Emotional Component
The Emotional Component Of Anxiety
The emotional component of anxiety is probably the most difficult to manage for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it is not obvious how emotions operate. The following are the 13 specific points of understanding that we will discuss in detail in the narrative that follows.
| Fact 1. | All circumstances and situations are neutral. |
| Fact 2. | Emotions derive from the way we think about situations or circumstances (perspective). |
| Fact 3. | We don’t have direct control over emotions, but we can exercise control over the way we think. |
| Fact 4. | Thinking is usually habitual. |
| Fact 5. | We are not bound by habit because we have free will and can choose what to think. |
| Fact 6. | If we don’t exercise choice about thinking, the habitual mode will be the default. |
| Fact 7. | If we want to change an emotion we must change the cause of the emotion, the thinking that precipitated it (our perspective). |
| Fact 8. | Emotions promote a particular way of thinking (namely, the kind of thinking that precipitated the specific emotion in the first place). |
| Fact 9. | Feelings are not facts. (Because we feel fear, doesn’t mean something is dangerous) Emotions are indicators that we are thinking a particular way or holding a particular perspective. |
| Fact 10. | Resisting an emotion will amplify the emotion or prolong it. |
| Fact 11. | The more intense an emotion, the more difficult it becomes to change the thinking that precipitated it. |
| Fact 12. | Labels (bad, horrible, etc.) act as amplifiers to emotions. |
| Fact 13. | Emotions are not things that happen to us, they are experiences that we create, although not necessarily on purpose. |
The emotional component is what you feel. If it weren’t for the emotion associated with any perception then our experience of everything would beflat. It would be as if our experiential world were a black and white sketchinstead of a rich, multidimensional movie. Emotional experience is the double-edged sword that provides us with the richness of experience in the world, andthe difficulties of everyday life. It is emotions that give color to life. Why,then, do emotions like anxiety give us so much difficulty? The answer to this question lies in how emotions work. Understanding how emotions work will inform us as to how to go about changing emotions that don’t suit us. Although the explanation my sound a bit confusing, the exercises recommended are simple and straight forward, although they do require effort and conscious choice.
In all forms of fear it is the emotion of anxiety that we are either acting out of, or resisting and trying to eliminate from our experience. Acting out of fear means we act on an impulse to avoid or escape. Resisting means simply that, we fight the feeling or always trying to get rid of it. Remember our example of two people walking down the street seeing the same scene of a dog jumping up on a child. One associates to, and experiences the warmth of childhood love and the other associates to, and experiences fear from a childhood trauma. One’s thoughts are associated, automatically, with a frame of reference of a time spent growing up with her dog, and the other’s thoughts automatically associate to a dog attack from his youth. In this instance, as with all experiences of anxiety, the triggering environmental stimulus (a dog jumping up) is NEUTRAL! This is to say that the environmental event holds no emotion, inherently, but it is the mind’s automatic associative thoughts about the event that precipitate an emotion, in this case fear or love. It is actually the emotional component of life with which we have the most difficulty and with which we struggle so hard.
It is the emotional component that will inspire us to kill ourselves if we’re depressed and that will lead us to isolate ourselves from life if we’re anxious. Because emotion is derived from our mental perspective we have no direct control over emotions. Emotions are the result of how we think about things. Now, the thoughts we generally have are conditioned, or are the result of how we are used to thinking about situations, i.e. they spontaneously come out of habit. In the above example we can be used to thinking about dogs in a traumatic way or a loving way. Just because we have a tendency to think a particular way does not mean that we are bound by that way of thinking. We can exercise our free will, and choose to think as we want. We can choose to think of a gray elephant, or if we want we can choose to think of a green elephant.
The point being that we can think or picture anything we want. Unless we direct our minds consciously, however, it will default to a habitual way of thinking. This is pure conditioning in a classical sense. This is like Pavlov’s dogs salivating to a bell after it has been paired with the delivery of meat. Generally, this process of learning is economical in nature. With each stimulus event that we encounter we don’t have to come up with a unique thought about it. The way we have thought about it in the past is generally good enough to be the way we think about it currently, particularly if we have thought about it that way for a very long time. So, what if the old way we have thought about something is no longer valid? This is when we begin to have problems unless we know things work.
Identifying the cause of the fear
We have just introduced the two elements of emotion that make it the most difficult component with which to work. The first difficulty is identifying the actual CAUSE of the fear. The second is that once we precipitate an emotion by the way we have thought of something, then action or thought not consistent with the emotion will “feel” false.
We will naturally try to address or change the thing that we imagine is causing the fear. The fact that emotions derive from our frame of reference, not from environmental events is a major source of confusion. Out of habit we will attribute the cause of fear to an event in the environment, let’s say a lion, when in fact it’s the thoughts about a lion that are scary.
We could just as easily have calm thoughts about a lion, if we are a lion trainer. If our goal is to change an emotion then we must address or change the cause of it. In order to have a different emotion, it is imperative that we address or change the thought, because the thought is the cause. If we address or try to change the environmental event in an attempt to change the emotion, then we have missed the boat.
The reason this is such a difficulty is because it makes sense to change the environment if something is really threatening, otherwise the lion might eat you. But, if the thought is not valid, i.e., the lion is not threatening, then we must address the thinking or perspective in order to change the emotion.
Otherwise we will reinforce an unrealistic fear by avoiding the environmental stimulus. The locus of causation of emotion is the first big challenge. Getting our minds to recognize that it is distorted thinking giving rise to unrealistic fears is a major hurdle. Why? Because we are not used to understanding the relationship between thinking and emotions this way, and changing our fundamental belief about what causes emotions is why it is such a hurdle.
How emotions and thinking interact
The second element that creates difficulty (the emotion promoting a particular way of thinking) is inherent in the way we have described the process of how emotions and thinking interact. Remember, perspective (thinking) triggers an emotion. The emotion of fear and arousal then promote fearful thinking. To give a very simple example of this phenomenon, consider the following.
You’ve just come out of the theater after viewing a thriller movie where the murderer has been killing people on dark streets. Let’s say it was a believable movie and you experienced fear. As you walk to your car parked on a side street all of a sudden it seems very ominous.
You start wondering if someone is “in hiding”. As you’re driving in the car, you wonder if someone had climbed in the back seat as you forgot to look there, when you first got in the car. Or alternatively, when you’re in the theater, during one of the more gripping scenes, a friend taps you on the shoulder and you about go through the roof screaming. Again, the emotion disposes you to a certain kind of thinking or mind set. This process of thinking giving rise to fear, and fear promoting fearful thinking is very self-reinforcing, and a very tight loop.
Now, here is our challenge. Once we are feeling fear it is very difficult to think otherwise, or in a way inconsistent with the emotion. For example, if we see a lion and fear for our life, thinking that we are in danger, then any thought to the contrary will be inconsistent with the emotion and seem “false”. If I feel fear when I see a lion, and then choose to think “I am safe”, then that statement will not fit or will seem false simply because it is inconsistent with the emotion. Herein is a very big problem. We tend to act out of our emotions, or act on them, or think consistently with them rather than seeing them for what they are, INDICATORS that we are thinking in a certain way. So, if we feel fear then we will automatically (out of habit) act, or think in a way that is consistent with the feeling even though we don’t want to feel fear. This is all based on our subconscious mind, or our habitual way of seeing things. If our goal is to change the emotion of fear then we must create a new way of relating to emotions, from something “to act out of “to that of a SIGNAL of the way we are thinking about something.
Whereas the first difficulty is with falsely attributing the fear to an out side situation or object; the second difficulty is in the way the mind relates to emotion, as something from which to act, as opposed to something that is a “signal” to the way we are thinking or viewing a situation. Because of the latter tendency, if we choose to think something inconsistent with the emotion then it will seem false, like a lie. The truth seems like a lie from the perspective of the lie, or if you believe the lie. When we get a handle on these two phenomena we will be able to affect the emotional component of anxiety much more effectively, rather than inadvertently reinforcing our distorted views of environmental circumstances.
Resisting vs. accepting emotions
There is a third aspect of emotions that is also a factor in our ability to change emotional experiences. We will use anxiety as an example, but any emotion will do. The experience of fear or anxiety is an emotion that is generally experienced as unpleasant, in fact, down right disturbing for some people. Because anxiety is unpleasant or horrible for some people we will work very hard to get rid of the experience. One way to get rid of anxiety, as we have been discussing, is to avoid a particular stimulus that is associated with fear or escape a perceived fearful situation. The other way is to “fight” the
emotion or to resist it. Resistance can take many forms as we will discuss. The concept to understand with any form of resistance to emotions is that resisting an emotion actually fuels it. Resisting an emotion is like having a song that you can’t get out of your mind. The more you try to get it out of your mind (resistance) the more it plays. Everyone knows how frustrating this can be. Even though you don’t want it to be there, the more you resist it the more it persists. Emotions are the same way, the more you resist them the more they persist. This, like many aspects of anxiety, presents us with a dilemma.
Because we have come to dislike the emotion of anxiety (mainly because it has grown to such high levels and we don’t just see it as a signal), the more we resist it, and the more we resist it the more it grows. We must learn to accept emotions for what they are, just “signals” to the way we are viewing things. If we resist an emotion, this will have an effect of turning the volume up on the emotion.
Additionally, the more we see an emotion as undesirable the more we automatically resist it. The reasons we find an emotion undesirable are manifold. First we come upon a situation or circumstance and we relate to it (think about it) in a particular way, which elicits an emotion (a conditioned reaction). Let’s say this emotion is fear. Immediately, because of learning (we’ve been taught by parents or society) and/or by conditioning (we’ve had this emotion paired with unpleasant circumstances in the past) we LABEL the emotion “bad”, “terrible”, “horrible”, etc. Everyone knows it’s a weakness to be scared, so being anxious is “bad” (a culture myth). The process of how we have come to acquire particular labels, although fascinating in and of itself, is really secondary to the fact that we do label our emotions. Labeling amplifies the emotion even beyond the thought that precipitated it, actually making the emotion horrible or terrible, in our experience.
If we didn’t crank up the volume on the emotion in various ways, then it would come and go on its own, simply signaling to us that we just perceived something as threatening. If it were just a signal we could then assess other information to which we have access and determine the actual threat value of the situation. But, because we have turned the volume up and made the experience horrible through labeling, then we automatically tend to fight or resist it even more. After all it feels horrible! We have clouded the emotion as “signal” with excess noise; the horrible, terrible, bad, extras in the form of “labels”.
This increased noise in the system makes the signal-to-noise ratio very difficult to handle appropriately (to use information processing lingo). We lose our clarity of thought. In our confusion and heightened emotional state we fight/resist the emotion and, thereby, amplify or prolong it even more, far beyond what is useful. The amplified emotion feeds into the “thinking triggering emotion, and the emotion promoting the same thinking” self-reinforcing cycle again. So labeling and resisting an emotion only serve to amplify, prolong, and further distort thinking. Our goal is to keep the emotion as a useful or productive experience rather than a confusing and self-reinforcing mess.
In order to use emotions to our advantage rather than undermining ourselves, we must address the way our minds automatically relate to emotions. This is the purpose of the Emotional Component intervention for anxiety, to independently address or alter the troublesome role emotions have come to play in the production of out-of-control anxiety. As such, in the intervention we are addressing both the automatic labeling process and the automatic resisting process that has been reinforced since our early years. This requires attention and effort! In order to do this effectively we must address the subconscious habit patterns that have been established. We will use our subconscious altering formula of R&R, recognize and replace to accomplish this.
Recognize and Replace: The Key to Change
What we will RECOGNIZE is any emotion that we don’t like, but anxiety in particular. Remember, the reason that we don’t like an emotion is because we have labeled it, and are resisting it. We will REPLACE the resisting and labeling with the following simple truth. When we say simple truth, we mean the actual, realistic way we want to come to relate to emotions.
IT’S OK TO EXPERIENCE THIS. IT’S OK TO EXPERIENCE (fill in the blank with an emotion, say anxiety). IT’S NEITHER GOOD NOR BAD. IT’S LIKE THE WEATHER, IT COMES AND GOES!
Remember the key to changing the subconscious is regularity, or consistently repeating the replacement each time you notice the emotion, and repeating it with feeling! Repeating the replacement with feeling helps to stamp the new idea or habit into the subconscious even faster.The Emotional Component intervention can not be over emphasized, it is very important. The emotional aspect in our experience is the most likely element to trip us up. It’s much easier to realize that we are logically distorting a situation, than to accept an emotion without labeling it, let alone choosing to think something that is inconsistent with the emotion. But creating an emotion is the crux of the anxiety problem.
Awareness
People go to great lengths to not be aware of their emotions simply because they think they are bad or wrong! Or because the emotions are so uncomfortable, because of how high the volume has been turned up on them. We will take drugs to numb the emotions, we will suppress them, we will become overly active to avoid them, or avoid situations where they arise, etc. Sometimes the only way an individual becomes aware of the emotion is if it is on maximum volume, i.e., panic mode, or depression mode.
The fact that one is not aware of an emotion doesn’t mean that it isn’t having effects, it is. The only thing that is true if we are not aware of the emotion is that we can’t do anything about the root cause of it, namely our frame of reference. One looses the value of the signal. This unawareness of emotions or denial of emotions is a very crippling process. The unawareness of emotions doesn’t allow us the opportunity to change the underlying cause of the distress. The skill with emotions is to become aware of them when they are quiet or settled and not so uncomfortable, and then use them as a signal to change the thinking or the frame of reference. We want to do this before the emotion becomes out of control or it becomes too difficult to exercise choice of thought.
An emotion is very hard to deal with when it is at high volume, because of how it affects the thinking, behavior and physiology. It’s the emotion of depression, anxiety, or panic that gets our attention, eventually, but then it becomes more difficult to deal with. When the volume is high on an emotional experience, it is more uncomfortable, and we are more likely to resist, causing the volume to be cranked up even more, etc. This is why the emotional component is so important to deal with by itself, and in connection with the other components of anxiety. The wise person will accept and welcome emotions as indicators of what they can change, the thinking and behavior which underlies them.
Taking Responsibility
Still another reason emotions can be so difficult to deal with is because we view the emotion as if it were something that is happening to us. It appears that people make us “angry” or that situations “frighten” us. It often appears that the source or cause of emotion is outside of us and that we have no “responsibility” for the emotion. The emotion happens because of someone or something. This can be a grave misunderstanding. When we talk about “responsibility” we are not talking about blame.Blame is a totally different process and topic of discussion. Blame is very destructive whether it is directed at others or oneself. Blame has to do with labeling something as “bad” and then attributing the “badness” to someone or oneself, again, another topic of discussion. Let’s continue with responsibility for now.
What we mean when we talk about responsibility is the ability to respond or act purposefully as opposed to react automatically. Being “responsible” means we have an ability to respond, that is, think, speak, and behave out of choice, although we are more apt to react, automatically. Reacting is easy because it’s automatic and habitual. React means to act as if something out side of us caused an experience and that we are a passive agent.
It is true that we don’t have direct control over emotions (we don’t choose this emotion or that one), but they are not things that just happen to us either. Emotions are the result of patterns of thinking or the way we are looking at circumstances. It is the way we are looking at something, that then precipitates an emotion. If we view the emotional experience through the “filter” of “being out of control”, or as something that just happens to us, then we will resist the emotion. Taking responsibility for our experience is a tremendously powerful tool for recognizing the control that we have when it comes to creating experience. It means that we can have conscious input into our emotional life rather than be the victim of past conditioning or learning. It means that we have power in creating emotional experiences rather than attributing power to others or outside situations for creating our experiences. Taking responsibility or power is the centerpiece for “being in control”. Remember the cornerstone of anxiety is “being out of control”. Being in control has nothing to do with controlling others or situations. Being in control is a process of exercising conscious choice over thinking, and acting. Being in control doesn’t mean that you condone the actions of others or condone any particular situation. It means you can exercise choice in how you relate to those situations and actions. It also means that emotional reactions will not rule your life experience.
Another R&R, recognize and replace, tool is applicable to “responsibility.” Whenever you RECOGNIZE the thought of something outside of you causing an emotional experience then you can REPLACE it with this simple truth,
“I AM 100% RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING I EXPERIENCE.
BECAUSE I AM 100% RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING I EXPERIENCE, THEN I AM 100% EMPOWERED IN MY LIFE.
I AM RESPONSIBLE!”
How emotions interact with the other components
Let’s take a closer look at how the emotional component interacts with the other components of Physiological, Cognitive and Behavioral. It is interesting to know that the underlying physiological state, for the most part, is the same for excitement as it is for terror. It’s the way we relate to the environmental stimulus that translates the physiological state of arousal into excitement or fear. This has important implications for transforming the experience of fear to one of of excitement!
For example, lets take two people going up on a rollercoaster ride. One feels excited as they ascend the first steep ramp, anticipating the rush of the upcoming dip, while the other feels terror anticipating a sure disaster with the upcoming fall. If you were to take physiological measurements of both individuals you would see all the indicators of arousal; increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, decreased galvanic skin response (sweatiness), increased muscle tension, etc. in both individuals. We can affect the “arousability” of each person by different physiological interventions (Physiological Component). In other words we can change the threshold of arousal through physiological interventions, but once aroused whether an individual experiences excitement or fear depends on the “lens” through which they are viewing a situation.
What is the difference between these two individuals who have similar physiological arousal levels, but two different emotions? Well for one thing, they are viewing the scene of climbing the ramp through two different lenses. One sees the ride through the lens of “being in control”. They are thinking something like, “I’ve been down these things a hundred times, nothing has happened, they are secure, and this is going to be an incredible experience!” All this is conditioned and automatic and done out of awareness, or subconsciously. The thoughts may be fleeting but they are the nature of the thoughts surrounding this circumstance. The other sees the ride through the lens of “out of control”. His thoughts run something like, “What if the thing derails? What if I don’t survive, I’m surely going to die”. They also remember reading a report of a rollercoaster crashing sometime in the past, and are sure this could happen here, not to mention they might have a heart attack along the way. This thought process is also subconscious and out of awareness or a conditioned way of thinking about such things (habitual). This is all the Cognitive Component contribution to the anxiety.
When we talk about subconscious we are not talking about things that are deeply buried or things that would take years to uncover, but more the automatic thoughts that accompany the emotion, fear. These thoughts are so routine that it’s easy to miss them. They are also easy to become aware of, if we choose to, but it is much easier to be aware of the emotion. Because the emotion is so loud or clamorous, as it were, we are much more likely to be aware of the emotion rather than the seemingly fleeting thoughts. Because the emotion is so prominent and uncomfortable, we will resist the emotion rather than change the thought that gave rise to it. If we were able to become aware of these thoughts associated with this fear then we would have a handle on the cause of the fear and be able to apply our cognitive techniques to change them as we accept the emotion as a signal.
If we are consistently modifying our physiology to be more stable through our physiological interventions, then we will lessen the power or the grip of the self-reinforcing cycle of “thought creating emotion, and then the emotion promoting thought. If we are not as arousable physiologically, then we are more capable of exercising choice in how we think about a situation. Namely, one that is not consistent with the emotion. If you think of the underlying physiology as the “glue” that binds us to the old habit patterns and strengthens the self-reinforcing cycle, then the physiological interventions loosen this glue of stubborn patterns and make it easier to change the old habits. It allows the mind to be more flexible.
All that is necessary to get the second person who is experiencing fear to experience excitement on the rollercoaster is to have them view the situation like the first person. The problem is when the “fear” person first begins to choose a new way of thinking, it seems false, like a lie. Whether the person begins to use the new “emotional acceptance replacement” or the “being in control replacement” or cognitive replacement it will feel false, like a lie to ones self. This is a very important concept to know when we are working with changing emotional experiences. The concept being, that anything that we think, say, or do that is contrary to the emotion will seem false, and we will have a hard time, intellectually, with the new way of thinking, speaking, or behaving. The conscious part of our mind will reel at the thought of deceiving ourselves, even though the deception is in the distorted thought that triggered the emotion to begin with. Again, the truth seems like a lie from the perspective of the lie. From the perspective of fear, thinking that “it’s not likely that anything will happen to me going down the rollercoaster” seems false. The fact that the new thinking is not consistent with the emotion is exactly the point of the intervention. Even though we know this, the conscious mind will have trouble with the new way of thinking. If we come armed with this understanding, that the feeling of “seeming like a lie” is an indication that we are on the right track, then it becomes easier to persist in our reconditioning exercise!
Now let’s look closer at the emotions of excitement and fear (each created because of the different thoughts about the situation). For purposes of illustration we will say that we like the emotion of excitement, and dislike fear. The reason we make this qualification is because some people may not like excitement, or enthusiasm a similar emotion depending upon what’s been conditioned to the emotion. If we don’t like the emotion it’s because we have learned to label it as “bad” or “horrible”. If we think an emotion is “horrible” we will suppress, repress, fight, avoid or somehow try and get rid of it. Why? Because it is horrible! The above are all forms of resistance. Remember if we resist an emotion it will persist meaning it will be prolonged or amplified. What makes the emotional horrible is our labeling it so. If we think it is horrible then we experience it as so. This idea is critical. Fear, excitement, enthusiasm, or joy are just emotions. They are neither good nor bad, they are the result of how we think about a situation or ourselves, etc. If we make them bad or horrible we will resist them. If we resist them we will make them grow in some form or other, what an irony if we don’t like the emotion. Because if we inadvertently make the emotion stronger by resisting it, then the stronger emotion will, in turn, promote the particular thinking that precipitated it, in our case fearful thinking, and so the self-reinforcing cycle goes. To say that an emotion is not bad is not to say that we want to experience it. We may prefer one emotion to another, and if we do, then all that is necessary is to change the way we think about something. Because it is the thought that precipitates the emotion! Resisting the emotion fuels the emotion! Labeling the emotion is one reason why we resist them.
An emotion is just an emotion; labeling it “bad” makes it bad. A few examples will help. Remember if we take the label of “bad” off the emotion then it will come and go and we will be less likely to get stuck in the emotion or emotion/thought feedback loop. Always, if we see something as threatening then we will experience anxiety. However, if we aren’t stuck in the emotion/thought feedback loop then we can always change our thinking more easily. Let’s look at a couple of examples where labeling changes automatically and makes it easier to have a different experience with fear. There are some situations where fear is not only NOT labeled as “bad” but is actually sought after. Our example will be horror movies. Why do people go to horror flicks? They go because they want to be scared and get the “thrill” of such. If the movie is a B grade movie and people laugh instead of scream then the critics would give the movie a poor rating. If people are “scared to death” those people will give it rave reviews. Why? Because the film was so skillful cinemagraphically that it got them to believe they were experiencing what they were seeing. They experienced fear but the fear didn’t “stick” to them.
Now, people generally don’t fight the emotion of fear when they experience it with a film and, hence, the emotion comes and goes. If they do hold images of it and start to think that it is real or how it could be real then they will carry the fear out of the theater! This is true of any emotion, that if you resist it, it will continue. You may think that this is only true of emotions that you don’t like because we have labeled them in some way, “bad”, or “horrible”, etc. If we can get someone to resist an emotion that they like, then it will amplify as well, but they would have to label the emotion bad in some way in order for it to amplify.
As we have illustrated above fighting or resisting the emotion causes it to either amplify, or persist in some form or other. It doesn’t matter the subjective quality of the emotion for this to happen. What usually causes us to resist the emotion is a learned or conditioned reaction to the emotion, usually, labeling it “bad”. Our intervention with the emotional component then is to reorient how our minds relate to emotions. Whereas we have learned, through conditioning, to label some emotions as bad and then to fight with them, we now want to relate to emotions in a new way. We want the mind to relate to emotions in a way that reflects reality, or the simple truth. Remember, if we are not purposefully relating to emotions in a new way then we will be relating to them in our default mode, resistance. Like with our other reconditioning experiences (cognitive distortions) we are looking to develop a new way of relating, not stopping the old way (that would be resistance). So, we want to do our R&R, recognize and replace. And, we want to do it regularly, with feeling to establish the new habit or new pattern. We want to RECOGNIZE an emotion (say anxiety) when it is active, and then REPLACE it with the following statement addressing the “resistance” tendency and the “labeling” tendency.
IT’S OK TO FEEL THIS, IT’S OK TO FEEL (fill in the blank with the emotion),
IT’S NEITHER GOOD OR BAD,
IT’S JUST LIKE THE WEATHER IT COMES AND GOES!
Just because we are not labeling emotions good or bad does not imply that we do not have a preference for particular emotions. It is fine to prefer any emotion. But with any emotion what you do with it will have consequences. We are not saying that certain emotions don’t have particular consequences, they do! All emotions have physiological consequences (beneficial or destructive), and promote certain kinds of behavior, or ways of thinking. Emotions have interpersonal influences, promoting certain reactions in others (although not binding them to such!) Some emotions can lead to death, like depression, if we act out of them. Some emotions can lead to isolation, like anxiety, if we act out of them. Like our previous analogy suggests, emotions themselves are like the indicator lights in our cars, the lights aren’t bad. We may not even like to see them come on, but when they do they are very helpful in showing us that something is out if order under the hood where we are not aware. In this respect we don’t try and get rid of the light (emotion) we use the light (emotion) as a signal to direct us to add oil (change our thinking or actions). Using our emotions appropriately, as a signal of distorted thinking, will enable us to effectively change what is out of order, and hence our experience. Seeing emotions as something to act out of or on will serve to promote the current pattern of emotional experience that is causing us suffering. Keep in mind that we don’t have direct control over emotions, but we can exercise direct control over our thoughts. We can influence our emotions through physiological changes, behavioral changes, and most importantly cognitive changes.
We are not in the business of changing emotions directly. That would be resistance. We are into the business of accepting emotions (viewing them as signals), and we are in the business of directly influencing the things that precipitate emotions. Hence, we are in the business of changing THINKING, BEHAVIORS, and PHYSIOLOGY to effect emotions.
