Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  Truly protecting your attention from the scientifically honed multimedia onslaught involves changing your flat screen TV into a carom table and walking through stores as if you are in a combat zone. If advertisements suck away control of your attention and you read the billboards or watch the images, the subconscious hooks go in. By now you probably carry a truckload of false emotions: inauthentic feelings from advertising agencies. The process of authenticating inauthentic feelings frees you from this huge and unnecessary burden that was never yours in the first place.

  It doesn’t really help to blame someone else for the design and intention of mainstream culture, because you helped make it this way. Through paying the price for each thing you bought—from home-heating oil, to hockey tickets, to high-heeled shoes, to mass-produced honey (rich in GMO pollen these days)—you are the one paying for development of ever sharper advertising hooks that capture your attention. Stop buying the plastic shit and they must eventually stop making it.

  DETECTING CHILD EMOTIONS: INCOMPLETE FEELINGS FROM THE PAST

  Each of us comes out of our teenage years fogged with incomplete feelings from the past. For example, imagine that you were a child who loved building elaborate castles in the kindergarten sandbox. If your parents or teacher decided it was time for you to go home before you were finished playing in your magical world, you might have felt rage and a terrible grief over being torn away from a valuable learning experience for no reason.

  MAP OF HOW TO AUTHENTICATE INAUTHENTIC FEELINGS

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  In order to survive you may have adopted inauthentic feelings, either from a parental authority figure or from a political, financial, cultural or religious belief system. Feelings from others are one of the two kinds of emotions, not feelings. By taking on the feelings of a source of authority you take on its authority, but that authority is inauthentic. Authenticity starts when you take responsibility for having abandoned your authenticity. This is a five- to fifty-minute partner-process that will help you to di˝erentiate between authentic and inauthentic feelings.

  HOW TO AUTHENTICATE INAUTHENTIC FEELINGS

  1. Monitor your feelings in your conversations. Authenticating a feeling means to test if a feeling is your feeling or not. The test is to apply this question: “What is the purpose of this feeling?” Use part of your attention to stay in the feeling and another part of your attention to find the purpose of the feeling. Ask yourself: “Where is this going? What is its intention?” If the purpose is anything other than being in relationship through vulnerably sharing myself, it is probably not your feeling, but a foreign feeling with a purpose like:

  a. Surviving by reenacting abusive behavior (physical / psychological / emotional / or sexual abuse).

  b. Surviving through identifying with someone else’s authority (father, mother, boss, teacher, movie/rock star, political leader).

  c. Surviving through identifying with institutional authority (police, religious believer, political party, brand name, professional title).

  d. Proving that you were abused so as to validate being a victim, thereby justifying taking revenge.

  e. Proving that you are right and the other person is wrong, thereby validating the superiority of your beliefs, and so on.

  2. In the instant you detect that your feeling is not about responsibly sharing yourself, STOP the conversation, midthought, midsentence, midgesture.

  3. Say, “Excuse me. I just noticed that what I am feeling is not authentic. It is an emotion, not a feeling. It does not actually come from me. I adopted it from someone else (name the person).” Or “I adopted it from an institution (name the institution). The purpose of this emotion is . . . (name its purpose, perhaps one of the purposes listed above).”

  4. Shift and start an entirely new conversation, an adult responsible conversation. The way out of inauthenticity is by being authentic about your inauthenticity. For example, even if the source and purpose of your emotions is not immediately clear to you, be as clear as you can be and then admit what is not clear. Say, “I feel angry about the ecologists because this is my political party’s dogma. But I don’t know why I need to follow their dogma. I don’t know what I actually feel about environmental issues. Probably scared.”

  5. This is not psychotherapy. This is becoming authentic at a new level. You do not have to process everything. Simply say, “That is not my authentic purpose. My real purpose is to let myself be known in this relationship.”

  6. Then create a new future for yourself by taking on a new practice. Say, “I promise not to empower that emotional rage again.” The promise means new behavior for you. Keep your commitment with fierce diligence.

  If your parents were unable to listen to your sadness (and whose parents were?), your feeling remained incomplete, trapped in your muscles, unexpressed even to the present day. If this happened often enough (once may be often enough), you may have decided that it is too painful to create because the creation will be suddenly torn away from you. Then you may forget that you made this decision.

  Now perhaps in your work you are given an opportunity to design or create something. As soon as the invitation is made you might notice a reflexive block or subtle fear that causes you to refuse the chance to create. At the same time you may feel a deep sadness. What you are feeling is emotional fear and emotional sadness. These are not feelings originating from the present circumstances at all. The emotions arise because your present circumstances resonate to a previous circumstance about which you carry incomplete feelings. In this case the present opportunity to create resonates to your childhood circumstances of being ripped away from the tender and elaborate worlds you were creating in the sandbox. The old decision, that it is too painful to create, prevails.

  Even if you as a grown-up tell someone you feel sad about the opportunity to create and the opportunity fades away, the sadness will not necessarily vanish. This is because the sadness is not about the present opportunity to create. The sadness is an incomplete emotional feeling relating to the incident in childhood. Your present conditions do not actually have anything to do with your feeling of sadness. This is how emotions work.

  Did you ever feel angry about something and the anger stayed with you for an hour? For a day? This anger is emotional anger.

  Did you ever feel sad about something and the sadness stayed with you for a week? For a month? This is emotional sadness.

  Did you ever feel scared about something and the fear just never seems to go away? This is emotional fear.

  Did you ever feel glad about something and the joy stayed with you for more than a few minutes? This is not the present feeling of joy. This is emotional joy, just as illusory and disempowering as the emotions of anger, sadness or fear. I tell you, it was a bad day for me when I figured this out! For forty five years of my life I thought I was a happy guy. Then one day in a training I made the distinction between the feeling of joy and the emotion of joy. In that moment I realized that I had been living in a fantasy world of emotional joy that I had smeared over from my past and which had nothing to do with what was happening directly around me in my present life. Until that moment I had no idea how much self-generated fog I had been living in. When that bubble pops for you, be prepared for some surprises.

  POWER IS IN THE PRESENT

  An incomplete feeling may have originated only five minutes in the past or it may have originated five decades in the past. Whenever it occurred, since an incomplete feeling is from the past, it has no true power in the present.

  For example, you just read the sentence, “Since an incomplete feeling is from the past, it has no true power in the present.” If you had power to affect the past, you could make it so that you did not just read that sentence.

  Can you do that? You read it only a few seconds ago. Can you make it so that you did not already read that sentence?

  No, you cannot.

  Why not?


  Because it already happened; it is done. It is in the past. You have no power to affect the past, whether an event happened only a few seconds ago or many years ago. How much time and effort have you invested in trying to heal or change the past?

  What happened in the past is as it is.

  What appears to influence us from the past is memories, old decisions, and incomplete feelings.

  Old decisions can easily be identified and redecided.

  Incomplete feelings can easily be clarified, expressed and completed.

  The actual manner in which the past influences you is determined by you in the present moment. This is a doorway to a future free of emotions.

  EMOTIONS FROM MEMORIES

  Memories can cause emotional reactions when you blur memories of the past with what is happening now.

  For example, can you remember ever being terribly thirsty? Yes, you can.

  If you take a drink of water now, does that make your memory of being thirsty go away? No, it does not.

  The memory of being thirsty remains no matter how much or how often you drink water now. If you blur being thirsty now with your memory of being thirsty in the past, the incomplete feelings of anger or fear you had when you were thirsty may automatically arise when you are thirsty now. The mechanism is that simple.

  Can you remember ever being lost, or terribly lonely? Yes, you can.

  If you know exactly where you are, or if you get together with people now, does that make your memory of being lost or lonely go away? No, it does not.

  The memory of having once been lost remains no matter how familiar your present surrounding are. The memory of having once been lonely remains no matter how many friends you meet with or how intimate you are with someone. If you remember feeling sad or scared when you were lost or lonely in the past, it can cause you to feel sad or scared even if you are with someone now.

  No present circumstances can change your emotional memories from the past.

  No partner can change your emotional memories from the past.

  You have your memories and you cannot change what happened to you in the past. You can, however, change your relationship to your memory of what happened to you in the past.

  You can clearly and consciously identify a memory as a memory. Say, “This is a memory.” You can let the memory float back down the river of time to where it belongs, in the past, including your memory of anger, sadness, joy or fear about what happened. It takes a watchful inner eye but only a moment of time to detach a remembered feeling from its resonance with the present circumstances.

  Distinguishing memories as memories gives you the freedom of movement to have a completely different relationship to the present circumstances than you had to similar circumstances in the past. By doing this you take back your creative power in the present.

  EMOTIONS FROM OLD DECISIONS

  If you habitually apply an old decision to new circumstances it can quickly entangle you in a briar patch of emotions. When you first make them, old decisions are new and necessary. Over time situations change. Your abilities change. Your perspectives change. But old decisions don’t change. Old decisions continue causing their originally intended results until they are noticed, highlighted, followed back to their point of origin, and replaced by new, more appropriate and useful decisions.

  For example, you may have had a class in school with a teacher who was more interested in having a controlled classroom than in having students expand into their full human potential. In that class you may have tried to express yourself in various ways and the teacher may have subtly or overtly punished you. Eventually you may have decided it was not worth it to express yourself, that it was safer to disempower yourself and withhold your genuine participation.

  That old decision may have metaphorically saved your life in school, but you are no longer in school. Your circumstances have changed, yet your present actions may still be influenced by that old decision to stifle your self-expression. Making a new, empowering decision to replace the old, disempowering decision gives you your present power back. Find the exact phrase of your old decision, such as, “It’s not worth the risk to make creative suggestions,” or “Nobody understands my ideas anyway so why bother saying them?” Then design and choose a new decision, such as, “My creative ideas are wanted and needed,” or “Explaining new perspectives fulfills my true purpose,” or “New ideas always seem strange and that is okay with me.”

  EMOTIONS FROM INCOMPLETE FEELINGS

  As a child you had needs. Because parents are busy with modern life, many childhood needs go unmet. For example, if you needed to be picked up and safely snuggled and nurtured and that need was not fulfilled you probably felt angry, sad or scared about it. If no one listened to those feelings then they stayed incomplete in the muscles of your body and continue to this day to be experienced over and over again as recurring emotions about not being taken care of.

  Emotions take your power away when you mistake them for feelings because emotions come from the past, and you are powerless in the past.

  MAP OF HOW TO COMPLETE INCOMPLETE FEELINGS

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  Incomplete feelings that were never expressed or never heard and completed become emotions. You can complete your emotions through the high drama act of taking responsibility. This process requires a listening partner and takes five to fifty minutes, depending on the feeling skills and maturity of the partners, and also depending on the significance of the issues being addressed.

  HOW TO COMPLETE INCOMPLETE FEELINGS

  1. Usually the roles in this process are not reversed. One person is the experimenter who wishes to complete an incomplete feeling, and the other person is the listener/coach.

  2. To find a coach the experimenter asks, “Would you help me complete some incomplete feelings?” If the answer is yes, you have your coach. By formally asking for help from the coach, the experimenter is not a victim/patient and the coach is not a rescuer/therapist. This is a transformational procedure of collaboration.

  3. (NOTE: It could be that the experimenter’s incomplete feelings apply to the coach personally. In this case, it is preferable to use the How to Clear Resentments process, explained in Chapter 6, “Communicating with Feelings.”)

  4. Arrange to use a space where you will not be disturbed even if you make some noise. Bring tissues, a plastic bucket, and a sturdy hand towel. Sit or stand facing each other.

  5. The coach begins by saying, “There are two rules: Don’t hurt yourself, and don’t hurt anyone else. Do you agree?” Require the experimenter to answer with a clear verbal Yes or No. If the answer is, “Yes,” you can proceed.

  6. The coach says, “Trust your feelings and let them get bigger. Keep 10 percent of your adult present and let your feelings get 90 percent out of control.”

  7. Further coaching could be, “Do not try to figure this out. You can figure it out later. This process is about experiencing and communicating your incomplete feelings. If it feels too big, put your hands behind your back, grab one wrist with the other hand, then keep using your voice. What do you want to say?”

  8. The moment the feelings are at their highest intensity, the coach says, “What is happening?”

  9. The experimenter relates what is happening to cause that particular feeling, being as precise as he can. For example, the experimenter might say, “I feel so angry at my brother because he has friends and I don’t!”

  10. After each statement the coach repeats back what he hears, without analysis or judgment, seeking confirmation of accurate hearing (e.g., “You feel angry at your brother because he has friends and you don’t” (said as a statement). “Yes.”

  11. The Yes signals that this communication has now been heard and completed, permitting the experimenter to go to their next deeper level of communication. The coach might ask, “Then what happened?”

  12. Coach continues completing communicat
ion loops until the experimenter repeats himself, signalling that the core emotion has been heard and has vanished. When finished, the experimenter says, “Thanks for listening to me”.

  Whatever happened to cause the original unexpressed feelings cannot be changed. You can, however, change your relationship to the resultant emotions by completing your incomplete feelings.

  The clues come from observing yourself to recognize patterns. When you detect that a feeling you have now is the same reaction that you have had at other times in similar circumstances, then you have identified an emotion!

  The instant you detect your emotion, change your purpose for communicating. Instead of communicating to solve a problem—a problem which does not exist here and now—communicate with the purpose of completing incomplete feelings from the past to dissolve away your emotions.

  Immediately STOP your present conversation. Say, “Excuse me, but I just noticed this is an emotion. It is not a feeling. It doesn’t have anything to do with you or with what is happening right now. It is an incomplete feeling out of my past.”

  Then either with the same person or with someone else who is able to listen and complete communications with you, start an entirely different sort of conversation. The new conversation is an adult responsible conversation that completes incomplete feelings from the past. It is truly a transformational conversation. Say, “I would like to complete an old emotion from my past. Will you help me do this?” If the person says yes, then use the Map of How to Complete Incomplete Feelings.

  YOUR SWORD OF CLARITY

  Staying sovereign within yourself involves walking down life’s streets centered and with your sword to hand. Not just any sword, but a flaming bright, ever active, diamond sharp, archetypal distinction sword that you never put away, even when you go to bed. This energetic sword of clarity has the capacity to distinguish between your true feelings and inauthentic or incomplete emotions.