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.
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.