We Become Our Feelings


When you are struck by an emotion, you experience yourself as that emotion. You lose your sense of self, and your consciousness is occupied instead with the feelings your body is experiencing. We have already discussed that you use the verb to be in order to communicate your feelings, as in ˜˜I am scared, or ˜˜I am mad. Our meta-thoughts have projected our feelings onto our consciousness. We have temporarily set aside our experience of ˜˜I am me and adopted ˜˜I am mad instead.

A client came to my office the other day and declared, ˜˜Oh, boy, am I ever stressed out. By the time he left the office, he had shifted to the declaration, ˜˜I have stressors. This is a desirable outcome. People need to disidentify from the perspective they have fallen into. They need to regain their sense of perspective.

When my client communicated his feelings of being overwhelmed, I said, ˜˜Dave, youre identified with being stressful. ˜˜Whats that supposed to mean? was his almost sarcastic reply. I should have known it was dumb of me to throw some theory at the problem. What Dave needed was to experience disidentification rather than have someone attempt to describe it to him for the first time. But now that Dave has experienced it, and we talk about whats on his mind, just reminding him that he has become identified with his feelings helps him to disidentify.

Disidentification is not difficult to replicate. Try it yourself. Think of the last time you were upset by something. Your feelings took over your thoughts. Your sense was not ˜˜Here I am experiencing a strong feeling; it was just strong feeling. In this experience there is a loss of perspective. Strong emotions and egocentric positions (such as pride , anger, and greed) have in common the capacity to cause this loss of perspective.

But the experience of being overwhelmed by a feeling is a kind of bad faith, or a lie one tells to oneself. By becoming focused on one dominant outlook, you deny other truths about yourself. There are, after all, many other truths about you that you are ignoring when you are engrossed in this way: your sense of self, your affection for other people, your history, your pleasures. But you deny yourself cognizance of these things. The idea is to regain your perspective. Later in this chapter well consider a variety of ways to accomplish this.

In Daves case, we simply isolated his dominant feeling and used some psychoimagery techniques to remind him that he could be the observer of his feelings of stress rather than be nothing but the feeler of those feelings of stress. Dave needed to be reminded that he was much more than a stressed-out guy. He was a successful businessman, a father, a husband, a lover of sports cars , and much, much more. Dave had stressors, but he was not his stress.




Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
ISBN: 814408354
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 134

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