From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: Becoming aware
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 92 15:06:07 GMT
Keywords: anger,meditation,balancing,healing

waddell@firnvx.firn.edu (Kathy Waddell) writes:

> When I have become aware of my feelings while in the grip of a strong 
> "negative" emotion (ie. I'm upset) and I ask myself why am I angry or why 
> am I sad, etc, the answer is usally the same: I'm not getting my way.
> 
[...]
> >...  If you consistently deny your emotions, ESPECIALLY the strong
> >ones, in my vision you are stunting your overall spiritual growth. You may
> >gain some outer appearance of peace, but the issues behind your emotion
> >do NOT go away.  They just remain.  You can deal with them now, or in
> >another incarnation.
[...]
> There is a difference from being in bondage to your emotions and denying it
> and freeing yourself from that bondage.
> 
> I see nothing wrong with going with your emotions and experiencing them 
> while remaining aware of what is happenning and staying detached, if
> possible.  The problem is that some emotions are destructive.  Anger can
> be destructive to others but especially to yourself.  There is no need to 
> deny your emotions, but to control them ( even if only minumally ) not 
> them control you. 

Well Kathy, I think you have hit near the centre of the issue. You've
noted that negative emotions are usually associted with not getting your
way. Expressing those emotions without restraint isn't likely to help us
get our way in most social situations! Most of us know we need some
control. Often that control gets exercised as denial or repression.

I've noticed that virutally all emotions of all kinds derive from some
kind of *thought* which precedes the emotion.

For instance - I see a fire in the fireplace and I feel warm and cosy
and safe and secure. But when I see smoke and fire pouring out my
neighbour's bedroom window I feel terror. In both cases I am seeing
flames and feeling the warmth. The sensory stimulae are quite similar -
and pleasant! The difference is the thoughts or meanings associated with
each. The fire on the hearth 'means' warmth and security and even
relaxation. The fire in the bedroom 'means' danger to life and limb and
property. The emotions I 'feel' are different in the two different cases
and appropriate to the 'meaning'.

Jack and Jill both receive layoff notices from the factory where they
work. Jack is terribly unhappy and feels bad. Jill feels ecstatic and
decides to have a big party to celebrate.

They both experienced the identical event, why the different feelings?

To Jack the layoff means poverty and hard times. To Jill, who has been
wanting to quit work and go back to school, but not quite able to bring
herself to take the risk of being without income for a time, the layoff
relieves her from making a hard decision and frees  her to do what she
really wants, even though she couldn't quite muster the courage on her
own.

These two little stories illustrate the fact that it's not 'what
happens' in an objective, external sense, that matters most (often) but
rather our attitude toward it - our thoughts about it.

Anger usually derives from hurt. Something happens (usually something
done by a person) which hurts us (perhaps our will is blocked). We tend
to think it was done deliberately in order to hurt us (which is rarely,
but sometimes the case). We fear that the villain may do it again and
hurt us more. A belief that we are powerless to remedy the situation
often is associated with this. We think that we must act to protect
ourselves from further hurt. Those thoughts usually precede the feeling
of anger.

Anger is a defence mechanism, like our body's reflexes, which acts to
push away other people who are deemed by us to be dangerous or
threatening, or exercise power over them.  It can protect us from danger
or villainy. 

The schoolyard bully who loves to beat up little kids makes the little
kids mad. They may get angry enough to gang up on the bully, thereby
defending themselves against further hurt. I think that is an example of
the 'natural' and healthy use of anger in a social context.

But the anger still derives from thoughts, thoughts about what a certain
event or action means to us. Until people practice recognition of the
thoughts which precede the anger, most of us don't notice this and the
anger appears to materialize almost instantly and appears not to be
subject to our will, but appears rather like something that comes over
us from outside over which we have no control. Then, we may control or
repress the feeling and the expression of the feeling, but not the
feeling itself.

Actually, we can control the feeling in very large measure simply by
careful thinking.

When I present this idea to people the usual response is "No way Doug,
feelings don't derive from thoughts, they are quite independent." But I
have been able to show everyone who's given me the chance, with
reference to their own lives, that there are thoughts and ideas and
meanings underlying the anger (and other emotions) and that often the
thoughts are *irrational* and once adjusted to reality the anger is
totally gone. 

There are professional and personal situations where I've had a real
problem with anger. Sure I could control the expression of it and keep
my mouth shut, but the fact of 'feeling angry' seriously effected my
ability to participate in a sales meeting or a friendship, no matter
what the expression, or lack thereof, of the anger.

The usual cause is that I have been trying to accomplish something that
is worthy and noble and I'm dealing with someone who not only fails to
appreciate the worth of what I'm trying to do, s/he blocks me from doing
it well and may also impute vile motivations to me.

The lack of appreciation for my valuable contribution leads to the thought
"it does no good for me to do all these good things if no one recognizes
or appreciates either the intrinsic value of the things or my value in
the social context as one who can do them!" The obstruction of my
efforts leads to the thought "if this person gets his or her way then
what I want won't happen (of course what I want is good and holy :-)). 
The imputation of vile motives leads to the thought "here I am busting
my behind trying to help these people and not only do they fail to
appreciate the value of what they receive, the only fruit of my efforts
is suspicion and ill-will." Then comes the thought "they are going to do
something really stupid which they will regret later and I have no power
to stop them even though I can see clearly what they cannot see. I can't
communicate my awareness in a way that they can accept it.. In fact they
may not even regret it later because they may not even care whether they
do it right or wrong, they are only concerned to cover their behinds.
They are a bunch of stupid, badly-informed, reckless and unprincipled
operators and others will suffer the consequences. They are blind fools
who cannot see that I am waving the ideal solution under their noses."

Those are the thoughts. The result of those thoughts is that my face
goes red, my body stiffens, I may snap out an angry comment that causes
offence and I feel great anger and great frustration. All of this
happens in a twinkling, of course. And of course once I am thusly angry
with someone, my capacity to persuade, inform, enlighten or even
communicate at all is severely imapired.

I know this. I then think "I can't continue this conversation in this
way when I am feeling like this because all that is likely to happen is
that I will make them more angry." Here's the double whammy. I think
"GAWD! what a stupid and incompetent idiot I am for letting myself get
into such a state that I cannot perform my job, which is in this case to
pass on information and convince the other of some facts that I really
am confident are completely true."

By this time my anger and impatience with the other has been compounded
with anger and impatience with myself and I am feeling VERY VERY BAD.

The triple whammy arrives with the thought "I'm no good and I can't
perform this job at all." The anger then turns to depression.

The point in all this is that one can take the self-same stimulae
(external event) and have a totally different outcome by thinking
different thoughts.

Instead of understanding someone else's ignorance or stupidity, say, as
some sort of threat to me I could understand it simply as a neutral fact
about the other. Instead of assuming it to be my responsibility to
correct the 'error' I could give the other permission to be wrong and
content myself with providing the other with the correct information and
not demand that my interpretation of that information be accepted. Then
I would no longer consider the non-acceptance by the other as 'bad' and
then I wouldn't 'feel hurt' and 'get angry' in response to that kind of
event. I still wouldn't *like* the event, in the way I don't like
traffic jams. But I don't feel hurt or get angry in traffic jams. A
traffic jam just slows down my body, it doesn't disrupt my emotions or
have much of any emotional impact at all.

Now I hope my explanation of the point has been sufficiently detailed to
make the point clear without being so verbose as to lose the point. It
all has to do with emotions, particularly those that are negative or
otherwise counter-productive or inappropriate, and how to control
emotions, not by retroactive struggle with undesired feelings but by
proactive thought which can prevent the undesired emotions from arising
in the first place. Problem prevention instead of problem cure, I guess.

In a nutshell, to use this technique, track the thoughts that go through
your mind in situations where you find your emotions are not what you'd
like them to be, and see if you can't replace your thoughts and your
sense of the meaning of the events with thoughts or meanings which are
more appropriate. If you can do that - and if some of your 'thoughts'
are inappropriate, or downright invalid, you can sometimes totally
dissolve the emotional strength of particular situations very quickly
and remarkably easily.

In essence you exercise the self-control at the thinking and
interpretive level *before* the emotion even starts up, when it is still
cerebral and neutral and therefore very easy to control. Once you let
the anger energy start to build you have something that takes a great
deal more effort to get under control.

If the thoughts in your head are inappropirate or inaccurate the
emotional problem you're having may really be just a misunderstanding.

A very funny story might illustrate this.  A former girlfriend of mine
once stitched together some unrelated facts and came to the conclusion
that I was having an affair on the side.  That thought caused her
enormous pain, grief and anger.  She went away, cried for a couple of
days and finally confronted me.  I was embarassed for her because there
was no affair and the 'facts' she'd observed had been erroneously
interpreted.  When I convinced her of this she realized that she'd just
gone through an enormous and painful emotional reaction to a situation
that did not in fact exist. 

That's an extreme example but I see that people do this frequently in
all kinds of little things. We get ideas about what is going on which,
if carefully checked out, prove to be false. And we build whole
universes of emotions around those ideas, often causing ourselves much
pain and suffering. And if we do check out reality and get back in
synch, the emotional universe dissolves away - as in the case of the
imagined affair mentioned above.

I guess the conclusion here is that our emotional reality is almost
entirely self-made, the raw materials being our thoughts and
interpretations and the culturally learned ways of dealing with
certain kinds of situations.

Thoughts - that is, how you understand and interpret the meaning or
significance of certain kinds of events are also learned and sometimes
habitual patterns which are entirely subject to one's own control if you
just observe yourself and your thoughts carefully and check your own
'meanings' out against 'reality'.

I know that in my life I have endured enormous suffering as a result of
understanding a certain kind of thing in a certain way that I
subsequently learned was a total misunderstanding. The suffering stopped
when the reality-checking improved.

None of this is to be interpreted as meaning that ALL suffering, hurt or
anger is self-induced and without utility. It is rather intended to
point out that a great deal of it (for me anyway) can be dispensed with
quite easily and really is rather bogus.

Doing that frees up a lot of energy to deal with the *real* problems,
energy previously consumed by a great many imagined problems.

=Doug

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