It’s not a one-way street; with proper technique (e.g. NLP anchoring and reframing methods, to name just a couple) you can change the cached “meaning” of a certain class of events so that they have pretty much any emotional content you choose.
Granted, my personal experiences run in the direction of modifying “negative” things to be positive, and I haven’t had much call for keeping around any negative feelings.
Truth is, your concern about losing the negative feelings is irrational… probably based on a science fictional ideal of “not being as human” if you lose the negative emotions. I used to be bothered by that, but then I got rid of the negative emotion I associated with getting rid of negative emotions. ;-)
Seriously, though, you need to distinguish between suppression or detachment/disassociation of a negative emotion, and not having it in the first place. It’s like Spock vs the Dali Lama: big difference. At the point where you merely disidentify from an emotion, it’s a step backwards.
What’s necessary is to detach the emotional “tags” from with the experience—specifically, your brain’s cached predictions of the future that will arise from a given situation. By updating the cached prediction, you can update the emotional response. Reframing, RET, “The Work” and other questioning techniques work by postulating interpretations that become a basis for an imagined alternative prediction, while techniques like anchoring, doyletics, EFT, et al operate directly on the emotional tags by disrupting the response or mixing it with non-specific state.
Whatever the technique, it should be empirically tested before and after use; with myself and my clients I have them notice their automatic feeling response to a chosen test stimulus (a remembered or imagined situation), and then compare it after applying different techniques. If the technique works, the stimulus should produce a new—and usually unexpected—response. (If you’re not surprising yourself, then how could you say anything’s changed about your brain? Interestingly, this also points to a separation in the brain between reflective modelling and active modelling of behavior: if your reflective model of yourself weren’t separate, your behavior could never surprise you!)
Anyway, I read your blog with much interest; on occasion it has been helpful in my work as a “mind hacking instructor”. Personally, it was also very helpful to read your thoughts about the lack of “meaning” labels on things, as at one point I semi-accidentally deleted my own sense of “meaning”… and it took a while to update myself to see that “meaningless” does not equal “bad, pointless, hopeless, despair.” These sorts of cached thoughts (like “you’re less human if you don’t feel bad things”) can be particularly insidious. ;-)
By the way, do consider that thinking you need negative emotions is a lot like thinking that you need death in order to fully experience life. We only need negative emotions to survive long enough to achieve some semblance of rationality, and the more of them I personally get rid of, the more time and opportunity I have to experience positive feelings.
Dissociation or suppression, on the other hand, does indeed lead to disconnection from all emotions, and less “humanity”. So don’t do that. Simply delete non-useful emotional responses, so that they don’t arise in response to the stimulus, rather than waiting for them to first arise, and only then detaching from them.
It’s not a one-way street; with proper technique (e.g. NLP anchoring and reframing methods, to name just a couple) you can change the cached “meaning” of a certain class of events so that they have pretty much any emotional content you choose.
Granted, my personal experiences run in the direction of modifying “negative” things to be positive, and I haven’t had much call for keeping around any negative feelings.
Truth is, your concern about losing the negative feelings is irrational… probably based on a science fictional ideal of “not being as human” if you lose the negative emotions. I used to be bothered by that, but then I got rid of the negative emotion I associated with getting rid of negative emotions. ;-)
Seriously, though, you need to distinguish between suppression or detachment/disassociation of a negative emotion, and not having it in the first place. It’s like Spock vs the Dali Lama: big difference. At the point where you merely disidentify from an emotion, it’s a step backwards.
What’s necessary is to detach the emotional “tags” from with the experience—specifically, your brain’s cached predictions of the future that will arise from a given situation. By updating the cached prediction, you can update the emotional response. Reframing, RET, “The Work” and other questioning techniques work by postulating interpretations that become a basis for an imagined alternative prediction, while techniques like anchoring, doyletics, EFT, et al operate directly on the emotional tags by disrupting the response or mixing it with non-specific state.
Whatever the technique, it should be empirically tested before and after use; with myself and my clients I have them notice their automatic feeling response to a chosen test stimulus (a remembered or imagined situation), and then compare it after applying different techniques. If the technique works, the stimulus should produce a new—and usually unexpected—response. (If you’re not surprising yourself, then how could you say anything’s changed about your brain? Interestingly, this also points to a separation in the brain between reflective modelling and active modelling of behavior: if your reflective model of yourself weren’t separate, your behavior could never surprise you!)
Anyway, I read your blog with much interest; on occasion it has been helpful in my work as a “mind hacking instructor”. Personally, it was also very helpful to read your thoughts about the lack of “meaning” labels on things, as at one point I semi-accidentally deleted my own sense of “meaning”… and it took a while to update myself to see that “meaningless” does not equal “bad, pointless, hopeless, despair.” These sorts of cached thoughts (like “you’re less human if you don’t feel bad things”) can be particularly insidious. ;-)
By the way, do consider that thinking you need negative emotions is a lot like thinking that you need death in order to fully experience life. We only need negative emotions to survive long enough to achieve some semblance of rationality, and the more of them I personally get rid of, the more time and opportunity I have to experience positive feelings.
Dissociation or suppression, on the other hand, does indeed lead to disconnection from all emotions, and less “humanity”. So don’t do that. Simply delete non-useful emotional responses, so that they don’t arise in response to the stimulus, rather than waiting for them to first arise, and only then detaching from them.