Emotional Mastery Series #8

If you really want to master your emotions -self-actualize. That is, make real (actualize) your best version of you so that you become as Carl Rogers said a “fully functioning person” and as Abraham Maslow said you access your “full humanness.” And if you do this, what will you feel? How will you handle your emotions? What will be different about your emotional life?

Well, first and foremost, you will have lots of energetic vitality. By gratifying your basic needs truly (and not falsely or through distortions) and adequately (sufficiently, not perfectly or one-hundred percent), those driving impulses (“needs” or requirements for living) will be gratified and “go away” thereby allowing the next level of drives to emerge. And after the levels of basic needs the self-actualization needs emerge. And when these are the inner driving impulses of your life-then you will be living passionately with a strong sense of purpose, inner value, and joy.

In self-actualizing you will be giving accurate meanings to your basic and higher needs which will enable you to truly and adequately gratify your inner impulses and drives. As you then learn effective and adequate coping skills, you will satisfy those needs which, in turn, will release your energy and vitality. That’s the design of your “needs” as well as the sign that you have gratified them truly and adequately.

The vitality that you will be feeling will be an energy to live fully, to be your best self, and to strive to contribute and make a difference. That’s what “self-actualization” means and if I belabor this, it is because of the myth that connects it to selfishness. The truth is that self-actualization is not about you, it is through you, but paradoxically not about you. This vitality involves experiencing those moments that Maslow called “peak experiences.” These are those little moments that happen to everyone (or nearly so) in which, for that moment, you sense that “life is good, it is precious, it is sacred.” And in that moment, you are again “in love with life” and are “surprised by joy” (C.S. Lewis) and are able to appreciate freshly as if for the first time, again.

All of this is one side of the self-actualizing emotional life. There is another. The other involves being able to experience your emotions- all of them, the negative ones as well as the positive ones- fully and accurately. And as you do so, you lose your fear of any of these emotions. After all, they are just emotions- just the somatic or bodily experience of the meanings being activated in your mind-body system. And now you can use the negative emotions for their best value- to stop, look, and listen and see where you need to make some life adjustments.

Now as a self-actualizer, you can much more effectively and efficiently use your fear, anger, sadness, stress, frustration, vulnerability, tenderness, etc. to be more fully alive and more fully human. Now you can allow yourself to fully experience the emotions without being overwhelmed by them or think that you are going to “lose control.”

By self-actualizing, what you will feel will be more appropriate to the contexts and situations of your life. Here’s what Abraham Maslow said about people actualizing (making real) their inner drives and integrating what could be dichotomies. This came after his study of the fully human self-actualizing subjects that he studied:

“It seemed to me that … it could be traced back to the relative absence of fear in my subjects. They were certainly less enculturated; that is, they seemed to be less afraid of what other people would say or demand or laugh at. They had less need of other people and therefore, depending on them less, could be less afraid of them and less hostile against them. Perhaps more important, however, was their lack of fear of their own insides, of their own impulses, emotions, thoughts. They were more accepting than the average. This approval and acceptance of their deeper selves than made it more possible to perceive bravely the real nature of the world and also made their behavior more spontaneous. … they were less afraid of being laughed at or of being disapproved of. They could let themselves by flooded by emotion.” (1968, Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 140-141).

About what happens to the experience of anger in a self-actualizing person, Maslow described the change in this way:

“In the healthier person, anger is reactive (to a present situation) rather than a characterological reservoir from the past. That is, it is a realistic effective response to something real and present, for instance to injustice or exploitation or attack, rather than a cathartic overflow of misdirected and ineffective revenge upon innocent bystanders … Anger does not disappear with psychological health; rather it takes the form of decisiveness, self-affirmation, self-protection, justified indignation, fighting against evil, and the like.” (1968, p. 162)

“The ability to be aggressive and angry is found in all self-actualizing people, who are able to let it flow forth freely when the external situation ‘calls for’ it.” … “a child should learn not only how to control his anger, but also how and when to express it.” (1968, p. 195)

Emotional Mastery Series

•  What is an Emotions (#1, 2 & 3)
•  Pseudo-Emotions (#4)
•  Emotional Continua (#5)
•  Emotional Tolerance (#6)
•  Don’t just feel, Do Something! (#7)

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Emotional Mastery Series #7

•  What is an Emotions (#1, 2 & 3)
•  Pseudo-Emotions (#4)
•  Emotional Continua (#5)
•  Emotional Tolerance (#6)

If an emotion is the difference between map and territory, between how you have mentally mapped something in terms of your understandings, beliefs, representations, etc. and how you then experience some event, person, or interaction in the world- then as noted before in this series, your emotions are always right. That is, they are right to the map that you’re using and the skills that you exercise in the territory of the world. But this right does not mean that they are useful, effective, or healthy. They are just right to how you created them. They can often be very wrong to the context and so inappropriate, unuseful, and even interfering and sabotaging.

No wonder then that we have to be careful and intelligent about how we relate to our emotions. We have to understand them- what they are, what they are not, their proper use, their improper use, etc.

Overall, a good way to start is to think of your emotions as signals of the map/ territory difference. And if they are signals, then they signal you to Stop, Look, Listen when a negative emotion is activated. That’s because a negative emotion means that something is wrong in your world as you have constructed it. So to positively use your negative emotions, use the signal to slow down, check things out, and reflect on how you have created that emotion, what it means, and what you should or should not do about it.

Like the gauge on your dashboard, the negative signals are there for a positive use. They tell you when something needs to be attended too-you need gas, oil, engine check, something. In The Emotional Hostage (1985) Leslie Cameron-Bandler and Michael Lebeau made a similar point, “Unpleasant emotions are worth having if they are used well.” And if used well, then it
means understand what the negative emotion is saying:

“There is little point in regretting something you have done unless that feeling of regret helps you change your future behavior. There is little point in feeling guilty unless your feeling of guilt leads to a renewal of will and intention to fulfil your standards in the future. There is little point in feeling frustrated unless that feeling of frustration propels you toward creative efforts to attain your desired outcome. The functional attribute of an unpleasant emotion specifies what you need to do to respond appropriately to that emotion.” (p. 38)

It is the function of emotions to get you to respond appropriately. Anger gets you to stand up and fight for something; fear gets you to move back away from a danger or threat or approach with caution and resources. Sadness enables you to acknowledge value and move you to replace what you have lost. Every emotion exist to fulfil a function that enables us to be healthier and more effective. And that why, positive or negative, the emotion is valuable and designed to energize you to take effective action.

Yet if you feel emotions, but you do not respond to them and from them, then you are not putting the signal, the message, and the energy of your emotions to good use. To put this more bluntly: The purpose of your emotions is not for you to just feel that emotion! The purpose of the emotion and the feelings it generates is so that you do something about it! So, yes, feel it, embrace it, be with it- and use the energy it generated to act, to do something about it!

There is little point in feeling the emotion unless that feeling helps you change your behavior and alter your thinking. There is little value in merely feeling the feeling and not understanding how your system created it in the context of your life.

This realization raises several questions for all of us:

• What are you going to do now that you have that feeling?
• Given that feeling will you check out and adjust your mental map?

Maybe that feeling should get you to work on your skills so that what you know, you can do with competence and grace? Are perhaps what you need to do is to qualify the expression of the emotion.

As signals, emotions come to us as ongoing feedback about what’s going on with you as you move through the world using your skills to actualize your mental map. If you don’t realize that your emotions are your creations, then moving through life will seem like being a back seat passenger of forces that are happening to you without your understanding or agreement. You will then see and feel like a victim to your emotions. Once, however, you realize and take ownership of the fact that your emotions are your creations you move from the back seat to the driver’s seat. You shift from going along for an emotional ride to being the manager of your emotions.

As energy to act, your emotions give you a boost for action. The emotion itself is not the action, just feeling the emotion does not demand or require that you do something. Yet once you feel the emotion, now you are in a position to decide what you are going to do about it. Will you just observe, notice, and understand? Will you express the emotion by informing others about what you are feeling? Will you act it out in a certain way? If so, to what purpose? What’s your outcome in acting on the emotion? What
do you seek to achieve?

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Emotional Mastery Series #5

Having provided an operational definition and description of what an “emotion” is (#1-#3) and that no every emotion is a real emotion (#4), I now want to present another perspective for thinking about emotions- one that will assist in experiencing more emotional mastery.

The perspective is to view any given emotion on a continuum.  If you think about your emotions in terms of a continuum, you can get a fuller and richer view of your emotions.  If you position any given emotion (the basic emotions) on a continuum, you thereby make it possible to begin to identify the other emotions that cluster around that one.  This will enable you to see the relationship between similar emotions and that will lead you to see how one emotion can shade or evolve into another emotion.

As an example, think about anger and the emotions similar to anger, the emotions that cluster around anger.  I first discovered the value of thinking about emotions in terms of a continuum many years ago when I took a contract with the Department of Corrections in the State of Colorado.  My job was to work with men who were leaving one of the Federal Penitentiaries in the state and to enable them to develop some anger control.  A year or two later I took another contract on the same subject, but the second group was composed of a bunch of boys, ages from 14 to 18, who were in a lock-up-situation for being convicted of a violent crime.

Displeasure Scale

• Violence
• Out-raged
• Rage
• Wrath
• Fury
• Ire
• Anger
• Indignation
• Offended
• Stress
• Frustration
• Agitated
• Upset
• Vexed
• Irked
• Dislike
• Annoyed
• Bothered
• Peeved

What I stumbled onto in engaging the two groups for anger control was to ask the men and the boys about the emotions they experienced before and after they experienced “anger.”

• Before you get angry, what are you feeling?
• What would you call that feeling or emotion?
• When anger stops being anger, what is it?  What do you then call it?

That led to a whole list of anger words: rage, wrath, fury, ire, indignation, offended, stress, frustration, agitated, upset, vexed, irked, dislike, annoyed, bothered, peeved, etc.   Then, working with the men and boys about this list of words, I put them into a scale- an Anger Scale or as I later labeled it: A Displeasure Scale.  I did that because displeasure is the message of anger- displeasure with something that’s not going the way we want it to go.

There are many words for describing kinds and intensities of displeasure:

Anger: “Anger” is the general term for the emotional reaction of displeasure, typically strong displeasure.  Anger refers to a sense of threat to your person and values.  You can experience rational and irrational anger, in-controlled anger or out-of-controlled anger, useful verses unuseful anger; current and appropriate anger and old dated angers. Anger does not refer to any outward expressions, only to the feeling of threat and desire to aggress.

Prior to the emotion of anger, we experience the levels and intensities of displeasure as:

• Upset: a state a disorder, confusion, disturbed, decomposed, a disorder that may range from minor to major.
• Annoy: feeling disturbed or irritated, something wearing on the nerves.
• Vex: more provocation than just annoyed, feeling perplexity and anxiety.
• Irk: having difficultly in enduring & resulting weariness or impatience of spirit.
• Bothered: feeling bewildered, upset, interference with peace of mind.
• Peeved: irritation, mild mood shift to resentful, holding a grudge.
• Peevish: querulous in temperament, fretful, contrary, marked by ill temper

When anger grows in intensity, then we have:

• Ire: great intensity and exhibition in words and deeds.
• Fury: even more violence and connotes a degree of temporary madness.
• Indignation: righteous anger at a commonly agreed upon unfairness, injustice, or meanness.
• Wrath: either rage or indignation and suggests a strong desire to avenge or punish.
• Rage: anger, sometimes including violent actions.

The Displeasure Scale – of Anger

When it comes to the emotions of displeasure, there is a wide range of descriptive terms we can use to sort and separate levels, intensities, and kinds of displeasure.  By developing the ability to distinguish these kinds of negative anger emotions saves the emotional energy of true anger for those events and situations that truly violate our values and call for a strong emotional response.

There’s a verse in the Bible that says, “Be angry and sin not . . .” (Eph. 4:26).  Here is some ancient wisdom about properly owning, using, and registering anger in a way that does not use it to violate another person or even yourself.   The verse also says, “Neither let the sun go down on your anger . . .”  That describes the need for releasing anger so that it is not stored up and turned into “cold” anger (e.g., malice, ill-will, resentment, bitterness).

Construct an Emotional Constellation for Emotional Awareness

This works with lots of other emotions.  Because emotions occur along a range and have varying degrees of intensity, we can gauge an emotion’s intensity on a scale and distinguish emotions at different levels of significance.

• What is the range of the emotion and on what scale?
• When is the emotion more intense, less intense?
• What is it?  What do you call it?

These questions and distinctions allow us to create emotional scales and distinguish emotions at different degrees.  This means that there are typically a constellation of emotions around an area of emotionality.  And as we did this with the Dislike Scale, we can do it with other emotions.

How?

1. Choose an emotion.
2. Make a list of similar emotions, words that indicate a closely related emotion.
3. Invent a continuum to put the emotions on.
4. Put the various emotions along the range of emotions from least to most intense.

Here are some more examples:

Here are some more examples:

Fear

• Terror
• Panic
• Paranoia
• Fear
• Worry
• Apprehension
• Stress
• Upset
• Out of sorts
• Avoidance

Sadness

• Depression
• Bitter, victim
• Emptiness
• Grief-stricken
• Grief
• Sadness
• Loss, miserable
• Hurt

Joy

• Ecstasy
• Happiness
• Delight
• Mirthful
• Joy
• Playful
• Pleasant
• Content

Guilt / Wrongness

• Overly conscientious
• Guiltiness
• Self-betrayal
• Pained Conscience
• Guilt
• Shame
• Embarrassment
• Remorse
• Disappointed
• Feeling bad

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Emotional Mastery Series #3

In the past two articles, I have identified five of the seven truths about emotions, and with this one the last two truths.  As a kinesthetic sensation enriched by meaning (cognitively) an emotion exercises influence on us to get us to move (motion) out (ex) from where we are.   As a difference between map-and-territory, these mind-body systemic experiences create energy, motivation, and vitality within us.  They are therefore important, but not as ultimate truth, but as relative truth indicating what meanings our bodies are attempting to actualize.  As somatic registering of our meanings- they indicate the meanings that we are feeling.

5) Emotions are always right – relatively and conditionally to the map-territory situation.

Here is the paradox, while fully fallible (definition- “liable to error”) emotions are always right.  How is that?  They are right to the maps out of which they come and they are right in the context and situation that they are reflecting.  That’s why we should pay attention to them without falling into the falsehood of “obeying” them.  They do provide information, although that information may be erroneous.  And what this means is fabulous for human beings.

What this means is that there are no “bad” emotions.  Write that down. There are no bad emotions. The judgment of “bad” doesn’t apply to this mind-body function, an emotion is just an emotion.  It arises as a symptom of how you are thinking in relation to your expectations and skills.  They are not indicators of external reality.  Instead they indicate the relationship between our map and our experience of the territory.  In this, they are completely fallible and not an infallible voice or authority.  Our emotions can be very wrong and erroneous to the outside world, a reflection of distorted thinking and fallacious reasoning.

6) Emotions can be responded to in a variety of ways.

When it comes to emotions, you and I can respond to them in a wide range of ways.   We can listen to them, suppress them, ignore their message, obey them, release them, take them into consideration, etc.  Once we feel an emotion we can be chose how we will respond, listen to them, ignore them, or deal with them later.  So, how do you want to respond when you feel any given emotion?

The range of your choices and your flexibility of response describes your repertoire of skills in responding to your emotions.  So as you develop more and more ways of responding to your emotions, you’ll have a sense of more choice and more control in your life.  And as you do this, be sure to quality control your emotions.

What does it mean to quality control? It means to check to see that the emotion itself, how you are experiencing it, how you are creating it, what it is registering, and so on is useful for you, helpful, empowering, and enhancing.  After all, if emotions are fallible, functions of thinking, meaning-making, and experiencing the territory, then emotions need to be quality controlled for ecology and realism.

So, just because we feel something doesn’t demand that you act on it. Emotions can be distorted and even perverted.  What you feel may not be real.  You may be feeling an “old” emotion, a dated emotion, an imaginary emotion, and so on.  So check it out before you just react!  By quality controlling your emotions, you will discover that you have many more ways of responding to an emotion and that ultimately, you have that choice.

7) Emotions always habituate and become unconscious moods and attitudes.

When an emotion habituates, we live in it and lose awareness of it as an emotion.  Then the emotion becomes something else, it becomes a mood.  It becomes an attitude.  It becomes a generalized mind-set or disposition and when this happens it doesn’t so much feel like an emotion.  As it is repeated and habitualized, it feels so familiar and so comfortable, that you will experience it as “the way things are,” “what’s real,” and “life as you know it.”

Summary

Here then in summary are the 7 truths we speak about emotions in Neuro-Semantics.  These are not the only “truths” but central to being able to create and experience a healthy emotional intelligence and emotional mastery.

1. Emotions measure the map / territory difference; they are felt meanings.
2. Emotions are important as information signals.
3. Emotions are functions of the body as well as the mind.
4. Emotions are just emotions, not commands from heaven or our destiny.
5. Emotions are always right – relatively and conditionally to the map-territory situation.
6. Emotions can be responded to in a variety of ways.
7. Emotions always habituate and become unconscious moods and attitudes.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Emotional Mastery Series #1

Just this past week I presented the Seven Truths that we Speak to Emotions. In Neuro-Semantics, we present this when we work with the Crucible Change Model, the Meta-Stating Troubling Emotions pattern, the Emotional Mastery training, and various other trainings.  These ideas are also in numerous books, Unleashed, The Crucible, and Meta-States.  Several suggested that I present the material here on Neurons, hence this series.

Today talking about emotions and working with them have become much more acceptable and welcomed especially given that a new field has arisen in the past two decades- Emotional Intelligence or E.Q.  Today we recognize that leadership is emotional and requires emotional intelligence.  Today we know that business is emotional and that managers, customer service, even research and design requires emotional intelligence if a company is to produce products, services, and information that fit for customers.

Today also we know that there is a feel of a semantic meaning within the human mind-body system.  What is the feel of meaning?  It is an emotion. When you have an emotion, you are experiencing what a meaning feels like. And that’s because of what an emotion is and how it works.

Emotions- The Feel of Meaning

If we ask where and how does a person register the feel of his or her meanings, what is the answer?  The answer is that you and I feel “meaning” in our emotions.  That’s due to the first truth about emotions.

1) Emotions measure the map / territory difference; they are felt meanings.

To have an emotion you have to have an internal map of understanding something, expecting something, believing something to be the case, and so on and then an experience in the world where you use your skills to act on your inner mental map.  What then happens results in an emotion.  If the balance between what you think (map) and what you experience (territory) is an emotion.  If the scale tips downward so that you are not getting what you want, expect, understand, you experience negative emotions: upset, stress, frustration, irritation, annoyance, fear, anger, loss, disappointment, etc. If the scale tips upward so that you are getting what you want, expect, and understand, you experience positive emotions: delight, joy, surprise, contentment, excitement, passion, love, empathy, compassion, etc.

If the scale tips down, your experience feels like it is violating your map. Your primary tool for navigating reality (your inner mental models of understanding, knowledge, belief, etc.) is called into question and so that is what “hurts.”  When we say that emotion or feeling hurts me, the feeling doesn’t hurt.  What’s been hurt is one’s sense of reality- due to one’s map being made wrong or inadequate.  Hence the negative emotions.  Something is wrong with our sense of the world.  And that’s why we don’t like it.  That’s why a negative emotion registers that inside us something is wrong with the world.  So like the brakes in a car, the negative emotions inhibit our neurological responses and moves us to “stop, look, and listen!”  Something is not right.

What’s not right could be our map.  What’s not right could be our skills in the experience.  So we can change our emotion by updating our map or up-skilling our skills.  And in this way we can change the emotion.

So the Neuro-Semantic definition of an emotion is this- an emotion is the difference between one’s mental map of the world and one’s experiences of the world or territory.

2)  Emotions are important as information signals.

Given that emotions indicate how our map is operating in the territory, emotions provide “signals” or “information” about how we are doing.  Are things going well according to our ideas, understandings, beliefs, intentions, etc.?  Or are things not going so well?  Positive emotions indicate the first, negative emotions the second.  But this system is a relative one.  It is relative to the accuracy and adequacy of our mental maps.  If our mental map of understanding and believing is off, our emotions will not register that.  It will only register whether our actions in the world are actualizing our hopes and dreams.

This explains why and how emotions can be false, wrong, and completely off-base.  If you expect that you will never make a mistake, fail, or be embarrassed and then you do make a mistake.  The emotions you experience will only tell you that you are not fulfilling your mental map, they will not tell that you have an erroneous map in the first place.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.