That.. sounds very profound, although I didn’t quite grasp it. I see what you are saying is that we should never repress our feelings and rationalize why they are there and make it about our identity. This seems like something I’ve understood a few years ago – that feelings are just feelings, they are like any physical state. They sometimes have a real life cause, and sometimes they are just hormones/chemicals in your brain. You just deal with them (like the way you’d deal with a burnt hand) and find out how to avoid the same pain (like hodling the hand away from fire). The hard part is find out why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, it might not always be possible.

“The hard part is find out why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, it might not always be possible.”

That’s hard, because you got the first emotional imprints before you were able to reason. So it’s easier to just go down there with feelings than with reason. There’s no (rational) memory map, but there’s an emotional one.

Men that control their emotions are better suited to survive. A proper man, a strong and confident man, has to excel under stress, has to appear to make easy what is hard for everyone else. And then this man should have enough spare emotional energy to enjoy life and reap on the profits, and reproduce, and pass his legacy. Cue: the grumpy man doesnt cut it.

But the shortcut to master your emotions is having none.

Does it work? yeah. Short term it does. The wave of bullshit is coming? turn it off. You have an efervescence of bad feelings and anxiety surging inside and cant turn it off? shake it out. Put it out there. Hit stuff.

But this doesnt allow you to understand your own feelings / emotions, and, at the end, your emotions are the ones in charge, not your rational brain nor your skills. So if you’re not aware and dont have emotional intelligence, if you cant command and understand and feel, and your skills are limited to turn stuff off, block control repress and redirect, youre an EASY pray for emotional manipulators.

Guess whos manipulating you? Media. Society. Religions. Family. Friends. People. Relationships. Everyone. And your own emotions, that you dont control, are manipulating other people. It’s a dark game played behind curtains and the most evident sign is what happens when you question it all.

It’s not the rational mind what’s blocking you. It’s not a logical puzzle. Question your life right now. The country, the city, the friends, your god, your pillars, and say: it’s all bullshit. Cancel your story. Take your most sacred belief and question it. Can you? or something inside shakes away from it?

What you cant handle you dont own. It owns you. You’re it’s bitch. And how exactly did you get into this position, where you respond to something and are unable to question, but you go with it. When exactly did you agree to be something else’s bitch? when did you surrender? do you remember? what if you hadnt?

But I might be getting in too deep again.

And. Women. You would think that since women are not taught to repress their emotions they are better off. But, no, since women are protected and treated like children and get a free pass and have other people to take on the consequences for them…. no. They have access to a wider range of emotions, but one that is also out of touch with reality, so it’s also a meaningless limbo / mess of preferences and unsorted waves of sensorial, minute bullshit. Sorry. Emotions for their own sake are not enlightment.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. The communication with reality and the know-how define it.

You have one gender with contact with reality but no emotional lexicon. And the other gender with emotional lexicon but no contact with reality.

And then we’re all manipulated through fear.

Whe’re are we again?

@ Stingray

I tried to read a couple of them once…. Early in college. I wasn’t equipped to handle it at that time. So instead in my theatre history classes, along with the liberal arts classes my college required, it seems as if I was taught from the shadow of the Greek giants of philosophy and stoicism without daring to enter Plato’s cave. And so they’re now on my current reading list – along side some of the great philosophers. Which are going to start right after I finish reading Strauss’s “The Game” along with keeping up with my daily ‘Sphere reading, Gettin better reading, and Reader Letters.

@ Yohami

Just going to briefly say Yohami, that you wonderfully got to the heart of what I was trying to say and went deeper with it. Bravo, I love it. Gonna go jump into the comment thread on the new post.

[...] happy to do so in any comments, or Yohami has some really brilliant posts on it at his site. This first post is great (and yes, watch the video he links), and in this second one he takes a comment I made and [...]

I only called for the free consult. We talked for maybe 5-10 mins. A good psychologist (one that insurance companies DO cover) would test and gather information carefully before planting ideas in the patient’s head–for fear confabulating a nonexistent problem. She intuited, did some cold/warm reading, empathized, fished, and guaged my reactions more like a “psychic”. At one point she said “I think you’ve been depressed your whole life”. Which elicited some blubbering from me. Her articles seem to cover every single base known to psychology/relationships/attachment & Imago theories so it seems next to impossible to find someone it won’t apply to and yet we have the mythical “healthy” or “integrated” people as a goal. Her picture plus her use of the words “wellness”, “spirit”, and “holistic” are all New Age.

In the end, her info is all very precise and personal, but there’s so much of it that the Forer Effect still applies. I don’t know if this Integrated Recovery does any legitimate good as opposed to the current therapy leader CBT, but…

Yes, she genuinely believes in what she does.
No, she doesn’t appear to be a Miss Cleo
Yes, you will get emotional
Yes, she appears to be very good at what she does
and
Yes, it’s very tempting