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Emotional

Rational logic will not convince emotional awareness of any particular truth. Do not try to brute-force-push emotional awareness to a specific conclusion; like a peasant under a dictator, emotional awareness will obey for the time being but will not understand. Remember, emotions are subrational and don't grasp logic; they need to be addressed differently.

Peace and calm is the starting point

Sometimes you can feel like so many things are going wrong, you don't know where to start addressing them. Start by sitting down, meditating, relaxing, breathing. Get emotional traction - ground yourself in peace and clarity and relaxation before trying to sort things out. Among other benefits, it's useful to be able to step away from your problems and conflicts for a moment.

Greenlight experiences

Another concept I am very thankful to Barrett Brown for. Greenlighting means not just accepting emotional reactions in you (or in others) that you want to suppress or shut out; it means fully going with those emotions and positions (find a benign way to do so, of course) so that that voice in you/others really gets a fair hearing. You can't judge something well if you haven't let yourself experience it firsthand. Those feelings that you want to reject or repress or throw away - find a way to express them, truly validate them in a creation, or a conversation, or an action... if you greenlight a voice and then you are still firmly critical of that voice, at least it will feel heard and acknowledged, not repressed; this is different from passive acceptance. And it is something I have a lot of difficulty with.

Acceptance

One approach to coping with intense emotional reactions is passivie acceptance. When emotions go haywire, allow them; accept and Greenlight them; let them spend out. This is in the moment as long as it is coupled with a steady commitment to resolving any emotional conflicts in the long run.

Use Shielding to cope with emotionally difficult situations

Shielding is a really good way to prepare myself to cope with an emotionally upsetting event or experience. It's healthy because it doesn't involve cutting off from or turning away from the experience; it involves processing the experience ahead of time. I need to anticipate the event ahead of time. In a calm and comfortable setting, envision the event happening in detail. Anticipate various possible results and various responses I might give. Allow myself to explore the various responses I might choose and the effects they would have. This emotionally prepares me so when the event actually happens, I can deal with it in a calmer, more collected, less clouded, more farsighted way.

Retraining emotions

An Orange approach to emotional management asserts that with enough understanding, I can reprogram my emotional responses and needs to suit my convenience. A Green response would more likely never want to "manipulate" something as beautiful and alive as emotional flows; to do so would be dehumanization Frankenstein-style. A Yellow assessment would understand and validate the beauty of emotions as they are, and understand that their natural state arises for very good reasons; it would point out that emotions are immensely complex flows and any manipulation must be done without arrogance; but it would boldly go forth and seek cautious, buffered ways to shape one's emotional self.

You can actively retrain your emotional flows, responses and needs, but be aware that these are immensely "heavy", immensely complex forces that influence you in intimate and unpredictable ways. As such, know that your every motion will have effects beyond what you anticipate. Design buffers against unintended side affects of emotional training by getting extra rest and interspersing your efforts with natural (unmanned) experiences to allow your emotional flows to "heal" from any bruising. Absolutely do not try to micromanage your emotional reactions.

As far as how to do this, it's useful for me to see the emotional mind and the subconscious mind as pretty much the same thing. This mind responds well to simple, repeated statements coupled with symbolic imagery (enacted or imagined). Entering a slightly altered, more suggestible mental state with self-hypnosis, meditation, etc. can increase the impact of whatever messages you tell yourself, but in my experience there is no substitute for a long-term commitment to periodically rehearsing a message, say, on a daily basis.

Choose your place

You need to actively choose your environment. Not all places are created equal and you can make all the expectations of yourself that you want, but you just won't function equally well in situations that don't jive with you. It's important to be able to recognize when you are in an environment that is not conducive to bringing out the best and strongest You; only in a healthy environment can you contribute to your fullest.

Warped interpretations

Be familiar with these common ways that people distort memories & events in a negative light. Credit to MoodGym, an amazing free online emotional therapy program.
- Absolutist thinking - it must be all or none.
- Overgeneralization - extrapolating negative events to characterize the whole situation.
- Magnification & minimization - blowing bad events out of proportion and failing to acknowledge the significance of good events.
- Thinking that my emotional state actually reflects reality, perhaps after trying and failing to provide concrete evidence that it doesn't.
- Deciding how the world "should" be and then holding it against that. (It will fail.)
- Personalization: deciding (unreasonably) that I am to blame for the way things turned out.

My problems are a training ground

Consider your internal problems a training ground. They're a place to work out problems that lots of people face and many never resolve. The more you "work yourself out", the more you can take your health and spread it to a world in need.

Stay connected to your environment

I drive with a window open because it gives me an emotional sense of how far I'm travelling. I do errands by foot because it's important for me to know how easily a carless person could get errands done. I smell the air in cities because I want to know what kind of pollution we are putting into our air. I don't do these things religiously, because I have the luxury of driving far distances and escaping air pollution; I'm not going to squander that luxury. But I want to be able to appreciate what my privileged life is worth, and I want to stay emotionally connected with the environment around me.

Never initiate interactions without total acceptance of others.

To interact without acceptance is rejection, not love. Starting an interaction with rejection will lead to little healthy growth. Accept people, accept where they are coming from, be prepared to go with that.

Your actions matter to people and can hurt people.

I sometimes slip into the dangerous feeling that I am inconsequential, irrelevant to the outside world. It's a deeply depressing sense. Among other things, it leads me to wonder if people are really affected by my actions. Depending on your social role, sometimes it seems like your input doesn't have any real effect on people.

In case you've ever had this feeling... people do care about you - really, vividly. People notice when you change your behavior. You have the power to shock and confuse them if you act irregularly. Don't make them prove that they care about you.