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johnpalmerThere’s a concept I’d like to describe, and I pull it from shamanism, but, it seems to me that it’s something that might be the basis of things like art therapy, where creating art can help people get in touch with their feelings, and sometimes the thoughts and reasons for unpleasant emotions.
When I enter the spirit world, I start with a fixed set of images, to help ground me, into saying “I’m not in ordinary reality any longer.” Well, that’s what I’m suggesting to you.
In this exercise, use a starting image of an “emotional landscape” where you can imagine yourself in any form you like – as a person, as a tree, as a flowering plant, as a spirit of the forest, or the earth, or the water; or anything you like, but, obviously, it’s best if it’s something that belongs in a “landscape.”
When you enter the emotional landscape, I’m asking you to enter a meditative, and, possibly, spiritual state (if you believe in the spirit). First, imagine yourself, but, when I say “imagine yourself,” I don’t mean “imagine yourself looking like your fantasy-you” – I want you to imagine your very real, very human, and possibly, deeply injured, self. You don’t have to imagine yourself as crippled with injury, just because you are emotionally damaged, but, you can’t imagine your damage away.
Then, if you want to cover that real, possibly injured, self with a nice fantasy-you, that’s fine. Here, you can dodge the unpleasantness of ordinary reality, but you can’t dodge the unpleasantness of your emotional reality, because that’s the point of this sort of exercise.
Where are you, emotionally, right now? That’s your self. What is hurting you right now? Maybe you had a small spat with your mom or stepmom, nothing serious, but you’re annoyed. Maybe your boss has been making random, thoughtless, comments, and you’re hurt and angry, but afraid to raise your concerns. Maybe you’re very happy in a lot of ways, too – don’t forget to enumerate the good stuff.
Some people, “enumerating the good stuff (in your emotional life)” they call “expressing gratitude.” I don’t like that concept – I’m in constant pain, and I’m really not grateful for another day of constant pain. That said: there are happy things in my life; if I don’t celebrate them, their happiness will dim, and even become lost for a while. So: don’t forget to enumerate the good things, including those you fear you may have lost! Also: if you express gratitude, and it’s a happy-making thing for you, go ahead and express that, instead of doing some dull enumeration. We depressed people need to do the dull stuff that you normal folks find happy-making, because sometimes, what’s happy-making for you is really, really hard for us.
Okay, so, you are trying to picture your emotional self. You can do that any way you want. Let’s say you imagine yourself as an ordinary person, and you see your “landscape” as a yard. You could imagine the anger, pain, and fear, from your boss as a badly ingrown toenail – it sounds ridiculously small, but it can cripple you, quite literally! That’s good imagination; something small-seeming impairs your function.
There’s another level you can take it to. You can imagine your boss as something completely separate from yourself. Maybe your boss is a tree, and shading certain underlings, so they never get a chance to grow – that’s one complicated mess of feelings. Maybe your boss is a mildly poisonous spider that sometimes bites you, and the bites hurt a lot, but, it’s just you who gets bitten. That’s a completely different complicated mess of feelings, you see? And that other level – thinking about your emotional problem as something separate, and seeing how it affects others, as well as you, that helps you understand your situation better.
Now: here, you can have full compassion for yourself, and you must. Let’s say that you realize you’ve been feeling down – that’s never anything to feel badly about. Okay, but, in addition to feeling down, you’ve been wallowing in misery – keeping yourself in a down/depressed state. That’s something you can feel badly about, but this is not the time to do more than gently remind yourself, no wallowing.
You shouldn’t wallow in unpleasant emotions, but, sometimes, we human beings end up wallowing, sometimes without consciously realizing it. So: you can’t be dishonest, and say “I was not wallowing!” Your emotional landscape isn’t your mom, judging a fight between you and a sibling; your emotional landscape is your personal truth, and it doesn’t care about the excuses you make. If you were wallowing, you should confess that you’re wallowing, and then, ask why.
For me, the answer is usually “I’m so effing tired” which is a good answer – tiredness, not habit, caused me to wallow in pain. But that’s not an excuse; tiredness makes it harder not to wallow, but wallowing still isn’t good. Well: you don’t need an answer. Not yet. For now, it’s okay if you figured out that, first, you were feeling down, and second, yes, you’d been wallowing.
Go one more level out, if you can. Were you feeling bad because someone spilled bleach at the ice cream parlor, and you couldn’t get ice cream? Maybe you’d been looking forward to ice cream all week, and this was your one chance, and it was blown. That’s okay – you can comfort yourself, reminding yourself it’s okay to be sad, but, reminding yourself that, hey, it was just ice cream. Maybe you can splurge on something not ice cream, if that will console you. Maybe you can just acknowledge your disappointment, and feel it fading. Or maybe your disappointment is linked to something completely unexpected – if so, you can keep on exploring.
The idea of imagining an emotional landscape is to give you two ways to imagine something that bothers you. You can say “I’m feeling down,” or, you can notice that your emotional landscape doesn’t look as pretty, as perky, as usual, you don’t have the same happiness when you move into it. You can say “I’m hurt,” but realize you’re actually angry; or, that you’re angry, and you realize you’re actually hurt.
I said this borrows from art therapy, but I didn’t mean that it borrowed heavily. Part of art therapy is trying to provide some visual, or tactile, or otherwise meaningful, piece of artwork, that helps you understand things you might not have seen without it. Well, it’s the same thing here. If you look at your “self” and you picture yourself as bright and perky (because you try to come off that way), but you realize that’s not quite right – the way an artist decides a brushstroke or line isn’t quite right – you get to dig into your mind, and your imagination, for what’s “not quite right”.
Another thing about your emotional landscape is, it’s a “no BS” zone. If your boss says hurtful things, about mistakes you made in the past, you can’t say “it’s not like I ever made those mistakes!” but you can say “it’s been far too long for my boss to hold this over my head!” And that’s a true statement, if they were minor mistakes during your onboarding, and you’ve got a year’s experience under your belt. It’s not true if you made the mistakes last week! Still, that’s the point: in the first case (minor mistakes during onboarding, with plenty of experience), you have every right to say “I’m experienced now, stop treating me like a newbie,” and in the latter, you can say “you don’t need to remind me – they’re seared into my memory. Please, watch me for a while before criticizing.”
You can do more here. You can realize that you have two friends who are in conflict, and you can think about how you feel about both, and their actions, and so forth. You can imagine ways in which you might modify your relationship to either. One warning: just like in the “my boss is saying mean things,” example, you can imagine a conversation in your emotional landscape, that won’t ever happen in the real world. You can hope one friend will understand your concerns, but s/he might not, right?
Always remember: when you imagine your emotional landscape, reality must take precedence over hope. One of the worst intellectual mistakes you can make in this life is “wishful thinking,” assuming something is true, because you want it to be. Well, you can see how easily that mistake can lead you astray in real life, but it can mess you up even more in your emotional life. Sometimes, you think someone cares about you, and knows you, and they don’t know you well, or, they never really developed any caring for you. Well – if you treat them as a close friend in your emotional landscape, you’re setting yourself up to be hurt, both by this “someone,” and, by your own imagination – you run the risk of feeling betrayed, because your imagination set you up to expect kindness and comfort, when you might receive neither.
Again: your emotional landscape must be a no-BS zone. Oh, don’t get me wrong – you will believe in a bit of BS here and there, just as I did (and still do!). But when you recognize BS as BS, you need to challenge it, and demand more evidence. That’s what a “no-BS” zone means – not that you can’t bring any in, just, you try not to carry all of it back out, if you can avoid it.
There’s one final thing you can do, but this is a very advanced topic. One day, during my honeymoon, I woke up, and I was hurt by an action – really, an “inaction” – taken by my friends. There was a nasty, hideous, ugly voice saying they didn’t love me, or care for me, and that I was too weird, and needy, for that to change.
Now: I was at my best, so I could easily put a mental shield over my sense of self, and I refused to let that ugly voice land a real punch. “NO!” I responded, “they didn’t know what to do, in a situation like mine, in the circumstances that showed up! I have to explain to them, why my life is different from theirs, and how to treat me in that circumstance!”
This method of dealing with emotions is partly “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” and partly “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy”. Cognitive, you can see – my brain is telling me to feel utterly alone and abandoned; I’m saying, “no, that’s what normal people do, when they don’t know better.” I’m challenging the thinking that says I was abandoned.
Acceptance, and Commitment, means I accept who and what I am – I’m so wiped out I can’t manage 3 days of socialization without my body showing horrible effects – and it means I try (“commit”) to live the best life I can, given my horrible state. That means I have to explain to these friends, so we can socialize better in the future.
Or I would, if I was ever up for socializing. Which, well, I’m not. The real point is, if you treat your emotions as real, and respect them as entities, and are honest with them, they become more of an ally than an enemy (though in fact, they’re just part of you, neither ally nor enemy). When you are more at peace with them, you have greater control over them. You can say “I’m not really angry about this,” and your anger might *poof* vanish away. Oh, you’ll still feel a bit annoyed, but, you’ll have let the actual anger go. You can hear that a friend, and an ex-crush, are getting married, and feel a sting of jealousy, but still show only happiness for the moment of the announcement, then go cuss out fate and let your jealousy go over time.
So: first, you imagine a landscape, or, if you prefer, “a place” – a place where you can see strength and weakness, harm, and wholeness, injuries and pains, somehow. A natural landscape works well, since you can see healthy or sickly plants and animals. While you’re there, you’re trying to get in touch with your feelings – both visually, and emotionally. You want full compassion for yourself – whatever feelings you are feeling are fine and dandy to feel, at least, within your own head. You also want a no-BS zone, so you don’t play like everything is fine in emotion-land, when you really need to do work.
The goals of this practice are to investigate your feelings on a personal level, and then on an interpersonal level, and then, to be able to go deeper, and find the sources of emotional issues you might be having – and, to find sources of emotional strengths you can exploit.
This sort of exercise can also help you defend yourself against negative emotions – you get more in touch, more in tune, with your emotions, and you know what really does hurt you, or anger you, or make you sad, so, when you look at a situation, you can decide not to let certain emotions, that you know don’t fit, attach to you and harm you.
Some of you are asking “but how? How does this work?” and, alas, I have to say it’s experiential. If you can relax, and contemplate your emotions, and visualize them, you’ll start to gain a vague understanding of the value – even if it’s not comfortable right now. If it’s a good tool for you (and not all tools are good for any given person!) it shouldn’t be too terribly hard to start seeing minor values in it.
Part of it works via the methods I mentioned – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The two are closely related – ACT is a slightly different perspective (in my humble opinion) based on radical acceptance of who you are, and where you are, before you start trying to make changes; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy strikes me as more “we don’t care about that ‘who you are’, you know yourself well enough!” And that’s true, for most people, most of the time.
Some folks, some of the time, need to go deeper, and find other techniques, something more than the cognitive (thinking) and behavioral (acting), and need some “why?” Well… this technique is meant to help you with some of the why, and maybe more.
Here’s hoping you can use it in good health!
When I enter the spirit world, I start with a fixed set of images, to help ground me, into saying “I’m not in ordinary reality any longer.” Well, that’s what I’m suggesting to you.
In this exercise, use a starting image of an “emotional landscape” where you can imagine yourself in any form you like – as a person, as a tree, as a flowering plant, as a spirit of the forest, or the earth, or the water; or anything you like, but, obviously, it’s best if it’s something that belongs in a “landscape.”
When you enter the emotional landscape, I’m asking you to enter a meditative, and, possibly, spiritual state (if you believe in the spirit). First, imagine yourself, but, when I say “imagine yourself,” I don’t mean “imagine yourself looking like your fantasy-you” – I want you to imagine your very real, very human, and possibly, deeply injured, self. You don’t have to imagine yourself as crippled with injury, just because you are emotionally damaged, but, you can’t imagine your damage away.
Then, if you want to cover that real, possibly injured, self with a nice fantasy-you, that’s fine. Here, you can dodge the unpleasantness of ordinary reality, but you can’t dodge the unpleasantness of your emotional reality, because that’s the point of this sort of exercise.
Where are you, emotionally, right now? That’s your self. What is hurting you right now? Maybe you had a small spat with your mom or stepmom, nothing serious, but you’re annoyed. Maybe your boss has been making random, thoughtless, comments, and you’re hurt and angry, but afraid to raise your concerns. Maybe you’re very happy in a lot of ways, too – don’t forget to enumerate the good stuff.
Some people, “enumerating the good stuff (in your emotional life)” they call “expressing gratitude.” I don’t like that concept – I’m in constant pain, and I’m really not grateful for another day of constant pain. That said: there are happy things in my life; if I don’t celebrate them, their happiness will dim, and even become lost for a while. So: don’t forget to enumerate the good things, including those you fear you may have lost! Also: if you express gratitude, and it’s a happy-making thing for you, go ahead and express that, instead of doing some dull enumeration. We depressed people need to do the dull stuff that you normal folks find happy-making, because sometimes, what’s happy-making for you is really, really hard for us.
Okay, so, you are trying to picture your emotional self. You can do that any way you want. Let’s say you imagine yourself as an ordinary person, and you see your “landscape” as a yard. You could imagine the anger, pain, and fear, from your boss as a badly ingrown toenail – it sounds ridiculously small, but it can cripple you, quite literally! That’s good imagination; something small-seeming impairs your function.
There’s another level you can take it to. You can imagine your boss as something completely separate from yourself. Maybe your boss is a tree, and shading certain underlings, so they never get a chance to grow – that’s one complicated mess of feelings. Maybe your boss is a mildly poisonous spider that sometimes bites you, and the bites hurt a lot, but, it’s just you who gets bitten. That’s a completely different complicated mess of feelings, you see? And that other level – thinking about your emotional problem as something separate, and seeing how it affects others, as well as you, that helps you understand your situation better.
Now: here, you can have full compassion for yourself, and you must. Let’s say that you realize you’ve been feeling down – that’s never anything to feel badly about. Okay, but, in addition to feeling down, you’ve been wallowing in misery – keeping yourself in a down/depressed state. That’s something you can feel badly about, but this is not the time to do more than gently remind yourself, no wallowing.
You shouldn’t wallow in unpleasant emotions, but, sometimes, we human beings end up wallowing, sometimes without consciously realizing it. So: you can’t be dishonest, and say “I was not wallowing!” Your emotional landscape isn’t your mom, judging a fight between you and a sibling; your emotional landscape is your personal truth, and it doesn’t care about the excuses you make. If you were wallowing, you should confess that you’re wallowing, and then, ask why.
For me, the answer is usually “I’m so effing tired” which is a good answer – tiredness, not habit, caused me to wallow in pain. But that’s not an excuse; tiredness makes it harder not to wallow, but wallowing still isn’t good. Well: you don’t need an answer. Not yet. For now, it’s okay if you figured out that, first, you were feeling down, and second, yes, you’d been wallowing.
Go one more level out, if you can. Were you feeling bad because someone spilled bleach at the ice cream parlor, and you couldn’t get ice cream? Maybe you’d been looking forward to ice cream all week, and this was your one chance, and it was blown. That’s okay – you can comfort yourself, reminding yourself it’s okay to be sad, but, reminding yourself that, hey, it was just ice cream. Maybe you can splurge on something not ice cream, if that will console you. Maybe you can just acknowledge your disappointment, and feel it fading. Or maybe your disappointment is linked to something completely unexpected – if so, you can keep on exploring.
The idea of imagining an emotional landscape is to give you two ways to imagine something that bothers you. You can say “I’m feeling down,” or, you can notice that your emotional landscape doesn’t look as pretty, as perky, as usual, you don’t have the same happiness when you move into it. You can say “I’m hurt,” but realize you’re actually angry; or, that you’re angry, and you realize you’re actually hurt.
I said this borrows from art therapy, but I didn’t mean that it borrowed heavily. Part of art therapy is trying to provide some visual, or tactile, or otherwise meaningful, piece of artwork, that helps you understand things you might not have seen without it. Well, it’s the same thing here. If you look at your “self” and you picture yourself as bright and perky (because you try to come off that way), but you realize that’s not quite right – the way an artist decides a brushstroke or line isn’t quite right – you get to dig into your mind, and your imagination, for what’s “not quite right”.
Another thing about your emotional landscape is, it’s a “no BS” zone. If your boss says hurtful things, about mistakes you made in the past, you can’t say “it’s not like I ever made those mistakes!” but you can say “it’s been far too long for my boss to hold this over my head!” And that’s a true statement, if they were minor mistakes during your onboarding, and you’ve got a year’s experience under your belt. It’s not true if you made the mistakes last week! Still, that’s the point: in the first case (minor mistakes during onboarding, with plenty of experience), you have every right to say “I’m experienced now, stop treating me like a newbie,” and in the latter, you can say “you don’t need to remind me – they’re seared into my memory. Please, watch me for a while before criticizing.”
You can do more here. You can realize that you have two friends who are in conflict, and you can think about how you feel about both, and their actions, and so forth. You can imagine ways in which you might modify your relationship to either. One warning: just like in the “my boss is saying mean things,” example, you can imagine a conversation in your emotional landscape, that won’t ever happen in the real world. You can hope one friend will understand your concerns, but s/he might not, right?
Always remember: when you imagine your emotional landscape, reality must take precedence over hope. One of the worst intellectual mistakes you can make in this life is “wishful thinking,” assuming something is true, because you want it to be. Well, you can see how easily that mistake can lead you astray in real life, but it can mess you up even more in your emotional life. Sometimes, you think someone cares about you, and knows you, and they don’t know you well, or, they never really developed any caring for you. Well – if you treat them as a close friend in your emotional landscape, you’re setting yourself up to be hurt, both by this “someone,” and, by your own imagination – you run the risk of feeling betrayed, because your imagination set you up to expect kindness and comfort, when you might receive neither.
Again: your emotional landscape must be a no-BS zone. Oh, don’t get me wrong – you will believe in a bit of BS here and there, just as I did (and still do!). But when you recognize BS as BS, you need to challenge it, and demand more evidence. That’s what a “no-BS” zone means – not that you can’t bring any in, just, you try not to carry all of it back out, if you can avoid it.
There’s one final thing you can do, but this is a very advanced topic. One day, during my honeymoon, I woke up, and I was hurt by an action – really, an “inaction” – taken by my friends. There was a nasty, hideous, ugly voice saying they didn’t love me, or care for me, and that I was too weird, and needy, for that to change.
Now: I was at my best, so I could easily put a mental shield over my sense of self, and I refused to let that ugly voice land a real punch. “NO!” I responded, “they didn’t know what to do, in a situation like mine, in the circumstances that showed up! I have to explain to them, why my life is different from theirs, and how to treat me in that circumstance!”
This method of dealing with emotions is partly “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” and partly “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy”. Cognitive, you can see – my brain is telling me to feel utterly alone and abandoned; I’m saying, “no, that’s what normal people do, when they don’t know better.” I’m challenging the thinking that says I was abandoned.
Acceptance, and Commitment, means I accept who and what I am – I’m so wiped out I can’t manage 3 days of socialization without my body showing horrible effects – and it means I try (“commit”) to live the best life I can, given my horrible state. That means I have to explain to these friends, so we can socialize better in the future.
Or I would, if I was ever up for socializing. Which, well, I’m not. The real point is, if you treat your emotions as real, and respect them as entities, and are honest with them, they become more of an ally than an enemy (though in fact, they’re just part of you, neither ally nor enemy). When you are more at peace with them, you have greater control over them. You can say “I’m not really angry about this,” and your anger might *poof* vanish away. Oh, you’ll still feel a bit annoyed, but, you’ll have let the actual anger go. You can hear that a friend, and an ex-crush, are getting married, and feel a sting of jealousy, but still show only happiness for the moment of the announcement, then go cuss out fate and let your jealousy go over time.
So: first, you imagine a landscape, or, if you prefer, “a place” – a place where you can see strength and weakness, harm, and wholeness, injuries and pains, somehow. A natural landscape works well, since you can see healthy or sickly plants and animals. While you’re there, you’re trying to get in touch with your feelings – both visually, and emotionally. You want full compassion for yourself – whatever feelings you are feeling are fine and dandy to feel, at least, within your own head. You also want a no-BS zone, so you don’t play like everything is fine in emotion-land, when you really need to do work.
The goals of this practice are to investigate your feelings on a personal level, and then on an interpersonal level, and then, to be able to go deeper, and find the sources of emotional issues you might be having – and, to find sources of emotional strengths you can exploit.
This sort of exercise can also help you defend yourself against negative emotions – you get more in touch, more in tune, with your emotions, and you know what really does hurt you, or anger you, or make you sad, so, when you look at a situation, you can decide not to let certain emotions, that you know don’t fit, attach to you and harm you.
Some of you are asking “but how? How does this work?” and, alas, I have to say it’s experiential. If you can relax, and contemplate your emotions, and visualize them, you’ll start to gain a vague understanding of the value – even if it’s not comfortable right now. If it’s a good tool for you (and not all tools are good for any given person!) it shouldn’t be too terribly hard to start seeing minor values in it.
Part of it works via the methods I mentioned – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The two are closely related – ACT is a slightly different perspective (in my humble opinion) based on radical acceptance of who you are, and where you are, before you start trying to make changes; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy strikes me as more “we don’t care about that ‘who you are’, you know yourself well enough!” And that’s true, for most people, most of the time.
Some folks, some of the time, need to go deeper, and find other techniques, something more than the cognitive (thinking) and behavioral (acting), and need some “why?” Well… this technique is meant to help you with some of the why, and maybe more.
Here’s hoping you can use it in good health!
