Bernards Voices

From Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps, Psychology Today Making Change blog, The First Step to Meeting Your Personal Goal:

Strategies for dealing with emotions: 1. suppress/deflect, 2. minimize/deny, or:

3. Another way people try to manage their distress is by working to solve their problems intellectually. This is great when they are faced with a problem they can solve. But it becomes a problem in itself when people repetitively review a problem that has no real or clear answer.

Or worse, in my experience, you come up with a clear answer which fails. You’re seduced by your own analysis.

Leslie’s recommendation:

There is evidence that you can strengthen your ability to manage affect, much like you can strengthen a muscle. To do this, practice sitting with our emotions. Spend time allowing emotions to rise within you and then subside, which they will naturally do. With practice, you can decide when to temporarily suppress emotions or sublimate them (channeling your feelings into a healthy activity). And, the better you become at managing your feelings, the better you will also be at following through with good plans for self-improvement.

My doctor, and some close friends, recommend mindfulness meditation. Be still, my beating heart. I achieve that at the yoga studio, it is harder, in a disciplined way, to bring it into my home. Maintain a daily practice. It is even harder with the thermostat set for 61–thankfully our winter has been mild so far.

In her follow-on post, in preparation for Thanksgiving, Leslie talks about gratitude the same way.

You might find it helpful to think of the feeling of gratitude as a muscle that gets stronger with use. To this end, below are two exercises that have been scientifically found to increase gratitude.

Gratitude journal: Keep a journal each night (for at least 2 months), listing at least 3 things that you were grateful for that day.

Gratitude letter and visit: Think of someone who has been a positive influence on you at anytime in your life, but who you have not thanked. Reminisce about how the person has made your life better, and then craft a letter to say thank you, being specific about what they did and how it affected you. Then set up a time to meet with the person without telling them why. When you sit down with them, read them the letter – slowly and with emotion. Give them a chance to react and respond. And, finally, take the opportunity to continue to reminisce together about what makes them so special to you.

Heavy lifting for me. I don’t know about you.

Reading self-help advice like this often churns my stomach–that emotion stuff–but I can’t argue that daily practices like meditation or focusing on what you are grateful for, would, if I could follow them, improve my outlook, strengthen relationships. If that’s what I wanted to happen. Do I want that?

And then Leslie’s next post, this one preparing for the holidays:

The best gift you can ever give those who love you is a healthy you.

From Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps Psychology Today blog, Making Change.

In contrast, kindness brings emotions in more closely. Acceptance calms them and dispenses with their need to defend against a critical adversary. Then, when a person experiences – in an accepting way – their painful emotion, they become more comfortable with it and less upset by it. It still hurts, but they are no longer also feeling distress about having the emotion.

Kindness, compassion … being generous to yourself. These are repeating themes: in Leslie’s posts, and in my visits to my therapist and yoga studio. And from my friend’s recommendation 5 years ago of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Kindness, which Libby and I read at Jack’s memorial service.

From neuropod podcast, September 2010, discusses research on processing emotions without being aware of it.

Click to listen to podcast and fast forward, if you want, to 18:39.

Driving a car is not a conscious exercise. The perceptions we’re picking up, consciously and subconsciously, continuously, are far too many to process consciously. Emotion, literally, motivate actions like getting out of bed. In the podcast the author endorses the idea that we (scientists, and the general population) overweight the significance of our conscious decisions and actions in daily life.

One example they talk about is visual perceptions. Not all the visual information goes to the visual cortex to be processed. The are other pathways, that go directly to emotional, older, closer to brain stem, more “animal” parts of our brain.

Here is the abstract from the Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, “Neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals” by Marco Tamietto & Beatrice de Gelder:

Many emotional stimuli are processed without being consciously perceived. Recent evidence indicates that subcortical structures have a substantial role in this processing. These structures are part of a phylogenetically ancient pathway that has specific functional properties and that interacts with cortical processes. There is now increasing evidence that non-consciously perceived emotional stimuli induce distinct neurophysiological changes and influence behaviour towards the consciously perceived world. Understanding the neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals will clarify the phylogenetic continuity of emotion systems across species and the integration of cortical and subcortical activity in the human brain.

On WNYC April 1, Leonard Lopate discusses the roots and consequences of anger with Dr. Philip Muskin, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, and Dr. Howard Kassinove, Professor of Psychology and Director, Institute for the Study and Treatment of Anger and Aggression.

Listen to the podcast:

Here are my notes:

• fear and anger are closely intertwined–central to our fight or flight response
• anger can be constructive, protecting, motivating righting wrongs
• the same trigger, eg. someone taking our parking place, can be perceived and responded to differently on different days, by different people.  do we, cognitively, perceive the triggering event as a threat or an annoyance?
• our brains our wired (nature & nurture) and some people are better at controlling impulses than others
• if you are sad or depressed, everything may feel like a threat to you
• alcohol can have that same effect
• anger is different from aggression.  anger, the emotion, has components of ideas about how bad things are, ideas about revenge.  where aggression is the behavior, the action.  in one of the doctor’s studies:  only 10% of anger events are followed by an aggressive action, but most aggressive action is proceeded with anger.
• people with high self esteem become angry–not people with low self esteem
• Alzheimer’s: “some people get angrier than they usually were” … the way the brain talks to itself is destroyed by Alzheimer’s, so, for example, the patient may loose some of their ability to control, moderate their response
• bipolar and anger relationship? anger is a component of a wide variety of disorders, including bipolar, but the linkage is unclear right now
• anger management: listener asks about children’s temper tantrum? … “you let them grow up”
• anger is part of who we are.  as we mature we learn to regulate anger’s intensity, duration, and frequency… so that we can become productive members of society.  who teaches us? parents, cartoons, friends, teachers, religious institutions.
• repression: catharsis is not a good idea, can amplify the emotion … no good to hold it in or to punch it out … the solution is “verbal assertion” … “communicate assertively”
• internet (because the other person is not right in front of you) is so impersonal that it makes it possible for people to express things inappropriately