Strong negative emotions can make life difficult. So it’s no surprise there are many ideas about what to do. But most of those ideas actually make things worse. Here’s how seven of the most common myths steer you wrong.
If negative emotion is causing you trouble…
MYTH #1: You should express it. Catharsis is best.
This one comes from the “hydraulic” theory of emotion, the idea that negative emotions are caused by ill humours or bad psychic energy from the id that needs to be purged. Guess what? It’s wrong.
In general, catharsis will tend to reinforce the negative emotional experience. You won’t “get rid of it.” You’ll only make yourself more comfortable with it. On the one hand, that’s a good thing in our repressed society. On the other hand, you’re likely to cause suffering to the people around you, and you’ll do nothing to actually change the pattern that keeps the emotion running amok in your life.
The Feeling Path gives us a way to access any negative emotion safely, effectively, with heightened awareness yet without the risk of getting hijacked by the emotion. In fact, the tangible mapping imagery connects our sense of self with a higher part of ourselves. We view the emotion from the perspective of our witness self, and bring all our best insight to the task.
MYTH #2: You should change the thoughts and beliefs that trigger it. Analysis is best.
This one comes from the most recent, cognitive era in psychotherapy. The idea is that thoughts cause your emotions, so if you have a problematic emotion, you need to change the thoughts that create it.
Nice idea, if it worked. Double nice, if you could actually do it. First, thoughts – especially unconscious beliefs – are maddeningly complex and difficult to track down. You could spend your whole life as a cognitive therapist trying to sort out the structure of belief comprising the thoughts of a single client.
Second, thoughts are insidiously interconnected with one another. The effort to change a single belief and make it stick has to contend with dozens of related beliefs, each of which is connected to dozens or hundreds more. The network of belief quickly becomes unmanageable.
With The Feeling Path, we bypass the complex web of thoughts and go right to the feelings at the heart of them. We shift the feeling states directly. When we do, we discover that the new feeling states cannot sustain the old, dysfunctional thought patterns. We find ourselves spontaneously thinking more healthy, productive thoughts and we notice our beliefs have become updated of their own accord.
Not only that, but the new thoughts and beliefs are authentic to us. They don’t conform to some idea of “correct” thought or belief imposed by a cognitive theory or therapist. They arise naturally from who we are and what’s important to us. They feel right, they feel like us, they feel true. And so it is easy to make a commitment to the new patterns. In fact, that commitment happens without our even making the decision.
MYTH #3: You should let yourself feel it and it will take care of itself. Surrender is best.
Of all the myths, this one may be the least damaging. The basic idea may have started with the humanistic schools of therapy, and the instinct is a good one. Feeling an emotion is absolutely essential to supporting its healthy function.
However, feeling it is not enough. Because negative emotions come in packs, each one reinforcing the others, simply allowing yourself to feel the emotion sometimes leads to unhealthy wallowing, indulgence, and overwhelm. Without an effective way to shift each emotion toward its healthy, ideal state, you risk getting caught in a spiraling web of dark and heavy.
Fortunately, The Feeling Path provides the full package. You feel the emotion, with great precision and awareness, using the tangible mapping imagery to keep you from getting hijacked by the emotion. Then, you use the visual handle provided by the map to directly shift the feeling toward its center. This is the essential step missing from most feeling-oriented therapies.
MYTH #4: You should look into the past to heal your wounds. Recapitulation is best.
This one has a long history, of course. How many people have spent how many years dredging through their long-gone history, sifting for clues for why they feel the way they do? Too many, and too many! So many times, people “complete” a multi-year course of therapy wondering what they got out of it. “Sure, I understand why I feel bad,” they say. “But that doesn’t change anything.” Exactly.
The fact is, the past is gone, no matter what might have happened, and the negative emotions you feel today are here, now. So the place to work with them is right here, right now. Feeling Path Mapping does exactly that. We start with the feelings you experience today, in the issue or pattern that challenges you. We go directly into those feelings without regard for where they came from or “why” they’re there.
These things don’t matter. And because we don’t waste time on recapitulation, we get the job done quickly, efficiently, effectively. We shift the old, stuck feelings into new, responsive states that provide us new sources of energy and passion.
Of course, if we are interested in the past, for the sake of understanding, we can explore that. The Feeling Path allows us to bring the wisdom and insight of our new, ideal states to the task of a deeper, more compassionate understanding of our past. This more human understanding can sometime be useful to bring to current relationships with family.
MYTH #5: You should put your attention on something positive. Distraction is best.
Short term, great. Long term, this reinforces the negative emotion outside of your awareness.
Our conscious attention can only hold a small portion of our total consciousness in awareness at any one time. So we are able to turn that spotlight toward something either inside ourselves or out in our environment which makes us feel good. However, the negative feelings haven’t gone away. They’ve just been bypassed by the light of attention.
When we make a habit of this, those negative feelings tend to accumulate and grow stronger. Eventually they can become strong enough to overpower our best efforts to focus only on the positive. At that point, collapse is inevitable. Someone who has made a life practice of focusing only on the positive has allowed their capacity for full feeling atrophy. They become quickly overwhelmed by the negativity as the emotions come cascading through the break in the dam.
The Feeling Path welcomes any and all feeling and emotion. Whatever it is, we embrace it. We learn to trust that every emotion, no matter how seemingly dark, or frightening, or heavy, has a nature that drives indomitably toward the light. We discover in this work that every part of every one of us is good, all good, nothing but goodness in all its manifest forms. The so-called negative is mere illusion caused by mistaken, outmoded beliefs shared by many, many people. We can let those go now.
MYTH #6: You should find a pharmaceutical solution. Medication is best.
This one is most likely driven by the needs of both patients and doctors for a tangible solution when faced with emotional difficulties. It is also most likely escalated by the profit machine and reinforced by the current whiz-bang heyday in neuroscience. And although drugs may provide relief for some people, in the long run it does nothing to help you.
A few years from now, we will look back and wonder, what were we thinking? It’s as if a child had learned to write while looking in the mirror. Their handwriting is in reverse, and someone gets the idea that if we tie their hands behind their back, they will no longer be able to write the wrong way. And they think that’s a good thing.
As a culture, we have learned some seriously bad habits when it comes to emotional hygiene. As a result, many of us box ourselves into a corner where the only option is to feel really bad a lot of the time. Then someone comes along and labels this with a diagnosis, ascribes the cause of the diagnosis to a fault of the brain, and cripples the whole brain by feeding it toxic chemicals. This is insanity, geometrically amplified.
Fortunately, The Feeling Path starts wherever you are, with whatever you are experiencing. In the perspective of The Feeling Path, every person’s brain works perfectly well. If you’re feeling bad, there’s a good reason for it. Take a look at this list of myths and you’ll identify at least one of the reasons.
Then, we simply apply the three steps of the feeling mind’s natural way of being. The feeling mind, when free of the encumbrances of the myths of our culture, naturally feels what there is to be felt, shifts into a optimal state as a baseline reference, and triangulates between the current state and the optimal state as a guidance system for living. You feel bad in order to call attention to something that’s out of balance in your life. You reconnect to the good feeling to orient yourself to the balance that’s supposed to be there. And you act to restore the balance.
It’s that simple. It’s that powerful. And it requires no medication, damn it.
(A word of caution: I have found that certain psychoactive medications, particularly some of those given for bipolar disorder, seem to knock out the capacity for Feeling Path Mapping. Someone taking these drugs can do the imagery, but the images are not viscerally connected to the actual, felt sense of the feeling. Moving the images produces no felt shift, and is experienced as a vaguely relevant mental exercise.)
MYTH #7: You should control yourself. Suppression is best.
Ah, the old Victorian ethic. Stiff upper lip and all that.
Do I really need to say anything about this one?
Now, turn these myths upside down!
The tangible imagery of The Feeling Path Mapping System provides an easy, 3-step practice for repairing your relationship with feeling. Using Feeling Path Mapping, you very quickly come to trust that every feeling you have is valuable, every part of yourself is good, and that you can trust your own inner guidance for anything in your life.
It’s not hard to do. It’s not hard to learn. You can get started right now. Just download the 3-Step Worksheet below. It will take you about half an hour to have your first experience of turning any challenging feeling you choose into a direct source of inspiration, confidence, or connection.
For a limited time, I’m offering a Free, 30-Minute Tutorial to walk you through the worksheet for your first experience. Just call me at 360-399-6575.
