Social Engineering Blogs

Let us recap what we’ve learned so far, my friends: Negative emotions, desirable or not, justified or not, often are not useful. They are not helpful, and unless part of some sort of grieving process, will not add to our humanity in any way. We don’t need anger, or sadness, or fear. But listen carefully:

I’m not telling you that your emotions are ever wrong. You must understand: You are right in believing whatever you believe, and you are right in feeling just the way you feel. You would also be equally right in believing the complete opposite, or in feeling completely different from how you are feeling.
Nor am I telling you to deny yourself your emotions. In fact, no matter what we choose to believe and choose to feel, it’s an important first step to become aware of these emotions and accept them. We shouldn’t fault ourselves for having emotions, no matter what they may be.
Never deny having negative emotions nor try to keep them secret or hidden, because no matter if you choose to share your thoughts and emotions or not – with your friends, your therapist, even yourself – they will still be precisely what you are thinking and feeling. Until you can bear to look at them, you can’t change them. 
Remember that all suffering is due to negative and distorted thinking. Though certain ‘bad’ emotions can have benefits in certain situations (making them what we call adaptive emotions), whenever negative emotions are tearing you down and you just end up feeling awful as a result, it’s because of distorted thoughts that are intrinsically unhelpful.

You already know all of this, so why am I telling you again?

Because, at some point in our lives, we all will have thought, “Yeah, I feel bad. But that’s only because my problems are real.” You may have thought precisely that while reading through the last two lessons. You may also have just subtly nodded your head in agreement with that quote because you are thinking that right now. Yeah, we all often think this way. And when think that, we are always wrong.

“So what, I don’t have real problems?”

Well, of course you do. We all do. We all have something wrong in our lives at every possible moment, as we always have some things going for us. But our ‘real’ problems aren’t the, well, real problem, nor is solving them a solution to how you feel. Telling ourselves we have a problem is nothing more than a factual statement, a reality. But the moment it feels like a problem to us, when we suffer because of it, that’s when the problem is no longer the cause of our hurt. That’s when our negative thinking has kicked in and gives the problems in our lives power over our happiness.

There are many examples of very real problems that can cause equally real discomfort and sadness: things like losing our job, loss of a loved one, or terminal illness. These cause a tangible amount of discomfort and detriment to our lives. But this discomfort, this detriment we experience, does not cause our suffering: we suffer because of what these things mean to us, and what they mean to our self-esteem.

Loss of a loved one causes profound sadness, which can be a very intense thing to go through. But sadness, on its own, is neither good nor bad. Grieving when a loved one dies can be a profound, humanizing, spiritual and deeply influential experience. When your grief is accompanied by intense stress, a sense of helplessness, hopelessness, and even physical pain, this is needless suffering. It has no positive effects, it just prolongs the hurt.

When recovering from any wound or trauma, we set out to process it in a healthy way. What we frequently do, however, is equate how we feel to who we are. Because of this, if anyone attempts to change how we feel – including we ourselves – we feel we are under attack, and we will literally defend our own person and our emotions as if our lives depended on it, which is what we think is the case.

But it isn’t true! 

This belief is a pervasive untruth that we have to unlearn, because there is nothing to gain by lengthening your suffering. There is no sense in pressuring yourself to feel those negative things, just because you feel it appropriate given your ‘real’ circumstances.

It is irresponsible and cruel even to force that pain on ourselves, because no matter how ‘real’ our problems are, our suffering is our own personal choice. We can choose to let go of it, as long as we learn how to do it. And when we do it, what is our reward?

a) A sensation of closure,

b) where we will feel peaceful and warm looking back on the situation,

c) without fear and

d) without losing any part of who we are.

That is how it will be when we let go of the illusion of ‘Real’ problems, when we take responsibility for our own emotional well-being, and when we assume command of our own thinking. It’ll all be ours, the moment when we choose to get our Mind Under Control.

Introducing: Rethinking

Let us start of with another bold claim: Feeling bad is not down to emotions at all. As David D. Burns, M.D. puts it in ‘Feeling Good‘: “A change in how you feel is of no more causal relevance [to depression or feeling bad itself] than a runny nose is when you have a cold.”

Feeling bad is a symptom – a consequence – of bad thinking! Distorted negative thoughts underlie every stressful feeling we’ve ever experienced. Have you ever felt sad and cried during a movie, or felt triumphant when the hero finally beats the bad guy at the end of a good book? You were sad or happy then – but did it ever make you feel bad? Did you feel stressed or pained?

You see, positive emotions can accompany negative events, and vice versa. But every painful or stressful emotion is always and necessarily accompanied by negative thoughts. Most of them are completely involuntary and automatic, and usually hidden from us by our subconscious!

Let’s start looking at emotions in a new light: There are no good or bad emotions, only positive or negative experiences. Emotions are neither positive nor negative until they either cause us or relieve us of stress or pain.

Any emotions that are traditionally seen as either good (like excitement, or the feeling of being in love) or bad (like anger and sadness) can also be both positive and negative, depending on… Our attitudes, thoughts and perceptions!

We need only look at the friend who laments falling in love again, making another one of those “mistakes,” and hates herself for it! Or look at someone like Nick Vujicic, who thinks a life without limbs can actually be a blessing in disguise!

There are no such things as good or bad emotions, good or bad thoughts, or good or bad events. The only question that you should ever want to ask yourself:

“What I feel, what I think, what I believe over what is happening: Is it helping me, or not?”

Are your thoughts helping you? Is your anger doing something useful, or just causing you more pain? If it is helpful, it’s worth keeping. If not, it’s stress you don’t need. Whether or not something is helpful is the only question worth asking.

Negative thoughts are destructive. Negativity causes your mood to become gloomy, your self-image to crumble, your body and willpower to become exhausted, and your actions and emotions to defeat you. Nothing breeds negativity like negativity, and this negativity is due to a lifelong cycle of negative thoughts that we were never taught to strip of their power, because we have never taken the time to convince ourselves that they aren’t helpful in the slightest.

So, our goal is to trade in our automatic and start switching the gears manually! Change your thoughts, change your reality. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, if it were all so easy as thinking positively, then people’s often well-intended encouragement to “cheer up” or “look on the bright side” would actually be a pleasant experience, and not the unnerving and often counterproductive guilt-trip it can be. Furthermore, if it were that easy, why can people be stuck with their negative thoughts for sometimes an entire lifetime?

Well, there’s a wrong and right way for doing anything, and practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice does. Even the best of intentions don’t always give the best results, so together we will learn a method that allows you to do things right.

But before we get started with that, let’s get rid of one more seemingly intuitive, but completely inaccurate lies we’ve learned and maintained over the course of our lifetime: the persistent untruth of having ‘real problems.’

Let’s talk about The Problem With ‘Real’ Problems.