Welcome to my blog,
Emotional Connection!I'm delighted that the blog premieres on Psychology Today just as my book on the same subject, The One Thing Holding You Back: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Connection, hits the stores.
With that it mind, I'd like to begin by describing Emotional Connection, how it works, and why it's essential in getting ourselves unstuck and functioning at our optimal state of performance and well being.
Recently, in preparation for the book, I discussed all that in an interview. Here it is below. Thanks for taking a look. I'm excited to create a dialogue with you on this subject, and would therefore heartily welcome all your questions and comments.
Q: Why is learning about emotional connection so important?
RC: Most of us grow up without ever learning what an emotion is, how to honor it, or how to feel it successfully. In fact, we get harmful messages to the contrary about "counting to ten" and bottling up our powerful feelings.
The truth about emotions is pretty straightforward. They're messages from the brain that are delivered in the body. To receive these messages we need to feel them where they arise.
If we're lonely, for example, the message might show up as a stab in the heart, a tug in the stomach, a welling behind the eyes, or all three. Counterintuitive as it may seem, to feel a painful emotion fully, at the site of its delivery, is the best way to help it diminish. Not feeling the emotion, on the other hand, causes it to grow stronger, remain longer, and mess up our lives in many ways.
Q: Often the message an emotion sends is unhelpful or just plain wrong - like buy this! or be afraid of that! If I pause to feel such emotions fully, aren't I just encouraging them?
RC: No, the opposite is true. To feel an emotion you must become aware of it. With that awareness you're best able to assess its validity. Without it, you're only able to respond to the emotion unconsciously.
Let's say you're afraid of intimacy in romantic relationships. You can't make yourself unafraid by trying not to be. But letting yourself experience the fear will reveal its origins from the past. You'll then be able to address and heal those earlier events. In the process you'll literally recalibrate your emotional response. You'll become less fearful going forward, and only when appropriate.
Q: You say that the one thing holding us back from our greatest possible success and well being is resistance to emotion. How so?
RC: Whenever you're not willing to feel an emotion, your choices and behaviors stem from your avoidance of that emotion. Your resistance then runs your life, and is directly contrary to your overall best interest.
Take the case of a man who's unable to feel inferior. This resistance is likely to make him allergic to criticism. He'll go out of his way to avoid criticism, or to deflect it, and will therefore deny himself the chance to hear potentially crucial feedback.
Q: If avoiding emotions is so detrimental, why do we do it?
RC: Through a glitch in evolution, our brains are wired to perceive challenging emotions as life threatening. We respond the same way to loneliness, for example, as to footsteps in a dark alley.
But emotions are inside of us, so we can't actually run away from them. All we can do, therefore, is attempt to stuff them down or numb ourselves to their affects. In doing so we'll use anything at our disposal - alcohol, cigarettes, porn, gambling, TV, the Internet, shopping, Chunky Monkey. Emotional suppression is a trillion dollar industry with countless tentacles reaching deep into every corner of our culture.
In truth, however, it's not really the substances and activities to which we're addicted. What we're addicted to, at our core, is emotional resistance.
Q: Which emotions do people most commonly resist?
RC: In the book I list thirty-three commonly resisted emotions. These emotions aren't just the usual suspects like anger or hurt. They also include more specific emotions like jealousy or lack.
Resistance to jealousy, for example, leads to controlling behavior in relationships. We think that jealousy itself is the source of such behavior when in fact it's the resistance. A person who is able to experience jealousy directly, physically, loses all need to control.
Resistance to lack, likewise, leads to hasty and unwise spending. A person who can tolerate the visceral sensation of not having enough is able to remain patient, and discerning, when presented with possible purchases.
Q: So how do we fix this glitch in evolution, release our habitual resistance, and start connecting to our emotions directly?
RC: The antidote to emotional resistance is acceptance. This means learning to accept your emotions, in your body, as soon as they arise. This acceptance is not mental or theoretical - it's a practical skill.
I call this skill surfing. With internal surfing, your attention is the surfer, and the emotion is the wave. Here's how it works. Suppose someone rejects you. Your initial inclination is to drown your sorrows. Instead, you locate the raw sensation of rejection in your body. Then, you remain attentive to that sensation as it moves and shifts. In the process you ride it out. Soon, much sooner than you'd imagine, this leaves you cleansed, refreshed, and truly over it.
Q: Aren't you making this sound a lot simpler than it is?
RC: No, it really is that simple. But not easy. Often, temporarily, the wave is excruciating. It takes a lot of practice not to bail. After quickly getting to "shore" a few times, however, your motivation grows exponentially.
Another difficulty is that surfing often brings up all kinds of distracting thoughts. In the above example, while surfing, you might simultaneously notice thoughts like, "No wonder I got rejected - I'm a total loser." Or, "I'm better off by myself." Or, "What should I have for dinner?"
Dealing with such thoughts requires noticing them dispassionately, like clouds in the sky, while doing your best to remain on the wave or catching the very next one if you "wipe out."
To be clear, surfing an emotion doesn't mean you must give credence to the thoughts associated with it. In other words, feeling like a loser for a few minutes doesn't mean you ever have to believe that you truly are one.
Q: Besides feeling better as quickly as possible, are there additional benefits to the process of emotional connection?
RC: Whenever we successfully surf an emotion, we also begin to clear ourselves of its backlog.
Staying with the example of rejection, the degree of its sting is connected to how much previously unfelt rejection we currently have on board. With enough surfing it's eventually possible, believe it or not, to experience serious rejection with relatively little upset.
Q: Doesn't this also have something to do with negative patterns?
RC: Negative patterns are caused by stored-up, resisted emotions. They are the way resisted emotions try to get our attention, so that we'll finally feel them.
If you're carrying around a lot of bottled up rejection, to complete our example, you'll actually draw people into your life who are bound to reject you. The good news is that once you surf your way free of that rejection, the pattern loses its power.
Q: What are the greatest stumbling blocks people encounter when trying to release their emotional resistance and begin feeling successfully?
· Analyzing - an attempt to figure our way out of an emotion
"What's going on? Why am I feeling so anxious?"
· Judging - a decision that something's wrong with the emotion, or with us for having it
"This guilt is too much. I shouldn't let him get to me."
· Assessing - excessive focus on how well or poorly we're connecting
"I'm not feeling much of anything. Am I doing this right?"
Emotional Connection
In my 20 year of inner search and practice I have found what Raphael Cushnir is presenting here to be true.
There is no other way to heal but to identify, experience and move beyond (so to speak)our emotional resistance.
2 minor points. One is that it is not that easy nor that simple but there is no other way and having participated in various "consciousness" communities
over the years I have seen that there is no easy fix nor any magic formula. In other words one can spend 20+ years working on a particular emotional resistance if is deeply anchored and like an onion little by little we are less and less triggered by it. Some resistance take longer some much less every person and resistance is different.
The 2nd small item is that in terms of messages from the brain being delivered to the body, it appears from considerable recent research that the body is not separate from the brain; in a way the body is simply an extension of the brain. Candice
Pert's research in the field of neuropeptides is one source of information regarding that point of view. So from that perspective emotions live everywhere inside us. Most experienced body workers have seen the connection between emotions and working on different parts of the body.
Exactly!
Emotional Connection
Raphael
Thank you for such a wonderful post - I really "got" the role of resistance and how it helps us hold on to the very emotions we want to avoid.
And I LOVED the surfing analogy. I use surfing as an analogy when I teach meditation. I find people lighten up about "watching" the breath when they imagine surfing it. They also notice finer nuances.
One way I found consistently brings me to a healing place with my emotions is Focusing (www.focusing.org).
Focusing is a simple way of being with our bodily felt experiences (physical, emotional, memories and so on). Through Focusing we allow our body to let us know what it knows about our living experiences and how it knows what is the most life supporting way forward. You could say it is a consistent way to tap into our inner wisdom and innate healing capacity. As you say, this healing is not a one-stop instant shop. Healing is an unfolding at just the right pace. To go too deep too fast is as traumatic as holding on too long. Focusing allows this unfolding to occur in just the right order and at just the right pace.
It has also shown me that no emotion explored (not analysed) is a "bad" emotion. It may just have a tragic way of expressing a deep need or value. Focusing has shown me that even something I conventionally label bad or painful is a gift if I just take the time to listen within.
Looking forward to more of your posts. Good luck with this venture.
Focusing - Yes!
This is wonderful! I am
This is wonderful! I am currently applying to PhD programs in Clinical Psychology, and have been developing a therapy process very similar to what you are proposing. I had been thinking along the lines of finding emotional opposites to the emotions people resisted, but I prefer your strategy. I am intrigued, and I look forward to reading your book, as well as your future posts. Thank you for sharing your insights.
Best,
Jonathan
I am moved, I am inspired, I
I am moved, I am inspired, I am intrigued. Beautifully put in every way.
Your words are inspiring,
Your words are inspiring, without question. Yet, I hate this life & everything it has to offer. I am tired of therapy yet cannot go without it. I believe your words & have applied this concept to life for years, yet, without fail, life is closing in. It is not worth it. It is cold and heartless.
The Dark Night
I resonate with the deep pain expressed in this response to my blog entry, as well as with the powerful sense that life is just not worth it.
I invite the poster to contact me directly, if interested, to dialogue about this in an open, spacious way offline. In my view, no thought or feeling is "wrong" or "unacceptable," and perhaps we could more fully penetrate the pain, and the mystery.
Whether we ever do connect, I send heartfelt blessings and boundless compassion your way.
The Dark Knight
I would like to take you up on your invite. How do I go about contacting you directly?
Do all emotions work for this process??
Raphael,
I am a student studying psychology and I found your article very interesting and inspiring! I understand we need to surf the emotional waves in order to lessen their effect, or to be able to handle them better. So really just going with that emotion and experience it... BUT What about Rage(great anger)? For some people that might not be a good solution because experiencing rage in its strongest state could cause problems. Or is it simply "allowing" rage to be there while consciously understanding it for what it is and being disciplined at the same time so as to not do anything dangerous (obviously)? How far should it be taken?
-M
Working Skillfully with Anger
You are quite insightful to focus on anger in your question. Anger, more than most emotions, often comes with a need to lash out in any number of ways. So what's important is to:
1)Become proficient in surfing anger within so that there's a greater capacity to release it without expression;
2)Learn how to strip anger's expression, when absolutely necessary, down to its elemental version. In other words, all the trouble occurs when we put words to it, or actually strike someone or something.
So in many instances I recommend removing oneself from others and just howling or growling it out, using only sounds and no words. While it might seem like this would feed the anger, usually it does the opposite. Once expressed as energy, minus the blame and other harmful content, anger usually dissipates enough to bring us back into balance.
Finally, learning to stay aware and connected to anger when it arises, rather than fighting against it fusing with it, is definitely an advanced skill in the emotional connection realm, and best to be approached only after some of the easier emotions have been successfully surfed.
What Anger really is...
ANGER
I'll be the judge, I'll be the jury, said the old cunning fury.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Anger and its variations (rage, outrage, and furor, irritation and annoyance, being peeved, pissed, piqued, and incensed) always provide at least one entry in every list of emotions, no matter how abbreviated (for example, in every major dictionary, in Watson's short list of three, in most of Freud's formulations). In the current vogue for " self-expression" and "ventilationism," it is virtually always anger, which reserves central if not exclusive attention. (Pent-up anger is said to poison the personality, and thus should be "let out"; but we hear few such exhortations to honesty concerning the far more poisonous emotions on envy and resentment.) Anger is an ideal example of the emotional constitution of our world, of the judgmental character of the emotions with their ideological commitments. We freely and often judge the "rationality" of anger ( its reasonability and warrant, its pettiness or its moral self-righteousness); and it is clear that anger is neither a "good" nor a "bad" emotion, neither "positive" nor "negative," but depends, in any particular case, upon the circumstances and the individual, the nature of the "offense" and its background. It is for this reason that I have used anger so often as an example and, because it is also the favorite example hydraulic theorists, behaviorists, therapists, etc. and emotion-as-feeling Cartesian mentalists, it is an ideal test case for any emotional theory. The key to anger is its judgment of indictment and accusation. Anger is a judgment of personal offense. It often has a moral edge, but need not (thus clouding the distinction between anger and indignation); it is usually outer-directed but may on occasion be turned inward toward one's Self. Here, it is worth stressing the fact that anger is a great equalizer, judging the object of one's anger as an equal. To be angry at a child (as opposed to merely irritated) is to treat him (perhaps unfairly) as an adult. To be angry with a superior is to raise yourself to his level ("insubordination," an apt term, "uppity" also). With an inferior, one avoids anger and will more likely be scornful or disdainful, annoyed or irritated. The mythology of anger more than any other emotion, is a judicial mythology of trial and judgment, crime and punishment. Its judgmental nature is thus the most explicit of all the emotions, with oneself as the court on which the indictment and argument, verdict and sentence (but not necessarily carrying out the sentence), are all portrayed. Anger is usually direct and explicit in its projection of our personal values and expectations upon the world. Anger, whether expressed or not, is our own insistence upon our own ideals, even when that insistence is based far more on self-assertiveness or obstinacy than on any commitment to the ideals as such. (Thus we get angry at trivia , which alone does not concern us at all, in order to assert our right to assess, and our need for legislative autonomy, mush as a magistrate might levy contempt of court charges, not for the nature of the remark or as a gesture itself but rather only because it was contempt of court, a denial of his own authority.) Anger registers our displeasure that the world does not obey our expectations, and displays our desire to punish those who would not obey our demands, no matter trivial and meaningless, or how indubitably moral and eloquently humane. (It is important , however, not to confuse anger with mere frustration and disappointment; anger, unlike frustration and disappointment, essentially includes a judicial indictment, an offense and a condemnation.
Emotional Connection
Emotions are part of the passions and are constitutive judgements (decisions) not feelings, feelings are a result and always follow. The passions are subjective and our lives consist of a dialectic movement back and forth between subjectivity and objectivity. There is nothing in between. Since these two are standpoints, for a person to attempt to live wholly subjectively would be threatened continuously with madness, cut off from the anchorage of other people's opinions and the "facts" of the world. But for a person to live wholly objectively, a tragic paradigm that is all to common in our society, it would literally be inhuman, for it is our passions and our sense of ourselves and our values that constitute our humanity. Without subjectivity there would be no passions (emotions), no values, and no "Selves." But without objectivity, there would be no facts, only opinions without a test of truth. It would be absurd to try and live in one standpoint or another. Subjectivity without objectivity is blind; objectivity without subjectivity is meaningless. The first is madness, the second meaninglessness. There are ample philosophical and methodological safeguards against the first. But the dangers of the second have been neglected, as if lack of passion were always to be preferred to the danger of the destructive passions, like resentment and hostility. The constructive passions are far better for obtaining self-esteem, as love and respect, and it is far easier to murder populations in the cold calculations of "science" or "religion" than in the heated vengence of enmity. The big problem is the "transcendental pretense," the attempt to project one's own subjectivity onto the world and other people - as the "truth" - That is the most dangerous arrogance of all.
It is our passions, and our passions alone, which provide our lives with meaning. The passions are not threatening or overwhelming “forces” that push us in this way or that, hopefully to be controlled by “the sweet light of reason.” Our passions - our emotions, moods and desires - define us, our Selves, and the world we live in. Controlling these wild beasts is the purpose of human society, religion and reason. In our maturity, we are held responsible for such control, no matter how difficult it may be. But there has been no suggestion that we might also be responsible for the passions themselves, which might need no “control” at all if we were to realize only that they are our own making in the first place.
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