December 5, 2007
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Mind Over Emotions
The mind is an extraordinary thing. With it you can overcome fear and doubt and anger. You can act when you are in pain and you can fight your way through sickness and you can push your body to feats beyond what you would have thought it was capable of. The mind and the mind alone overcomes weaknesses and solves problems and enables us to be so much more than we otherwise could be. If you were to ever show me that the mind could be used to move through time or or turn iron into gold I wouldn’t bat an eyelash because the things that I have seen that the mind can already do already seem so much more extraordinary than that.
But the one question I have always had. The one thing I’ve never been entirely sure of is this. Can the mind be used to change the way in which you really feel about something? I don’t mean simply controlling your emotions. It’s clear that people can choose to act in a manner that is not in line with how they feel about something should the need arise or choose not to demonstrate or reveal their feelings about something if they so choose. In those cases it’s easy to see how your mind can govern your emotions. But can you change the emotions themselves, I wonder? Can you change what it is that you are actually feeling?
It’s obvious that feelings do change over time but the patterns of emotional change seem to be in my observation driven by experience, not will. In effect some event or events triggers a different emotional reaction in you which causes you to know longer feel the way you did about something. It isn’t a conscious choice. You don’t generally decide something like “I’m no longer going to feel X” and then simply make yourself no longer feel X. Or do you? That’s the question I have. I wonder if it is possible.
Take as a trivial case in point. I’ve been reading or rather trying to read this book. I’ve had it for months. I got it because it was well reviewed and seemed like it would be beneficial to me. It is one of those sheerly practical books designed to teach you or benefit you in the process of learning how to sell yourself or at least present an aspect of yourself in a way that will be favorable to you under certain contexts. It’s one of the plethora of books out there designed to provide data and advice in order to give people more confidence when seeking to succeed in the competitive arena we call life..
The thing is, whenever I read this book, even for a short time, it makes me feel miserable. Not just bad, but absolutely miserable. I feel this strange mixture of repulsion and anger and dread and disgust and aversion and sadness that I just don’t want to look at it. I get this feeling like I would rather be doing anything else in the world than be reading this book no matter how beneficial it might prove to be. I just feel sick when I read this. If I read for long I feel like I want to scream or to hurt someone. I don’t know why. I just react that way.
I’m not even a third of the way through this book despite having been trying to read it for months. That I got this far I attest only to my willpower to act in spite of my visceral negative emotional reaction to the words. Even so it’s so hard. It seemed to take forever for me to even get past the first page. To get further I read a little and then do something more pleasant to get my mind off of it, then read a little more. It is a slow and tedious process, but I am making progress through the book. And as I suspected, much of it looks like it could actually be quite useful to me if I choose to make use of it and even if I don’t, it is useful to know about it all.
So the thing is I don’t get this emotional response. It serves no purpose and I don’t know where it is coming from. I can see where I might have rational objections to some of the content in the book and I understand those, but I don’t understand this wholly irrational inexplicable aversion.
And my question is, can I get rid of it? Can I change this feeling? Can I make it so that reading these words no longer invokes those sensations within me? Or is that simply impossible? Is the best I can do is become strong enough to simple experience the feelings and choose to read the book and get what I can out of it anyway? To just suffer through it? Is that the best that we can hope for?
It’s not just that damned book of course. There’s lots of things. Lots of endeavors I seek to engage in that seem important and valuable to me but which once I start to engage in them invoke in me a similar intense emotional aversion. And it makes just so many things so damned hard to do. So I usually end up just not doing them. Why put myself through it? Of course I can overcome these feelings. I’ve done it before. Through force of will I can act anyway, despite the discomfort. But it doesn’t make me happy to do so. And the ill feelings never go away. It just seems like a lot of wasted effort. The real problem is the feelings themselves. Unless I can change those then I think I am ever stuck in a never ending battle against myself a battle in which every time I relax my mental focus for just a moment I lose.
So that’s the question. Is there such a thing as mind over emotions?
