On Addressing Emotional Conflict
I am not going to pretend to be an expert at doing this. I am not. I have only done it once that I can remember, and that was today. But I do want to discuss the practice as a whole, and for me, that starts with a lack of awareness. I am no stranger to negative emotions and states of mind; the hits for me are guilt, shame and just general anxiety. My body has equally unpleasant, distinctive feelings that can also be surprisingly insightful into how I feel about something that’s just happened. There is sometimes a presupposed victim, a physical manifestation of my ill mood, and it is these cases I now see myself able to correct. I’ll get into how before exploring the other kind.
It helps to recognise the trappings of mental negativity in its early stages. Let’s start with the example of guilt, which I feel rear its grotesque little head all too often. Going back to that recognition, the first step is, as always, to arrange all the facts as I know them. How do I feel? Why do I feel this way? Is there anything I can learn from this? Is there anything I can do for any wronged parties? Is there anything I can do to alleviate this bad feeling within me? These are all the questions I choose from. The more myopic ones tend to take centre-stage in my mind, as is feeling elimination prioritised over personal growth. Today, though, there was something different in the way I approached this mental interrogation. I answered a question I’d never done more than recognise as inconvenient. Actually, I combined two of them. Suddenly, I thought, ‘Is there something I can do that makes me and someone else feel better?’.
And there was. It wasn’t an easy way out – I didn’t expect it to be. But like a lot of behaviour I’ve written about here, that first success is invaluable; it instils the knowledge in me that this is a doable thing that brings about a good result. I think this is a recent behavioural development of mine that has come into focus as I only now start pursuing better outcomes, while conscious of and willing to expend the sizeable effort required.
While I don’t want to diminish the progress that’s being made, I do want to circle back to a point from earlier – what if there is no person attached to my feeling? I don’t expect this to come off as a surprise, but I do a lot of things that I later regret. Rarely that much later. In those cases, there isn’t a person, an avatar of my discomfort to whom I can appeal. The questions I laid out earlier grow fewer in number, and the feeling becomes less something I can overcome and more a pain to endure. For now, though, that’s something I’m willing to live with. There is always the welcome by-product of possibly learning a lesson, but it would be arrogant to try and avoid all pain. It’s an evolutionary tool – it’s not beautiful or elegant, but it’s functional, and so are we. Anything else is a temporary comfort.