Huge obstacle I had in my own work was a mentor who repeatedly insisted that emotions only last as long as you hold on to them
I was a master of feeling and letting them go, but the same ones arose with powerful charge over and over
Shook my confidence in myself first, then him
Conversation
it gets tricky to find good language after a certain point. sometimes it feels to me like there’s a large, fixed, old reservoir of emotion that i have to feel through and it can take awhile but then it’s done. sometimes it feels like the emotions are being “freshly” generated
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if there’s e.g. a *present* threat in my life (abusive partner, that kind of thing) that’s the sort of thing that naturally continually freshly generates anger until dealt with. at some point you hopefully take the hint and find some way to deal with the threat
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i had an anger a few months ago that i could not find the end of in exactly this way and it did not even slightly relax until i put up much firmer boundaries in an ongoing conflict. wondering if this kind of thing is related to your experience at all?
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Some ppl are just obsessive, not naming names but it's me
Unconscious processes render the feelings in thought BEFORE they enter consciousness, then trigger cognitive-behavioral loops
You can get underneath them but "letting go" is the wrong stage in the cycle to intervene
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hmm i sorta have a sense of what you mean but could you be more concrete? in coherence therapy there are def things like “i must commit myself to repeatedly generating this feeling in this context or else bad things happen”
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This could be the logic of the underlying process
But if your brain's most practiced way of handling a feeling is to formulate thought about it, by the time you're aware you're ruminating, you're already deep in it. Letting go at that point won't discharge the feeling
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You might have to go drain it another way - mb somatically, running or referring it to a punching bag / sexualizing it - basically practicing distributing the volume of emotion across more than one defense mechanism before it's manageable enough to let go of and have it stay gone
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Then an underlying emotion deeper than the loop might arise, and if it's smth you've been storing a long time, it's not necessarily just gonna discharge in a couple seconds and set you free. These things live in complexes.
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BUT once they have been fully felt and the associated beliefs are free of their charge, i do think they let go, somewhat. What used to be a 7-8 becomes a 2-3
But I do agree that fresh emotions don't "stick" if you feel them fully and let them go
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huh interesting - i should’ve picked up on this a lot sooner in the conversation but it sounds like at least sometimes for you “letting go” is a distinct motion that you’re doing on purpose?
i think i never learned how to do that 😅
It's a non-doing 🙂 I bet you have, it's identical to returning attention to the breath
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Sometimes I think this non-doing is the whole point, but you have to do a lot first (and struggle) to grasp what this is...having been beaten into submission, and utterly trusting. Can't do it, but it can happen.
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