoughts are lines of code that cause your emotions and actions. You can rewrite your thoughts. I recommend counseling and reading the primary source - CBT Basics and Beyond by Beck - it’s very readable and simple. It’s like learning another programming language and rewriting your own brain OS.
You’ll change your nonadaptive unhelpful thoughts to the adaptive helpful ones.
P.S. Please, at least remove the line about suicidal thoughts. You should never say “change” to a suicidal person.
While it's true that CBT is the most researched, virtually all of that research is on overall observed efficacy (and there are concerns that the efficacy that has been observed, especially in the earliest studies, is inflated by allegiance effects). That kind of research doesn't provide the tools to say anything about the validity of CBT's underlying conceptual/theoretical model, especially considering that CBT doesn't consistently outperform other modalities with radically different underlying models.
The writer of the article based it on the book by Karla McLaren M.Ed., as her Amazon page describes her “an award-winning author, social science researcher, and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions revalues even the most “negative” emotions, and opens startling new pathways into the depths of the soul.” When was the last time scientists discussed souls?
Here is her articles, make your own conclusions: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Karl...
Compare them with Beck’s articles: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=aaro...
1) The margin of CBT's superiority in robust studies (AFAICT, most published psychotherapy studies are of sufficiently poor quality that if you cited a similar one for a medical intervention, you'd be accused of being an industry shill) is likely sufficiently small as to be of little practical importance [1], and there are credible reasons to suspect that even that small apparent superiority might be an illusion caused by biases among both individual researchers and institutions [2].
2) Even if we did have robust evidence that CBT works substantially better than other modalities as a treatment, that wouldn't represent a validation of its underlying theoretical model per se; it would just suggest that any model telling us to take blatantly opposite material actions is unlikely to be valid. Consider the scenario of an isolated, highly religious society encountering leprosy. Probably the most effective intervention would be for a religious leader to tell the people that it's a punishment from the gods and sufferers must be shunned. That would work, but it would work because leprosy is caused by a pathogen spread through close contact, and the intervention provides a strong incentive to avoid close contact, not because that society's gods actually exist and care who people hang out with. That's arguably an extreme example, and my point is not to suggest that belief in CBT is akin to religion (indeed, one could reasonably argue that CBT is the flavor of psychotherapy least guilty of stumbling into a religious mode of thought), only that just-so stories are all too easy to spin.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36640411/
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.0015...
Even being effective doesn't mean its stated rationale is correct. Acupuncture absolutely treats numerous conditions, but that doesn't mean meridians are real.
I'm glad you found a modality that works for you. But in general, it doesn't routinely out-perform other interventions. It is more popular than the other effective modalities because it easier to administer and sell to insurance companies, but that doesn't make it more correct.
There are aspects of CBT that are essentially gaslighting ourselves, ignoring the information we could get from our emotional responses in favor of becoming more socially acceptable. It is part of why it is contraindicated in cases of cPTSD.
This book is about a very different goal. It is about what can be learned from our built-in sensors, rather than how we silence their alerts.
Could you be more specific? I'm another patient undergoing CBT, and I've found it overall helpful in managing BPD. I'm curious what you mean by this.
Emotions are about other people, and about social positioning. Traditional self-help gets away with murder when it talks about "exploring your emotions" as a personal thing. "Exploring your emotions" really means acting on other people, which you illustrated well.
That's... one way to put it for sure.
Emotions can teach you about yourself: what you like/dislike, what actions you are likely to take after a trigger, how you respond if others act a certain way (as you mention), what situations are more/less likely to impact you in different ways, etc.
Understanding what you feel will help you become a better thinker. We're constantly being tugged around by our mind and emotions are a big part of that push/pull. We think we're rational but most of our mind does not work that way and has subtle ways to nudge us.
This can be an exploration about yourself exclusively if you make it so. You could climb a mountain to avoid contact with other human beings and still learn about yourself by paying attention to your emotions.
In all seriousness, I believe that mastery is a learnable, transferrable skill. Knowing what improving feels like, what stagnating feels like, how much complexity to load on, finding the experts...
There is nothing nerdier than meta-
Geek/nerd-wise, the first thing that comes to mind is, what is an emotion? How does it differ from an animal instinct, or from a conscious thought expressed as a symbolic string? Consider, for example, the rather unpleasant emotionally manipulative human type, who first thinks "What emotion should I express now to get what I want" and then deliberately engages in that emotion to trigger a desired response in others. (Young children often have to be gently advised that this is not going to work, some are not taught this and so persist in this behavior as adults). Where does instinct become emotion become thought?
Another interesting human behavioral type is the emotional button-pusher, who tries to elicit strong emotions in others, for their own usually unpleasant purposes. The best defense against this dark art is probably meditation, which in part involves learning how to recognize an emotional state at the moment it arises, before one takes any action on it.
At the very least, a wise human recognizes that actions are best taken with at least a modicum of rational input, and should never be wholly emotional in nature. And sometimes, having a little cooling off period is the best option of all (particularly with strong emotions). On the other hand, the saying "trust your instincts" should not be disregarded.
Instead, children are taught to perform emotion in ways that are legible and acceptable to adults by having their genuine emotional expressions misconstrued as manipulative.
It's when these behaviors persist into adulthood, while also being amplified by the advertising industry who understands all this - and which is profoundly emotionally manipulative - that it becomes a problem.
Funny, doesn't the tech industry today get most of its money from advertising? That would explain some things.
Think about it this way: when a user gives you some user feedback, you don't build the thing they tell you to build. Instead, you figure out what was frustrating them about the product that they wanted that thing build, and then you consider what the consequences of implementing various solutions to that underlying problem might be before you decide what to do with the feedback you got.
I don't do what my emotions tell me to do, but that is no reason to ignore the underlying dynamics that sparked them.
> Boredom—a call to do something I am avoiding.
This is actually an evolutionary mechanism preventing us from expending energy on things with a low probability of success. Only problem is, our brains haven't changed much over the last 200k years and they can't assess relatively recent stuff like doing taxes or filing for divorce, so these things go to the default category of "not worth doing".
One way to go around this is to imagine how you will feel when it's done - not guaranteed to help, but at least it's actionable.
Boredom is a good example of a bad call. That sounds like how he internalizes it, but it's definitely not true for everyone. It signals lack of anything challenging. A starving man is seldom bored. Same with:
> Hatred—a call to accept something about myself I don’t like.
This one's just dumb. This is the logic behind "I hate gays, ergo I must be one." Glad we figured that out. Now explain "I hate blacks, Asians and Italians."
Hatred--real, actual hatred, not the pithy SJW definition--is borne from fear, ignorance, or grief. It is not a signal of introspection.
I wonder if you've ever actually felt hatred. Not of some general concept (that is more likely disgust than hatred anyway, and as far as I've seen is usually rooted in insecurity about whether the person earned their relative status and fear that on a level playing field they will lose), but of an actual specific other person.
I have.
It was sparked in how someone was behaving towards me and the consequences his actions had, but my reaction was not some rational response: it was an intense vicious loathing that could have rationalized any response I chose to indulge.
And when I looked into it, really sat and was honest with myself, it was because he was doing things I wouldn't let myself do.
Now, I wouldn't let myself do them for very good reasons, because they were bad things with bad consequences that hurt people, but there was a part of me that wanted to do them anyway. The intensity of my emotional response, which actually got in the way of me effectively responding to his shitty actions, came because I saw the part of myself I liked least, that I had tried to stamp out and destroy, in him. The feeling was evidence that I had failed to eradicate the impulse from myself, and I externalized all of that onto the person who reminded me that that part of me existed.
Once I acknowledged that, that some part of me was envious that he got to do these terrible things and get away with it and I wouldn't even let myself try, I could decide how I actually wanted to respond without being ruled by those feelings I had.
> I wonder if you've ever actually felt hatred. Not of some general concept (that is more likely disgust than hatred anyway, and as far as I've seen is usually rooted in insecurity about whether the person earned their relative status and fear that on a level playing field they will lose), but of an actual specific other person.
> It was sparked in how someone was behaving towards me and the consequences his actions had, but my reaction was not some rational response: it was an intense vicious loathing that could have rationalized any response I chose to indulge.
> And when I looked into it, really sat and was honest with myself, it was because he was doing things I wouldn't let myself do. [...] Now, I wouldn't let myself do them for very good reasons, because they were bad things with bad consequences that hurt people, but there was a part of me that wanted to do them anyway.
This hits weirdly close to home, but you lose me at the end (I have to watch what I say since the individual has taken up cyberstalking). It's possible "disgust" is applicable, but I deal with disgusting people all day-- this one in particular evokes something more unpleasant. I have no interest in playing their games, and yet they're still at it years later. I'm not sure how to internalize that the way you have.
but isn't introspection how you overcome fear, ignorance, or grief?
> Hatred - a call to accept or change something about myself or (my relation to) the world I don't like
Or threat. Not as common in industrialized life though.
A challenge is that we don't know how to mitigate every threat or fix every problem, and we may never be able to do so in our current situations or in our whole lives.
So there can be an additional challenge of saying "yep, I got the message, and unfortunately I've actually done what I can about this issue at this time!". (And maybe, if I remember correctly what I thought I understood from the SF Zen Center's anxiety class, "I appreciate that I'm a person who cares about mitigating this threat or fixing this problem; it's great that I can see the value and urgency of this".)
We might say that, evolutionarily, acute anxiety, like acute physical pain from an injury, is hard to turn off merely by saying that we've gotten the message. Anxiety and pain serve as reminders of some of the most urgent problems we face, where procrastination could be very detrimental. But sometimes we need to find a way to say WONTFIX.
The solution typically suggested is to realistically consider the actual consequences of the worst-case scenario and sit with that until it stops being overwhelming. Then we can consider what we could do to mitigate that actual realistic worst-case possibility, and then after figuring out what it would take we get to decide if we want to put in all the effort to take those precautions or if actually it's fine, we can just do the thing despite our anxiety yelling at us. And when we do the thing and nothing bad happens, our body has a chance to learn that it is actually safe after all and it doesn't need to freak out trying to protect us.
If instead we avoid the thing, that makes us more anxious in the future. And if we try to skip examining our fears and just muscle through, we'll end up associating doing the thing with feeling strung out on adrenaline, which also isn't great.
depression is anger turned inwards.
don't know if it is true.