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April 21 - June 3, 2019
The fear we experience, however, is a derivative of our now-inherent fear of being excluded from our tribe.
These otherwise innocuous encounters with one another still, even today, are assessed as threats to our survival and the survival of our offspring.
there are also grades or degrees of fear, which are often labelled as such things as anger, depression, sadness, anxiety, and frustration. (If we examine our thoughts, when we are in one of these states, we will discover that our thoughts are generated from something we fear.
If you find yourself in one of these states, ask yourself, “What am I afraid of,” and listen for the answer.)
Weakened emotional intelligence can be detected in how regularly we rate ourselves and others as perfectly bad or perfectly good and things as magnificently awful for not meeting the ideal standard we set for how we believe the world must be.
Often, if something we are not comfortable with happens in the twenty-four hour day we live in, we rate that day as bad. If everything goes well, we rate that day is good. We have a tendency to do the same thing to ourselves. If we make a mistake, we are bad. If we do not make a mistake, we are good.
Schema means shape, or more generally, plan.
Our recollections of ourselves are generally biased in ways that tend to validate our self–schema, while vigorously rejecting any information that conflicts with our affirming self–image.
Opinions can serve to give us information; but they cannot serve the purpose of defining our human value.
the pendulum has swung away. We now find every opportunity to praise our children, avoiding any suggestion that the child may not have succeeded, believing instead that the avoidance of critique and criticism is essential to healthy child development. Both approaches are extremes and inherently flawed. Neither approach represents the real world.
We are never perfect. We are all works-in-progress.
Even an Olympic gold medalist fails at something. Likely even on the same day s/he received h/er gold medal. We must train our children to make this fair and balanced self–evaluation for themselves, helping them to grow into more self–accepting, un–ratable, neither-good-nor-bad, adults.
Emotional intelligence theory may be best understood as a multidimensional system encompassing not only thinking but also the body’s physical response to thought. We call this whole-person view the bio–psycho–social (BPS) model.
Emotional problems interact with the body’s functioning and often compromise the individual’s physical health problems. Likewise, physical health problems can easily complicate emotional health.
For example, depression, by itself may not actually cause liver problems; but a depressed person may turn to alcohol and develop an addiction and suffer liver damage. Furthermore, it has been shown that Type–2 diabetes has a correlation to lifestyle choices, particularly food selections and physical inactivity. Without a complete assessment of a patient’s way of life, medical and pharmaceutical interventions would only help to alleviate the biological component of the patient’s illness and neglect to recognize or treat the contributing psychological factors resulting from every–day life.
Human biology and psychology do not exist separately.
adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine, the three essential hormones necessary to propel the animal to safety, if need be.
your automatic system demonstrates its effectiveness at protecting you from danger.
the adrenal medulla produces a hormonal cascade that results in the secretion of catecholamine.
humans will respond to ridicule, criticism, judgment and disrespect in much the same way as a deer responds to the SNAP! of a twig in the wood.
Time has not altered our human blueprint for self–preservation, leaving us with little skill for distinguishing between threats to our lives and emotional threats to our ego and our self–image.
Thought activates a part of the brain (the limbic system) and does one of two things: maintains homeostasis (balance) or activates a protective response (F3).
You feel yourself beginning to shake (adrenaline and norepinephrine are entering our bloodstream and circulating through our viscera. Your heart is responding). Your voice rises. “I already told you I wanted to make an appointment to see the doctor,” you hear yourself saying. (Sustaining the thoughts that prompted the stress response continues to pump more and more adrenaline and norepinephrine through your body.) You hear, “No need to get angry. Name?” The hair on the back of our neck seems to stand on end. (This is Nature’s way of preparing us to cool our skin as we progress toward our
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But when stressful thinking is constant, ever-present and we constantly feel under attack, also known as chronic stress that stress reaction stays turned on. The long-term activation of the stress-response, and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones, can disrupt almost all our body's processes, placing us at increased risk of numerous health problems, including: anxiety, depression, digestive problems, heart disease, sleep problems, weight gain and memory and concentration impairment.
A steady diet of long–term stress, however, without the requisite period of emotional and physical rest and relaxation, places an unusual burden on our capacity to rebound. Nature never intended the stress response to last as long as we often sustain it in modern times.
Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. –Eckhart Tolle
“You made me so angry!” “I did nothing of the kind.” “You are obstinate.” “How is that a problem for you?” “You should take responsibility for how you make me feel.” “It’s hard enough for me to take responsibility for how I make myself feel.” “I think you’re insane.” “I think I can live contentedly with your opinion.”
we can be happy some of the time; but we can be content all of the time.
The concept of happiness comes from the Norse word hap, meaning luck or chance.
Contentment, by contrast, is derived from the Latin contentus and is translated as being satisfied.
consciously pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing it.
Acceptance is the key to contentment.
We must learn to accept everything we experience as if we had asked for it ourselves. Whether we like it or not it cannot be the first question we ask ourselves. It is what it is and liking or disliking it contributes nothing to the reality of its truth. Resistance to truth makes two difficulties from one. Not only do we have the situation we are facing, but we now have our resistance to the situation to contend with.
contentment is a process of making peace with the truth that exists in the moment, but believing that change is possible.
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear is not 'yours.' They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you. –Eckhart Tolle
The simple fact is all behavior has to have a purpose. People will not behave in ways that do not bring them some kind of reward. If behavior does not bring a desired result, behavior will go extinct.
Extinction is a process of ignoring behavior, forcing it to die away, encouraging alternative activities that are more along the line of acquiring an increased aptitude for frustration tolerance.
Once it is started, it is much more diffic...
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Nature leaves the initial process of acquiring emotional custom on–going for the first 25–or–so years of human life. It is not unusual to see a seventeen-year-old behaving as if s/he were a five-year-old. The seventeen-year-old is still in a stage of neural development where testing behavi...
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As the years progress, people will actually react forcefully against change that requires even the slightest modification in thinking and behaving. In fact, people will defend their premise for expressing a particular thought and emotion at a particular time with a great deal of fervor, even if they know it isn’t bringing good results.
We might call these social-emotional customs our honorable beliefs. Ideas about patriotism, religion, politeness, gender roles, sexual behavior and even what we eat and drink on Friday can make up a portion of our honorable beliefs, passed down to us through our encounters with others.
Our honorable beliefs are made up of such things as what we believe should, ought, must, has to and needs to happen in order for us to be happy in our lives.
For instance, we may hold the following absolute musts: We must be polite and others must treat us politely. We must be helpful and others must also be helpful. We must be respected and others must respect me. We must never lie and others must never lie to me. We must conform and others must conform.
The fact is, people perceive what others do and say and they make judgments about those behaviors. They think about them, and they generate an emotion that they believe is supportive of their judgment.
“Yes, you also embarrassed me.” “The extent of my power over you is unsettling.”
“Kid, if it weren’t our baldness, it would be something else. If you all of a sudden sprouted a new head of hair, you would find something else to condemn yourself about. It isn’t your hair that you’re worrying yourself about. It is ridicule, plain and simple. You’re afraid of being viewed as flawed and imperfect. Let’s work on that and leave this foolishness; but let’s leave your hair out of it.”
To get better, I would have to pay less attention to what people thought of me and more to what I thought about myself, my imperfections and my willingness to accept that everyone is flawed in some way.
Somewhere, somehow we’ve learned that we must keep an emotional distance from ourselves. We seem to be in contempt of our own guidance.
Nothing changes without some level of risk.
