Emotional Retraining®

Imagine a scene in an office. Mary’s supervisor attacks Mary, saying, “How could you be so incompetent? Now you have messed up the Kleinjans file and you should have known better. Any idiot off the street could have done it right.”

How does Mary now feel? Of course you don’t really know, but you could ask Mary.

•  Perhaps Mary would answer:

“I am worried. I need this job. Maybe he is just looking for a reason to fire me. How could I pay the rent if I lose my income.”

Mary might now be feeling anxiety, maybe even panic.

•  Another response could be:

“He’s an SOB. He’s always picking on me and everyone else. He’s just using all of us in order to propel himself into a promotion.”

In this case Mary’s feelings are hostility and anger.

•  Alternatively Mary could say;

“He’s right. I am a loser. I never get it right. I deserve it.”

Mary’s depression just keeps building.

•  But there is a completely different possibility:

“I don’t deserve that kind of treatment, but that’s just the way he is. Besides, maybe he had a fight with his kid this morning. Or didn’t get enough sleep. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it really isn’t about the one page in the Kleinjans file. I can fix that in a minute. He’s having a tantrum, maybe like a child.”

Now, while Mary is perhaps annoyed, she doesn’t react with self-damaging emotions. Her emotions do not immobilize her or lead her to make her life worse.

Of course there are other possibilities, but what these illustrate is that our feelings do not come from the things that happen. If they did, they would always result in the same feelings for everyone. Instead, the activating event—the boss’s insult—triggers some belief or automatic thought. It is the belief that creates the emotion. While everyone’s irrational beliefs are somewhat different, there do tend to be a few major categories.

Emotional Retraining is designed to replace irrational beliefs with rational ones, automatic negative thoughts with realistic ones. In different ways, the first three possibilities for Mary’s reaction are all beliefs and thoughts based on unreality or irrational thinking. Emotional retraining helps us, and Mary, to respond rationally and realistically, as she does in the fourth response.

Emotional retraining is not a new “self-help” idea. It is based on some well-established principles. The first was expressed by a Greek philosopher, Epictetus, over two thousand years ago. Epictetus told us that a person is troubled, not by the things that happen to him, but by what he believes about what happens.

Psychologists, beginning with Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, have applied Epictetus’ idea and call it Cognitive Behavior Therapy. It has become the best tested and demonstrated system of working with major and minor emotional problems from post traumatic stress disorder to depressions, phobias, and anxiety.

Emotional Retraining takes this same system and applies it to the day-to-day, ordinary, emotional stresses and responses that we all encounter. Learning to retrain our emotions doesn’t require therapy, but it does require learning new beliefs that function better and are more realistic.

Emotional Retraining is also focused on the here and now. Present emotions may be sadness, joy, grief, annoyance, and others. But real emotions are not tied to other places and other times, as are guilt, hate and worry. The focus on

the here and now is one that is present in the writings of many spiritual paths. It has been pioneered by the teachers of both Eastern and Western wisdom. The here and now focus, gives us the tools of mindfulness, presence and immediacy.

Another older idea that Emotional Retraining embraces is one stated by Alfred Korzybski, “Whatever you say it is, it isn't.” What he meant was that the words we use about someone or some situation, do not tell us about that person. At best they tell us a little about what we think about the person or situation. With somewhat the same meaning, Kozybski said, “The map is not the territory.” The map is just an abstraction that may help us get around the territory, but often the map may be partly wrong and correctly, according to the map, we turn left into a road, but it turns into a dead-end. Or the map may show a bridge and we plan to drive across, but when we arrive the bridge is only a foot-bridge—or perhaps it’s an auto-bridge but has fallen in a recent storm. Maps and words are handy but we can’t rely completely on the them because they are only a representation of reality.

Emotional Retraining helps us develop ways of checking our maps by relying always on reality. That way we don’t try to drive over the foot-bridge.

If we learn Emotional Retraining and apply it, we can stop our dysfunctional reactions to events and have a better emotional life. When we make mistakes, we can correct them without berating ourselves. If we treat others poorly, we can correct our errors, and apologize, but we need not keep punishing ourselves by useless guilt. We can plan for the future without worrying about it.

Emotional Retraining gives us the tools to lead a better, happier life together with our families and community.