My own experience with my mental mountains has led me to what I call the “One, Two, Many” model of emotion formation and annihilation.
1: There is an initial event which causes a sensory memory of the experience to get stuck in my mind, usually a visual/tactile memory with an associated specific type of feeling bad, or more rarely, feeling good.
2: There is a reinforcing event, which has a specific similar characteristic that makes my mind go, “these are the same type of thing,” like having a hard time remembering the names of both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro at the same time. (Seriously, I had to google a De Niro role just to be able to type his name right now!)
Many: Every subsequent event that shares that characteristic gets lumped into the sea of “it always happens” or “it never happens” barring further conscious examination, but I can only remember the current or most recent such occurrence no matter how often or rarely such events actually occurred in my past.
For me, the “TNT” that can usually blast through this mental mountain is to identify the similar characteristic by tracing the memory of that specific type of feeling bad. I trace it back to the pair of self-reinforcing memories, and they disintegrate, turning from sense memories into simple narrative of something that happened to me, usually with a sense of relieved tension mingled with the feeling of being miffed that I had been tripped up by my own mind’s processing artifacts.
I perform my process using the “fourth step” tools developed for Twelve Step programs, which I now believe function on UtEB-style self reflection. The “fourth step” tools work because they focus on the interaction between a resentment emotion which drives behaviors, the person and specific action which caused that resentment, and one’s updated (sober) understanding of the world.
I wouldn’t be surprised if UtEB-style reconsolidation underlies the success many have reported with Twelve Step programs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the people who drop out of Twelve Step programs do so before they experience a mental mountain’s disappearance from their minds.
My own experience with my mental mountains has led me to what I call the “One, Two, Many” model of emotion formation and annihilation.
1: There is an initial event which causes a sensory memory of the experience to get stuck in my mind, usually a visual/tactile memory with an associated specific type of feeling bad, or more rarely, feeling good.
2: There is a reinforcing event, which has a specific similar characteristic that makes my mind go, “these are the same type of thing,” like having a hard time remembering the names of both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro at the same time. (Seriously, I had to google a De Niro role just to be able to type his name right now!)
Many: Every subsequent event that shares that characteristic gets lumped into the sea of “it always happens” or “it never happens” barring further conscious examination, but I can only remember the current or most recent such occurrence no matter how often or rarely such events actually occurred in my past.
For me, the “TNT” that can usually blast through this mental mountain is to identify the similar characteristic by tracing the memory of that specific type of feeling bad. I trace it back to the pair of self-reinforcing memories, and they disintegrate, turning from sense memories into simple narrative of something that happened to me, usually with a sense of relieved tension mingled with the feeling of being miffed that I had been tripped up by my own mind’s processing artifacts.
I perform my process using the “fourth step” tools developed for Twelve Step programs, which I now believe function on UtEB-style self reflection. The “fourth step” tools work because they focus on the interaction between a resentment emotion which drives behaviors, the person and specific action which caused that resentment, and one’s updated (sober) understanding of the world.
I wouldn’t be surprised if UtEB-style reconsolidation underlies the success many have reported with Twelve Step programs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the people who drop out of Twelve Step programs do so before they experience a mental mountain’s disappearance from their minds.