Given the way emotions work there’s a danger of false attributions as rpapp suggests. If I for example show a person with arachnophobia an image of a spider for 20 milliseconds they will feel anxiety but they won’t know why they feel it. The image is enough to trigger the emotional stimulus but it’s not enough to raise to cognitive awareness. The mental processes that produce anxiety are strong enough to match patterns that don’t rise to cognitive attention.
If that person then goes and says “I feel threatened” and tries to reason about why they feel threatened, there’s a good chance that they come up with another reason for why the feeling exists.
Debugging a false reason can still release the negative emotion and help you deal with it, but you shouldn’t take it too seriously. Hold it lightly. It’s similar to how past-life regression can help people deal with emotional issues. It’s a technique that works, but if you take all the information that comes out of it as being literal truth you run into problems.
The correct mental stance is a light one of curiosity and exploration and not one of “I now have to accept the serious reality of how flawed I am”.
In addition I would expect that you will be better able to deal with the feeling if you first feel into the felt sense as taught in Gendlin’s Focusing.
There’s are two emotional ways to react when threatened. One is anger and the other is anxiety. It frequently happens that people suffer from anxiety because they don’t allow themselves to be angry because they want to be a “nice guy” or “nice girl”. David D. Burns sees this need to be nice as one of the pillars of a lot of cases of people have anxiety disorder in When Panic Attacks.
I see now that I didn’t adequately emphasize my experience with meditation and CBT-style thought dissection enough, and perhaps my advice is terrible if you have not done those things first. Thinking in terms of “my body feels threatened” helps me because I 1) have the mindfulness to notice quickly, 2) I am able to rewind the tape a little and, often, recall the moment the anxiety wave broke over me even though I wasn’t mindful of it at the time, which 3) often makes the “threat” clear. Noticing the things I consider threats helps me to keep them in perspective as I continue to encounter them. Mostly importantly, realizing the banal thing that actually triggered my anxiety helps me not to make false attributions.
It frequently happens that people suffer from anxiety because they don’t allow themselves to be angry because they want to be a “nice guy” or “nice girl”. David D. Burns sees this need to be nice as one of the pillars of a lot of cases of people have anxiety disorder in When Panic Attacks.
Hear, hear. Yes, this is what I think was happening with me and jealousy. I basically felt that good person is not jealous and steeped in comparison, and so I stopped being aware of when I was jealous, getting anxious and attributing the anxiety to other stuff instead.
Given the way emotions work there’s a danger of false attributions as rpapp suggests. If I for example show a person with arachnophobia an image of a spider for 20 milliseconds they will feel anxiety but they won’t know why they feel it. The image is enough to trigger the emotional stimulus but it’s not enough to raise to cognitive awareness. The mental processes that produce anxiety are strong enough to match patterns that don’t rise to cognitive attention.
If that person then goes and says “I feel threatened” and tries to reason about why they feel threatened, there’s a good chance that they come up with another reason for why the feeling exists.
Debugging a false reason can still release the negative emotion and help you deal with it, but you shouldn’t take it too seriously. Hold it lightly. It’s similar to how past-life regression can help people deal with emotional issues. It’s a technique that works, but if you take all the information that comes out of it as being literal truth you run into problems.
The correct mental stance is a light one of curiosity and exploration and not one of “I now have to accept the serious reality of how flawed I am”.
In addition I would expect that you will be better able to deal with the feeling if you first feel into the felt sense as taught in Gendlin’s Focusing.
There’s are two emotional ways to react when threatened. One is anger and the other is anxiety. It frequently happens that people suffer from anxiety because they don’t allow themselves to be angry because they want to be a “nice guy” or “nice girl”. David D. Burns sees this need to be nice as one of the pillars of a lot of cases of people have anxiety disorder in When Panic Attacks.
I see now that I didn’t adequately emphasize my experience with meditation and CBT-style thought dissection enough, and perhaps my advice is terrible if you have not done those things first. Thinking in terms of “my body feels threatened” helps me because I 1) have the mindfulness to notice quickly, 2) I am able to rewind the tape a little and, often, recall the moment the anxiety wave broke over me even though I wasn’t mindful of it at the time, which 3) often makes the “threat” clear. Noticing the things I consider threats helps me to keep them in perspective as I continue to encounter them. Mostly importantly, realizing the banal thing that actually triggered my anxiety helps me not to make false attributions.
Hear, hear. Yes, this is what I think was happening with me and jealousy. I basically felt that good person is not jealous and steeped in comparison, and so I stopped being aware of when I was jealous, getting anxious and attributing the anxiety to other stuff instead.