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Becoming the Rainbow's avatar

I have read every post in this series. At the time of reading, I felt that I understood each post and found it interesting, but I never got the feeling that any of the information would change my emotional life. That was why I was looking forward to this post: this was the post that was going to put it all together for me and spark change, or so I thought. Come to find out the life-changing information was in the previous posts in the series and somehow I missed it. Does this mean I'm intelligence-challenged, demented or perhaps just lazy? I might go back and see if I can recover the gems I've somehow forgotten or skipped over. That would probably be a good idea. But in the meantime I'm voting with Josh.

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SkinShallow's avatar

I think ultimately Rob is more correct: just knowing won't help much but practice informed by this knowing will, and learning to asses emotions as conditionally-useful information through the prism of the first stage of the decision tree is definitely useful.

That said, an awful lot of suffering seems to be caused not so much by consequences of "acting on" emotions but simply by the intense unpleasantness of their feeling: the step I have the biggest problem with is the "discharge" one. I'm not exactly choosing to have the lingering feelings of terror about historical atrocities for example even though the cognitive process around that is 100% "correct". That's why CBT does not work all that well: the idea that thoughts lead to emotions is preposterous, obviously emotions are first, the thought merely explains (some would say: rationalises) it.

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