Emotions and Personal Growth

How do you change particular emotions that create problems for you? How do you come to have emotions that make sense?

Let’s start with two examples:

Alexa wishes she could be more assertive, but she is terrified of displeasing people. She avoids confrontation. When she does ask for something, even something small, she feels guilty and ashamed. The prospect of telling a waiter that he brought the wrong salad dressing fills her with fear and dread. Alexa wishes she could feel more comfortable asserting herself. Her feelings cause a lot of trouble in her life.

          Anthelme gets terribly defensive whenever anyone corrects him. He cannot help feeling threatened and combative. His anger when corrected has cost him three jobs in the past year. Anthelme wishes he could accept criticism and correction gracefully. His emotions are bringing him to financial ruin.

Changing Powerful Emotions Is a Four-step Process.

Step 1: Discover. We need to unpack our troubling emotions. We need to tease out the embedded attitudes and judgments, patterns and ways of responding. Where do they come from?

Step 2: Evaluate. We need to look critically and evaluate those attitudes and patterns and judgments. Are the judgments right? Are the patterns helpful? Are there things we should change?

Step 3. Form a plan. We need to figure out how to change them. Generally, successful plans have three components: figuring out new attitudes, changing our behavior, and emotional processing (a cognitive part, a behavioral part, and an emotional processing part). What kind of help will we need with all this and how will we get it?

Step 4: Implement (Live out the plan). Live your life, trying out and getting used to new ways of thinking, acting, and seeing.

Alexa

Alexa’s parents withdrew love whenever she displeased them. They didn’t just disapprove of bad behavior: they made Alexa feel their love was conditional on meeting their standards. Alexa learned that the only way to avoid being unloved was to prioritize pleasing her parents and putting herself last. She grew up with the idea that being loveable means pleasing others. That’s a game she learned how to win, at least sometimes. So Alexa came to think that a really good person puts herself last. Most of her self-esteem came from pleasing others. As an adult, Alexa has trouble saying no and avoids confrontation. She feels guilty and embarrassed being assertive. She says “I know I should assert myself more, but I just can’t do it.”

If Alexa wants to change, she has to do a lot of soul-searching. Her worldview has contradictions: “I should be more assertive,” but also “good people put themselves last.” Deciding that you don’t have to put yourself last is not enough. Alexa’s self-esteem, her sense of her worth as a person, comes from pleasing others. The way she relates to other people is based on exchanging pleasing them for validation. If Alexa really wants to change, she has to develop new ways of finding self-respect and new ways of relating to people. Her understanding of herself and how to relate to others has to be discarded and replaced with something quite new. This is hard and scary: she is throwing away a lifetime of self-respect and a lifetime of relationships. But that’s the work Alexa has to do. So, first she can look clearly at her present attitudes, unpacking the network of ideas about self-worth, putting yourself last, and so on. Are they really true? If Alexa is a person just like her friends, shouldn’t she count as much as her friends? What are the things she truly values and thinks are worthwhile and important? If honesty is one of those values, is she an honest person? If not, how can she be more honest. If she is honest, and honesty is valuable, isn’t Alexa a good person? Alexa has to think about what she really values—compassion, for example, and see herself as worthwhile because she is compassionate. In other words, she needs to identify her values and remind herself that meeting her values makes her a good and worthwhile person. Next, she needs to formulate a plan for change. Doing the cognitive work helps bring about change, over time. If you keep reminding yourself that honesty makes you a worthwhile person, you will begin to feel more worthwhile. But much of the time, that’s not enough. You have to practice, to live with the new outlook and ways of thinking and feeling. And you may need to do some emotional processing. Alexa might find it helpful to draw a picture of her old “people pleaser” self and ritually burn it, for example. While doing all this, she has to start changing her behavior. She can try acting more assertive in small ways. That can help a little, as she gets more used to the guilt and discomfort. But deep-seated attitudes like this don’t just go away. You can’t just act differently and expect it to work. Changing her behavior has to come along with changing the way she thinks, with coming to base her self-esteem on her values. Changing the way she thinks has to come along with actually living it, with changing her behavior. So Alexa can start with small acts of assertiveness and build up to scarier ones, understanding where her fear of conflict comes from and why she is still a good person.

Alexa will need support in all stages: the cognitive work of thinking through her old attitudes and developing new ones (discovery and evaluation); the emotional work of processing; and the behavioral work of trying out new things, like returning a badly cooked dish at a restaurant. People often find therapists helpful. (Some are very good and some are useless or worse. You have to find someone who works for you.) Friends, mentors, and support groups can be invaluable. What works for one person with one problem may not work for another with a different issue. Experiment.

Anthelme

Anthelme was criticized and diminished relentlessly by his parents. As a child he felt worthless and cried himself to sleep at night. Part of his teenage rebellion was fighting back at his parents’ constant criticism. Being combative felt better than being crushed. Even today, criticism sparks in Anthelme a familiar sense of worthlessness against which his only defense is fighting back. Cognitive work for Anthelme may include identifying the source of his strong emotional reaction to criticism and, especially, the connection being criticism, worth, and fighting back. He needs to find a secure sense of worth not easily threatened by criticism and a new attitude toward criticism as the path toward self-improvement rather than the path toward diminishment. Anthelme also developed a kind of perfectionism. In his parents’ eyes, anything short of perfection was shameful. This kind of extreme black and white thinking means that if anyone suggests Anthelme is less than perfect in some way, what Anthelme hears is “you’re a worthless piece of trash.” Anthelme needs to learn to think in terms of balance, nuance, and degrees. Again, these are not easy changes to make, as the old attitudes go deep into Anthelme’s way of understanding himself, the world, and other people. What will help Anthelme is a combined program of re-thinking (intellectual change), behavioral change, and emotional processing. For example he might start with being given a small criticism in a comforting setting (your fingernails look a little dirty). He might be told to say aloud “this I can handle,” and then think of a way to translate that criticism into a small corrective action (washing his hands), doing the action, and receiving support and validation for doing it (I love the way you handled that). He might read a story or watch a TV show about someone who received a difficult criticism that, ultimately, changed their life. Anthelme may benefit from seeing a good therapist, but he will definitely need the support and validation of friends or family.

It Can Be Done

Not all troublesome, long-term emotions go this deep into our worldview or go back to childhood. Sometimes only one or two of the “holy trinity” will be enough (re-thinking, practicing, emotional processing), though usually, if the emotion is deep-seated, all three are needed to some extent. Sometimes change can be rapid. Sometimes it is very difficult and takes a long time. The good news is, it can be done.

Living Wisely

Finally, keep in mind that our emotions are not separate little snow globes bobbling around in our head. The come out of our worldview, which reflects the way we live. Our emotions will tend to be wiser and more mature if we live wisely. Take time to reflect on what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, and how you’re acting. Inculcate the habit of stopping to think critically, asking yourself if what you’re feeling is fair, if what you think is reasonable, and if how you’re acting makes sense. It is often said that people don’t respond to logic, and in some particular ways this is largely true, but we all generally respond to logic or we wouldn’t still be alive. If you see three people eat the purple berries on the tree and immediately keel over dead, logic tells you it might be wise not to eat the purple berries. Anyone who doesn’t respond to this logic is dead by now. So, habitually thinking through your feelings and behavior does tend, over time, to influence how you feel and act. It’s not a magic pill and it takes time. As Aristotle says, we learn by practice, reflecting thoughtfully on what we’ve done and experienced, making changes, and living out what we learned. Reflection is a glass that changes what it sees.