This is the seventh in a series of articles about emotional intelligence for personal growth.

Many people are unsure what they feel. Some deny feeling anything at all. Others report boredom much of the time and seek reckless excitement when they can. Still others have never felt like they fit in. They may have experienced being ignored, picked on, or even being treated like scapegoat. Others seem to have an emotional on/off switch; they're either rational or raging.

Some people seem to carry a fowl mood with them where ever they go. All it takes is a bad experience, and they spiral down into an emotional hole. Others get so emotional at times they feel like they're going crazy. They become so desperate to escape their feelings that they'll do anything to escape, even things they'll feel badly about later. Some feel broken, beyond repair and have no idea what to do.

Many people report their life seems to be going no where. They work hard, try their best, but seem to be defeated at every turn. Their life seems to be spinning out of control.

Whenever something goes wrong, they look first at themselves and blame themselves. They expect others to blame them as well. Some feel that others are setting them up to fail. They expect mistreatment from others and it shows in their behavior. They get defensive or provocative increasing the likelihood people will react to them just as they expect.

Some feel as if their life has been a series of failures. They feel constantly on edge as if awaiting the next disaster to occur.

Some people when they look back on their lives, they see mostly regrets, mistakes and failures. They berate themselves for their failures. They punish themselves thinking it will make their future efforts better. But when a challenge presents itself, they feel dazed, anxious, exhausted and/or discouraged. They expect to fail again, tainting their effort and perceptions until it indeed looks like another failure.

If you find yourself struggling with some of these issues, then the problem could be shame. Shame is a self-destructive form of guilt. Guilt is the feeling you get when you make a mistake.  You say, "Uho. I made a mistake. I'll have to learn how to prevent that again." Shame goes well beyond motivating you to prevent another mistake. Shame promotes self-punishment. You say, "Here is another example of how I can never do anything right. I'm such a loser!"

Shame doesn't come naturally, it has to be learned. It tends to be learned in early childhood, often before a child has a good command of the language, before the age of 8. Young children learn their lessons in a different way from adults. Young children learn emotionally, rather than with words.

Very young children tend to see the world as revolving around them. Adults appear as all knowledgeable and powerful giants. When an adult mistreats them, they tend to believe that they must have deserved it, that it was something they did or something bad about them. So not surprising, abused children tend to believe on an emotional level that they deserved how they were treated. As they grow up, they may well learn that it wasn't their fault, that their parents were inappropriate. But what they learn in words doesn't necessarily change the older emotional learning.

I often see adults abuse survivors still struggling to meet impossibly high expectations for themselves. It is as if they are still trying to please their parents. Despite being able to verbalize the abuse as inappropriate, they still feel like a mistake.

Such is the nature of shame. Shame is learned emotionally. Even though we know in our heads that we are not to blame, we feel the blame none-the-less. Shame is often learned in childhood from parents and caregivers. Parents may either shame their children with abusive words or behavior, or repeatedly devalue their children through neglect. Even well meaning parents may inadvertently teach their children by example. They model calling themselves "stupid" or other forms of self-abuse. They may throw temper tantrums and rage out loud how useless and incapable they are.

Once children get to school, they have many more opportunities to learn shame. Their teachers maybe inappropriately critical in a mistaken belief that such treatment is motivating. However, a shamed child feels a wound to their self-esteem and believes the adult sees them as defective. It's as if a child must face the challenge with a handicap, an expectation that they are likely to fail. Shame by it's very nature is not motivating, but discouraging.

Peers can be another source of shame. Children too often treat each other in a malicious manner, by teasing, harassing, verbal, physical and even sexual abuse. Sexual harassment is rife on our playgrounds and in the hallways at school. Any child who is notably different in anyway can become a target of abuse from his peers.

Even adults can experience major mistreatment and so learn to shame themselves. Any intensely emotional experience is recorded in emotional memory, while verbal memory is impaired by the emotion. The experience of war, witnessing violence and carnage, being mugged or raped, or beaten by a loved one, can change one's emotional reactions to similar situations. Any sort of severe trauma, such as rape, crime, war, injury, natural disasters can lead to a personal sense of responsibility and lead to a deep shame.

Heart felt values distorted by shaming messages can have a similar effect. An over-emphasis on the work ethic can become a belief that an unproductive person is a leech, leading to a belief that ill, aged or disabled workers are useless and unworthy of respect and support. The workplace is sometimes turned upside down to find the person to blame for a mistake. Workers learn to hide their mistakes or even blame them on others, just to avoid the consequences of being the one to blame.

Persons who have learned to see all of their behavior from a shame-based view point suffer from a tragically low self-esteem with very little hope of relief. Shame becomes a filter through which everything is distorted in a way that makes every action a test of the person's adequacy as a human being. It's like they carry around with them an internal harsh dictator that pummels them with withering criticism at every turn. They may actually believe that self-abuse will motivate them to make a change. But change becomes the first casualty in a shame-based person. Instead, they are locked in a never ending cycle of shame and self-defeating behaviors.

Shame often gets played out in intimate relationships where one pressures one self to perform, setting impossibly high standards for themselves in hopes they can eek out a mediocre performance.

Escape from this self-induced misery becomes a desperate preoccupation. Shame-based people will engage increasingly risky and self-destructive behaviors to capture a few moments of relief. They learn to numb themselves until their intuition-based social judgment is impaired. Feeling unworthy in any relationship, they over-estimate the trustworthiness of people around them. But they advertise their self-esteem with an apologetic presentation, so healthy people see their dependency and are driven away. Predatory people are drawn to the shame-based person because they are easily manipulated and fooled due their own self-doubt and poor judgment.

Exhaustion, discouragement, self-doubt, and a feeling of being trapped in a hopeless rut, prevents any confidence that meaningful change is possible. Life becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The cycle of shame and self-defeating behaviors becomes a trap. Every mistake is interpreted as proof of a person's unworthiness. A mistake becomes a personal failing, evidence of a character flaw. It becomes so painful to examine the error that any effort to correct the mistake is compromised. Without change, the shame-based person is condemned to repeating the mistake, perhaps many times.
 
Misery grows with each mistake, each reinforcement of the perception of being a defective human being. Sufferers get so desperate to escape their misery, the person will engage in any sort of temporary release to feel even a little better.
 
Every escapist behavior isn't in and of itself self-destructive. Driven by the misery, the person repeats their self-indulgence excessively, even compulsively. Drug and alcohol abuse, excessive gambling, promiscuous sex, over spending, over eating, controlling even intimidating behaviors can be pretty easily seen as self-destructive. Excessive computer games, TV watching, even day dreaming can also be taken to an extreme.

After wasting so much time in self-destructive behaviors, the indulgence becomes another mistake complete with serious consequences. This adds to the list of mistakes the person sees and starts the cycle again.

But it's hard to break the habit. Life is so miserable for the shame-based person, that she will do anything to feel better, regardless of the long-term consequences. The more miserable she feels the more desperate for escape she becomes.
 
I call these escapist habits temporary feel good behaviors. Many of these behaviors, in and of themselves, are not self-destructive. But all of them, when they become part of an escapist pattern to avoid negative feelings like shame, it not only wastes tremendous time, it saps most if not all of the creative energy we need to make changes in our lives.
 
Misery is one of the most creative forces in our lives. We all resist any change that appears unwelcome. We will stall until we have to make major changes, until we can't stand how we feel until we make the change. If we work to avoid, escape or subvert the change, at least some of the motivation for change is depleted.

Then there are behaviors that are widely recognized as self-destructive. The feeling of euphoria from these behaviors is a quick fix from misery, but the consequences to lives is huge. The effect on one's self-esteem is tragic. A long life of shame has much the same effect as brainwashing.

To break this self-destructive pattern it is necessary is to fundamentally change one's relationship with oneself. A shame-based person can't afford to ever call themselves stupid again. Any amount of self abuse starts the cycle all over again, and leaves them lacking the energy and belief in themselves to make changes. The problem is that it's been going on for so long, it's become automatic and may even happen beyond immediate awareness. All the person may be aware of is a dull feeling of failure and discouragement.
 
It is necessary to become more aware of your feelings and self-talk. That will certainly increase your misery for awhile. The next step is to replace that thought with a more constructive one. While you may not be able to readily stop a thought from happening, you can always replace it with another. It's not as simple as filling your thoughts with only positive thoughts. You need to recognize the meaningfulness of the new thoughts. Answer your negative thoughts in a meaningful way.
 
You may not believe in your new thoughts for a long time. The effect of life long shame-based thinking is akin to brainwashing. You are now charged with reprogramming how you think.

Your emotional memories are where your shame is buried. Changing those memories requires a painful self-exploration. With your therapist, share your oldest most painful shameful memories. Recognize you were a child, and had no responsibility. Likely, your parents or caregivers were directly or indirectly responsible. Even though they meant no harm, they were the adults. Feelings of shame brainwashes your self-concept. You can permanently change your emotional memory by activating your anger at those responsible.
 
Blaming those responsible and allowing your anger to grow changes your memory and lets you off the hook. Just because you are angry at your parents or caregivers, you don't have to change your behavior towards them. Though you may find it necessary to limit contact for awhile while you reinforce your new memory and start to recover.

Remember you've handicapped your ability to problem solve by punishing yourself for every mistake - it became too hard to look close enough at the mistake to make changes. Start with praising yourself for recognizing your mistake. Encourage yourself to review your actions carefully and thoroughly, but be encouraging and supportive with yourself.
 
Gently but persistently encourage yourself to make the needed changes. A bad habit, in particular, can require enormous effort and can take a long time to change. Recognize your courage and maturity for recognizing the need to change and remind yourself repeatedly every step of the way. Heap on the self-praise for your work. You are making up for past self-abuse.
Carefully examine intense rage or lack of self-concern or self-care. Shame may lie deep beneath. If you neglect your health or fail to follow your doctors recommendations, you not feel you are worth the effort.

In order to recover from shame, you have to repair the damage. The purpose of having a nurturing mother is to learn how to nurture yourself. If you didn't have a nurturing mother, it's all the harder to learn how. But there is no one else who can do this. Even if your mother is around and nurturing you, it just doesn't feel the same, it won't have the desirable effect. You are an adult now. No one else will have the same effect on you. You must do this yourself. Love yourself, make yourself your own best friend. Never mistreat yourself in any way. Put yourself first in your life. Nothing you can feel or think is unacceptable. Remember, you can't stop a thought or feeling from occurring, but you can always replace it with another. It just takes practice and persistence.
 
None of your behavior is unforgivable by you. Without self-forgiveness, there can be no change. You need all the energy you have to make a major change.
Many people feel obligated to forgive others for transgressions. Often, we will take on some of the responsibility for how the act effected us. Perhaps, we think it shouldn't have hurt so much, or we could have avoided it. So, forgive yourself first. You get to decide when and if you forgive others. Giving yourself permission to not forgive someone makes the seemingly unforgivable within reach, but only if you wish it so.

Perfection is impossible.
 
You are only as good as you are capable; we all have limits. Limits are good. Some things are over our heads. It's good to recognize that and let go. Consciously lower your standards for yourself especially, but also for others. Recognize that when others haven't met your standards, you may have blamed yourself in the past.


Many people who have suffered a lot of mistreatment learn to numb their feelings. It's one thing to be victimized, it's another to feel victimized again every time they remember the event.
 
If you numb your feelings, you interfere with your ability to make judgments and decisions. We often decide how much we can trust someone based on intuition. Even if we spend a long time reviewing the pros and cons of a decision, we still need to judge what the right decision is for us.
 
Feelings will not do permanent damage. You may feel like you will never stop crying or go crazy with anxiety. But that never happens. But whatever you do to escape a feeling could have serious consequences, even death. Escaping is inevitably be self-destructive.
 
We have feelings because our emotions provide us with important information we can't get anywhere else.
 
Treat strong emotions like a big four foot wave. Bend your knees, let the wave wash over you, then let it go. Repeat as needed.

Emotions can enhance your judgment. An emotion that comes to you that makes no sense is a message from your sub-conscious mind. Review what might have happened to elicit the feeling. The answer maybe one issue, or more likely it will be two or more issues to deal with separately.
 
If you can't pinpoint the problem issue, file it away. Something may occur later to help you answer the question.

If you can see the triggering event for the feelings, address it as the problem the emotion warned you about. Work at the problem one step at a time. You will uncover the underlying problem even if you start on something else. The benefit of any goal is not the achievement as much as it is what you learn along the way. Self-examination benefits us with irreplaceable information.

If you feel something, assume it's important. Sit with that feeling, don't move to change or avoid it. Observe the thoughts that come to attempt to make sense of  the feeling.
Let the intuitive solution slowly emerge from the feelings and thoughts as they interact. This could take days or even weeks. Remember, it's important, don't rush it.

Consider your options carefully. If you have a good idea, look again, you may find a better one.

When you feel ready to decide, choose the best option, from both an emotional and a rational point of view.

Try out your idea. Be ready to change to another option if it proves wrong or a poor fit.

The accuracy of your choice is dependent on your self-knowledge and full access to feelings. At first you will be more often wrong than right.
 
Judgment takes time and experience to develop. Avoid taking major risks based on developing judgment. Find a trusted and experienced friend to help you make an important decision.

Recognize that shame is learned.
 
Identify the sources of shame in your life, often the people who are most important to you.
Write a letter to the shamers to focus your feelings on those who provoked them. Don't send this letter. You don't want to purge your feelings on people with whom you may want a relationship.
 
If necessary, find a diplomatic way to clear the air between you. You'd be amazed how little you say will feel validating. Plan what you will say to be true to yourself. Recognize that the shamer may never respond as you like. If the relationship is important to you, be satisfied with saying only what is necessary. Expect you will not get the response you want. You might be surprised.

Shame is not a personal conflict, it is something acquired and maintained in your relationships. Return your conflict with shame to relationships where it belongs. Recognize shame as inhibiting appropriate risk taking in trusting relationships. Look for shame impeding sharing, trust, and making you defensive or on-guard.

Decrease your tolerance for discomfort! We all accept much more disrespect than we need to. Shame-based people put up with way too much crap from others.
 
Business relationships are often seen as reflected on an accounting ledger, debit vs. credit, in pocket vs. out of pocket. Keep your social relationships on the credit side.
 
Give only when it feels good, and never expect anything in return. When you are generous, people will notice. But when you say no, healthy people will recognize this as self-respect. They will admire you for it. Trustworthy people are generous out of appreciation, not out of obligation. People who wish to exploit you will eventually go away. You will be rewarded with many loyal friends.

A Shame-based Person's Bill of Rights

You have the right...
To say no;
To not tolerate disrespect, and say so;
To not be sorry;
To be without self-doubt;
To have limits and limitations;
To have a punishment and blame free life;
To not fear power in yourself or others;


You have the right...
To be who you are without comparing yourself to others;
To be less than perfect;
To privacy;
To speak up, or not;
To change situations to meet your needs, even if it imposes on others;
To praise yourself without fear of conceit;
To be angry;
To feel overwhelmed;
To recognize feelings of vulnerability as a form of strength;
To give only when it feels good;

Related articles by Zemanta

• Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth - Part I (dare-to-dream.us)
• Mindfulness - Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth Part II (dare-to-dream.us)
• Self-Awareness - Emotional Intelligence For Personal Growth Part III (dare-to-dream.us)
• Self-Knowledge - Emotional Intelligence For Personal Growth Part IV (dare-to-dream.us)
• The Essence of Human Experience: What is Normal? Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth, Part V (dare-to-dream.us)
• The Two Darts of Suffering: Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Voluntary Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth, Part VI (dare-to-dream.us)
• Emotional Abuse: Understanding Mentally Violent Relationships (emotional-verbal-abuse.suite101.com)
• Adolescence and emotion. (psychologytoday.com)
• Societal Assumptions on Abuse and the Victim's Perspective (brainblogger.com)
• Re: The problem of shame and guilt in CSA (vanguardngr.com)
• Institutional Child Abuse Causes Immense Psychological Harm (ultimo167.wordpress.com)

This is the sixth in a series of articles about emotional intelligence for personal growth. In keeping with the idea that emotional intelligence is one of the foundational concepts of mental health, I dedicate this installment to May, Mental Health Month.

It is often said that life is suffering. Some of that suffering is unavoidable. Life has a way of throwing us adversity. The pain of physical distress and illness as well as the psychological pain of loss is unavoidable. This is the first "Dart" and might be called pain. Pain serves an adaptive function in human life and allows us to appraise our experience and prepare to act in ways to maintain favorable conditions or to change unfavorable conditions (Egloff et al., 2006). Positive emotions encourage us to maintain that which evoked our pleasure. Negative emotions motivate us to avoid or solve the problem that triggered the pain.

Much of our suffering after the initial pain is voluntary. How we react to things, how we talk or think about our experiences often complicates and prolongs the pain. This is the second "Dart". Second darts often trigger more second darts through feelings and thoughts about one's first reaction. For example, you feel guilty about your anger about the first dart. Or perhaps you feel sad about having been hurt again. (Hanson & Mendius, 2009).

The concepts of the two darts of suffering come from the "Pall Canon", one of the earliest teachings of Buddha.

There is a further distinction implied in the metaphor of the Two Darts: that reaction and response are distinctly different modes of behavior, the former a pattern rooted in clinging [to reality as it is] and the latter a spontaneous meeting of phenomena free from impatience and judgment. The first dart refers to the ability to be present with what is arising, unfolding, and passing away in present experience. The second dart is characterized not just by fight or flight, but by the entire self-constructing mechanism of the mind.... Whenever there is clinging, there is a story about "me" that arises from one's reaction to what is occurring in that moment. (Thera, 1983)

Pain signals an abrupt change in our environment, one we at least initially do not like. The pain, in a way, represents the reality we cling to being ripped from our grasp. We then perceive a sense of loss, that slows and focuses our thoughts, prolongs the experience and allows us to mourn and make sense of what's happened to us. What we learn from our losses builds our skills of coping with loss. As we age, the frequency of loss accelerates. Our children grow up and move away, grandchildren grow and no longer need the attention of the grandparents. Our friends and older family members die off ever more frequently. If we fail to master the painful process of grief, it will threaten our mental health with a mind numbing depression, increase the stress on our internal organs, shorten our lives and perhaps threaten our very existence (Goleman, 1995).

How we react to our experiences, how we think and feel about them, largely determines how we extract understanding and meaning from them and how they are recorded in memory. All of the thoughts and memories are recorded in bits and pieces that amount to little more than a skeleton of the actual event. Each time we re-experience this memory, it's recreated from the remaining memory traces, and our more recent experiences fill in the detail. The experience of old distress in the presence of new information, permanently changes the memory, adding the new information. However, without our intervention, the overall structure of the memory and it's accompanied emotions will see little change.

This process of recreation allows us an opportunity to change memory permanently. Our experience over time and the support of those around use who are wiser in this regard, can teach us about this experience us, allowing us to modify the experience and direct how the memory is changed (Hanson & Mendius, 2009).

We have many ways we manage our emotions. Two have been widely investigated: expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal (see Gross, 2002, for an overview). Expressive suppression is a reactive emotion regulation strategy: It aims at inhibiting ongoing emotion-expressive behavior. Cognitive reappraisal, in contrast, is a planned strategy: It aims at changing how we think about a situation such that the resulting emotional response is modified, e.g., by construing the event as a challenge rather than as a threat (Lazarus & Alfert, 1964). In a typical loss situation, we have both strategies available to us. It's probably best if we suppress some rather dramatic expressions of our pain, lest we scare those around us, damage our relationships or our belongings and distract us to the challenge before us. Shock immediately and sadness subsequently manage our reactions. The shock we feel immediately gives us time when we "know" what has happened to us, yet we are not feeling the emotional effects yet. Presumably, we have a bit more judgment to prepare for a prolonged period of impaired judgment. When we are sad, the perception of time and our reaction times slow. Our grief dominates our experience so much that it is difficult to think of anything else. We find ourselves repeatedly re-appraising about our loss, its consequences, and its implications.

This process is a necessary part of grief. We must feel the distress, experience the emotional arousal as a bodily felt experience, accept and tolerate it as a necessary part of integration and resolution. We must also understand that experience as information, explore, reflect on, and make sense of it, and access other internal and external emotional resources to help transform it to something less distressing. This processing of our experience creates a new perspective reflecting acceptance, making sense of difficult and painful events and creates wisdom in the form of future flexibility and mindful adaptability.

An individual's capacity for emotional processing is not an inherent skill. We learn this skill in the process of early attachment experiences. The more secure the attachment, the more effective our ability to tolerate, understand, integrate, and transform an emotional experience into a new perspective that enables us to better cope with the future. Even if we've not had a healthy attachment in childhood, we are able to acquire that skill as an adult in healthy adult relationships, such as a transformative relationship with a counselor (Greenberg and Pascual-Leone, 2006, pp 614-615).

After we have dealt with the initial pain and begun the process of grief, we will experience other less adaptive emotions. These secondary emotions are at best distracting, at worst maladaptive and may need to be regulated. For example, feeling hopeless can be secondary when there is an suppressed feeling of anger. Maladaptive emotions obstruct and the process of grief and can leave the person feeling stuck, often hopeless, helpless, and in despair. These emotions are inevitably a part of grief adding detail and texture to the assessment of our loss and the envisioning of our future. But they also add to the stress and can prolong the experience without appropriate regulation.

Regulation of emotion essentially involves gaining some psychological distance from overwhelming feelings such as despair and hopelessness, in the short term, and developing self-soothing capacities to calm and comfort core anxieties and humiliation, in the longer term. When one feels a maladaptive emotion such as core shame or a feeling of shaky vulnerability and self-doubt, one benefits from regulation in order to prevent becoming overwhelmed by those emotions, thereby creating the opportunity to make sense of them. Forms of meditative practice, mindfulness and self-acceptance are often very helpful in gaining a working distance from overwhelming core emotions.

Mindfulness treatments have been shown to be effective in treating generalized anxiety disorders and panic, and chronic pain and in preventing relapse. Mindfulness allows for flexibility in affective meaning processes and the interruption of automatic, habitual processes. In short, acknowledging, allowing, and tolerating emotion are important aspects of helping to regulate it. Soothing of emotion can be provided reflexively within one's self or with the help of another person. Among other processes, self-soothing involves diaphragmatic breathing, relaxation, development of self-empathy and compassion, and self-talk. Soothing also occurs interpersonally in the form of another's empathic attunement to one's affect and through acceptance and validation by another person. Internal security develops through the feeling that one exists in the mind and heart of the other, and the security of being able to soothe the self develops by internalization of the soothing functions of the protective other (Greenberg and Pascual-Leone 2006, pp 616-617).

And from David Wallin:

...suffering is largely a psychological construction that is largely unconsciously self-generated. Embedding in our experience, we are victims to our own self-constructions. Mindfulness lifts us out of embeddedness and gives us the perspective to see our self-constructions as separate from our selves and our environment. Mindfulness is:

• Non-conceptual. Awareness without absorption in our thought processes.
• Present-centered. Always in the present moment. Thoughts about our experience are one step removed from the present moment.
• Non-judgmental. Awareness cannot occur freely if we want it to be different than it is.
• Intentional. Attention is directed, returning attention to the present moment gives mindful awareness continuity over time.
• Participant observation. Mindfulness is not detached witnessing, but rather experiencing the mind and body more intimately without immersion.
• Nonverbal. The experience cannot be captures in words, because awareness occurs before words can arise.
• Exploratory. Mindful awareness allows investigating subtler levels of perception.
• Liberating. Every moment of mindful awareness provides freedom from conditioned suffering. (Germer et al., 2005)

Mindfulness fosters integration of the social-emotional right brain and the interpreting left brain. Feelings can be informed by thought and thought by feelings. By repeatedly becoming aware of awareness, we shift the locus of subjectivity from representations of the self to awareness itself. Self becomes a continuous flow of aware experiences. Our reified images of self serve only to constrain the limits of potentials for understanding and growth.... Mindfulness allows us to make sense of our awareness of feelings and thoughts and offers a calm spacious meta-awareness [...as well as a perception of] centerness that makes us less vulnerable to confusing our internal experience with who we are (Wallin, D. J., 2007, p 165).

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is largely voluntary. Suffering can and must be used judiciously to improve future coping. We can minimize our suffering by emotion regulation strategies, but we must do so with care. Too little review of what happened limits our learning, too much distorts our judgment.

We are truly not the victims of our experience. While we cannot control external events, we have considerable control over our reactions, both emotional and behavioral, and significant influence on future events. That future influence is, in part, the result of our deliberate review of the source of our pain, using our suffering as part of the information reviewed, while managing the excessive emotional reactions to prevent distortion of our perceptions and conclusions. This is the essence of judgment: balancing our emotions with thoughts.

To be continued....

References

Egloff B, Schmukle SC, Burns LR, & Schwerdtfeger A (2006). Spontaneous emotion regulation during evaluated speaking tasks: associations with negative affect, anxiety expression, memory, and physiological responding. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 6 (3), 356-66 PMID: 16938078
Germer et al., (2005) cited in Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York: The Guildford Press, p159
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Goleman 1995. New York: Bantam Books.
Greenberg LS, & Pascual-Leone A (2006). Emotion in psychotherapy: a practice-friendly research review. Journal of clinical psychology, 62 (5), 611-30 PMID: 16523500.
Gross JJ (2002). Emotion regulation: affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39 (3), 281-91 PMID: 12212647
Hanson, R., & Mendius, R. (2009). Buddha's Brain - The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
Lazarus & Alfert, 1964 cited in Egloff, B., Schmukle, S. C., Burns, L. R., & Schwerdtfeger, A. (2006). Spontaneous Emotion Regulation During Evaluated Speaking Tasks: Associations with Negative Affect, Anxiety Expression, Memory, and Physiological Responding. Emotion, Egloff et al (2006), 6(3), 356-366
Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Linehan 1993. New York: The Guildford Press.
Thera, N., (1983) cited in Stone, M. (2006, September 22). The Two Darts: meeting pain with mindfulness practice. ReVision. Retrieved April 11, 2010, from http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-164947526/two-darts-meeting-pain.html
Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York: The Guildford Press.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth - Part I (dare-to-dream.us)
• Mindfulness - Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth Part II (dare-to-dream.us)
• Self-Awareness - Emotional Intelligence For Personal Growth Part III (dare-to-dream.us)
• Self-Knowledge - Emotional Intelligence For Personal Growth Part IV (dare-to-dream.us)
• The Essence of Human Experience: What is Normal? Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth, Part V (dare-to-dream.us)

This is the fifth in a series of articles on Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth.

Probably all of us have asked our self from time to time if our thoughts, feelings, or behavior at any single moment is "normal". Actually, there are different answers for each one of these.

Normal behavior is, like it or not, defined by our legal, community (family, neighborhood, social group) and religious institutions. The law is enforced by our local police, and sanctioned by our courts. Religious values might be said to be collectively defined by our church going population and it's leadership. If we are observed behaving outside of legal boundaries, we may find ourselves in a court room facing a judge. If we stretch our community or religious values, we might be ostracized, and separated from the kind of support we have been reliant on through our life.

Our internal life, our thoughts and feelings, that which goes on within ourselves may be our last real privacy. And that is indeed fortunate. Our internal creativity is uncomfortably broad. We are capable of thinking and feeling most anything from time to time. Under provocation, we are capable of thinking about things we would never do. Angry enough, we may think of assault, even murder. Seeing a pretty woman, a married man might think about cheating on his wife, but never act on that thought. Shocked about a death in the family, our first thoughts may be directed at the inconvenience of disrupting out usual routine and our feelings might be closer to annoyed. Our thoughts and our feelings often contradict each other. In a real sense, we live a dual existence.

Duality

Our body speaks to us through our feelings. Messages are typically fast, automatic, effortless, associative, not available to reflection, and often emotionally charged. Messages are also governed by habit and are therefore difficult to control or modify without time and significant effort. Curiously, since the messages do not require conscious awareness, they do not cause or suffer much interference when combined with other tasks.

Our thoughts, however, are relatively slower, serial, effortful, more likely to be consciously monitored and deliberately controlled. Compared to feelings, thoughts are relatively flexible and thus change readily and can be directed by conscious or habitual rules. Because thoughts are effortful, they tend to disrupt each other. Thus monitoring mental operations for quality interferes with monitoring overt behavior. People who are occupied by a demanding mental activity are more likely to respond to another task by blurting out whatever comes to mind.

Intuitive judgments combine the function of feelings and thoughts. The perceptual system and intuitive about perceptions generate impressions of the attributes of objects. These impressions are neither voluntary nor verbally explicit. Judgments are always intentional and explicit even when they are not overtly expressed. Thus, thinking is involved in all judgments and can be reflected upon, whether they originate in impressions or in deliberate reasoning. Monitoring of intuitive judgments is normally quite lax and allows many to be expressed, including some that are erroneous (Kahneman, 2003).

We perceive reality by these two interactive, parallel processing systems.

"The rational system , a relative newcomer on the evolutionary scene, is a deliberative, verbally mediated, primarily conscious analytical system that functions by a person's understanding of conventionally established rules of logic and evidence. The experiential system, which is considered to be shared by all higher order organisms (although more complex in humans), has a much longer evolutionary history, operates in an automatic, holistic, associationistic manner, is intimately associated with the experience of affect, represents events in the form of concrete exemplars and schemas inductively derived from emotionally significant past experiences, and is able to generalize and to construct relatively complex models for organizing experience and directing behavior by the use of prototypes, metaphors, scripts, and narratives. Although the experimental system is generally adaptive in natural situations, it is often maladaptive in unnatural situations that cannot be solved on the basis of generalizations from past experience but require logical analysis and an understanding of abstract relations.

[B]ehavior is guided by the joint operation of the two systems, with their relative influence being determined by the nature of the situation and the degree of emotional involvement. Certain situations (e.g., solving mathematical problems) are readily identified as requiring analytical processing, whereas others (e.g., interpersonal behaviors) are more likely to be responded to in an automatic, experientially determined manner. Holding such situational features constant, the greater the emotional involvement, the greater the shift in the balance of influence from the rational to the experiential system (Denes-Raj & Epstein, 1994). "

One might ask, why are there two systems? Many of us have at times wished that our emotions could quiet themselves or even go away. Our culture has a bias towards logic and is suspicious of our emotional side. To quote Ayn Rand:

"A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a bail and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown..."

Not matter how much we wish we could be logical and rational, there is a burgeoning literature that says otherwise. Our decisions are evident in our brain activity long before we are consciously aware (For example, see Libet et al., 1983 and Dennett, 2003). We have a dual system of decision making because it works. Think about it. How often to we make decisions where we have all the information we need to be absolutely sure that our logical deduction is correct? I would venture to say that being sure is limited to only our most simple and concrete decisions. Most every other decision involves weighing facts, impressions, intuitions, and feelings and making as best a decision as possible.

Phineas Gage is perhaps the most famous neurology patient of all time. After a gruesome injury in which he was impaled through his skull by a metal rod and then miraculously recovered, poor Phineas retained all the logic he ever had, but was completely unable to make a decision. He was also left without any awareness or expression of emotion (Demasio, 1994). The very act of making a decision is an emotional process. We choose our decisions among competing alternatives based not only the evidence, but what feels best to us, our "gut level" reaction.

The story behind this dual system is most evident in normal social development.

The Attachment Relationship

John Bowlby (1969/1982) is credited as the founder of Attachment Theory, based on his observations that the quality of a child's social development was largely determined by the quality of the child's relationship with her caregiver. Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main began the research that would ultimately follow children over their first 20 years of development demonstrating Bowlby's concepts to be true and elaborating that theory to account for how, as a child and adult, how freely and effectively she can think, feel, remember, and act (Ainsworth et al., 1978, Main et al., 1985 & Fonagy et al., 2002). Fonagy went on to find that a parents style of attachment before birth predicts their one year old child's attachment style. The parent's ability to mentalize strongly predicted their child's subsequent security. Perhaps most importantly, the the strength of the adult's ability to mentalize enables her to strengthen their attachment style.

"Attachment is not an end in it's self; rather it exists in order to produce a representational system that has evolved, we may presume, to aid human survival. The quality of our attachment enables us to understand, interpret, and predict the behavior of others as well as our own behavior. It is the cornerstone of social intelligence (Wallin, 2007)."

It is through attachment experiences as a child that she develops rudimentary affect regulation. In the loving care of her caregiver, the child senses that connection to others can be a source of relief, comfort, and pleasure. The child ultimately learns that she -- in expressing its full range of bodily and emotional experiences and needs -- is good, loved, accepted, and competent.

One of the more interesting parts of the process is the role of imitation, mirroring and empathy. There is growing evidence that the same brain areas involved in the execution and observation of motor actions also become active when people listen to sentences that describe the performance of human actions using hands, mouths, or legs, or when people imagine performing an action without actual movement. It would appear that the processes of motor control, mirroring, and mental simulation (or imagination) rely on shared neural circuits (van Gog et al., 2009). While a mother interacts with her child, they interact in a largely non-verbal body-based union. This process of attunement builds within her child a largely emotional communication system that becomes the foundation of intimacy in all future relationships.

"[T]hrough a kind of "social biofeedback," the child comes to associate the initially involuntary expressions of her emotions with the responses of the caregiver. That is, the infant comes to "know" that her affects are responsible for evoking the caregiver's affect-mirroring responses. Thus, in the most desirable scenario, the infant is learning a number of very useful things: (1) that expressing her feelings can bring about positive outcomes--which generates positive feelings about the self and others; (2) that she can have impact on others--which generates a dawning sense of agency or self-initiative; and (3) gradually, that particular affects elicit particular reactions-- which helps her begin to differentiate and eventually name her feelings (Fonagy et al., 2002) A relationship of secure attachment can thus be seen as a school in which we learn to effectively regulate affects not only in early childhood but throughout our lives (Wallin, 2007)"

Through the secure attachment experience, the child learns to reflect on her feelings and thoughts. Her sense of security, flexibility, and internal freedom becomes very much enhanced. Secure attachment embodies a quality of attunement and contingent responsiveness between mother and infant that is close but imperfect. By the very process of attunement, distraction and reconnection, the child learns that her own internal states are sharable and, at the same time, distinct from those of her caregiver, she recognizes herself and her caregiver as a separate persons, rather than objects. From the loss and regaining of attuned connection emerges from the discovery that the other, and the relationship itself, can survive anger and conflict, and learn to balance the needs for self-definition and relatedness. The parent must reflect on emotion, her's and her child's, so as to make sense and inform her responses. She effectively regulates her own emotions while modeling how the child can regulate hers. Raw feelings become namable and integrated in interaction with her. The child creates representations of her emotion, then the parent names those emotions through her body, feelings and finally words.

Much learning is acquired in non-verbal form while the child acquires language skills. Some learning may be stored unconsciously, for example, when thought, felt, or spoken, this information could threaten vital relationships, especially formative and traumatic experiences. The center of verbal memory, the Broca's area of brain doesn't come on-line until 18-36 months, remains a secondary process until after a child enters school and continues to mature well into adolescence. Traumatic experiences cause overwhelming emotions, which effectively shuts down Broca's area, limiting verbal learning. So much emotional learning happens after childhood during highly emotional experiences.

Explicit memory, the verbal memory of Broca's area of the brain, can be consciously retrieved and reflected upon. This memory can be readily turned into words, it is symbolic, and it's content is information and images. Implicit memory is present from birth and includes reflexes that are not learned as well as emotional learning acquired in childhood or traumatic learning at any age. It is largely nonverbal, nonsymbolic, unconscious in the sense that it can't be reflected upon. The content includes emotional reactions, patterns of behavior, and skills related to knowing how to do things without thinking. These memories cannot be recalled, but they can be recognized, for example, like deja vois. From implicit memory comes our personal style, implicit relational knowing (gut-level knowledge) and some relational expectations. Perhaps most significant to this article, implicit memory includes the internal working model of attachment. Our attachment style is often enacted without awareness, especially in non-verbal communication.

Ultimately, through our early intimate relationships, we make sense of ourselves and others in terms of a "coherent autobiographical and biographical narrative", a personal story (Wallin, 2007).

Adult Experience - Duality Integrated

We have a built in need to be around people. Our social nature has been built in for thousands of generations with genetic and biochemical support. We feel pleasure just being around people with whom we feel safe. Our social group also influences our behaviors and values. We are reminded by our knowledge of social expectations within the
Continue reading The Essence of Human Experience: What is Normal? Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth, Part V.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth - Part I (dare-to-dream.us)
• Mindfulness - Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth Part II (dare-to-dream.us)
• Self-Awareness - Emotional Intelligence For Personal Growth Part III (dare-to-dream.us)
• Self-Knowledge - Emotional Intelligence For Personal Growth Part IV (dare-to-dream.us)

I've been a skeptic about self-help books as have many of my colleagues. Self-help concepts often represent the home grown philosophy of the author. Seldom is there comprehensive research documentation of the foundations of the concepts shared. And so you can never be sure you are reading something that applies real science to every day needs.

This book is an exception. Buddha's Brain - The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. is the catchy title. Actually, there is little about Buddha or Buddhism in the book. Written by Rick Hanson Ph.D. with Richard Mendius MD, it uses some concepts of Buddhism as a frame of every day experience to convey the main themes. It thoroughly summarizes for the layman the latest neuroscience research as it relates to happiness, love, wisdom and peace of mind.

The book details proven methods to transform your brain using conscious thought to challenge our beliefs and assumptions as well as body focused imagery to access and change the implicit memory of emotion.

Did you know that suffering has two parts, one that is inevitable and inescapable, and one that entirely voluntary yet we seldom have the awareness to avoid?

Learn how to enhance your positive feelings, and cool your hot negative emotions and to focus your mind and body towards achieving your goals. Find peace and centeredness and maintain it even under stress.

Applying recent neuroscience and psychological research to teaching emotional intelligence has been a passion of mine for a number of years. And the topic has been common on my blog. I was curious about what inspired the authors to write this outstanding book, so I emailed Rick Hanson to ask about his motivation.

"As a child, I saw what seemed like a lot of needless unhappiness around me, and wondered about what led to lasting happiness. That question took me into the human potential movement, spiritual studies and practices, clinical psychology, and now brain science. At the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative practice (especially Buddhism, the tradition I know best), there's a rich source of insights and tools for happiness, love, and wisdom. The brain is the final common pathway into the mind of all the causes and conditions that lead to joy or sorrow, helpfulness or harm - so understanding with increasing clarity, dexterity, and precision how to use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better is a fantastic new way to improve one's own life and the lives of others.

And hopefully this offers a way as well to nudge the world altogether away from greed and fear, poverty and war, since ignorance of how the brain works - both its dark tendencies and wonderful promise - is a major factor behind the mess the planet is in, with caveman/woman brains armed with nuclear weapons. So I am actually very hopeful, taking the long view, while also believing that we have a lot of work ahead of us."

It's apparent that Dr. Hanson and I have a similar view of the potential for emotional intelligence. The human being is a paradoxical creature. Believing we have transcended our animal nature, we alternate between being full of ourselves, inflated by false assumptions about ourselves and our world, to crushing self-punishment and shame about our natural foibles. For many of us, our moods swing with abandon, influencing our judgment, our decisions and our sense of fairness from self-serving to over-generosity. We idealize logic and often assume we are capable of it. And thus we allow the subtleties of emotion to distort our perceptions beyond our awareness.

We generally lack an ability to read the language of our body. Built into our genetic make up is thousands of generations of knowledge from our ancestors. Our implicit memory contains the painful learnings from our past that communicate their meanings in a similar language of emotion. We often ignore the more subtle feelings that are in fact deep in wisdom and act on intense compelling feelings. We make the erroneous assumption that slightly felt feelings are unimportant, and act on the compelling emotions. The result is poor judgments due to dismissing gut feelings and impulsive passion driven actions we soon come to regret.

Our self understanding is critical to our success in relationships and the foundation to our quality of life and ultimately our very survival. Learning about how our brains work will guarantee us a happier and more successful life. Buddha's Brain could be the beginning of your journey towards greater success and happiness.

This is the fourth in a series of articles on emotional intelligence for personal growth.

Self-knowledge is something we all strive towards. But how many of us have done a complete review of our emotions and how they influence our thoughts and behavior? Most people find that pretty hard to do, especially since they struggle to put their feelings into words. We talk about "will power" as the ultimate motivation. It might surprise you to find out that motivation is really emotion.
Emotion in it's simplest form is motivation, "...each emotion offers a distinctive readiness to act; each points us in a direction that has worked well to handle the recurrent challenges of human life." (Goleman, 1995, p4) Entering a state of mindfulness or flow a person reaches "perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive; energized; and aligned with the task at hand." (Goleman, 1995, p90)
The skill of reading another's feelings is built on self-awareness and flow. People who have good empathy skills are better adjusted emotionally, more popular, more outgoing, and more sensitive. Childhood neglect dulls empathy. Abuse makes people hypervigilent to emotional cues. Empathy predicts intervention to prevent injury to another, certainly an important action in primitive communities.
Expressions of emotions have been found to be a cross-cultural repertoire of non-verbal emotion communication and serve essential functions in cooperative society. "...emotional communication functions to bond social groups. ...language evolved as a more efficient form of grooming and facilitates group cohesion. ...the use of clear signals to communicate intentions and motivations aids the regulation of group processes." (Waller et al 2008)
Human attributes, as important motivation, self-awareness, empathy, non-verbal communication, get little attention in education in our society. The very complexity of our current circumstances makes it our mutual interest to ensure that our community has learned as much as possible about how to understand emotions.
Psychologists have been studying cognitive bias for many years. The various biases demonstrated in these psychological experiments suggest that people will frequently fail to make rational judgments in systematic, directional ways that are predictable. How many of us understand how bias works in our lives?
Many people persistently avoid and suppress negative emotions because of how painful they are. The trouble is, the more they avoid negative emotion, the more negative experiences they have. Those who have experienced emotional excess at it's worst have been traumatized as a result. Revisiting memories of the events seems to stir up the pain all over again for no good reason.
But there is a heavy cost for avoiding emotion. The very act of making a decision and acting on it with any level of motivation depends on emotion. The kind of snap judgments we make in social situations require a finely tuned awareness of our emotional reactions. Even in decisions that allow more time for reasoning, seldom do we have sufficient factual information to make it completely rational. Instead, we have to weigh the information we have with emotional memories of similar situations and intuitions about the current situation to make our best judgment.
People who have learned to numb their emotions have impaired judgment. Their social judgments, their problem-solving and decision making are plagued by systematic error. Many report finding themselves in repeating past mistakes. Many lament that they repeatedly find themselves unsatisfactory relationships, sometimes with abusive and/or chemically dependent partners. They may not recall an error in judgment such as an event they over-looked that might have warned them of the ultimate outcome.
Understanding our emotions is critical to self-knowledge.This is often the part of ourselves we know the least about. However, our ability to read and make use of emotions has been honed over thousands of generations. Even our chimpanzee friends have a similar ability, though no where near as well developed as ours. This conceptual skill is called the "theory of mind." The term theory of mind was introduced into the scientific literature by primatologists who observed a chimpanzee's ability to understand the intentions of an actor in film clips, which enabled her to predict the actor's next move. Theory of mind is the ability to be aware of others' mental states as different from our own. We then use that knowledge to identify others' intentions, motives, beliefs, desires, and feelings in order to interpret their behavior. This is a skill we all have and use all the time. It is critical to communication, building and maintaining relationships, and for most us, our ability to make a living.
A mother, attuned to her child, responded emotionally, physically, and supportively to the child's expressed distress. The mother's theory of her child's mind allows her to anticipate the child's needs and provide for them. Her facilitative movements and empathetic facial expressions communicate her emotional and physical attunement to her child in a way that helps the child convert a felt, physical, sensory experience into a contained mental, conscious awareness of his internal experience, the warm supportive presense of his mother. That awareness enables the child to regulate his affect and distress. It enables the child to develop a sense of self different and separate from his concept of his mother. Mother, then ultimately others, come to be seen as a source of relief, comfort and pleasure. Self-expression comes to be seen as good, loved, accepted, and competent. From this basic begining, the child develops a rudimentary sense of self (Wallin, 2007).
Consciously practiced mindful self-awareness provides an opportunity for the development of a theory of mind for ourselves. Our ability to interpret others behavior utilizes a finely tuned ability to perceive not only a person's behavior, but their unspoken intent. Understanding our own behavior is not so easy. In a real sense, others can see us and interpret our intentions much better than we can. We would rather believe that we know our own minds, that we have a clear idea why we do what we do. Research says that that is often not true. There are all sorts of influences to decision of which we are unaware. Our ability to predict expected punishment is enhanced by our bodily arousal (Dolan, 2002). It would appear that a cool and reasoned state of mind is not as good at predicting punishment. Yet we make some judgments and prepare ourselves for response without any awareness (Kahneman, 2003). Well-learned goals can be activated by environmental stimuli and attendant behavioral plans can run their course without conscious awareness. People can be unknowingly enticed to either trounce an incompetent competitor or protect his self-esteem by words that that encourage acheivement or friendship (Westen, 1998).
Interpreting another's behavior is enhanced by our ability to face and observe that person. We cannot observe ourselves directly. Instead, we rely on our ability to remember our thoughts, feelings and behaviors and make inferences after the fact. There are many unconscious barriers to the accuracy of our memory of our behavior and it's context. We are naturally biased to see ourselves in the right and be suspicious of others. We must learn to correct for our natural biases in order to create a useful theory of our own mind.
There are several skills we can learn and enhance to better understand ourselves and others. Many of these skills are learned in our most cherished relationships, starting with our mothers. We need to be aware of the nature of mental states, that understanding ourselves and others is often difficult and incomplete; people can change their mental state to minimize pain, or disquise themselves. Our interpretations of others are influenced by our own internal states. Feelings often do not follow logic or reason. Mental states evolve from day to day and experience to experience. Parents are highly influential teachers of their children. Their teachings are influenced by that which they learned from their parents. What we learn as children often must be revised based on our adult experiences. Our very presence in a relationship influences the others mental states and in turn our own, often beyond our awareness (Wallin, 2007).
Self-knowledge is often difficult and painful to acquire. Our learning is most robust from a major mistake that we can acknowledge and examine unflinchingly. Healthy self-esteem enhances the accuracy of our self-examination, poor self-esteem distorts it as either positively or negatively based on our willingness to accept the truth. Prediction of our behavior and others is improved with mindful practice and experience over significant time periods.
Continued here.

References

Choi-Kain LW, & Gunderson JG (2008). Mentalization: ontogeny, assessment, and application in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. The American journal of psychiatry, 165 (9), 1127-35 PMID: 18676591

Dolan, R. (2002). Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior Science, 298 (5596), 1191-1194 DOI: 10.1126/science.1076358

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Goleman 1995. New York: Bantam Books.

Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58 (9), 697-720 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.58.9.697

Waller, B., Cray, J., & Burrows, A. (2008). Selection for universal facial emotion. Emotion, 8 (3), 435-439 DOI: 10.1037/1528-3542.8.3.435

Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York: The Guildford Press.

Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124 (3), 333-371 DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.124.3.333

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mindfulness - Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth Part II (dare-to-dream.us)
• Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth (dare-to-dream.us)
• Self-Awareness - Emotional Intelligence For Personal Growth Part III (dare-to-dream.us)

TED Blog:Jonathan Haidt on how our moral roots skew our reasoning

"Our Righteous Minds were designed to unite us into teams, divide us against others, & blind us to the truth -Jon Haidt http://bit.ly/9N7TyU"

This is the third in a series of articles on emotional intelligence for personal growth.
Self-awareness is one of the most important benefits we get from spending time in a mindful state. The longer we are able to stay mindful, the more we learn about our selves. We come to recognize the ebb and flow of our thoughts, moods, emotions and impulses. We begin to see relationships between our thoughts and feelings and external events.

One thing we notice is that our thoughts and feelings often contradict each other. Our emotional selves and our rational selves often have conflicting memories, perspectives, and motivations. On the surface, positive emotions seem helpful, and negative emotions seem to be destructive.
There is an old Cherokee folk tale called the "Wolves Within".

"An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice, "Let me tell you a story. I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.
But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times." He continued, "It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.
But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger,for his anger will change nothing.
Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."
The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"
The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed.""

Likewise, many of us grow up with messages that discourage us from expressing anger and other negative emotions. We often learn very young to suppress our anger because it is seen as disrespectful to our parents. There also appears to be a common belief that strong emotions can control our behavior. Indeed, we often hear about people who have a "bad temper" and anger management programs proliferate to treat mostly men who can't seem to manage their anger.
Sadness is another negative feeling that has had a bad rap. Many people feel horribly shameful for crying in front of someone else. The word "depressed" is often used interchangibly with sadness to describe the feeling. This serves to further pathologize normal feelings. Many people I've treated fear becoming sad as the first step of becoming depressed again.
Sadness is a feelling commonly felt whenever someone experiences a loss. Depression is a mental illness characterized by prolonged sadness and impaired function. Depression goes well beyond simple sadness to where the body has begun to shutdown. Symptoms include what is called neuro-vegetative signs that cause interruption of natural sleep and eating patterns as well impairment in concentration, memory, and decision-making.
I've found it useful to conceive of the mind as having two main parts. One part is largely made up by the cortex, or the evolutionary most recently developed brain structure. It's this part of the brain that is largely responsible for manipulating symbols, interpreting and remembering patterns of perceptions, and self-awareness and self-monitoring.
The cortex overlies a phylogenically older part of the brain that largely makes up the autonomic nervous system. [Its sometimes referred to as the "Lizard Brain" because even reptiles have equivalient brain structures.] In this part of the brain, the body functions largely "automatically". Here the heart is stimulated to beat, breath is maintained, pain sensors are monitored, Automatic behaviors like walking and steering a car are monitored, largely without conscious awareness. Here is also the roots of our emotions, the biochemical and hormonal precursors to the thoughts whose symbolic representations we create to understand our emotions.
Roughly speaking, the cortex is the thinking part of the brain, the autonomic nervous system is the emotional and functionally analogic part of the brain. That part of us we imagine as "rational" or "logical" largely resides in the cortex. Those parts of us that are instantly compelled to act out of sheer emotion reside in the autonomic brain. Virtually all of our behavior is in fact the result of BOTH parts of the brain. The cortex retains a veto on most emotionally inspired behaviors beyond basic instinct. So we duck when we hear a loud noise, but we consciously retain the decision whether to run or not. It is equally inaccurate to call our behaviors as rational manifestations or solely emotionally based. Our behavior is largely the result of both parts of us.
Why would we have both kinds of emotions if we didn't need them? Whether your put your faith in natural selection or God, would we expend so much negative energy if we didn't need it? I think it's more useful to think of the body as a functional whole that emerged from generations of development into a amazingly effective organism. We seem to naturally have an amazing ability to heal ourselves.
So which is true, are negative emotions the scourge of our existence? Or do we need both kinds of emotion to make us complete? Are negative emotions always evil, inspiring only the most despicable manifestations of our behavior? Or does the negative serve to differentiate, elaborate and balance the positive?
Our motivations are largely emotionally driven. Negative emotions push us to face and act on those things that make us most uncomfortable. Positive emotions allow us to enjoy success and give us energy to meet new challenges. But negative emotions inspire us to make changes. Misery is perhaps the most creative force in our lives. Seldom do we make major changes in our lives without considerable emotional pain. Each negative emotion comes complete with an intuitive guide to action. Anger pushes us to stand up for ourselves and speak up when we've been treated with disrespect. Fear makes us hyper-vigilant to potential danger and readies us to duck or run away if needed. Sadness makes us review over and over again what we've lost. That ruminative search is for the knowledge to compensate for our loss and meaning and wisdom to understand our lives from a new perspective. Guilt reminds us of our responsibility in the errors we make and motivates us to work to understand our mistakes and learn how to avoid repeating them.
Therefore, ALL parts of us are as necessary to survival as any one. On an experiential basis, this requires a leap of faith. Strong negative emotion or even ambivalence is an uncomfortable condition. Our mind is known to create all sorts of convenient fictional explanations of motives and their behavioral manifestations in attempt to maintain an illusion of rationality. One such example is cognitive dissonance.
In order to make use of our incredibly effective brain, we must be aware of as many of it's manifestations as is possible. We must recognize and be able to put into words emotions as complex and varied as our thoughts. We must also accept the fact that our thoughts and emotions OFTEN contradict each other, but in a real and very personal sense, both are right. Both parts of the brain have learned their reactions over years of experience. Both points of view require consideration for a good decision about what must be done. Our rational mind can consider all options, develop all needed strategies, but when it comes to deciding what is best, what is most important and what is the right thing to do, our emotional side steps in to make the final call.
Cognitive learning is the most available for change. We think, therefore we do. If we change how we think, we change what we do. However, everyone knows from their last New Year's resolution that it's not that simple for the many behaviors we want to change. Changing emotional learning is much more difficult. Our emotional side learns by repetition or by another intense emotional experience.
To become truly self-aware, we must understand both parts of us, the rational and the largely hidden emotional part. Each part of us is just as needed as the other part. Once we embrace the notion that all feelings are necessary, we can search for their meaning and purpose. Then we harness them to motivate ourselves and we are pushed in the direction we need to go.
Next time you feel overwhelmed by vile emotions and thoughts, sit with them; make sense of them. Trace them to their origins; understand what they might mean for you today. Then, make a reasoned decision what should be done. As hard as it is to sit with a foul emotion, you will find it an amazingly creative force for change.

Continued here...

Related articles by Zemanta

• How We Decide (Paperback Remix) (scienceblogs.com)
• The amygdala contributes to both aversive and appetitive arousal (mindblog.dericbownds.net)
• The Function of Contradictions Between Emotion and Thought (dare-to-dream.us)
• Mindfulness - Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth Part II (dare-to-dream.us)
• Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth (dare-to-dream.us)

This is the second in a series of articles on emotional intelligence for personal growth. The first part is here.

Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises is acknowledged and accepted as it is. It is a skill that is learned by committed practice. The object is to focus one's attention on thoughts, feelings and events in the present moment while remaining curious, open, and accepting whatever occurs.

The idea is to take on the role of an observer of your own mind. Notice everything that happens without holding onto anything, having a "Teflon Mind". An important part of observing is putting words to the experience. The effect of naming the experience effectively separates you from it. Thoughts are just thoughts, feelings just feelings, all transient experiences that are not necessarily a part of or define who we are.

True mindfulness involves immersing yourself in your experiences so that you actually forget yourself. The idea here is to stop the conversation you have with yourself, or as Eastern traditions put it, letting go of ego. This internal dialogue, while an important skill in the right circumstances, can become a major distraction. Imagine yourself walking through a beautiful park muttering to yourself. Would you remember what you saw in the park? You'd probably remember more about what you were muttering to yourself!

One way to do this is to focus on what is at hand. "See the job, do the job." The idea is NOT to always stay busy, ut to invest all of yourself in everything you do. "Smell the roses." Another thing to watch while doing things judging if this should have happened or whether it's fair, just, or right or wrong. It IS, the only value in questioning why is avoiding a problem in the future. Anything more than that is a waste time and emotional energy. See what you are doing, but don't evaluate it. Focus on the facts without evaluating it. Count on your intuitive self to react appropriately, changing the harmful situation or changing your harmful reaction to the situation.

Another distraction to your experiences is multi-tasking. Doing more than one thing at a time spreads your skills thin so that your product becomes sub-optimal, perhaps even mediocre. If you multi-task regularly, you actually train yourself to be easily distracted. There is some research that suggests that this subtle distraction training contributes significantly to attention deficits that impair your concentration. Research also suggests that training persons with Attention Deficit Disorder with mindfulness techniques can be an effective treatment!

The idea is to keep your mind's eye on the objectives until the task is done having faith that you will do the best job your can and react appropriately should something go wrong. Think about it, if you are preoccupied with what might go wrong while doing something, will your focus be on the job or the fear of what might happen? If you are distracted by fear, how good a job can you do?

Most of us, when not structured and focused on a task at hand, are thinking about past and future events. We either review previous experiences looking for new learnings we might have missed or planning our reactions to anticipated events. We focus on the moment only when there is something immediately presenting that requires a response. Our focus is often divided between what is happening in the moment and the thoughts on which we are focused.

For those of us that have more than our share of regrets and/or worries, being focused on the past or the future becomes a nearly full time job! This is not good. Without your full participation in the moment you are in, you are distracted, your reactions are primed with the emotions of the worry or regret. That means your judgment and decision making ability is impaired by emotionally distorted judgments! Have you ever been startled by someone while preoccupied with regrets or worries? Did you react with an emotion not meant for the other person? Most people have had that experience. It is likely we have all experienced spilling our internal emotion on an unintended other. And if that person was paying attention, he or she probably noticed your emotion and wondered if you were upset with them!

Few of us have the ability to be focused on the moment at will. It is a skill that takes a lot practice and a commitment to follow through. The eventual reward is an incredible feeling of peacefulness, acceptance, and centeredness combined with heightened concentration. You see, a mind uncluttered by regrets or worries has only the moment to focus on. Self-consciousness dissolves into the experience of the moment. Instead our focus is on our senses, our perceptions, punctuated by the thoughts and feelings flowing through our minds. The ultimate state of mindfulness is what is called flow.

Flow is the state in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing with a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and an expectation of success. Flow could be conceived of as being completely focused and motivated in a single-minded immersion. Emotions and thoughts are synchronized in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. While in flow, we feel a clear sense of direction, confidence, intense concentration, and personal control. We feel a natural and continuous intrinsic reward. Time seems altered, slowed or moving quickly. Feedback for one's actions and focused redirection come easily and painlessly so that action and awareness seem to merge.

One does not have to reach the ultimate form of mindfulness to benefit. With each strengthening of the skill comes with incredible benefits in quality of life. There are many tools available to us that will help us learn. Check out the resources here.

Continued here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Emotional Intelligence for Personal Growth (dare-to-dream.us)
• Mindfulness Effective (dare-to-dream.us)
• 4 Quick Mindfulness Techniques (psychcentral.com)

View image

This is the first in a series of articles on the topic of emotional intelligence for personal growth.
I got this quote in one of those anonymous emails that has been forwarded through thousands of inboxes all over the planet:

"Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting '..holy sh*t ....what a ride!' Enjoy the ride. There is no return ticket."

I had heard something like this decades ago and remember that it had a profound effect on me. It was one of those "Aha!" moments we all have from time to time. I had always been a cautious man and taken great pains to avoid unnecessary risks on my way to building a career.
While this new perspective didn't change a lot about what I did, it did change how I thought of myself. I had been holding myself back, reviewing everything I was about to say or do before I considered acting. I'd also review everything I had done over and over again hoping to pull one more insight from each act in my past. It was exhausting! I was focused totally on the past and the future and I was often miserable with self-imposed anxiety. And my life was passing me by. I experienced a shortage of joy. My only fun was in many escapist activities I engaged in, luckily none were particularly self-destructive. My life had become driven by regret, worry and escape. This little saying made me acutely aware that I was living life all wrong. I was totally focused on going somewhere and never stopping to enjoy where I was. It took a number of years to figure out just what I had to do to change things. New understanding of this task still comes to me every day.
"Full Impact Living℠" is what I call my life philosophy. It's a set of key concepts that I have developed over the more than thirty years I've practiced as a psychotherapist and manager of mental health programs and applying those concepts to my own life.
The term "full impact" is borrowed from the concept of full impact aerobics or karate. Life is not something that should be lived in a restricted and totally safe manner. Life is designed to be spent liberally until you are done. You can't take any savings through over-done caution with you or will it to your children. Life can involve going for the gusto in a way beer could never do for you. Full Impact Living℠ is about living life with passion, relishing the entire experience from beginning to end, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.
Each concept of Full Impact Living℠ builds on the previous one in a step by step developmental process. We all travel through these steps many times in our lives. But without our awareness and proactive participation, the full benefit of the process can never be realized. Each skill builds on the other. Each new mastery of knowledge feeds the basic skills with new forms of awareness and the process of further development begins anew.
Mindfulness is the basic skill. Awareness of the flow of thoughts and feelings through ones mind is critical to self-awareness. Careful observation of one's internal awareness matched with observing the environment and one's behavior leads to self-knowledge. Self-knowledge applied to life's challenges leads to experience and wisdom. The wisdom of experience allows one to build meaning for one's life that manifests in a focus on creating one's legacy based on one's basic values. Balance ensures that every manifestations of one's life receives its due investment of time, effort and focus. Then each new insight is fed back into the learning process by mindful awareness.
Continued here.

I really enjoy reading the blog Kellevision.com. She says it like it is and seldom misses the point of what she's writing about. She identifies a problem in programming for homelessness and proposes a set of concepts to help clarify the situation.

"Many of the "barriers" faced by the chronically homeless are not external. They are self-inflicted. Repeatedly failing to pay one's utility bills is not a barrier. It is a behavior. Repeatedly getting into relationships with drug addicts and being evicted because you have allowed your new girlfriend to turn your affordable housing into a crack house is not a barrier. It is a behavior. Choosing to pay your boyfriend's bail instead of the rent is not a barrier, it is a behavior. Consistently refusing to hold down steady employment and being evicted for not being able to pay the rent is not a barrier, it is a behavior.

[..]Lastly, how we label the problem determines how we approach solving it. True social barriers need to be addressed by social services. Better programs need to be designed to specifically address the needs of the mentally ill population. Programs designed to assist the medically disabled need to be accessed. But behaviors require a clinical intervention - therapy. Clients who demonstrate patterns of behavior which result in repeated instances of homelessness need counseling, not social services. The problem is not a social problem. It is an individual problem which requires an individual intervention."

I think it's much more complicated than that. Our world has always had an underclass, a group of individuals who have been largely invisible in the US except during the Depression. These people largely function outside the visible society and economy. They share housing with family and friends, squat in abandoned buildings, and sometimes live under bridges. They live off their housemates or family, work for temp job agencies, borrow, steal, deal drugs, and even engage in formal criminal enterprise. Given our recent policies that have reversed the tax-based redistribution of wealth since FDR, the stagnant wages, disappearing jobs, and ever increasing cost of living, that underclass has become so large it is again visible.

They are chronically under or unemployment and are not collecting Social Security, either because they don't qualify, try though they may to apply, or they haven't the where-with-all to get themselves qualified. This chronic underclass is best described as a sub-culture. They are structurally built into the economy. "Full employment" doesn't include them. Because they have given up on finding work, they no longer register with unemployment offices and so are not counted among the unemployed. Those who are chronically homeless are a sub-group of this sub-culture, and probably represents some of its most dysfunctional members.

By describing the chronically homeless, Kellevision describes most of the common attributes of this subculture.

"For the majority of the [chronically] homeless population, homelessness is a lifestyle, not an event.

[..]My purpose here is not to blame the victim, but to talk openly about the severe dysfunction I see in chronically homeless families. Unless we identify the true problem, we will not be able to form a lucid solution. Homeless families typically do not function well on any level. Children are frequently truant from school and display numerous behavior and developmental problems. Dorm rules are constantly broken and there is constant turmoil between the families on the dorm. Relationships are fleeting, intense and severely dysfunctional including domestic violence, substance abuse and exploitative. Interactions with other people are inappropriate or dysfunctional. Most homeless families have burnt all their bridges with every social service agency and with their own families because of their severe dysfunction. Shelter staff often feel like we are running a middle school rather than a homeless shelter. This behavior is what needs to be addressed rather than giving them more money or building more homes.

[..]What are the elements of the homeless mindset? I'm still trying to work this out in my mind, but here are some of them which I see frequently:

• An external locus of control
• the belief that they have no control or responsibility for their choices, actions or behaviors but they are the victim of circumstances
• the belief that the causes for good or bad events in your life are totally outside your control or responsibility
• Sense of entitlement
• the belief that the worlds owes them something and they should be able to collect immediately
• the belief that they should be taken care of by others, by the government or by social service agencies
• the belief that they should be given things they have not earned (i.e. free housing, clothing, food, etc.)
• the belief that others should "help" them (i.e. by paying their unpaid bills or appealing their housing denial)
• Impulsivity
• Poor boundaries
• Emotional immaturity
• Need for instant gratification
• Dependency issues
• Predatory/antisocial behaviors
• Pathological relationships

"

Certainly, not every member of what I'll call the "underclass sub-culture" share all of these attributes. Each and every person has a story behind their situation. A careful account of their histories, something they usually reluctantly give, chronicles the development of these problems. It's important to discourage a prejudice developing against a whole group of people who are already stigmatized along with the "welfare mother" of the AFDC era. But we are not going to get to a more complete solution without understanding the problem. I suspect that why there is little commentary on this topic.

Kellevision hits on what I believe to be one of the most common roots of dysfunction, repeated traumas throughout their life.

"A vast majority of our clients seem to have endured some sort of trauma(s) during their childhood which has(have) halted their emotional development. The result is immaturity, impulsivity, dependency, a sense of entitlement (that someone should take care of them rather than being responsible for themselves), an external locus of control (seeing problems as existing outside of themselves and therefore being outside of their control and/or responsibility), immature relationships and emotional lability. These factors result in behavior which appears erratic and irresponsible."

"Arrested development" is what Kellevision calls it. Indeed, this problem is pervasive and most often multi-generational. There are most often one or more of the following in the family history:

• lifelong repeated exposure to trauma:
  
  
  
  • child abuse and neglect
  
  
  • incest
  
  
  • domestic assault
  
  
  • gang or drug related violence
  
  
  • repeated exposure as a crime victim including assault, rape, and drive by shootings
  
  
  • inconsistent parenting ranging from abusive to no supervision
  
  
  • one or more family member who was murdered
  
  
  
  
• poor performance/attendance at school


• high school drop-out


• parenthood started by mid-teens


• by their twenties, they have several kids with mostly different partners


• sporadic work history and chronic unemployment


• efforts to qualify for Social Security


• family members relying on other families income, so no family member is able to break the pattern of poverty


• chemical abuse


• drug dealing to support a habit


• mental illness


• parents, spouses, brothers, sisters in prison


• criminal activity as income


• crime as a family enterprise

Persons who are members of the underclass see dysfunction as normal. They've never known any different. Many think this is how everyone lives. While they may dream of a good job, they appear to not have the self-discipline to keep a good job. Many of this group might be diagnosed with an anti-social personality DO. Personally, I think this diagnosis is misleading at best. A person earns this diagnosis if their history includes sufficient "anti-social" behavior. This doesn't account for family cultures that teach a confusing mix of conventional and anti-social values. Thus we have neighborhoods that have no constructive relationships with police, believe that justice is against them and label anyone reporting a crime as an informant and not to be trusted. This of course contributes to the chaos in the neighborhood.

In my experience people who get diagnosed anti-social are the ones the clinician don't trust or believe. The whole underclass culture tries to keep their business to themselves. Lying to protect one's family's reputation is encouraged. I suspect while there may be a few classic psychopaths out there, most of those folks who populate our jails are drug abusing, impulsive, underclass members with shut down emotional systems due to repeated chaos and trauma. These folks won't tell you the truth unless they are desperate and already feel they are the lowest of the low. Their judgment is so impaired that they see fear as a weakness they must squelch out. Danger in their world is everywhere and it must be faced, not avoided.

I have worked with some persons of the underclass who have a clinical presentation of PTSD after many years of participation in gang violence. They know what conventional values are, but they also know what is the law of streets. They are scared and tired of living a nightmare, and want a stable peaceful life but are tortured about what they've seen and what they've done to others over the years. Just seeing a gun sets off flashbacks. They describe their younger years as being "shut off" emotionally, and "not caring" about anyone or anything but money. But now in my office, they are presenting a mostly full range of emotion and a guilty conscience that suggests conventional values. Has their impulsive, "immature brain", associated with anti-social acts, matured into a more conventional pattern? Or is it more accurate to describe them as a product of an anti-social sub-culture? I suspect the latter is more accurate.

Returning to the homeless and Kellevision, she notes the major problem with relationships is homeless people's "picker is broken".

"For every person in a homeless shelter with dependency issues we seem to have an predator waiting for them. Half the population seems to be working or receiving some form of assistance and the other half seem to be trying to hook up with them to take advantage of that income....

It is important to realize that single parents contribute to the problem of picking the wrong partner with their own pathology. The single mothers in the family dorm are not simply victims of the men they pick out. There seems to be a predominant attitude of these women that the man should "take care of them". They believe it is just a matter of picking out the right one. The first problem is that their "picker" is broken. They do not pick out a good one. They usually pick out one of the predators roaming the alley behind the shelter. The second problem is that you cannot sit at home expecting to be taken care of in our modern economy. That might have worked in the 1950's, even in the 1970's, but June Cleaver is no more. The modern American household takes two paychecks. Two full-time paychecks. The third problem presents it self when the man expects to be supported by the woman. Even if the woman is working full-time and picks out a man who wants to live off of her, women traditionally earn much lower wages than men. So the family's financial stability is even more shaky.

This predatory - dependent dyad seems to play out in most of their relationships and I wonder if it is not the source of their alienation from their families of origin. A person who constantly expects to be taken care of can be quite tiring. By contrast, a person who is constantly preying on others also becomes quite tiring. "

Having grown up in a chaotic home and living a chaotic lifestyle, repeated trauma has numbed their emotions to the point that they are unable to make proper judgments about who is worthy of trust. The predator-prey dyad began in their family of origin where parents exploited the children when they were young, and when the children grow up, they exploit their vulnerable elderly parents. Recently, in my therapy group, one male member admonished a older woman for setting limits with her adult children because they were tacitly supporting her grandchildren for default on a loan she'd co-signed. He felt family was entitled to lean on, effectively use, each other.

"Mental illness is often cited as a factor in homelessness. A significant number of homeless clients suffer from debilitating mental illnesses and many researchers sight the high numbers of mental illness in the population. However, each researcher seems to define it in their own way. Some include only the big three Axis I diagnoses (Schizophrenia, Bipolar I and Major Depression). Others include substance abuse (since it is an Axis I diagnosis in the DSM IV) which dramatically inflates the numbers of the "mentally ill". Others include Axis II personality disorders, but only some of them, usually Antisocial Personality Disorder. Still others include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In my experience, mental illness is a factor in about 10-20% of our homelessness clients and it is a serious problem. However, it does not explain the other 80%. These 80% use an unusually high percentage of services and monies devoted to the homeless and they are repeat customers. "

Here I have to disagree with Kellevision. Everyone I've counseled with substance abuse were running from their feelings about themselves and/or their past. I have found Bipolar DO in significant numbers behind petty criminal activity, gambling addiction, alcoholism, sexual addiction, exotic dancing and prostitution. I participated in a local county survey that identified their most expensive clients. The general profile was bipolar chemically abusive who revolved in and out of the hospital, placements and jail. Personality disorders are mental illness. While many may think the rest of the world is the problem and are not willing to take responsibility, many others are desperate for relief from a horribly chaotic and often traumatic life.

"There is a very high incidence of traumatic histories in the homeless community, even before they became homeless, usually during childhood. I believe that a majority of the substance abuse problem in this population is an effort to treat trauma symptoms. However, this can be said of other populations as well, including the substance abuse community. Most trauma survivors manage to maintain housing despite their trauma symptoms. Though trauma symptoms may play a factor in homelessness, I do not believe they are the sole cause. "

Sole cause, no, it's the multi-generational underclass sub-culture with it's accompanied fractured families, drug abuse, trauma, predator/prey cycle, and chaotic lifestyles. Trauma comes in forms that are not readily identified. Chaotic events in close proximity in time give the victim the impression they have no control of their fate and so they scramble for every edge in the moment, and anxiously await for the next disaster to strike. Those in the underclass go way out of their way to withhold their histories of trauma and chaos, insisting that they can handle their own problems, and it's none of anyone's business. Or is this simply the accepted cultural method to deal with the shame of their past?

"Most homeless clients do not have family support systems. If they did, the family would take them in and they would not be homeless. Many homeless clients come from families who are themselves very nomadic and teetering on homelessness. Some come from families rife with substance abuse, sexual abuse or domestic violence. Others have been rejected by their families for various reasons. These reasons often involve their dependent and/or dysfunctional behaviors. "

Underclass families exploit each other until the resources are gone, or the member with resources cut off the leech. Once the underclass has used up their family resources, they become at risk for homelessness. Many have family who died young living violent or drug infested lifestyles, or who are in prison. By this time, they've burned out most of their friends as well. All they can do and meet new vulnerable people and continue a new predictor/prey dynamic.

So what solutions are there for healing the cultural divide? The problem is mostly economic. The underclass lacks a realistic chance for escaping their plight. Oh, sure a few make it, usually through advanced education. But many will hit a ceiling in achievement when they rely too heavily on "temporary feel good" behavior that provides relief from stress, but self-destructively complicates their lives and increases the chances they will fall out of their newly found middle-class status.

The middle-class in America is shrinking, many of the hard working blue collar workers are falling into the underclass from where with a floundering economy, escape will be difficult. Jobs programs, affordable housing, and counseling are sorely needed but remains largely unfunded. What infrastructure is present is actually shrinking with government tax dollars.

Too often the only role models for success are the gang members, drug dealers or pimps who drive fancy cars and flash wads of money. Too many get lost in this dream turn nightmare. But my experiences working with recovering gang members is that many are retrievable when they get desperate enough to escape with the right kind of treatment and patience with their guarded presentations. I work in a Partial Hospital Program (PHP) at an inner city public hospital that is designed to intervene with persons with personality disorders. It's largely based on the Crisis Intervention model that relies on the desperation of the client to inspire commitment, insight and behavior change in therapy. The PHP format is ideal for persons who are suffering from acute exacerbation of substance abuse, PTSD or personality disorder. I call it "mental health boot camp". We have a satisfaction rate of over 90%.

Kellevision lists a number of problems within the system.

"In my humble opinion, our current social services system and is a major factor contributing to the homeless mindset. This is a complicated element to explain. But I think it is important to make an attempt.

I see two major problems with the social services system: 1) the system itself - how benefits are applied and eligibility determined and 2) the people working within the system - the mindset of caseworkers and social workers working with the homeless population. "

• The social services system seems to be designed to punish attempts by the poor to achieve independence. Assistance programs penalize people for working "too much" by cutting off benefits when assets accrue. These systems often reinforce irresponsibility and impulsivity while punishing people who try to work and plan ahead.
• Many social services programs seem to "teach" clients to wait until the last minute then create a dramatic "emergency" in order to get help. This fosters the emotionally immature and histrionic displays in emergency rooms.
• Our current welfare system does not allow exchanging work for benefits. Benefits are given away free.
• Caseworkers and social workers have a bad habit of doing things for clients, rather than expecting the client to do it or teaching them how.
• So what have clients learned so far?
  • Don't work too much.
  • Don't plan ahead.
  • Expect someone else to provide you with what you need.
  • Don't take responsibility. Someone else will fix it for you.

The welfare system is complex, cumbersome, and difficult to change into a working entity. The major problem is that it is designed not to serve the poor, but to mollify the political needs of the tax payer. That makes it inherently punitive. As we know from behavioral science, punishment doesn't change behavior. I believe it in fact feeds the cycle similar to the one Kellevision describes above. As long as we put political considerations ahead of evidence-based methods, we'll have a broken system.

Kellevision proposes ideas that I think have significant merit.

"I think counseling should be provided liberally. Teach people how to fish. Teach them how their maladaptive behaviors impair their ability to function. Stop rewarding bad behavior. Stop giving away money. Stop cleaning up their messes for them. Stop giving away free stuff.

Once homeless clients are assigned jobs, they would be provided with counseling to address the behavior problems that interfered with their ability to maintain employment. If they failed to come to work due to a poor work ethic, substance abuse problems, domestic violence or other relationship issues, etc. instead of getting fired - again - and having another black mark on their work history, they would be required to participate in counseling or group work to address it. "

Related articles by Zemanta

• Barriers vs. Behaviors and the Homeless Population (kellevision.com)
• The Secret to Ending Homelessness in America (kellevision.com)
• The Homeless are not Black (kellevision.com)
• "Some People Just Don't Think She's Homeless Enough " [Absurdity] (jezebel.com)
• The Downtown Chronic Homeless: Seattle's Solution (austinist.com)
• B.C. homeless law would hurt most vulnerable: critics (ctv.ca)

I very much enjoyed recent exchange on Psychotherapy Brown Bag. I find myself frequently thinking of the implications of our approach to research and how it contributes to our understanding of psychology.

"Intuition is, by no means, useless. A half-century ago, Karl Popper (1959) gave an answer to this that today remains powerfully compelling. Intuition, inductive reasoning, and philosophical theories are extremely valuable as the first step of a multi-step process. He termed this step the "context of discovery." His point was that we need creative thought, outside-the-box thinking, and alternative perspectives in order to drive progress, but that our thoughts, no matter how elegant, can not be the end point. We need to follow up this stage with deductive reasoning - testing our theories to see which ones are backed up by facts and which ones are clouded by flawed reasoning.

In this sense, science becomes a series of competing theories, each of which builds upon the past and corrects a variety of prior errors. No theory is pefect, most if not all are eventually overturned by others, and progress continues. Our progress, however, is marked by the evidence supporting our claims, not by the strength of our beliefs in our cause without reflection upon the evidence for its validity."

Not only can our interpretations effect how we see and use a research finding, but the assumptions we bring to the research effects our choice of hypothesis and measurement target. Wood et al.(2009) pre-publication manuscript has gotten much press inappropriately proclaiming that positive affirmations may in fact harm those those most in need, those with low self-esteem. As I stated in an article I wrote about these conclusions, there was I believe an error in one of the basic assumptions of the research. Wood and her colleagues assumed negative feelings after affirmations demonstrated harm. A review of basic theory might have captured what I believe was actually happening, the subjects were beginning a process of extinguishing their conditioned negative emotional response.

It seems researchers have drifted away from embedding their investigations in theory. Few authors seem willing to delve into the grand theoretical formulations as a basis for their research. For that reason, it's difficult to apply the results to much more than the specifics of the research setting. You've been discussing intuition as it impacts research. I think theory serves as a check on intuition.

I think one of the most important recent grand psychological theories was Henriques "Tree of Knowledge", yet I've caught little written about it since 2003 other than my humble attempt. I think this model provides us with a framework for these sorts of discussions. The link between psychology's investigation of the mind and interpreting the meaning of behavior (The Justification Hypothesis) is where data meets intuition, where research interfaces with theory. Ever since studying psychometrics I've integrated the concept of validity and reliability into my thinking about the theoretical interpretation of data. Reliable data that that is consistent wwith the hypothesis of the study, (predictive validity) set in a meaningful context (content and construct validity), give us an opportunity to further our understanding of the meaning of human behavior in it's cultural context (construct validity). Yet I've never seen the concepts applied outside of psychometrics where they certainly seem to belong. Perhaps its again related to researchers reluctance to bringing a theoretical discussion to their research.

Related articles by Zemanta

• David Sloan Wilson: Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Relationship (huffingtonpost.com)
• Do you love humanity? (bps-research-digest.blogspot.com)
• Into the ancient mind (mindhacks.com)
• Repost: The Biology of a Mother's Love (network.nature.com)
• Accentuate the positive (healthskills.wordpress.com)
• Asking for it (badscience.net)
• Episode 98: Evolutionary Psychology - An Interview with Dr. David Buss (thepsychfiles.com)

I caught this article at Psychcentral.com, Positive Thoughts Make Things Worse for Poor Self-Esteem . It struck me as a counter-intuitive finding for a research study. I've been helping clients build self-esteem for over 30 years and while positive thoughts is not a short road to better self-esteem, it certainly does work over the long run. I'd estimate that at least six months is required to make significant progress with self-esteem from solely refocusing on the positive, and some people require much more time. Several things jumped at me as I read the article. First of all, Dr. Grohol quoted an article from the The Economist of all places. Both articles stated the research was published in this month's Psychology Research and authored by Wood et al (2009). A review of the past three months of that journal produced no article.

So I went to the old reliable, I googled the lead author, Joanne Wood. I came up with several mentions of her at academic institutions and emailed the author for a reprint. I also found another review of the same article by Ed Yong writer for the Science Blog Not Exactly Rocket Science dated May 15th.

The next day, the article arrived in my email with a short note from the author saying it hadn't been published yet! Apparently, there have been some pre-publication prints floating about likely for publicity purposes. This is one of my pet peeves. Articles submitted to peer reviewed journals are intended to inform the academic community and allow scholarly review and comment. The object of repeated review is to ensure the research is sound and is appropriately interpreted. When it appears first in lay publications, the writers who are not scientists often inadvertently distort the interpretation of the research, as I've noted before. That really didn't happen this time. Both the Psychcentral.com and The Economist got the research mostly right. But Ed Yong did a much better job of explaining the fine points.

This time, it's the researchers that make a subtle but major error in an assumption involving an interpretation of a key measurement. Its subtle because it's endemic in our culture. It seems like everyone assumes that negative feelings are harmful. In this case, Wood et al (2009) found that their subjects who had low self-esteem, immediately reported a lower mood and self-esteem after telling themselves sixteen times they are a "lovable person." Interestingly, persons with high self-esteem report only slight, non-significant improvement in self-esteem.

I decided to do an anecdotal demonstration of the "intervention" for my own understanding. After saying to my self 16 times "I am a loveable person", I felt annoyed, a little silly, embarrassed, and was reminded of quite a few traits which make me not always so lovable. But I can't imagine how this would have any long term effect on my self-esteem either way.

An even bigger problem is one that I talked about before and called it Dust Bowl Empiricism. Researchers are so enamored with their professional activities, they demonstrate their preference for inductive research. Wood et al. reviewed all the relevant research on their topic quite satisfactorily, but then failed to do a sufficient review of related theory. In previous post, I quoted Michael Schermer, a columnist with Scientific American, who eloquently asserted that the really valuable research, the kind of research that can fairly readily be used to educate the public, "higher-order works of science that synthesize and coalesce primary sources into a unifying whole toward the purpose of testing a general theory or answering a grand question." To be fair, few researchers venture into grand theory, perhaps because of the dearth of recent reviews, and perhaps because of the few notable exceptions have been eviscerated by their colleagues for their efforts. Sigmund Freud comes to mind. I have sometimes wondered if psychology's love-hate relationship with Freud resulted in an over-emphasis on induction and de-emphasis of deduction and construct validity.

Wood et al. appears to be testing a specific intervention using Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). CBT purports to change feelings by changing thoughts.

While I prefer more psychodynamic conceptualizations, lets approach this issue of negative feelings from cognitive-behavioral point of view for purposes of demonstrating how relevent theory would aide in the interpretation of research. There is conceivable explanation of low self-esteem and associated negative emotion in the concept of "conditioned emotional response" or CER. A person may learn they are not valuable or important by, for example, an invalidating experience. That invalidating experience is remembered in at least two ways, by the facts of the event and by the associated emotions. According to current understanding of neurophysiology, memories of facts and emotions are kept in different part of the brain, presumably by different methods of storage with different processes of recall. The hippocampus and medial temporal lobe are involved in verbalized memories. Emotional memories involve the amygdala.

Sufficient invalidating experiences may lead to low self-esteem. Whenever a sufferer of low self-esteem remembers an invalidating experience or experiences a new one, she is likely to remember the event and feel the emotion associated with the experience.

In the Wood et al. experiment, the lowered mood and self-esteem are experienced after a validating experience. The subject feels the emotions associated with the original invalidating experience of invalidation perhaps because the positive self-talk controdicts the perception of the subject. Wood et al. makes that point. However, what she misses is that the subject is under going extinction of the conditioned emotional response. The subject is experiencing the emotion without the triggering invalidating experience. According to the theory of Classical Conditioning, repeated exposures to the emotion without the associated invalidation will eventually weaken the conditioning. Perhaps this process is complicated by the fact that the alternative experience, validation, is a close opposite to the conditioning stimulus, triggering a strong emotional response.

In my experience, this triggering of a strong negative emotional response associated with past destructive learning without the presence of the negative stimulus actually quickens the de-conditioning. What this experience amounts to is an abreaction, an emotional re-experiencing of the past event in a supportive and nurturing environment.

One point of the research is well taken. A person with an abysmal self-esteem reading a self-help book will find herself ruminating about how wrong it is that she could be so lovable. Such a person, supported only by herself, is not receiving the necessary nurturing due to her low self-esteem. She is likely re-conditioning the CER with more invalidating self-talk.

The reviews of this article did a fair job of presenting the study. However, there is risk in presenting research to a lay audience. The well written review by Yong had unintended consequences. The comments below the article contained some anquished and angry responses:

"As a person with very low self-esteem who has been encouraged to think positively and love myself throughout my life, I can only thank Joanne Wood for publishing this study. Packaged one-size-fits-all programs promoting the personal pep talk only serve to make those people already in touch with their mediocre side more acutely aware of their non-value within society."

...and...

"And when I feel unloved by one person even i feel like no one at all loves me or values me. How can I value myself when i feel like that. and after going thru a marriage where my ex always devalued me and everything i did if he did not approve of it. being abusive, verbally, mentally, emotionally, and physically... and even tho i have come a long way past this experience, it haunts me and i feel lower then dirt. no positive self talk makes me feel better, only makes me feel worse, cuz i figure if i don't actually believe what i am saying or thinking how can it possibly be true?"

Unfortunately, some people with very low self-esteem have been reinforced in their belief that positive thinking can't help. Self-help is best read by the worried well. People with long standing issues with low self-esteem need psychotherapy. Both the authors, Wood et al., and reviewer, Yong, stated this clearly, the other two articles did not. Even so, this knowledge proved harmful to a few. I certainly do not fault the authors for this problem. Yong especially did a great job. One can't ensure everyone reads the entire article or even correctly understands it.

I believe we as professionals who write about mental health have a duty to be as clear and thorough as possible in an attempt to avoid confusion and inadvertant harm. But knowledge is powerful. Sometimes, knowledge mishandled can lead to worsening of symptoms that hopefully brings those in need to help.

Reference: Wood, J., Perunovic, W. Elaine, & Lee, J. (2009). Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02370.x

Update 7/15/09: Joanne V. Wood, PhD responds to all the media hype about her research.

Recently, I exchanged messages with Michele Rosenthal, author of the blog, Parasites of the Mind. She asked me a very good question, one that is so much a part of my everyday work, a good long contemplation was needed just to tease out a good answer.

"Speaking of inspiring, how do you inspire a client to believe in what he/she is doing? It's so difficult to believe in anything when PTSD has settled its big black cloud on your head.

Any general rules of the game for (self) empowering belief?"

Another therapist, Mary Redoutey, joined our discussion and attempted to answer this question. She took the conventional route.

"All therapy in essence is self empowered therapy.... The therapist is the partner in the process. I can sit in the chair in my office, can make suggestions, can teach, can do anything as much as I want... and nothing different will happen unless of course the client is present, listens somewhat attentively, suspends negativity long enough to experience a shift in feeling state and/or thoughts or actions.... And the work in the session does not transfer into the client's life unless the client chooses to make the necessary changes. "

Essentially, Mary says that therapists don't change people, people can only change themselves. I have commented on a release for a new book that made this point as well. While it is true that what a client brings to therapy may account for much of the effectiveness of therapy, I don't think this is the core of Michelle's question. As I understand her question, she wants to know what the therapist brings to the therapy room.

My first attempt at replying was rooted in my daily routine. I'm always helping people understand how their past experience impinges on their current symptoms.

"Consider what happens between mother and child. A child develops their self-concept initially based on how they are treated by their mother. In therapy, the therapist communicates his belief in the client. And if the connection already exists, a seed is planted. But as an adult, only the client can nurture the seed to germination and growth. The therapist can only teach them how."

Generally, when I take this tact, which is common with the childhood trauma survivors I see, I am helping them see the importance of exploring their childhood history and their relationships with their caregivers as a way to understand the origins of their symptoms. This is a much more specific answer that still only partly answers Michelle's question.

I think Michelle wants to know what is the therapists role in motivating a client in each and every step through therapy. In other words, what is the client getting from paid expert advice they can't get from a book? From Michelle's point of view, perceptions of her options are clouded by the rollercoaster existence that accompanies PTSD.

There has been extensive research on this topic. Most recently, much of this research has taken on a ideological fervor endorsing Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). I've written often about my opinion CBT. Suffice it to say, CBT may be the core methodology in helping a client manage their thoughts and building treatment plans, but there is much more to behavior change than changing thoughts. One of CBT's central assumptions is patently false. Not all feelings are produced by or changable by thoughts. Much of our earliest learning occurs before thoughts begin to play a major role in our learning around the age of 8.

Patterson (1989) identified common specific factors recognized by virtually all schools of psychotherapy. He included therapist acceptance, permissiveness, warmth, respect, nonjudgmentalism, honesty, genuineness, and empathy or empathic understanding. Three of these, warmth, empathy, and genuineness have considerable research backing. In a previous article, Patterson (1984) points out:

"There are few things in the field of psychology for which the evidence is so strong. The evidence for the necessity, if not the sufficiency, of the therapist conditions of accurate empathy, respect, or warmth, and therapeutic genuineness in incontrovertible.... The fact that specific change occurs in a therapeutic relationship without the addition of so-called specific techniques, such as interpretation, suggestion, instruction, etc., is also evidence of the sufficiency of the relationship by itself. "

More recent research has found the competence of the therapist is critical. Verhofstadt et al. 2008, in their article about the value of emotional similarity and empathic accuracy in support giving with couples. They cite:

"...mounting evidence that unskilled support can be ineffective or even harmful to the support recipient.... In summary, whereas matching the partner's emotion during a support-seeking interaction may provide a sufficient basis for understanding the partner's current affective state(s) and responding with appropriate emotional support and consolation, understanding the partner's specific thoughts and feelings during a support-seeking interaction may provide a sufficient basis for understanding what kind(s) of help the partner desires and how to provide such help in an acceptable way."

Successful therapists must be able to adapt to their clients' emotional uniqueness and to accurately perceive their thoughts and feelings to provide appropriate support in an acceptable way. Perhaps even more important, therapists must be perceptive and adaptive enough to understand the clients complaint that brought them to therapy and the nature of their quandary beyond the clients' own understanding, or the underlying problems. And having discovered what must be done, therapists must be able to provide the clients insight into their dilemma, provide a rationale for a course of action, and persuade their clients to make changes they are unlikely to find easy or achieve without significant discomfort. Initially, clients are often unable to understand the significance of their problems or nature and potential benefit of the required changes. If they did they wouldn't need therapy!

There is only one experience that I find cuts through virtually any dark cloud, and that is the touch of human empathy. When people who are overwhelmed by pain suddenly find someone who seems to understand how they feel, they no longer feel alone and abandoned by the world. A skilled therapist can provide more than the usual kind of empathy. After years of exploring the human condition, the therapist reaches within the client's experience that at least begins to provide some meaning to explain and place in context her experience.

Preston and de Waal (2002) describes the nature of human interaction as involving an exchange of complementary emotional and thought messages. These shared representations allow people to adjust their responses based on the communicated states of others suited to relieve each others' distress. (Cited in Gruhn et al., 2008)

Grillion et al. (2008) describe the emotional exchange between client and therapist and the unique skills required of the therapist.

"When the context becomes safe enough for the client to lower his or her defenses, the alteration of regulatory structures becomes possible. The therapist's own self-regulatory movements reveal his or her inner states to the client. Much like the "good enough mother", the therapist's efforts to regulate his or her own inner states show the client that he or she is in contact with the client. Personal therapy for therapists helps to extend the range of experience that they can draw upon in their work with clients (Schore, 2006, cited in Grillion et al. (2008). According to Amini et al. (1996) the most effective interventions are based on the therapist's awareness of his or her own physical, emotional, and ideational responses to the client's veiled messages.

Accordingly, when the therapist has increasingly expanded self-integration and awareness in regard to his or her state of mind with respect to attachment, then he or she has a larger capacity for assisting clients to achieve integration and awareness. This understanding derives from the primary attachment relationship within the developmental psychobiological perspective in which parents who have secure or "earned" secure states of mind with respect to attachment function in certain ways (including attunement and sensitivity) with their infants that result in attachment security in their children. Therefore, from an attachment point of view, the more secure the therapist is, the greater the likelihood is that he or she can assist clients with achieving greater security (Beebe, 1998, cited in Grillion et al. (2008). Therapist self-awareness broadens "clinical intuition", which is referred to as the art of psychotherapy (Bugental, 1987; Schore, 2006; cited in Grillion et al. (2008). "

Thus the relationship of between therapist and client is perhaps the second most important aspect therapy, right behind client characteristics and motivation. So it is critically important that the client has a good relationship with the therapist. Clients must be willing to shop around to make sure there is a good match. Cooper (2008, quoted in Croft, 2008) makes research based recommendations for finding the right therapist.

"Think about choosing a therapist who can help you build on your strengths - for instance, if you are good at understanding why you do the things you do, a therapist who can help you develop these reflective skills may be more use to you than a therapist who wants to focus mainly on your behaviour or emotions. Ask potential therapists what thoughts they might have on why you are facing the difficulties you are and what they think might help. If these are radically different from your own understandings, it may be more difficult to establish a good working relationship. Ask yourself whether you like your therapist and feel respected by them - the quality of your relationship, early on in therapy, will be one of the best indicators of eventual outcomes, so don't put up with a bad relationship. Remember that probably the best predictor of the outcomes of therapy will be the extent to which you actively involve yourself in the process."

References

Croft, Alison. (2008, October 17). Clients, Not Practitioners, Make Therapy Work. Press release by the British Association For Counselling & Psychotherapy on a new book Cooper, Mick (2008). Essential Research Findings in Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Facts are Friendly. In Medical News Today. Retrieved May 1, 2009, from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/125815.php.

Grillon, C., Pine, D., Lissek, S., Rabin, S., & Vythilingam, M. (2009). Increased Anxiety During Anticipation of Unpredictable Aversive Stimuli in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder but not in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Biological Psychiatry DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.12.028

Grühn, D., Rebucal, K., Diehl, M., Lumley, M., & Labouvie-Vief, G. (2008). Empathy across the adult lifespan: Longitudinal and experience-sampling findings. Emotion, 8 (6), 753-765 DOI: 10.1037/a0014123

Patterson, C. H. (1984). Empathy Warmth And Genuiness In Psychotherapy: A Review Of Reviews. Psychotherapy, 21, 431-438

Patterson, C. H. (1986). Foundations For A Systematic Eclectic Psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 29, 427-435

Verhofstadt, L., Buysse, A., Ickes, W., Davis, M., & Devoldre, I. (2008). Support provision in marriage: The role of emotional similarity and empathic accuracy. Emotion, 8 (6), 792-802 DOI: 10.1037/a0013976

Related articles by Zemanta

• Clients, Not Practitioners, Make Therapy Work (dare-to-dream.us)
• Ecstasy could help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (scienceblog.com)
• The (Unsurprising) Psychic Toll of the War in Iraq (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)
• Specific dopamine receptors control perceptions of emotional events (anxietyinsights.info)
• New York Times Examines Challenges Faced By A Minneapolis Hospital That Treats Many Somali, Hispanic Patients (medicalnewstoday.com)

We have become a medicating culture. If we don't like how we feel, we can take a pill to feel better.

Kellen Von Houser, MA, LPC, in her blog Kellevision says it boldly.

"My concern is for people who are actually experiencing the normal emotions of life, labeling them "mood swings" and trying to medicate their discomfort away. My concern is for doctors who participate in this and validate it. My concern is for teaching people that emotions can be "negative" and undesirable. That they are "bad" in some way and should be eliminated, by chemical intervention or any other means. This is not a message we want to send. Emotions are what make us human. And expressing them is what keeps us sane. "

In this world, shrewd advertisers manipulate our moods to overwhelm our self-control so that we buy their products.

Jeremy Dean in his blog PsyBlog documents the research findings:

"New perspectives on how our self-control interacts with our spending see a battle between impulsive, emotional processes and far-sighted planning processes. One part of us is saying: "Buy it, you'll feel real good!" and another part is saying: "No, we need that money to pay the rent!"

Findings from this type of research are only just starting to emerge, but here are some fascinating highlights on how our self-control works:

• Increased cognitive load decreases self-control. This is something marketers are well-aware of: distracted people are more likely to spend money. Most shops are filled with shiny, complicated distractions - bright colours, music and 'incredible offers' - designed to confuse us and open our wallets.
• Our supply of self-control is limited. Studies show that our self-control is actually sapped each time we use it (Baumeister & Vohs, 2003). It's also sapped, predictably, by alcohol, lack of sleep and stress.

"

Cultural explanations about how we managing our emotions carry almost a mythological quality. "Will Power" is that elusive asset that drives our self-control. But ask someone what "will power" is? Few people have a satisfactory answer. Many will attribute it to a quality within another ill defined concept called "character". "Strength of character" gives one self-control. But what is "strength of character"? Some say its a product of parenting. Others see it as something that is passed down in the bloodlines. According to the genetic hypothesis, certain families are best suited to lead by example. So many cultures have "blue bloods", families of entitled "royals" who serve sometimes as mere figureheads (e.g. Britain), sometimes as actual political rulers (e.g. recently in Nepal).

Psychology sees "will power" as motivation, a biochemical energy that drives humans to act. That role seems for us to be played by emotion. Again from PsyBlog.

"Sadness makes us want a change (any change). Sadness may well increase the chance we want to spend. One study found that those who are sad are more likely to want to sell at a lower price and buy at a higher price (Lerner, Small & Loewenstein, 2004)."

So does sadness make us devalue what we have and seek something better? There certainly could be some truth to that. Sadness may be the primary feeling state induced by loss of something we value. Indeed, we may feel the need to shed old priorities and invest in major change. But that seemed to hardly translate into selling low and buying high. That seems more like an escapist approach to grief.

But indeed, everything about our medicating culture is about escaping from how we feel.

"Disgust makes us want to get rid of everything. When we're disgusted we want to get rid of the things we have and don't want to buy anything."

In research settings, disgust is often broken up into disgust of actions (guilt) and disgust of self (shame). Getting rid of things and avoiding buying would seem like a form of self-deprivation or punishment. We know from research that punishment is not effective, in fact, it may provide add incentive to do whatever for which one is punished. A sign "Don't pull this cord!", as the cartoon goes, induces the inevitable response. So again, without contemplation, our emotional impulses provide us with at best a temporary escape, but the consequences of our actions are waiting for us in the next moment.

"Anxiety makes us want to reduce uncertainty. Anxiety makes us prefer low-risk options (Raghunathan & Pham, 1999)."

But if we follow the impulse, avoiding the risk, will actually make what we avoided even more anxiety provoking the next time. People who suffer from anxiety disorders find their world ever shrinking, sometimes to the point where they are afraid to leave their home! The treatment is to gradually face the fear and restart one's life. Sounds simple, but for many it's terrifying to contemplate. In fact, the very act of thinking about it induces intolerable anxiety, making withdrawal appear highly inviting.

So, in a nut shell, emotions are our motivations. But if we act on impulse, we will prolong our misery and inevitably face the same situation again, with more intense emotion. So it's not enough to recognize what our initial impulse is when we are highly motivated. We have to apply sound judgment as well. We must think about our situation and apply the motivation judiciously.

So, as it applies to make better decisions with money:

• Self-imposed limits. Research by Professor Dan Ariely (reported in his book Predicatably Irrational) suggests that self-imposed limits can help to increase self-control. Telling other people about these limits will tend to increase our adherence to them. Professor Ariely even suggests a special credit card which only lets you spend money on certain categories of goods (e.g. groceries) up to a certain pre-set limit, then it warns of overspending. Unsurprisingly credit card companies haven't taken up the idea, good though it is.


• Cooling-off periods. Take time to decide about a purchase, especially anything expensive. Not just a few minutes - more like a few hours or days. Many people already do this and it's an extremely effective method of financial decision-making....


• Monitor your self-control. The fact that self-control seems to run-down with use suggests we need to monitor its levels. Have you used a lot of self-control recently? Are you tired? Are you about to snap? Again, it might be better to wait until your self-control tank is refilled.

Another good option is to consult with someone you trust about your decision, someone who isn't similarly invested in the decision or depleted of "self-control".

Horwitz and Wakefield (2007) in their book, The Loss of Sadness, make the provocative proposal that psychiatry have transformed normal sadness into clinical depression. With the 1980 publication of the DSMIII, depression was defined as a set of symptoms without considering the context in which the symptoms occurred. Their central thesis is that much of what is now diagnosed as clinical depression is in fact a normal emotion of sadness that has resulted from major loss.

But it's not just psychiatry that has things confused, our entire culture contributes to the problem by not educating our children about emotion in any consistent way. How our children deal emotionally with school and social relationships have more to do with success as adults than any other reason. People who visit my office were wounded in childhood by emotionally ignorant parents. Without psychotherapy and education, these now grown up children are predestined to repeat many of their parents mistakes raising their own children.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is There Really an Epidemic of Depression? (sciam.com)

Even in our high-tech world, our understanding of emotions is dominated by culture.

FirstPeople.us

"An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed.""

Negative emotion is thought of as evil, perhaps even the embodiment of Lucifer's influence upon us. Positive emotions are considered good, for some, the manifestation of God's will. Could it be that simple? Recall one of our 20th Century morality dramas, Star Trek, the episode, The Enemy Within.

"While orbiting the planet Alfa 177, the U.S.S. Enterprise experiences a transporter malfunction.... Captain Kirk beams aboard. Kirk leaves with his officers and when the transporter room is deserted, a second Kirk materializes on the pad.

When a space animal is beamed aboard the starship and splits into two entities; one tame and one vicious, it is discovered that the same thing has happened to Kirk. While one Kirk is good and honorable, the other is evil and runs amok on his ship, committing violent acts, including the attempted assault of Yeoman Janice Rand.

[...]As time passes, the "good" Kirk is weakening, losing his ability to make decisions, while his "evil" half is dying. Neither Kirk can survive without his other half.

[...]Scotty effects repairs on the transporter, but there's no time to test it. McCoy is fearful because the "space dog" which had been split earlier, had gone through the repaired transporter and, while joined into one animal, was dead. Kirk takes the chance and beams down with his counterpart and returns to the U.S.S. Enterprise whole and alive."

So which is true, are negative emotions the scourge of our existence? Or do we need both kinds of emotion to make us complete? Are negative emotions always evil, inspiring only the most despicable manifestations of our behavior? Or does the negative serve to differentiate, elaborate and balance the positive?

Why would we have both kinds of emotions if we didn't need them? Whether your put your faith in natural selection or God, would we expend so much negative energy if we didn't need it?

Contrary to popular belief, Will Power is a Indy car driver and he has nothing to do with motivation. Our motivations are largely emotionally driven. Negative emotions push us to face and act on those things that make us most uncomfortable. Positive emotions allow us to enjoy success and give us energy to meet new challenges. But negative emotions inspire us to make changes.

Misery is perhaps the most creative force in our lives. Seldom do we make major changes in our lives without considerable emotional pain. Each negative emotion comes complete with an intuitive guide to action. Anger pushes us to stand up for ourselves and speak up when we've been treated with disrespect. Fear makes us hyper-vigilant to potential danger and readies us to duck or run away if needed. Sadness makes us review over and over again what we've lost. That ruminative search is for the knowledge to compensate for our loss and meaning and wisdom to understand our lives from a new perspective. Guilt reminds us of our responsibility in the errors we make and motivates us to work to understand our mistakes and learn how to avoid repeating them.

So next time you feel overwhelmed by vile emotions and thoughts, sit with them; make sense of them. Trace them to their origins; understand what they might mean for you today. Then, make a reasoned decision what should be done. As hard as it is to sit with a foul emotion, you will find it an amazingly creative force for change.