The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett makes a compelling case that emotions are actually stories that our minds construct to explain the bodily sensations that we experience in different situations. She says that there are no “emotion circuits” in the brain and that you can train yourself to associate the same bodily sensations and situations with more positive emotions. I find this idea liberating and I want it to be true, but I worry that if it’s not true, or if I’m applying the idea incorrectly, I will be doing something like ignoring my emotions in a bad way. I’m not sure how to resolve the tension between “don’t repress your emotions” and “don’t let a constructed narrative about your negative emotions run out of control and make you suffer.”
Large parts of BDSM are about experiencing emotions that are commonly seen in a negative way in a positive way by setting a specific context. At the same time BDSM is not about repressing emotions at all.
There are plenty of different ways to interact with emotions and changing the context of how you relate to them. If you try it, don’t know what you are doing and do it wrong, there’s a lot of potential to mess things up.
I like focusing/IDC/belief reporting because they are techniques for dealing with emotions in a way where the risk of messing up important self-regulation processes is lower then with certain other techniques.
If you want control over emotions that’s comparable to your control about breathing, the Grinberg method has guided ways to learn it. At the same time there are reasons against going into that community. One problem that they have as a community is for example that they aren’t good at respecting personal boundaries.
I see the apparent tension you mention. My only interaction with Lisa Feldman’s model is a summary of her book here, so I’ll try and speak from that, but let me know if you feel like I’m misrepresenting her ideas.
Here theory is framed in terms that on first glance make me suspect she’s talking about something that feels entirely at odds with how I think about my own emotions, but looking more carefully, I don’t think there’s any contradiction. My one paragraph summary of her idea is “stuff happens in the world, your brain makes predictions, this results in the body doing certain things, and what we call ‘emotions’ are the experience of the brain interpreting what those bodily sensations mean.”
At the key point (in regards to my/your take-away) is the “re-trainability”. The summary says “Of course you can’t snap your fingers and instantly change what you’re feeling, but you have more control over your emotions than you think.” Which I’m cool with. To me, this was always a discussion about exactly how much and in what ways you can “re-train” yourself.
My current model is that “re-training” looks like deeply understanding how an emotional response came to be, getting a feel for what predictions it’s based on, and then “actually convincing” yourself/the sub-agent of a another reality.
I bolded “actually convincing” because that’s were all the difficulty lies. Let me set up an example:
The topic of social justice comes up (mentioned because this is personally a bit triggering for me), my brain predicts danger of getting yelled at my someone, this results in bodily tension, my brain interprets that as “You are scared”. I used to “re-train” my emotions by saying “Being scared doesn’t fit our self-concept, so… you just aren’t scared.” It really helps to imagine a literally sub-agent with a face looking at me, completely unimpressed my such incredibly unconvincing reasoning. Now I go, “Okay, what would actually deeply convince me that I’m not going to get yelled at?” This probably involves understanding why I had that fear. This might involve some exposure therapy. It’s also important to note that it might turn out that, yes, I will get yelled at 50% of the time in a conversation on social justice.
This is getting a bit long/ranty, so I’ll tie it up. I map “repressing your emotions” onto “trying to re-train emotions via unconvincing arguments” and “re-training your emotions” to getting your mind to update certain predictions by speaking its language and giving it actually compelling evidence.
Thanks. Thinking about it in terms of convincing a sub-agent does help.
Breathing happens automatically, but you can manually control it as soon as you notice it. I think that sometimes I’ve expected changing my internal state to be more like breathing than it realistically can be.
Buddhism resolves this in the direction of “Internalize that your emotions are ultimately just a bunch of sensations. They can’t ‘run out of control’, aren’t positive or negative, until you construct a running narrative attaching those values to them.”
The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett makes a compelling case that emotions are actually stories that our minds construct to explain the bodily sensations that we experience in different situations. She says that there are no “emotion circuits” in the brain and that you can train yourself to associate the same bodily sensations and situations with more positive emotions. I find this idea liberating and I want it to be true, but I worry that if it’s not true, or if I’m applying the idea incorrectly, I will be doing something like ignoring my emotions in a bad way. I’m not sure how to resolve the tension between “don’t repress your emotions” and “don’t let a constructed narrative about your negative emotions run out of control and make you suffer.”
Large parts of BDSM are about experiencing emotions that are commonly seen in a negative way in a positive way by setting a specific context. At the same time BDSM is not about repressing emotions at all.
There are plenty of different ways to interact with emotions and changing the context of how you relate to them. If you try it, don’t know what you are doing and do it wrong, there’s a lot of potential to mess things up.
I like focusing/IDC/belief reporting because they are techniques for dealing with emotions in a way where the risk of messing up important self-regulation processes is lower then with certain other techniques.
If you want control over emotions that’s comparable to your control about breathing, the Grinberg method has guided ways to learn it. At the same time there are reasons against going into that community. One problem that they have as a community is for example that they aren’t good at respecting personal boundaries.
I see the apparent tension you mention. My only interaction with Lisa Feldman’s model is a summary of her book here, so I’ll try and speak from that, but let me know if you feel like I’m misrepresenting her ideas.
Here theory is framed in terms that on first glance make me suspect she’s talking about something that feels entirely at odds with how I think about my own emotions, but looking more carefully, I don’t think there’s any contradiction. My one paragraph summary of her idea is “stuff happens in the world, your brain makes predictions, this results in the body doing certain things, and what we call ‘emotions’ are the experience of the brain interpreting what those bodily sensations mean.”
At the key point (in regards to my/your take-away) is the “re-trainability”. The summary says “Of course you can’t snap your fingers and instantly change what you’re feeling, but you have more control over your emotions than you think.” Which I’m cool with. To me, this was always a discussion about exactly how much and in what ways you can “re-train” yourself.
My current model is that “re-training” looks like deeply understanding how an emotional response came to be, getting a feel for what predictions it’s based on, and then “actually convincing” yourself/the sub-agent of a another reality.
I bolded “actually convincing” because that’s were all the difficulty lies. Let me set up an example:
The topic of social justice comes up (mentioned because this is personally a bit triggering for me), my brain predicts danger of getting yelled at my someone, this results in bodily tension, my brain interprets that as “You are scared”. I used to “re-train” my emotions by saying “Being scared doesn’t fit our self-concept, so… you just aren’t scared.” It really helps to imagine a literally sub-agent with a face looking at me, completely unimpressed my such incredibly unconvincing reasoning. Now I go, “Okay, what would actually deeply convince me that I’m not going to get yelled at?” This probably involves understanding why I had that fear. This might involve some exposure therapy. It’s also important to note that it might turn out that, yes, I will get yelled at 50% of the time in a conversation on social justice.
This is getting a bit long/ranty, so I’ll tie it up. I map “repressing your emotions” onto “trying to re-train emotions via unconvincing arguments” and “re-training your emotions” to getting your mind to update certain predictions by speaking its language and giving it actually compelling evidence.
Let me know if any of that landed.
Thanks. Thinking about it in terms of convincing a sub-agent does help.
Breathing happens automatically, but you can manually control it as soon as you notice it. I think that sometimes I’ve expected changing my internal state to be more like breathing than it realistically can be.
Buddhism resolves this in the direction of “Internalize that your emotions are ultimately just a bunch of sensations. They can’t ‘run out of control’, aren’t positive or negative, until you construct a running narrative attaching those values to them.”