Tao-Te-Chi - Becoming Free of Fake Emotions
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One of the hardest things for most people to deal with in this life are our emotions. They seem to have a mind of their own and rear up at the worst possible times. For many of us it feels as if we were slaves to our own emotions. We feel like puppets on a string at our emotion's beck and call. However it is not emotions that are the root of these feelings… they are that of Fake Emotions.
To first understand this it is important to know the difference between real and fake emotions. Without this understanding none of it will make any sense and just add confusion to your life. As a result, Real Emotions are best defined as "the feelings or sensations caused as a result of the direct stimuli to an event or occurrence." In simple terms this means that something that happens to make us Sad… makes us Sad!
On the other hand, Fake Emotions are defined as "the feelings or sensations caused as a result of our unwillingness to deal with the direct stimuli to an event or occurrence." Much more difficult to understand, however when we use the same example as above it becomes… something that happens to make us Sad… makes us want to lash out and hurt someone!
The problem with Real and Fake Emotions is that they come from the same place, are triggered in the same manner and feel identical. The reality however is that Real Emotions are REAL and Fake Emotions are a means of defence so we do not have to feel something we do not want to feel. This is really why for most people they feel they are puppets to their own emotions… their Fake Emotions have taken hostage of their lives and taken over!
This however does not need to be the reality of our lives. We have the means, the power and the ability to fix it. Of course no one said the job would be easy or simple. What we can say however is that it will allow you to feel alive and become so much happier and content in your own life then you can even begin to imagine right now!
The first step in freeing ourselves of this burden is to understand why it happens in the first place. When we know the root of a problem we can begin to fix it. Sadly the root of this problem is the belief that we are not capable of dealing with our own lives. This presents a rather major first problem in that we need to feel we are capable in our own lives, in the face of feeling we are not.
This means that to first begin to deal with this we need to find a way to make us feel more capable. Since the feeling of incapability is merely a program running in our heads, the best option is to overwrite it with a new one. If we spend time everyday all the time telling ourselves we are capable eventually we will begin to believe we are capable. This is the idea behind positive thought and affirmation.
The problem is that our minds will countermand this and hold to the idea that we are not capable. This really is more out of a sense of familiarity than reality. However, we are powerful and intelligent beings and can override our own minds. The easiest way to do this is to include our mind's negative affirmation into our positive one. In other words if we say "No… I am not incapable, I am fully capable!" it will have more meaning. The more emphasis we put onto the "I am fully capable!" part the more it will stick.
This by itself is a very powerful tool, however it will take a long time to make enough of a difference to help the situation. As a result it is important to add more to this package of positive affirmation. What we can do to super power this even further is to spend time each day looking in the mirror saying this to our own face!
Simply by spending even just five minutes a day staring into our own eyes and repeating the phrase… "No… I am not incapable, I am fully capable!" will do the trick. The reason is that when we look into our own eyes we connect to our deeper selves. After all the eyes are the windows to the soul. When we connect to this part of ourselves it bypasses all the defences that we build to shut ourselves off from the world and any supposed pain we may feel. This allows us to hit the real "us" buried inside and add a powerful punch to the mix.
When we can begin to feel that we are actually capable, because we are totally capable after all, then we can begin to deal with this situation. Remember our Fake Emotions exist because we did not feel capable of dealing with pretty much anything. Now that we are done putting ourselves down and know we can handle it… we can do so.
Fake Emotions exist because we feel that what we need to really feel in a situation is not appropriate or acceptable. It may be that we feel if we cry we are weak or that if we are happy we somehow are damaging the memory of a deceased love one. No matter the reason why we do it, the reality is that we lie to ourselves about what we feel so we do not have to feel it. This would be like hitting our thumb with a hammer and going and killing some homeless person because of it.
Sadly there is a lot of reality to that last idea. Fake Emotions by their very nature completely overkill the situation at hand. Realistically they have to as they must completely hide the real emotion buried underneath. Without this total overriding of the real emotion then it would sneak out and be seen. What it the point hiding it, if it can just step out and say hello anytime it wants to?
Now however, as we feel capable of dealing with the real emotions we no longer need the fake ones! If it was that simple then we would not really need to be talking about it right now. Feeling capable is the first step, however we now have to learn how to deal with the real emotions first hand.
Just like riding a bike you never forget! The problem is that for people with fake emotions they never really learnt in the first place how to deal with real ones. Since we did not feel capable of dealing with them, we learnt the fake ones instead. This means that we now have to start from scratch and learn all about real emotions. Sadly, for the men out there this means you have to drop the "Manly" notion that you do not have any emotions. Of course the women do not get off that easy either. They get to face the reality they have to give up their manipulation and control ideas and start again too.
This will likely cause a lot of people to become angry. However the facts are that this all began a very long time ago. It is important to understand that women by nature use their emotions to manipulate and control as a natural way of life. This is because they need to ensure that the father of their offspring is the best of the best. This means that they must remove all other competition and also test all the possible fathers at the same time. As a result women developed defined control and manipulation techniques in order to offer the best possible survival to their offspring. Of course as we no longer have a 90% infant mortality rate this is a little overkill in today's society.
Sorry men… you don't get off easy yet either. Men developed the unemotional streak at the exact same time. The reason behind this being that when you are likely to lose friends and family members every single month it is going to hurt. When you also can not stop hunting and bringing in food for the rest to survive you need to be able to function. The best way to function with that much pain is simply to stop feeling the pain all together. Of course, just like the women, we no longer live in that world so it is time to put the club down and enter the modern world.
So, now that we realize that we really know nothing about emotions and how to deal with them we get to begin. The first thing in dealing with real emotions you need to firmly lock in your head is this… No matter what you think you should feel, you need to feel whatever is there! This means that if you think you should feel sad, however feel sort of on edge… then you need to feel on edge. The reason is that each of us processes emotions in different ways. Some people will laugh at a funeral because they simply are too overwhelmed to deal with the grief. Others may cry at some highly joyous event because they are just so incredibly happy.
There is no right and wrong way to feel real emotions. This for most people is the hardest thing with real emotions. When we dealt with fake ones they were predictable and orderly; in fact they did exactly what we told them to when we told them to do it. Even though we felt like the puppet… we were the puppet masters. Now we get to be real and honest; no matter what that means or what happens.
Once we are prepared to deal with whatever happens and give it credit we can go further. Learning how to deal with our emotions is a lot like the first time you ride a bike. There is a lot of fear, we generally fall down a few times and in the end we feel totally alive for having done it. You will likely fall down a few times before you get your emotions all figured out. In fact you may have a few major emotional outbursts before everything stabilizes. Always remember one important thing… you can always apologize to people after that happens. Don't worry if it happens; just take a moment to clear your mind and then go back and honestly apologize for whatever you said.
Learning to deal with our emotions is a lot like a pendulum. One moment it will swing far to one side, then the next it will swing far to the other. Back and forth it goes, back and forth. Eventually it will begin to settle in the middle and stop at the center point of its swing. This will also most likely happen as you learn to deal with your emotions… hence the emotional outburst that may or may not happen.
What is happening is that our minds will need to learn what is real and what is not. This takes trial and error. When we see that this one thing was wrong we will swing the other way. When we do something over there that is wrong we will swing back. However this time we will not swing as far over as we did the first time. This will happen over and over until we begin to get it right.
If we do not allow ourselves to feel whatever we feel during this period then our minds can not sort out right from wrong. This means that we will have a very hard time determining what is real and what is fake. However the easiest way to figure out if we are doing it right or not is the situation at hand.
If we can pull ourselves out of the situation for a moment and look at what is happening we can evaluate it. If the situation is one that should evoke sadness then what you should be feeling should connect to sadness. This may be a bit hard to figure out because remember some people laugh when they are really sad. However in the mix somewhere will be the feeling of being sad, even if it is not on the surface. Without this feeling then we are missing the point.
Of course if we also see that the situation requires a small amount of sadness and we feel like the world is crumbling… then we are missing the point as well. Even with the pendulum swing this will not go that far out of whack. This generally means that those fake emotions are coming out again and trying to take over.
By looking at the situation, even if we can only do it after it happened, then we can see if what we are doing seems appropriate to the situation at hand. Another way to know if we are doing it right is how the emotions themselves feel. If they feel honest and real then they likely are. In the event that they feel fake there is a good chance they are fake.
Real emotions also have a tendency to feel "full" or powerful. The reason is that real emotions are filled with a lot of stuff on the inside; fake ones are a lot like a balloon… big on the outside, yet do not have a lot in the middle.
There is also one last way to tell if what you are experiencing are real emotions or fake ones. That is how fast they onset or change. Real emotions, because they are filled up with things on the inside take time to grow and develop. They may happen fairly quickly, however there is still a time span from creation to onset. Fake ones just tend to pop into place. Mood swings by their very nature are Fake Emotions coming out to play. That is why they can change so completely so quickly. They really are just a hollow shell that looks and feels real.
The only time this comes into question is with anger itself. Anger is the only real emotion that can happen in a heartbeat. It does take time to build, however that time span can be very small when we have built up reasons to be angry. In the case of Anger we already built it up in the past and now it sort of waits half formed to come out. This is not a bad thing, it is simply the nature of Anger; which is also why it is seen as a negative emotion.
Of course Anger can also drop like a stone. The difference is that with Anger it dropped because we ran out of energy. Most of us have probably come down from being angry and know how tired we felt. This is because it eats up a great deal of energy when we use it. The reason it drops is not because it is fake, it simply has nothing left. If we are finished with Anger and feel recharged, then it was Fake Anger. If we feel totally spent and depleted it was Real Anger.
Learning to deal with your emotions will take time. Do not rush it and while doing it take some time to learn from it. You might be surprised by what you discover about yourself! You are also fully capable of doing this all if you simply believe you are. It may take some time and effort, however you are totally worth it… trust me!
Copyright April 2005
ISBN 0-9739566-0-7
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