Emotions are neither random nor chaotic. And despite how it may seem at times, they do not come and go of their own accord. Rather, emotions are intimately associated with our thoughts and behaviors, both of which are purposeful and directed. Given their connections with our thoughts, how can undesired feelings and behaviors manage to be so persistent... even when we don't enjoy them?
Habit. Much of what we do, think, and feel is habitual. In other words, we initiate and direct many of our actions, thoughts and feelings automatically, via processes that are other-than-conscious. Since the unconscious mind has its own rules of operation, many of which have nothing to do with conscious logic, we may not appreciate the fruits of its labors. In fact, we may be quite uncomfortable with those results. To sum up: emotions and behaviors that seem to spontaneously emerge from out of nowhere are, in reality, the result of automatic, unconscious cognitions.
Introduction
First Aid: Individuals
BluesBusters
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The Right Stuff
Tool Room I
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Parting thoughts
More about symptoms
Thoughts, behaviors and feelings are achievements. Even if we don't like them and call them "symptoms," they are still achievements. To create a specific emotion, we need to coordinate a specific pattern of internal events; the right images, movies, words and sounds; the right body chemistry, posture and movements; all these and more must be sequenced in just the right manner if we are to experience the emotion. As you might imagine, this process is often too complex for the conscious mind to organize. Typically, it's handled by the unconscious.
The human brain has often been likened to a powerful computer. If our brain is like a computer, then the unconscious mind is something like its operating system. Developing this analogy even further, we can say that one role of the conscious mind is to "program" part of the computer's operating system: the automatic thoughts outside of awareness. Consider emotions. We've seen how our feelings are typically generated by unconscious cognitions (mental images, internal dialog, etc.). If we do not like the way we feel about something, we can re-program our unconscious (automatic) thought processes so that they lead to different feelings. In other words, we can change what we are feeling by changing what we are thinking. Much of the first aid offered here is designed to do exactly that. The tool rooms found elsewhere at this site give additional techniques for monitoring and altering what is going on in your head.
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