Help Me Help Myself
By
David Lawrence Chilcote II, MSW
Copyright © 1997
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Help Me Help Myself
Proven self help strategies that work to help us rebuild our happiness and well-being
David Lawrence Chilcote II, MSW
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Other works by this author:
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Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Understanding Our Parents
Chapter 5 Forgiveness of Others
Chapter 7 Dealing with Divorce
Chapter 8 The Art of Appreciation
Chapter 10 It’s All about Attitude
Appendix 1 Feeling and Emotions
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Preface
Help Me Help Myself is a self-help book written specifically to help people live a happier life. It is written by a highly successful medical social work therapist and is designed to help people learn to help themselves. Using tried and true therapeutic methods, this book is easy to read and yet very effective in helping people change. It arises out of ideas spurned in therapy and in consultative collaboration with professional colleagues, children, clients, parents and spouses.
It is further designed as a reference book that can be referred to and re-referred to as troubles come and go in our life experience. Simply written, simply applied. Enjoy it and enjoy life.
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Help Me Help Myself
Layout and illustrations are produced by Kathleen C. Chilcote
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Chapter 1- Emotions
Most people believe emotion is the way we feel about the events in our lives; that emotions just happen to us. “I’m an emotional wreck,” or “I’m so emotional,” or “He or she has gotten me so upset,” are a few common phrases people speak. In reality, our emotions are only partially about feelings. The thoughts mentioned above and many others are really just beliefs that have become ingrained into our being from our life experiences and from accepting teachings from those around us.
Emotion is best defined as a feeling we allow to exist in our life stemming directly from a value we place upon a thought. Whew, that’s a mouthful and worth re-reading slowly. It may sound difficult to understand, but one can understand it very shortly. The fact that “emotion is a feeling we allow to exist,” is well worth studying and understanding. To truly understand this is the basis upon which all of us can use to positively change how we feel.
Notice the beliefs evident behind this truth:
1. Only we can control how we feel; not the people, places, things around us, nor the events we experience.
2. Feelings are not much more than thoughts we permit to influence our mood.
3. As it relates to emotions, perception is much more important than reality.
Let’s take a look at how emotions work. Emotions are affected by events, perceptions and the processes of valuation.
An event happens that we experience.
We place a value on that event.
Based upon our valuation, we have a particular emotional reaction.
The emotional reaction affects our current and forthcoming experiences.
Because of our individualized experience and learning prior to any given event, we perceive the event in an individualized manner. Simply said, each person can react differently to any given event. Perception is a thought process that has been taught to each of us through a series of rewards and punishments in our growing up, which we incorporate into our being. Based upon that training, when an event occurs, we can subconsciously put a value on the event and that value affects our emotions, negatively, positively or neutrally. Those emotions affect how we perceive the next event, etc.
Typically, when we have a negative emotion, most of us have a bad habit of placing blame for that negativity on an event, a person or an experience. This is an unhealthy habit, but one that can easily be changed. With a little work and a little insight, we can control our emotional response to any event in our life without blaming others people, places or things. This is much healthier for all of us and makes our experience in life much nicer.
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Emotion can best be described as a feeling that is born in thought, tied to a belief and an assigned value.
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Properly put into perspective, our control of our own emotions can be a very effective tool we use to enhance our social interactions to defend or express ourselves, attract and / or evict ourselves and to help others change for the better.
I firmly believe that no one other than ourselves can make us feel any other way unless we allow it. In other words, if we are feeling sad, we are choosing to feel sad. If we are feeling mad, we are choosing to feel mad. In a few minutes, we will read a story that will drive this point home and provide us with a very powerful tool in helping us shape our emotions positively whenever we wish, however we wish.
Let’s explore how outside events have very little to do with our internal emotions. Once this is assimilated into our everyday life, we will have a greater chance of experiencing life more positively. We can learn to master our emotions and create healthy, pleasant ones DESPITE the events experienced in our lives that we currently allow to pull us down.
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The value we place upon an event can influence the emotion we feel.
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Here is one of the best stories I have ever heard that illustrates my point.
Excited to be finally going on a date with an acquaintance you’ve wanted to date for a number of months, you await their arrival at home, outside. You are dressed and ready for the evening’s events. It has been raining this particular day, but the rain has been replaced by a very clear sky and you are excited. Suddenly, from behind, without warning, you are pushed and fall face first into a puddle of mud. Feeling angered (an appropriate emotion to being pushed), you get up and turn toward the aggressor ready to defend or protect yourself. Before you can open your mouth, you see a sight-challenged teenager with their seeing-eyed dog. The child sweetly says, “I am so sorry. I hope I haven’t hurt you. I am simply trying to cross the street and didn’t feel your presence.” Almost magically, it appears, you find yourself feeling sympathy instead of anger. You forget about your dirtiness and assist the young person across the street. Having completed your assistance, you begin to re-experience the earlier excitement and anxiety for the date and you go inside to clean up and get ready again.
Here are some questions I’d like us to ponder:
Who caused our initial excitement?
Who caused our instant anger?
Who changed the anger into sympathy?
Who caused us to feel anxious and excited a second time?
The answer to every question is, “I did.” I’ll explain how we did all of that changing (in a matter of seconds, I might add), in hopes that we can use this example in our everyday life to change our emotions.
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No one, other than ourselves, can make us feel anything.
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In the example, as we were being pushed, just before we fell in the puddle, we immediately developed an assumption about the person doing the pushing. Our primary assumption, if we are like most people, was that the person doing the pushing did it on purpose or with intention. If in fact, the pusher did push us on purpose, I would argue that the correct emotion would be anger, but in this case, before we knew whether or not the push was intentional, we assumed it was and we, because of our own assumption, created our anger.
Notice I didn’t say, the pusher made us angry. It was our initial assumption that the push was intentional that created our anger.
As we get up and turn around, we receive new information! Even though we are still covered in mud, we “see” that the push was unintentional and we hear the young person apologize for the mistake. We almost immediately change our assumption and our belief, and as a result of us changing our belief, our feelings change from anger to sympathy. That is an amazing feat in a matter of seconds. Instead of fighting or retaliating, we instead help the person across the street, with sympathy. We may even feel a little guilty for initially feeling angry.
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Our assumptions play a huge role in the feelings we allow to exist.
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It is not so important what has happened to us (we got pushed into a puddle), as it is what belief we assigned to that event (initially we believed we were pushed on purpose, but then we believed the push was a mistake). The belief about the event was far more important than the event itself in shaping our emotions.
Once we learn this very important truth, we can then, and only then, begin to assign any belief to any action or event that we experience in our life, and as such, control our emotion that is attached to that particular event. There may be some exceptions to this belief, i.e., people with a diagnosable, clinical depressive or anxiety disorder which is biochemically caused and certain personality disorders among others, but even with these issues, the philosophy behind this construct can be helpful.
If we don’t take responsibility for our own emotions, we are left with the choice of giving that power to other people in our lives or worse, to events we experience. The downside to blaming others for how we feel is that we have to wait on them to change before our emotions will get better. Who wants to wait on someone else to change in order to feel better? Certainly not me, and I would bet certainly not you.
It might appear easier to have others responsible for our feelings and emotions, but it isn’t healthier. If you say something mean to me and I feel bad about it, I can mistakenly believe that you caused my bad feelings. If that is true, that you caused my bad feelings, then, logically, you must be responsible to change them back. I can sit back and wait. I don’t have to do anything but stay mad until you do or say something that makes me happy again. Making you responsible for how I feel is easier than taking responsibility for the process of change myself. Indeed easier, but easier is not always better.
We need to have complete control over our own emotions, regardless of what we experience or what others say or do to us to become a mature responsible person. We will do a far better job of managing our own emotions than anyone else around us. Imagine developing, changing and managing our own emotions despite the actions of others or despite the circumstances we encounter on a daily basis. How empowering is that?
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“The nature of the mind is such that if certain mental qualities are developed on a sound basis, they not only remain, but they also increase. In fact, once properly developed, the mind's good qualities eventually increase indefinitely. Therefore spiritual practice brings us long-term happiness and inner strength.”
~ Dalai Lama
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Consider the fact that there are people around us right now that have improperly learned how to feel better about them self by “making us feel” bad about ourselves. We have all had these people in our lives that appear to take joy in our pain or at the very least find pleasure in putting us down. If we allow that to happen, our emotions could ruin most of our days on this planet and our experiences would be jaded by the pessimists with whom we choose to associate.
When and if we stop blaming others for how we feel, we instantly develop a very potent power to choose the feelings we wish to experience ourselves. While controlling our emotions is certainly not an easy task, it is learnable with practice and it can become second nature. Once we develop this habit, we can maximize our individual happiness.
A close psychiatrist friend of mine once noted this about emotional control:
Some old vaudeville comedy acts brought laughs over such choices as the two comedians quipped:
“I fell down and sprained my ankle last month.”
“Oh, that’s bad.”
“No, that’s good! As I lay there on the ground, I found a $100.00 bill.”
“That’s great!”
“No, that’s bad. I spent all the money to go to a Broadway musical, but I lost my wallet while at the show.”
“Oh, that’s bad.”
“No, that was good. While I was at the lost and found, I met a dear old friend who I hadn’t seen in 23 years.”
This story highlights the vast importance of our perspective of the events in our lives. If we perceive something as bad and put a negative value on it, we will guide our emotions into a negative area. If we perceive something as good, and put a positive value on it, we will guide our emotions into a positive arena. The latter is what we need to learn to do.
Even our memory of our life experiences carry the emotional tone we assigned to the event when it occurred. When we look back on our life, wouldn’t we like to have good memories with positive emotions? I am betting we would. This book is designed to help us do just that despite people that surround us and the events we experience. It will take repeated practice to disentangle our emotions from others, but, doing so will allow us all to be greatly stronger!