How to change that, because of what we experience emotions

Walking on the edge of a cliff can cause fear, despite the clear understanding that the barrier will prevent you from falling. It does not matter that the path is completely slippery and the barrier does not seem fragile; your heart still beats faster, and your palms are sweating. In itself, the knowledge that you have nothing to fear does not destroy our fear. Even though most people can control their actions and walk firmly along the path, they only occasionally allow themselves to cast their eyes on the landscapes opening before them. The danger is felt even when objectively it does not exist. ^[48] An example of a walk on a cliff shows that our knowledge may not always outweigh the evaluations of auto evaluators that generate emotional reactions. After our emotional reactions occur, we may realize that we should not behave so emotionally, but our emotions may persist. I suppose that this usually happens when the trigger is the subject of an emotion developed in the process of evolution, or an assimilated trigger that is very close to this topic. When the learned trigger is more closely related to the topic, our rational knowledge can successfully interrupt emotional experience. In other words, if our concerns are only remotely related to the topic, then we can suppress them at our own discretion.
But there is another, more dangerous way to suppress the emotions of what we know. Emotions can impede our access to all that we know, to information that would be at our disposal if we were not emotionally excited, but which, in the case of our emotional arousal, becomes inaccessible to us. When we are embraced by inappropriate emotion, we interpret what is happening in accordance with what we feel, and ignore our knowledge that does not correspond to our feeling.
Emotions change the way we see the world and how we interpret the actions of other people. We are not trying to challenge the correctness of the reason for which we are experiencing a particular emotion; on the contrary, we try to confirm its validity. We evaluate what is happening as it is consistent with the emotion we experience, and thus justify and support it. In many situations, this can help us focus our attention, guide our decisions on how to respond to current problems, and understand what is at stake. But this may create difficulties for us, because when we are embraced by emotion, we underestimate or ignore the knowledge we already have that might not correspond to the emotion we are experiencing, just as we ignore or detract from the value of the new information coming to us information that does not match our emotions. In other words, the same mechanism that directs and focuses our attention can weaken our ability to use the information and knowledge already accumulated in our brain. ^[49]
Suppose someone is enraged at the public insult inflicted on him. During this rage, it will be difficult for him to assess whether the words spoken to him were indeed offensive in nature. The availability of knowledge about the past life of this person and the nature of the insults will be selective; only knowledge that justifies his rage will be remembered, and not those that indicate its groundlessness. If the person who uttered the words perceived as an insult gives explanations or apologizes, then an angry person cannot always immediately reflect this information (the fact of apology) in his behavior.
For some time, we are in a state of immunity , when our mind cannot assimilate information that does not correspond, does not reinforce or does not justify the emotion we are experiencing. Such a state of immunity may be more useful than harmful, if it is very short, that is, one or two seconds. In this short span, it focuses our attention on the current problem, using the most relevant knowledge that can guide our initial actions and preparation for further actions. Difficulties or improper emotional behavior can arise when the state of immunity lasts much longer - a few minutes or even hours. Too long a period of immunity contributes to the distortion of how we see the world around us and ourselves. ^[50]
In the event of a potential car accident, which we miraculously avoided, we do not feel fear after the oncoming car rushes past. We quickly realize that the danger has passed, and we wait until the heart rate and breathing rate returns to a normal level, which usually takes from five to fifteen seconds. But suppose that fear is caused by a cause, the falsity of which we cannot realize quickly enough. Suppose a person is afraid that the cause of back pain is liver cancer. During the period of immunity, he will reject information that does not corroborate his fears, ignoring the fact that yesterday he helped a friend drag furniture and tore up his back.
Consider a typical family situation: in the morning, before the spouses leave for work, Jim tells his wife Helen that, due to the changed circumstances, he cannot take their daughter out of school today and that Helen should do it. Helen answers him with a dissatisfied voice and an expression of anger on her face, as she is extremely angry. “Why didn't you warn me in advance? I have an appointment with one of my managers for this time! ”Helen did not deliberately consider her reaction, she didn’t want to look irritated at all. This happened because her auto evaluators interpreted her husband's message as interfering with the achievement of her own goals (a likely topic for anger), regardless of herself.
Feeling the voice and expression of his wife that she is annoyed, Jim decides to question her right to anger. Now he begins to feel irritated by Helen's behavior, since anger often breeds anger. “Why are you so angry? I could not tell you about it yesterday, because my boss called me a few minutes ago and said that an extraordinary meeting is being held in our department today, which I have to be. ” Now Helena knows that Jim was not guided only by his whims and that she has no reason to be upset about the unexpected collapse of her plans, but if she is still in a state of insensitivity, the struggle can continue. Her annoyance seeks opportunities to justify her appearance. Helene may want to leave the last word for herself: “You should have told me about it right away!” - but try to control yourself and not act under the influence of your irritation.
If Helen is able to take into account the information received from Jim, then she will change her perception of why Jim did what he did. Then she can refuse to interpret his behavior as disrespect for her, and her irritation will disappear. However, there are many reasons why a period of immunity can be long, which will force Helene to maintain her anger and not give up after Jim has provided information that would have to ease this anger. Perhaps she did not get enough sleep. Perhaps she is overloaded with work and sheds her displeasure at Jim. They may have been arguing for several months already on an important issue for them, for example, whether to have another child, and Helen was irritated about Jim's position, which seems to her to be selfish. Perhaps Helene belongs to the type of people whose anger plays a dominant role in character. (I will talk about my examination of people who have hostile feelings towards others, in section 6.) Or, Helen could act in this situation according to a scenario borrowed from another period of her life, a scenario with a high degree of emotional tension, which she plays again and again.
The scenario envisages the presence of the main actors - the person who plays the scenario together with other necessary characters - and the history of their interactions in the past. Not everyone “imports” in today's situations from his past those scenarios that are not very suitable for these situations. Traditional psychoanalytic theories of personality assert that scripts are imported when people have unrealized feelings — feelings that were never fully expressed or satisfactorily complete, or, if they were expressed, did not lead to the desired result. Scenarios distort reality, causing inappropriate emotional reactions and extending the period of immunity.
Suppose Helen was the youngest child in the family, and her brother Bill was often a bully who hurt her. If Helene was scared of such a life experience, if her parents always took the side of Bill and thought that Helen was exaggerating, she could often import the “I always am in someone's submission” scenario in situations that even remotely looked like situations from her childhood. One of the main concerns of Helene is that no one suppresses her, and this makes her feel someone's dominance, even when in reality it is absent. Helen does not want to import this script. She is an intelligent woman and thanks to the feedback from those with whom she is in a close relationship, she is aware of her penchant for this kind of erroneous interpretations and inadequate reactions. But during the period of immunity, she can do little about it. She does not even know that she is in a state of immunity. Only later, after serious reflection, does Helene realize that she acted inadequately with the situation, and regrets her behavior. She would like to extract the trigger “he is trying to dominate me” from her database of emotional readiness. Her life would be better if she could eliminate this trigger; she would lose the propensity for the long-term manifestation of anger and would not distort the motives of other people in order to adjust them to fit their emotions.
Many people would like to be able to exercise just such control over when they show an emotional reaction. One of the reasons why people turn to psychotherapists for help is that they don’t want to feel any more emotions about what is causing them now. But none of us wants to completely and permanently get rid of all our emotions. If we could do this, our life would become dull, boring, uninteresting, and possibly less safe.
Fear really protects us; we manage to save our lives, because without thinking we can respond to threats of harm to us with the help of defensive reactions. Reactions of disgust keep us from committing actions that can be harmful in the direct and figurative sense. Sadness or despair over the loss sustained can provide help from other people. Even anger — an emotion most people would like to suppress — is also good for us. He warns others and ourselves when something interferes with the fulfillment of our intentions. Such a warning can cause a change, although it can also cause retaliatory anger. Anger encourages us to try to change the world, to achieve social justice, to fight for human rights.
Would we really want to eliminate these types of motivation? Without excitement, sensual pleasure, pride in our achievements and the achievements of children, pleasure from bizarre and unexpected events happening around us, would our life become so attractive that we want to live? Emotions are not like appendix. Emotions are at the center of our lives. They make our life alive.
Instead of suppressing emotions completely, most of us would like to be able to selectively restrain our emotional responses to specific triggers. We would like to use something like the "delete" key to eliminate one or more triggers, a script or a care stored in our emotional readiness database. Unfortunately, we do not have irrefutable proof that this can really be done.
One of the eminent researchers of the human brain and emotions, psychologist Joseph Ledoux, recently wrote: “Conditional learning by fear is particularly elastic and may actually be a form of indelible learning ... ^{[51] The} ineradicability of acquired fear has its positive and negative sides. Obviously, it helps our brain to store information about the incentives and situations that were associated with danger in the past. But this important information, usually assimilated in traumatic circumstances, can also find its way into our daily lives, interfering in situations in which they are not very helpful ... " ^[52]
I received a happy opportunity to talk about it with Ledoux at the time when I was writing this chapter, and asked him to speak a little more precisely about what he had in mind and how much he was sure of the correctness of his words. First, I must immediately state that Ledoux addresses only learned triggers, which I call variations. The themes that are the product of our evolution, and Ledoux, and I consider them to be irremovable. An illustration of such a theme is, for example, the discovery of the fact that rats born in the laboratory and never seen cats, when they see a cat for the first time in their lives, show fear. This is an innate topic, a trigger for fear that does not require learning. The ability of a topic to evoke an emotion can only be weakened, but not completely eliminated. But can we forget about variations, i.e. those triggers that we learned in the process of our life?
Without going deep into the technical details of brain studies performed by Ledoux, we only say that when an emotion trigger is created, that is, when we learn to fear something, new connections arise between groups of cells in our brain, forming what Ledou calls a cluster cells . ^[53] Those clusters of cells that contain the memory of such a learned trigger seem to be permanent physiological records of what we have learned. They form what I call the emotional readiness database. However, we can learn to break the link between clusters of cells and our emotional behavior. The trigger still activates the existing cluster of cells, but the link between the cluster of cells and our emotional behavior can be broken, at least for a while. We are afraid, but we do not act as if we are afraid. We can also learn to break the link between the trigger and these clusters of cells so that the emotion is not activated, the cluster of cells remains, the database is not destroyed, its potential is reconnected to the trigger, and the reaction remains inside us. Under certain circumstances, when we experience this or that kind of stress, the trigger becomes active again, its connection with the accumulation of cells is established and the emotional reaction arises again.
Although all studies to Ledoux were devoted to emotions of fear, we believe that they are unlikely to bring different results for fear or sadness. This is consistent with my personal experience and what I have observed with others; therefore, I believe that his conclusions can be extended to other emotions, perhaps even to those that are perceived positively. ^[54]
Our nervous system does not allow us to easily change what makes us feel emotions, forget the connection between a cluster of cells and a reaction or between a cluster of cells and a trigger. The database of emotional readiness is an open system in which new variations are constantly being added, but this is not a system that allows you to easily delete the data you once entered into it. Our emotional system is designed to keep our triggers in working order, rather than restrain them, and allows us to trigger our emotional reactions without thinking. Biologically, we are created in such a way that we cannot easily interrupt our emotional reactions.
Let us now return again to the example of a potential collision with another machine, to learn how the results of Ledoux help us understand what is happening when we try to change what causes us to experience emotions. Each driver can remember the situation when, sitting on the passenger seat, he involuntarily tried to press his foot on a nonexistent brake pedal when he saw another car suddenly appearing in front. Pressing the brake pedal is a conditional reaction to fear caused by the possibility of a collision with another machine. Learned are not only the reaction - pressing the brake pedal, but the trigger. Cars were not part of the outer environment of our ancestors;the machine that arises before us is not a topic that was originally present in us, but a learned variation. We assimilate it very quickly, because it is very close to one of the probable themes of fear - something that suddenly appears in our field of vision and approaches us, as if trying to strike us.
Although most of us, sitting in the passenger seat, will involuntarily press a non-existent brake pedal when a sense of danger arises, driving instructors learn not to do so. They can learn to interrupt the reaction and in this case they will still be afraid, but they will not react to it physically. (I suspect that traces of fear can be seen on their faces or in the sound of their voices.) Or they can learn to break the connection between the trigger (a car suddenly appearing in front) and the accumulation of cells in the brain that was created for this trigger of fear. ^[55]It is possible that they fine-tune the connection between the trigger and the accumulation of cells so that fear occurs, and the protective reaction in the form of pressing the brake pedal is activated only if the probability of a dangerous event is high. But if they didn’t sleep well last night or thought about an unfinished dispute with his wife that began this morning, they would again try to press the brake pedal with their feet like all those who are not driving instructors and didn’t learn to interrupt this trigger. The links between the trigger, the cluster of cells and the reaction were not destroyed, but only weakened.
Further, my attention will be focused on weakening the triggers of emotions, created either directly by learning, or indirectly, through communication with one of the topics of emotions. In the next section, I will explain how we can weaken the connection between an emotion-inducing event and our emotional responses. Both are not easy to do. Let me explain how this can be done with another example.
Suppose the boy - let's call him Tim - is constantly teased by his father, whose remarks, although they look like harmless jokes, painfully hurt Tim because they make fun of his poor physical development. Quite early, perhaps even before the age of five, the script of an imperious person who humiliates a child with his jokes is entered into Tim's emotional readiness database. Over time, Tim began to respond to jokes with immediate outbursts of anger, even when they were completely harmless. This was pleasant to his father, who with pleasure continued to infuriate his son with his wits. Twenty years later, Tim still responds with outbursts of anger to the first signs that someone is teasing him. This does not mean that Tim always shows anger, but he would feel more comfortable,if he didn’t have to fight his impulses “to strike back” when someone makes fun of him.
Six different factors influence how successfully each of us can reduce the “temperature”, visibility and strength of the trigger emotion, and reduce the duration of the immunity period — the period when we can use only the information that supports the emotion we are experiencing. The first factor is the proximity of the trigger to the theme developed during the evolution process. The closer a learned trigger is to an initially present topic, the harder it will be to weaken its power. Anger at the wheel is an example of an event that is very similar to the topic, and not to the learned variation. The dean of our faculty on the way to the university passes a place where two lanes merge into one. There is an unwritten rule according to which cars in each lane stand in a queue, but sometimes it happens that someone tries to slip out of turn.In such cases, my dean becomes enraged, although the reason for this is completely insignificant, since, because of such an offender of the unwritten rule, he arrives at the university only a few seconds later. However, at work, when one of the professors criticizes his faculty development plans, he is extremely rarely irritated. Why does he get furious because of nothing, but does not feel anger in more serious cases?
This happens because the driver’s actions resemble a universal theme of anger that has evolved during the evolution caused by interferences that appeared - not in the form of words, but in the form of real actions that impede progress toward the goal. The actions of an impolite driver are much closer to this topic than the critical words of a colleague. (To those who are surprised at such frequent manifestations of anger by drivers, I would like to say that, in my opinion, manifestations of such anger occurred before, but not with such frequency due to lower traffic intensity. In addition, the mass media are paying these events a lot of attention.)
By applying these ideas to Tim's problems, we can expect Tim to ease his position by weakening the trigger, which is more remote from the universal theme than close to it. The humiliating ridicule of the father, expressed with stinging words, is no further from the topic than possible physical actions, such as, for example, if Father would put Tim on his shoulders and deprive him of the opportunity to move. As an adult, Tim would have had more opportunities to weaken the trigger, if his childhood experience of experienced humiliation was associated only with stinging words, and not with physical limitations.
The second important question is how closely the current circumstances of the provoking event resemble the initial situation.in which the trigger was first learned. It was the father who cruelly teased Tim - a strong and domineering man. If a person is being teased by a woman, a peer or a subordinate, then it is not as close to the initial situation as when a man who has authority over this person does it, and therefore it would be easier for Tim to loosen the trigger if he had been teased by a person with less by authority.
The third question boils down to at what stage in the maturing of a person the trigger was learned. Apparently, the soonerthe trigger was learned, the harder it is to loosen it. In particular, this is due to the fact that at the beginning of life, the ability to control emotional reactions to any emotional trigger is not so well developed. Thus, the emotional reaction associated with the triggers learned early in life will be stronger than the response to the triggers learned later. In part, this is also due to the high probability (assumed by many evolutionary psychologists and all psychoanalysts and supported by more and more studies of the brain and emotions ^[56]) that the period of early childhood is of key importance for the formation of personality and for the further emotional life of a person. What is digested during this period is more durable and difficult to change. Triggers learned at such a critical age can create a longer period of immunity.
The fourth key factor is the initial emotional charge . The stronger the emotion experienced at the first assimilation of the trigger, the more difficult it is to weaken its effect. If the teasing was carried out in a softer form, if the feelings of humiliation and indignation with their impotence were weaker, then it would be easier to “cool” the trigger.
The fifth factor is density.experience - affects the strength and strength of the trigger. Density of experience implies the repetition of episodes with a high emotional charge for a short period of time, which have a suppressive effect on a person. Thus, if at some period Tim was regularly mocked cruelly and mercilessly, then it would be very difficult to loosen the trigger. When the initial emotional charge is very strong and dense, the period of immunity to this trigger in subsequent reactions will be long, which may prevent a person in the first one or two seconds from understanding that he is not responding properly. If this initial emotional charge was very strong, then this alone may be sufficient to increase the period of immunity for a given trigger,even if the emotional charge was not dense or if the experience was not created due to the frequent repetition of episodes.
The sixth factor is affective style . ^[57] We all differ in the speed and intensity of our emotional reactions and in how much time it takes us to recover from the episode that caused the emotion. My research in the last ten years has been devoted precisely to these issues. (The conclusion describes four other aspects of the affective style besides speed, strength, and duration.) Individuals who usually have faster and stronger emotional reactions find it much harder to cool their hot triggers.
Let's now look at how Tim could have loosened a teasing trigger. Tim's first step involves identifying what causes his anger. He may not know that teasing by a strong and domineering person is a very hot trigger for anger. Automatic evaluation occurs in thousandths of a second - before consciousness does it, and before Tim himself understands what causes him such anger. Perhaps he knows that anger causes teasing, but he does not know that it must be exercised by someone who has authority over him. He may not understand that anger is associated with his childhood experience of suffering from the merciless jokes of his father. Tim may be defensive and not willing to admit that he is beginning to feel angry or that his father has treated him cruelly.The very first step is to understand that he is angry, to recognize the corresponding sensations in his own body (how to achieve this, is described in section 6 on anger) and to understand the effects it has on other people.
Suppose that Tim begins to realize that at times he is overly angry, but does not understand when and how this happens. In this case, Tim should start keeping a diary of the episodes that caused his anger. He should note the events that caused his anger, which he himself knew about and which other people told him. Entries in the diary should contain as much information as possible about what occurred during the moments preceding the appearance of anger. A close friend or psychotherapist could help Tim understand from the stories about these episodes that teasing, perceived as a form of humiliation, is a hot trigger. Fortunately, when Tim thinks about this, he can realize which scenario he is “importing” - those horrible scenes that happened to him with his father. I'm not sure if he really needs to know this,to weaken the effect of this script. Perhaps it will be enough for Tim to understand that he overreacts to teasing, that he treats him as if he is always associated with humiliation.
It may seem that now the simplest solution for Tim is simply to avoid any situations in which he could be teased. This implies that he will stop having lunch with friends who can send out naughty jokes about him and that he will easily foresee any situations in which he may be the object of ridicule. Therefore, a more correct approach is to try to cool the trigger.
Tim needs to analyze how often he felt that he was being mocked when in reality he was not mocked or at least had no intention of humiliating him. He needs to understand how to overestimate what motivates teasing. Such a thorough analysis can be very useful if carried out regularly. ^[58]Tim can do this by reflecting on each episode of teasing later, carefully considering alternative explanations of the motives for which he was teased, in addition to wanting to humiliate him. Over time, he can learn to do such a reassessment faster, directly during the current episode. He can also learn to understand when there is an opportunity to tease him, and not treat the jokes in his address as insults or attempts at humiliation. After a while, teasing may become a colder trigger. As a last resort, if in the process of such training Tim learns that teasing is a trigger and that this trigger is triggered in the event of a deliberate attempt to humiliate Tim, he will be able to better control his anger when he really becomes angry with the offender. ^[59](For more on controlling emotional reactions, see section 4.)
If what I have proposed does not work, if the trigger of emotion continues to trigger difficult-to-control emotional reactions again and again, then other approaches can be considered. Psychotherapy is one of the options, although, according to my observations, it does not always help a person to fully understand what a trigger is and what scenario is imported, which makes it difficult to loosen a trigger. Other possible approaches are behavioral therapy and meditative training. ^[60]
Suppose that Tim identified a trigger, spent time analyzing various situations in which he felt mocked at himself when in reality there were none, and learned to re-evaluate situations in order to perceive the teasing as a joke, and not as an insult or attempt to humiliate . Suppose that it was easier to do this, because before Tim had only a few episodes with teasing for many months and not a single episode lasted long, that is, the charge and density were low. Further suppose that Tim's anger does not manifest itself quickly or in strong form. Now Tim rarely has to fight with himself, so as not to be angry with the person who teases him. But he may be angry - and often this is exactly what happens - when for some reason he is in an irritated mood. .
Here we need to distinguish between emotion and mood. All people have both, but emotions and moods are different, even though they are associated with feelings. The most obvious difference is that mood lasts longer than emotion. Mood can persist all day, sometimes two days, while emotions can appear and disappear within a few minutes or even seconds. Mood resembles a light but continuous emotional state. If it is irritated, the irritation will be moderate all the time and can easily turn into anger. If we are talking about a sad mood, then we are slightly saddened and can quickly go into a state of deep sadness. Neglect mood involves emotions of disgust and scorn,Euphoric or high spirits are pleasant excitement and pleasure, and anxious mood is fear.
Mood activates specific emotions. When we are annoyed, we look for opportunities to be angry; we interpret the world in a way that allows us or even demands anger from us. We show anger for something ordinary, and when we get angry, our anger is stronger and more lasting than when we are not in an irritated mood. Mood does not imply a special signal through the face or voice. We can say that a person is in a particular mood because we see signs of an emotion coloring this mood. Moods reduce our flexibility, as they make us less able to react quickly to the changing nuances of the external environment, distorting our interpretation of what is happening and our reaction to it. Emotions also cause this effect.but only for a few moments, the mood can be maintained for hours.
Another difference between mood and emotions is that as soon as an emotion arises and we are aware of this, we can usually point to the event that caused it. But we rarely know why we were in a certain mood. It seems that it just arose by itself. In the morning we can wake up in a good mood, and in the afternoon we can find that for no apparent reason we experience despondency. However, autonomous neurochemical changes that cause and maintain mood should occur here. I am sure that mood can also be caused by intense emotional experience. Intense anger can cause an irritable mood, just as violent joy can create a euphoric or high spirits. Thus, we still know why we are in a particular mood.
Earlier, I argued that emotions are necessary for our lives and that we would not want to live without them. But I am much less convinced that sentiment brings us some kind of benefit. ^[61] Moods can be the unintended manifestation of our emotional structures that are not selected in the process of evolution, as they are adaptive. ^[62]Moods narrow the choice of alternatives, distort our thinking and make it difficult to control what we do, and usually without any reason that makes sense to us. Some may argue that when sentiments are caused by intense emotional experience, they perform the function of maintaining our readiness to receive such experience in even greater amounts. Perhaps this is true, but, in my opinion, this is an insignificant benefit in comparison with those troubles that create moods. If I could, I would forever refuse to be able to re-invoke any mood I have experienced in the past and would prefer to live with my emotions. I would gladly refuse euphoric moods in order to save myself from an irritated or sad mood. But none of us have that opportunity.
Triggers that have become cold as a result of hard work are reheated again when a person is in the mood corresponding to that trigger. When Tim is in an exasperated mood, then teasing can make him angry again. As Ledu argued, not only a stressful situation, but also a mood can recreate the connection between the trigger and the emotion. Despite the fact that the trigger may be weakened or cooled so that it will not trigger the emotion, it will become hot again when the corresponding mood occurs.
Even when our vulnerability due to mood is not very high, many of us, at least for a while, still have activated emotions, under whose influence we would not like to take any action. Next, we consider involuntary emotional reactions and how well we can control our actions when we experience some kind of emotion.