Mini-Love-Lesson #202
Synopsis: For many, this mini-love-lesson presents a
fresh and different than usual approach to both discovering new
learning from your feelings and for changing them for the better with love-befriending techniques
and through some rather different ways to think and behave in regard to
your own emotions, especially the ones you don’t like to feel.
About Bad-To-Better Feelings
When you feel bad, even real bad or maybe just blah or sort of
neutral; do you want to feel better? Of course you do. But do you know
how? Many people don’t or aren’t very good at it. Some people even
think it can’t be done but maybe they just don’t know how. There are
ways to do it which you can learn, and with practice you can accomplish
the changes quite well and healthfully. Also, you might want to assist
your loved ones in learning these love connected skills.
Some Stuff to Know and Think About Concerning Emotions
To change your emotions from bad to better and best, you will do well
to first know some things about emotions. Emotions are part of your
feeling system. You have two kinds of feelings, physical and
emotional. Your emotions are processed in your brain but also effect
your body. Because emotions are inside you, you can effect them (change
them). To do that you may have to give up the idea that they are
entirely caused by things outside of you and over which you have little
or no influence, let alone control. That means changing the way you
think and maybe the way you talk, especially to yourself.
When you say
“he, she or it made me feel . . .” you may be subtly and subconsciously
giving away your power to change your feelings. He, she or it did not
make
you feel anything. They only triggered, or assisted or activated your
internal feeling system. Your internal feeling system can be strongly
influenced by the other two major psychological parts of you – your
thinking and your behaving. To change your emotions, change your
thinking and/or your behavior. Of course that is much simpler said than
done.
How You Catch, Is Key
Think of a game of catch the ball. Somebody throws the ball at you
and how well you catch it determines whether it hurts or not, and
whether or not you get to play catch with them and have some fun. How
well you psychologically catch what is thrown at you, determines how you
psychologically feel. When being cussed at or criticized, some people
catch it poorly and get all upset while others can disregard it and be
unaffected or even be amused. If you are cussed at or criticized in a
language you do not know, you are likely to be mostly puzzled but not
hurt.
Sure, the nonverbal or expressional part might make you a bit
apprehensive but it does not have the same effect as if you understand
the language. If what they send at us
made us feel something,
we would all feel pretty much the same thing when it reached us. Like
we all react the same way to a bullet entering us, we bleed. It is your
linguistic understanding that causes it to hurt, or upset you or
whatever feeling you get. That feeling occurs in your head where you
can have influence and make (catching) changes. You learn to
emotionally catch, the way you do growing up. You can improve on that
now.
Bad Feelings Are Your Friends Trying to Help You
I once had a really brilliant little kid in therapy who said, “I
guess God made evolution put that bad feeling in me for a good reason.
Without it I would never have learned to forgive and love my mother and
myself for what we did to each other”. He had learned that he does
better when he learns from his
hurt and that is part of why it
is there. And, no, you do not get to know about the thing with his
mother. That is private and confidential.
You have to learn that
hurt is the enemy of harm (that is
one of the big things to learn about emotions). Here are some
examples. Anxiety warns you that something harmful may be approaching,
so look for it. Fear says the same thing only stronger and gives you
power to escape faster. Anger gives you emergency power to fight
perceived threatening destructiveness. Depression helps you inventory
what is wrong in your life. Very frequently depression has something do
with a lack of sufficient healthy, real other love or self love.
When
you hurt after hearing something negative aimed at you, it is a message
telling you “maybe you need to catch better”. All your feelings, both
good and bad, were created in you to help you. So, learn to befriend
them, listen to what they are trying to tell you and then cooperate.
Doing that usually gets bad feelings to get over and be done with faster
than trying to fight or ignore them. Trying to influence your emotions
with just chemicals (e.g. drugs) or escapist behavior, may only help
you miss their message and make things worse in the long run. There is a
role for meds to play when bad feelings overdo it but medication is
best used along with counseling or therapy.
About Seeking Help
Like all human systems, your emotions system can overdo or under do
it. None of our human systems are yet perfected. Fear can turn to
dysfunctional panic, anger to irrational rage, and so forth. This
especially can happen when people have not learned to work with their
feelings and hear their feeling’s guidance messages. It also can happen
when there are certain neurochemical imbalances in the brain. When
that happens seek professional help. A good therapist usually can work
wonders.
Emotional education can help. It can be argued that at least half of
our emotional pain seems to come from love problems of one sort or
another. For more on dealing with love related hurt and negative
feelings link to the mini-love-lessons
“Dealing with Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance” and
“Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From”.
What Love Has To Do with Changing Bad Feelings to Good Feelings
Have you heard the concept: “Love all your parts and all your
systems, and they will be more likely to love you back better.
Especially love the ones you do not like and think you do not want.
That is the way to bring them into harmony with the rest of you so they
can do you their maximum good, which is their purpose”. What do you
think of that concept?
To help you think about that, consider what Maxine thought. “I just
couldn’t stop worrying. I over-worried about everything and nothing
helped. Distractions, drugs, alcohol, sex, cognitive behavior therapy,
religion, they all did a little good but only for a little while. Then a
new therapist got me to talk and listen to my
inner worrying self
in a semi-hypnotic state. She told me my worry was just a presentation
of a possible problem. But I would never do what I was supposed to do
about the problems, which she told me was to make a plan and then do
something about the problem, or go on to something else if there was
nothing that could be done.
My
worry myself also told me I
just get stuck on the problem’s presentation. That is because I don’t
love and believe in myself enough, nor believe that I am competent
enough and can come up with adequate solutions, which don’t have to be
perfect solutions. I was astonished that all that knowledge was in me
and I just had to lovingly listen to the part of me that knew it”.
“With my therapist’s help I worked on growing my healthy self-love and believing what my
worrying self told me. It was even more amazing when my
worrying self evolved into my
solution suggesting self.
Now when I worry, I listen really closely and get the guidance
message. I don’t know exactly how that works but it does work for me. I
now love and respect that part of me that worries but that also comes
up with solutions. It’s a precious part of me I was ignorantly trying
to reject and ignore, but now I embrace it with love”.
More Love Please!
This love is so often, at least a part if not the whole solution,
needed for the emotions you want to change. So, you might consider just
going and asking someone who loves you to show you love, and see if
that helps. If you have a good loving dog or other pet, go get a dose
of their love and see what that does. While you are at it, give
yourself a hug and some good, self loving, affirmational talk. Getting
more love is like putting high-octane gas in your tank. It helps you go
further with more power and more calm confidence.
The Thinking Different to Feel Different Approaches
Sometimes a new insight, a different understanding, the mental
re-framing of an event, or reasoning something through, changes emotions
for the better. That often occurs in psychotherapy and personal
counseling. Another type of thinking also accomplishes changes in
emotion. This is the positive cognition approach which sometimes uses
positive imagery, affirmational language, heightened emotional
motivation self-talk and confidence building terms, sayings and
slogans. It does not go through investigative reasoning very often but
rather works to directly create emotional change.
Non-conscious and
semiconscious approaches, such as occur in pictorial thinking and the
thinking that goes into music, movement and art therapies sometimes
bring about marvelous changes in emotions. When any of these are
dynamically coupled with healthy self-love, love of life, altruistic
love and spiritual love focused thought techniques, they seem to have a
more powerful effect, at least for a lot of people.
The Motion Emotion Love Connection
If your emotions are not what you want, out of healthy self-love
decide you are going to treat yourself with a big dose of positive,
upbeat movement. That’s right, motion can change emotion especially
when done with a healthy self loving thought process. If you talk to
yourself with some positive self loving affirmations and push yourself
into dancing around the house, going for a run or vigorous walk, doing
happy movements exercise, bouncing a ball off the wall and catching it,
marching to vigorous music or any other way you choose to move, you are
very likely to change your emotions for the better.
Remember before or after you do the upbeat different motions
approach, or any other approach, to change your feelings, it will be
important to listen and figure out the guidance message coming from your
less than pleasant emotions. Otherwise they probably will have to come
back and try to deliver their maybe unpleasant but actually friendly
message again.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Possibly all your life you have been practicing some other approach
to dealing with what you perhaps think of as negative emotions. It also
is likely that no one around you has been effectively modeling for you
the approach of
loving befriending and working cooperatively with all your feelings.
Therefore, it may take quite a bit of practice to counter and reform
your habitual way of dealing with certain emotions. Working on making
these changes with a counselor’s or personal coach’s help can speed the
process. Working on this sort of changing as a couple or with friends
doing similar work also can be quite useful. However, you do not have
to believe in this process before you experiment with it. It is not a
true believer system. It is a “do different to get different” system.
Know that it usually does take repeated effort. So, with good, healthy
self-love why not give it a go?
Help us spread the word. Tell somebody about this site and our
free mini-love-lessons, and how knowledge about love and love-relating
helps.
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
♥ Love success question:
How much do you know about your own and other’s emotions; where did you
get your knowledge; and is it doing you any good, especially in your
love relationships? You might want to read any of a number of books
about emotional intelligence.
