All learning involves change. Change involves inner questioning, doubts, fears, ecstasies – in short, it hurts. You cannot avoid the pain included in learning, and this applies to feelings-work in particular. Pain is not bad. As Westley says in the film Princess Bride, “Life is pain. Anybody who says different is trying to sell you something.”
Pain is neutral experience and has no meaning whatsoever. But we are human beings. We have a Box and our Box is a meaning-making machine. Our Box gives pain meaning (both our pain and other people’s pain). Our Box changes pain into suffering.
I think that the Buddha is often misquoted as saying, “All life is suffering.” What I think he actually said is, “All life is pain,” meaning, “If you are alive you will feel things.” But we did not get the transmission. That is because for us human beings, until we do the clarity work of separating them, pain and suffering are glued together as one thing. But pain and suffering are not the same thing. The difference between pain and suffering is that pain is neutral and suffering has implications. Human beings have the ability (and the tendency) to change pain into suffering. We are the only animals that can do this.
If the Buddha ever said that all life is pain, he understood that there are four kinds of pain: anger, sadness, joy and fear, and he understood that pain is valuable. (Obviously the Buddha visited France, where if you drive down the road you can see signs everywhere advertising fresh hot pain for sale.) Pain is valuable because neutral pain contains neutral energy and neutral information that are rich resources for life. Energy and information are “building blocks” for evolution. The building blocks are far more available and effective if we avoid the temptation to give our pain meaning, such as “this pain is good” or “this pain is bad;” “this pain is right,” or “this pain is wrong.” If you want to avoid evolution all you need to do is keep pain equivalent to suffering in your mind. If you want to enter extraordinary human relationship, learn to intelligently and maturely feel pain without suffering over it.
Emotions Are Not Feelings
Without understanding the difference between emotions and feelings we may struggle in relationship thinking that emotions and feelings are the same thing. Emotions and feelings are not the same thing. One of the steps in establishing yourself in the Adult ego state and entering extraordinary human relationship is to live in the distinction between emotions and feelings. Without having this distinction on the pads of your fingers and the tip of your tongue, you will keep being confused thinking that emotions are feelings when, in fact, emotions are not feelings. For our purposes: Emotions are incomplete feelings from the past or from someone else that feel present only because they are still locked in your body unexpressed.
Emotions from the past are triggered through present association. That is, some detail in the present situation resonates with an uncompleted feeling that is stuck in your tissues from the recent or distant past. The resonance between the unprocessed emotion and the present situation awakens the unexpressed emotion as if it were a present experience.
In actuality, this is the healing opportunity that you have been waiting for. The emotion is a signal announcing to your consciousness that there is an unexpressed feeling locked in your muscles that, in this moment, has a chance to be healed. The healing occurs through recognizing and understanding the emotion from the Adult perspective. The redeeming value of emotional pain is when the pain becomes conscious. Gaining clarity about the validity of the emotion and the cause of the emotion, in other words, by hearing the emotion’s personal painful story, completes the communication and vanishes the emotion forever. But since we are not trained or practiced at going through the process of completing communications, we instead think that the emotion is a real feeling. We assume that, since we are feeling anger, fear, sadness or joy, the emotion must be a true and justified reaction to the person standing in front of us, or to our present circumstances that “caused” the emotion. Lacking clarity about what is really happening, we project our emotion onto the person or circumstance. We blame the other person, we react with fear and anger toward the circumstance, we feel sad or depressed, and this is how we create spending our days and our nights in ordinary human relationship. I tell you, the moment I realized that all the joy I had been feeling fairly consistently since my childhood was actually emotional joy and not a real feeling at all, it ruined my day.
Although both feelings and emotions at first feel the same and fall into one of the four categories of anger, sadness, joy or fear, it is very easy to experientially distinguish emotions from feelings. Here is how: Feelings are triggered, they arise, the energy and information gets used, and then, within a minute or so, they are completely gone from your body. Emotions on the other hand, are triggered, they arise, and then no matter how you seem to express them, they persist in your experience.
Did you every feel scared and then an hour later you were still scared? That is emotional fear. Did you ever feel angry and then a day later you were still angry? That is emotional anger. Did you ever feel sad and then a week later you were still sad? That is emotional sadness. If you feel a feeling and five minutes later you are still feeling that feeling, it is not a feeling at all. It is an emotion. By paying attention you will soon learn to backtrack along the course of the feeling to its point of origin. If the point of origin of the feeling experience is in the wordless present, it is a feeling. If the point of origin of the feeling experience is a sentence or a picture in your mind’s eye, it is an emotion.
I still remember the moment when at thirty-eight years old I experienced my first Adult feeling. My anger arose to 100-percent intensity, was used to make a boundary communication with a petty tyrant, completed itself and vanished from my body in less than a minute. In the next moment I was talking with a different person about something else entirely, freely laughing as if nothing had occurred just a moment before. This was so new and strange that at first I thought perhaps I was going insane. But then I realized, “This is what it feels like to have a real feeling.”
To avoid letting emotions run their automatic and often obnoxiously disruptive course in your relationships, you need only open the smallest gap between the picture or thought that triggers the emotion and the Box’s automatic reactionary machinery. You have about one instant of time to open this gap. Opening the gap will stall out the mechanical process. Like with an orgasm, once the Box’s machinery starts chugging away there is no stopping it until it runs its full course – you must ride it out, and precious time and energy are lost in the meantime. But, if you blast a little gap between the origin of the emotion and the Box’s reaction mechanism, then the machine never starts going. Sense the trigger being stimulated; throw in the gap; hold the gap in place; wait a few seconds, and in those few seconds the triggering momentum will die out. Let the train come into the station but do not get on the train. Wait. Wait. Make no sudden moves. Soon the train will proceed on its way, not taking you with it. Then you can stay in the blissful present.
A straightforward way to blast the gap between the triggering thought or picture and the emotional reaction mechanism is by naming the emotion as an emotion. In your mind, or out loud if you like, you distinguish the experience by giving it a name: “This trigger is only an emotion.” Hold that thought. Tag the incident for later work if you want, but do the work at some other time … and away from the person or the circumstance with whom you are presently involved. The emotion has nothing at all to do with the person standing in front of you. They simply provide the triggering-association stimulus. Be grateful for the learning opportunity they have provided. Then drastically change the subject of your conversation.
An emotional reaction reveals a wound that still needs healing. If you make a practice of inserting gaps between the triggering circumstances and the ensuing emotional reaction, then the healing will tend to take care of itself. Growing up involves learning that you do indeed have unhealed wounds, and also realizing, “So what?” You can never heal all the ol
d wounds anyway. Say thanks to the triggering experience, thanks to any other people involved, thanks to your own discipline to not get on the emotional-machinery train, thanks to the gap, then go on creating for yourself and other people experiments in extraordinary human relationship overflowing with extraordinary human love.
Communicate About Feelings
Communications are a combination of energy and information. The energy serves as a “carrier wave” that transports the information. We do not usually realize this. Our ordinary communications are often incomplete. Ordinary communications deliver information but fail to acknowledge and deliver the associated energy. This incompleteness can make the communication inauthentic, confusing and shallow.
The impulse for communication comes from the energy of feelings. To deliver a whole communication you would then express both the energy and the information of the communication, both the feeling and the data. This is a new skill.
When you do not recognize that there is a carrier wave of feelings supporting your message, the feeling doing the carrying is often joy. (It could also be fear because fear often manifests itself as paralysis or numbness, so you do not at first recognize that it is fear. But most often the carrier is joy.) Joy is the natural-background, steady-state feeling in every human being. Joy is so abundant and familiar that it is often not recognized. To admit that we are mostly happy in our lives is a shock that contradicts our habitual problem-oriented “life is hard and then you die” perspective. To admit that you are considerably happier than you realized begins by admitting that you feel happy even in those moments when the happiness only lasts for two seconds. With Adult feelings you may begin noticing that you can even feel glad about feeling angry. You feel glad about feeling sad or scared. No, you are not going crazy! This is how it actually is being alive with mature Adult feelings. If you take responsibility for feeling happy in those two seconds, even if the happiness is about feeling angry, sad or scared, then you begin noticing how many of those two seconds of happiness there are in your day. Suddenly you start feeling happy about feeling happy.
Learning to communicate about feelings is simple. You only have to memorize one sentence. The feeling communication sentence goes like this:
“I feel (mad, sad, glad or scared) because __________.”
You fill in the blanks. Experiment by using this sentence three times a day.
For example, when you say to someone, “Hello,” if you were to deliver both the energy and the information of the communication verbally you would say, “I feel glad to say hello.” When you say, “I’d like coffee and a donut,” you would say, “I feel glad to ask you to bring me coffee and a donut.”
Next, start doing experiments that are a little more risky. Remember that feelings-work starts with Phase 1 (See Section 5-E), which is simply being able to clearly identify and feel your feelings from 0 to 100-percent intensity. Feelings are not thoughts. Feelings are not emotions. Feelings are not mixed. Feelings are mad, sad, glad or scared. Phase 2 of feelings-work is responsibly applying the energy and information of feelings toward fulfilling your destiny. In Phase 2 of feelings-work there is no final mastery. It is a no-top-end, ongoing evolutionary process of continuing to develop your art.
To begin, we start where we are. Start slowly and simply. Go to the post office and say, “I feel scared that there are not enough stamps on this letter.” Go to the café and say, “I feel angry because I am already full and I want to eat more cake.” Call your friend and say, “I feel sad because we have not talked in two weeks and I miss talking to you.”
Then you can start communicating feelings with your partner. The form for communicating feelings is precise. Feelings are personal and inarguable. Your experience of feelings is subjective, not objective. There are no right feelings or wrong feelings. Give two people identical experiences and they will invariably have wildly different feeling responses. Tell two people, “Your dog just died,” and one will feel sad to have lost a friend and the other will feel glad that the dog’s suffering is over. Tell two people, “We only have vanilla ice cream,” and one will feel scared not to ever taste spumoni again while the other will feel angry that it was vanilla ice cream last week. Sharing about feelings is a courageous act of letting yourself be known. The following communication example respects the vulnerability of revealing your inner experience. It demonstrates the expression of feelings using a completion loop:
Jane: “I feel scared to look you in the eyes because I think that you will see right through me and that you won’t like what you see.”
Bob: “What I heard you say is that you hate it when I act superior to you.”
Jane: “No. That is not what I said. What I said is that I feel scared to look you in the eyes because I feel naked and judged by you and I think that your are disgusted by me.”
Bob: “What I heard you say is that you won’t look me in the eyes because I internally criticize you.”
Jane: “No. That is not what I said. What I said is that I feel scared to look you directly in the eyes because I feel totally exposed and you will see that I am not perfect.”
Bob: “What I heard you say is that you feel afraid to look into my eyes because you think I will see that you are not perfect.”
Jane: “Yes. Thank you. Your turn.”
Bob: “I feel angry because nobody is perfect. I am not perfect. And I don’t care that you are not perfect. I need you to be imperfect. And when you do not let me look into your eyes – when you feel scared when I look into your eyes and you look away – then I feel rejected and I do not get to be close to you in a way that I want to be close to you.”
Jane: “What I heard you say is that you feel angry if I do not look into your eyes because you feel rejected. You do not care that I am not perfect. You just want to be close to me.”
Bob: “Yes. Thank you. Your turn.” Jane: “I feel sad because…” and so on.
Notice that at first Bob was listening more to himself than to Jane. He listened to his own projections and did not hear Jane’s feelings. Bob heard the information but he did not hear the carrier impulse. After a couple of rounds, using a completion loop, Bob got enough feedback to shift his listening. As soon as he received Jane’s whole message, both the information and the carrier impulse, then the message was completed and it became Bob’s turn.
The purpose of communicating about feelings is to be in love together. You can successfully include both delicate and intense feelings in your communications if you use a completion loop to confirm what was heard. Your daily communications will not always follow this exact form, but to be effective they will in some way repeat back both the information and the energy of the communication.
Adult responsible feelings are not used to blame, justify, resent, complain, be right or make someone else wrong. This would be using feelings to create low drama. To avoid using feelings for fueling low drama you will need to build and use a low drama detector.
SECTION 6-T
Build and Use A Low Drama Detector
In Section 2-C the Map of Low Drama introduced what low drama is, how it works, and how pervasively low drama is woven into our ordinary human relationships. In fact, low drama is the main characteristic of ordinary human relationship. The point here is: “If low drama is happening, nothing else can.” You would not be reading this book unless you wanted something else to happen. What are we then to do? If we start seeing how committed we are to creating low drama at home, at work, and maybe even at church, what can we do to change? Clearly we need some ways to avoid creating low drama ourselves, to exit low drama once we are in it, and especially not to enter low drama even when we are so temptingly invited.
The first thing we will need is a foolproof way to identify and distinguish low drama from other actions in our life. What we seek is a low drama detector. When we sincerely and from the depth of our souls and the bottom of our hearts insistently ask with intense self-reflective anguish: “How do I avoid making low drama? How do I
exit low drama once I am in it? Better yet, how do I avoid entering low drama in the first place?” there may be some possibility. The secret alchemical ingredient in these questions is the “I.” The “I” indicates you taking inescapable responsibility for creating your involvement in any low drama. It can never be anyone else’s fault that you are in low drama, even to the smallest degree. No one else can ever bring you into even the tiniest role in a low drama. It is always and only you who get yourself there. From this realization you can start building yourself a low drama detector.
You will find plans for building your low drama detector by seeing the responsible adult view of low drama. The responsible Adult view of low drama is nearly incomprehensible to the ordinary human view as given to us by our culture. Attaining a responsible Adult view of low drama requires that we start over again, understanding low drama from the beginning without any assumptions. From the responsible Adult perspective, low drama is an unconscious theatrical performance through which the Shadow Principles can do their work in the world. Low drama is the arrangement to have a few winners and lots of losers, to have aggression, hopelessness, jealousy, scarcity and survival. The objective in low drama is to gain power over others, where the highest reward you can ever achieve is proving yourself to be right. Nothing ever changes in low drama. What you produce after successful low drama is more low drama, because losers want revenge. After one low drama the ever-present question remains, “When is the rematch?” The Box loves action as distraction, like Roman citizens loved Circus Maximus. Low drama is a perpetual action machine – the motor for turning the wheels of ordinary human relationship.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 29
