My initial reaction is that the fear has less to do with people’s reactions to me and more the amount of change in the actions I take. Their responses to these new actions is more severe than their expected actions as a result of my dropping Theism.
I was just giving an example. The key questions are:
What is the trigger stimulus? and
What is the repeatable, observable reaction you wish to change?
In what you said above, the trigger is “thinking about what I’d do if I were not a theist”, and you are using the word “fear” to describe the automatic reaction.
I’m saying that you should precisely identify what you mean by “fear”—does your pulse race? Palms sweat? Do you clench your teeth, feel like you’re curling into a ball, what? There are many possible physical autonomic reactions to the emotion of fear… which one are you doing automatically, without conscious intent, every time you contemplate “what I’d do if I were not a theist”?
This will serve as your test—a control condition against which any attempted change can be benchmarked. You will know you have arrived at a successful conclusion to your endeavor when the physiological reaction is extinguished—i.e., it will cease to bias your conscious thought.
I consider this a litmus test for any psychological change technique: if it can’t make an immediate change (by which I mean abrupt, rather than gradual) in a previously persistent automatic response to a thought, it’s not worth much, IMO.
But the more I think about it the more I think that this is just semantics.
Focus on what the stimulus and response are, and that will keep you from wandering into semantic questions… which operate in the verbal “far” mind, not the nonverbal “near” mind that you’re trying to tap into and fix.
This is one of those “simple, but not easy” things… not because it isn’t easy to do, but because it’s hard to stop doing the verbal overshadowing part.
We all get so used to following our object-level thoughts, running in the emotionally-biased grooves laid down by our feeling-level systems, that the idea of ignoring the abstract thoughts to look at the grooves themselves seems utterly weird, foreign, and uncomfortable. It is, I find, the most difficult part of mindhacking to teach.
But once you get used to the idea that you simply cannot trust the output of your verbal mind while you’re trying to debug your pre-verbal biases, it gets easier. During the early stages though, it’s easy to be thinking in your verbal mind that you’re not thinking in your verbal mind, simply because you’re telling yourself that you’re not… which in hindsight should be a really obvious clue that you’re doing it wrong. ;-)
Bear in mind that your unconcious mind does not require complex verbalizations (above simple if-then noun-verb constructs) to represent its thought processes. If you are trying to describe something that can’t be reduced to “(sensory experience X) is followed by (sensory experience Y)”, you are using the wrong part of your brain—i.e., not the one that actually contains the fear (or other emotional response).
I was just giving an example. The key questions are:
What is the trigger stimulus? and
What is the repeatable, observable reaction you wish to change?
In what you said above, the trigger is “thinking about what I’d do if I were not a theist”, and you are using the word “fear” to describe the automatic reaction.
I’m saying that you should precisely identify what you mean by “fear”—does your pulse race? Palms sweat? Do you clench your teeth, feel like you’re curling into a ball, what? There are many possible physical autonomic reactions to the emotion of fear… which one are you doing automatically, without conscious intent, every time you contemplate “what I’d do if I were not a theist”?
This will serve as your test—a control condition against which any attempted change can be benchmarked. You will know you have arrived at a successful conclusion to your endeavor when the physiological reaction is extinguished—i.e., it will cease to bias your conscious thought.
I consider this a litmus test for any psychological change technique: if it can’t make an immediate change (by which I mean abrupt, rather than gradual) in a previously persistent automatic response to a thought, it’s not worth much, IMO.
Focus on what the stimulus and response are, and that will keep you from wandering into semantic questions… which operate in the verbal “far” mind, not the nonverbal “near” mind that you’re trying to tap into and fix.
This is one of those “simple, but not easy” things… not because it isn’t easy to do, but because it’s hard to stop doing the verbal overshadowing part.
We all get so used to following our object-level thoughts, running in the emotionally-biased grooves laid down by our feeling-level systems, that the idea of ignoring the abstract thoughts to look at the grooves themselves seems utterly weird, foreign, and uncomfortable. It is, I find, the most difficult part of mindhacking to teach.
But once you get used to the idea that you simply cannot trust the output of your verbal mind while you’re trying to debug your pre-verbal biases, it gets easier. During the early stages though, it’s easy to be thinking in your verbal mind that you’re not thinking in your verbal mind, simply because you’re telling yourself that you’re not… which in hindsight should be a really obvious clue that you’re doing it wrong. ;-)
Bear in mind that your unconcious mind does not require complex verbalizations (above simple if-then noun-verb constructs) to represent its thought processes. If you are trying to describe something that can’t be reduced to “(sensory experience X) is followed by (sensory experience Y)”, you are using the wrong part of your brain—i.e., not the one that actually contains the fear (or other emotional response).