Working with Emotions

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DIGITAL DISTRACTION:  HOW WE USE OUR DEVICES TO AVOID DIFFICULT EMOTIONS

Digital distraction is everywhere these days.  I have started paying attention to how I also use my devices to avoid difficult emotions. Checking my emails and surfing the internet consume more hours in my day than I’d like to admit. So, I have started looking more mindfully at my digital device habits.

How We Use Our Devices to Avoid Difficult Emotions

I have noticed that when watching the horrific news of the day, I often pick up my tablet to play a game of Solitaire.   With this mindful view, I now understand that I often play Solitaire to avoid feeling anxious and worried.

Similarly, when I’m taking public transportation, I tend to fritter away my time on my cellphone. As a result, I miss human interactions and the beautiful scenery around me.  I see how digital distraction distances us from others, and from our environment.

I have been weighing whether my digital device use truly connects me to others. Many close friends and family members prefer to “talk” via text, rather than by phone or in person. I have picked up this habit as well. I believe that much of the divisiveness, violence, confusion and lack of empathy in today’s world can be attributed to an over-reliance on social media for connection.

Digital Distraction As a Defense Against Being Hurt

Many of the clients in my therapy practice admit that they surf the internet to avoid difficult emotions, such as anger, fear or anxiety.  For example, “Donna” has a history of complex trauma, primarily due to her mother’s emotional abuse.  As a result,  Donna has used distraction as a coping mechanism throughout her life to avoid painful emotions.

Donna told me that she has long been “disconnected from life” to avoid anxiety and fear. She worries that if she connects with those in her life, they will disappoint and hurt her, like her mother did. Likewise, Donna avoids connecting with herself because when she does she is filled with negative self-judgments.

Due to her anxiety and fears, Donna often stays up until 2am or later, surfing the internet and playing computer games.  She understands that this habit allows her to avoid her fears and other difficult emotions.

How The Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan Can Help Create Healthy Relationships with Our Devices…And With Others

Donna and I have been working with the book Emotional Rescue:  How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy that Empowers Youby Dzogchen Ponlop[i].  We recently applied Ponlop Rinpoche’s Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan to Donna’s digital distraction as a way to avoid feeling her emotions at bedtime.  As a result, Donna is beginning to let go of her digital device urge, and instead, has begun reading or knitting to help her relax into sleep.

I offer the Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan here to help you create a mindful and healthy relationship with your devices and understand the triggers that make you turn to them to avoid difficult emotions.

The first step of the Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan is Mindful Gap.   When you feel the urge to distract yourself with your devices, simply stop, take a breath and notice the urge without taking action. Breathe and feel what’s going on in your body without judgment.

From this internal focus, expand your awareness to your environment.  This is Clear Seeing,  the second step of the Emotional Rescue Plan.  Take a look and see what your body is telling you when you have the urge to digitally distract yourself.  For example, do you feel a fluttering in your chest or tightening in your stomach when you feel anxious? Do you start fidgeting when you’re bored? Is there a pattern to mindlessly picking up a device when you feel certain emotions?

The third step of the Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan is Letting Go.  Allow your body to relax. Breathe in compassion for yourself, and breathe out compassion for all others who feel the need to digitally distract themselves to avoid difficult emotions.

Letting go gives you the chance to choose whether or not to pick up a device at that moment.  My aspiration is to choose connection and aliveness over distraction and numbness.

 

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[i]Dzogchen Ponlop (2016). Emotional Rescue:  How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy that Empowers You.  New York: Tarchin/Perigree.

(c) 2019 Beth S. Patterson.  All rights reserved.

 

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WORKING WITH THE WISDOM OF THE BODY

Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood says that our bodies hold our wisdom. He describes this basic tenet of both psychotherapy and Buddhism regarding how to best react to our disturbing emotions in the context of what he calls The Spectrum of Felt Energy. At the broad, spacious and stable base of the spectrum is our basic goodness, which can also be called our innate wisdom or basic aliveness.

The part of ourselves that is closest to our true and wise nature is our felt senses, in other words, what we feel in our bodies and experience with our sense faculties, as well as the raw unprocessed emotions that are directly felt in the body. Since our thoughts and conceptual emotions are not experienced directly, they are far from our basic nature and can be quite claustrophobic and unworkable. In contrast, our bodily experiences are direct and provide a sense of spaciousness, the information we need at that moment, and the ability to choose our responses freely and responsibly, with the intention of benefiting ourselves and others.

Working with and directly experiencing our feelings in the body is a highly effective way to untangle the thoughts and stories that keep us stuck and unhappy and make us act out automatically in ways that can be harmful to ourselves and others. Our story lines about the way things are, and all the “shoulds” that accompany those stories trap us in unhappiness and a lack of spontaneity and aliveness.

The body’s felt senses are not given the respect they deserve. We human beings think that our thoughts and intellect are what matters, but not what we feel in our bodies. Many of my clients tend to live in their heads and are not connected to their bodies. They get caught up in story lines that feel solid and unyielding, making them feel hopeless and helpless. When I ask them “where do you feel that in your body?” I sometimes get a blank stare in return because they are disconnected from their bodily experiences.

People who have experienced trauma and abuse often disassociate from their bodies as a coping mechanism so as not to feel their pain so deeply. They have come to believe that living in their thoughts instead of their bodies is safer than feeling what they actually feel, and they escape into their heads to escape their pain. Their felt senses often feel alien and dangerous. Indeed, if they were victims of sexual or other physical abuse, living outside their bodies felt necessary at the time of the abuse for their very survival. Even for those of us who have not withstood terrible trauma, disconnecting from the rawness of our direct feelings can feel safer. However, slowly befriending the wisdom of our body is the path to healing and growth, and frees us from the grip of our fears and self-doubts.

A great opportunity to practice using the wisdom that lies in the body is when anger arises. Anger in and of itself is not a problem. It is simply raw energy that is telling us that something does not feel right. When we are not being mindful of our anger as it arises, we may automatically react and act out, hurting others and ourselves in the process. The key is to notice the sensations of raw non-conceptual anger as they arise, at the level of our felt senses. It could be a clenching in the stomach, tightness in the chest, a rush of blood to the face.

It helps to get very familiar with the sensations you feel when anger arises so that you can identify them immediately and not react automatically. If the sensation is a clenching in the stomach, for example, explore its energy, color, temperature, shape and texture. Then, stop and observe the sensations with curiosity, and ask, from the spacious ground of your basic aliveness and wisdom, what those felt sensations are telling you. This creates the opportunity to choose how to respond in a way that will be beneficial.

To illustrate further, many of us have a core issue of feeling unacknowledged for who we are and what we have to offer. Someone we care for may say or do something that affects that deep wound. If we react from our thoughts and indirect conceptual feelings, we act out automatically with defensiveness or an attack to “protect” our wound. In contrast, using the wisdom of the body, when our friend says or does something that touches our woundedness, we can breathe into what we are feeling in our body, then ask what message the body is conveying. It may be that we feel hurt and misunderstood. Breathe into that hurt feeling, with compassion and tenderness, and then choose an appropriate response rather than react out of anger. As Welwood poignantly states (p. 86), “if I turn to face my own demons, they dissolve, revealing themselves to be my own living energy.” This living energy is the basic goodness and aliveness in all of us, beyond our storylines and negative thoughts.

Slowing down to feel what we are feeling in the body without automatically reacting takes patience, discipline and practice, but it can definitely be done. Taking a breath before reacting is a great first step, because it slows us down so we have the ability to choose rather than react. This puts us on the path of wisdom, compassion and wellbeing.

Our basic aliveness, primordial wisdom and goodness is open and spacious, allowing us to let the world in and act in a healthy and beneficial way. Feeling our feelings directly, without manipulating or judging them with our thoughts and concepts, allows us to develop greater confidence in working with whatever life confronts us with. Our confused thoughts and emotions can be transformed into the wisdom of clarity when we tap into what our bodies are telling us.

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Using Anger Mindfully

Many of us, especially those on the spiritual path, tend to look at anger as an entirely negative emotion.  However, anger used mindfully can be extremely positive, powerful and ultimately healing.  Anger is simply energy, and we always have a choice as to what to do with it. Dzogchen Ponlop, in his recent book Rebel Buddha (2010) aptly states:

We usually think of anger … as negative.  Ordinarily, our impulse would be either to cut through it and get rid of it or to transform its intense energy into good qualities like clarity and patience….[T]he  direct experience of our unprocessed, raw emotions can generate a direct experience of wakefulness. These emotions are powerful agents in bringing about our freedom, if we can work with them properly (p. 144).

So, what do we do that that energy?  We are often afraid to feel its raw power, and fear that expressing it will make us seem less than the kind compassionate people we are.  However, using anger mindfully will actually awaken our compassion, starting with compassionate lovingkindness toward ourselves.

In fact, many people who are compassionate toward others do not treat themselves with the same degree of compassion, and are self-critical and often depressed.  It has been said that depression is “anger turned inward.”  One of the major goals in treating depression in psychotherapy and in grief counseling is to help clients feel safe to express their anger, and turn the energy of anger outward.  “Ex-pressing” anger literally means pushing it out, so that it becomes workable and is not a toxic agent against oneself.

Anger in its pure form, without the “additives” of concept and labeling it as a bad thing, is simply energy.  The key is to harness that energy through the use of mindfulness.  Mindfulness enables us to recognize the anger without simply reacting — either spitting it out against another or turning it against ourselves.  By looking at it without reacting, we have the ability to choose to use our anger productively.

The following are some suggestions for using anger mindfully:

  • Notice how anger manifests in your body — is it a burning sensation in your heart?  A cold tight clenching in the pit of your stomach?  A flush of heat in your face or hands?  Become as familiar as you can with your own unique physical “early warning signs” of anger so you can catch its energy without reacting.
  • As soon as you notice the physical sensation of anger, stop and breathe.  Allow the energy of anger to wake you up to what is actually happening at that moment.
  • Give yourself permission to feel hurt, abandoned, scared, frustrated or sad with a sense of compassion for yourself.  Breathe in light, peace and compassion, and breathe out the dark, heavy sensations of anger without judgment, accepting it just as it is.
  • If you notice the anger turning inward against yourself, continue to breathe it out more forcefully.  Use your body to keep the energy of the anger outward — shake it off your hands into the air, stomp it into the ground with your feet  — whatever it takes not to turn that energy against yourself.
  • Be curious.  Ask yourself:  “What is this feeling?  What is it telling me?”
  • Trust your body to tell you the appropriate course of action.  Is there something you need to say to someone who has hurt you, in a way that will forward your own healing and contribute to the growth of the other person and your relationship with him or her?  Is it something you can simply let be, making sure not to turn the anger inward?

As Stephen Levine (1987) eloquently says, “the investigation of anger…leads us directly to the love beneath, to our underlying nature. When we bring anger into the area where we can respond to it, where we can investigate it, where we can embrace it, it emerges into the light of our wholeness….Then anger is no longer a hindrance, but a profound teacher.”

References

Dzogchen Ponlop (2010).   Rebel Buddha: On the Road to Freedom.  Boston:     Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Stephen Levine (1987).  Healing into Life and Death.  New York:  Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

© 2011.  Beth S. Patterson, MA, LPC.  All rights reserved.