AUTHENTING VS IN-AUTHENTIC FEELINGS

YOU ARE NOT YOUR EMOTIONS
When someone asks, “How are you doing?” Some of us feel like we’re failing
if we don’t say “Good.” We feel shame if we feel anything else. Or some of us
always say that something is wrong because we learned that we should not
be ok if we are to be liked or gain people’s care and sympathy.

We attach so much meaning to the feelings we experience and believe that
our emotions say something deeply about who we are. But your emotional life
has nothing to do with who you are. It simply arises in the moment from a
trigger in the brain. That trigger arises out of a million causes and conditions
outside of us: our family history, the evolutionary and genetic history of the
human species, the events of the past day, or month or life. Emotion is not
being created by you. It is automatic and brain generated. We must take care
of our emotions and do our best to respond skillfully to life - but we are NOT
our emotions, WE HAVE EMOTIONS.

This is important because when we take our emotional life very personally
(when we assume our emotions mean something about who we are), we can
fear facing them or simply being with them.

WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
What recent studies by neuroscientists show, is that emotions are simply a part
of a brain pattern. A brain pattern consists of:

Mental State
Emotional State
Physical State
Thoughts and Thought processes.

Every brain pattern is correlated with ways of being and acting. So, an emotion
does not cause your actions or who you are; it is just correlated to it. What is
also important to notice is that an emotion does not happen on its own, as an
individual phenomenon, it is one with and happens simultaneously with a
mental state, a physical state, and thoughts.

Our relationship to the physical experience that happens simultaneously with
emotion will be very important in developing more emotional freedom. Also,
emotions are correlated with our actions. We all know the sense of urgency
that emotion tends to inspire. It’s not as if anxiety arises, for example, and we
think to ourselves, “Oh, no problem, I’m just really anxious...nothing to do
here.” When an intense emotion arises, we quickly react to that emotion. If the
emotion could speak, it would often say something like: “Change Something!”

While changing our patterns may be an important aspiration, it’s important to
remember something in these moments - our habits, even our ‘bad’ emotional
patterns, have served a purpose. And usually when we look, we can trace a
habit back to some need we have. Maybe the habit is not meeting our need
well, or maybe we want to let go of that need - but we can still honor the fact
that our habits are, in their own weird way, trying to take care of us.
For example, consider someone who habitually used anger to survive a
difficult childhood. As the years go by, the strategy becomes less and less
appropriate to life. However, this doesn’t mean that the strategy of getting
angry at everything is “stupid” or “wrong.” It means our way of responding to
life is asking to be “updated.”

Emotions are our compass, and we need to learn when and how to listen.
Sometimes the messages our emotions are sending us are important. A skill
that is very important to develop is learning when to listen to the counsel of our
emotions, and when we might question that counsel.

There are two kinds of emotions:

Authentic Emotions: Authentic emotions are the emotions that are related to
something happening right now, and without the interference of
mentalizations. In other words, your brain’s input on the situation is not what
caused the emotion, but the emotions arise directly from being in a situation.

Inauthentic Emotions: Inauthentic emotions are the emotions that are caused
by thinking about a situation, remembering it, judging it, analyzing it,
anticipating a future possibility etc.

When we fail to decipher between authentic and inauthentic emotions then we
run the risk of overexaggerating our emotions and thus creating distance
between us and the other person who can no longer relate or we run the risk of
making bad decisions. The problem is, we decide based on the totality or our
emotions. Our brain cannot tell the difference between the two kinds, so it
decides based on the sum of both.

Here is a real-life example:

A friend who had already been through a divorce was in a new relationship.
She told me that her partner made her feel insecure and that she was sure
that he was going to cheat on her just like her ex-husband did. She had
decided to end her new relationship; I told her to write down how she feels
when she is with him or when she talks to him on the phone for two week
(write down her authentic feelings) and to ignore all her in-authentic feelings.
She realized that all her anxiety came from the thoughts she had while alone
or at work. When she was with him, she observed that he made her feel
wanted, loved, and cared for so she decided against breaking up with him.

The opposite example happened with a male friend of mine who was about to
get married to a woman that checked all the boxes in his checklist but when
he observed his authentic feelings, he realized that she was good on paper
but that he did not feel what he should towards her and once doing the
exercise opted out of proposing and soon ended up ending the relationsip.

With authentic feelings we need to learn to observe and listen to them.
When we observe our authentic feelings, we will notice that the authentic
emotion in a conversation has a source, and that source is either us or the
other person.

Then we can ask the following:

1. Am I the source of the anger that is present, or was I happy before
started this conversation?

2. Was I already upset about something that happened unrelated or
even related to that person? If so, I acknowledge it and apologize
and if it was related I discuss the past that I did not let go of so that
we can complete it.

If it was from me that the anger emanated but I got angry during the
conversation, then, I look for what did the person say that triggered me? When
we are triggered, it is because an insecurity in us is triggered. It would be good
to try and understand it and observe it rather than blame others for it.

3. If the anger came from the other person and it was already
present even before our conversation then we acknowledge and
ask about it.

4. If the anger came from the other person but while we were talking,
then we ask what it was that we said that upset them and try to
understand what triggered them (and their insecurity – without calling it
that) so that we do not trigger them in the future.

When we have in-authentic feelings, and so that we do not suffer and cause suffering
unnecessarily or end up making bad decisions, we practice letting them go. In the
beginning it is not that easy, but with practice we can get really good at it and even end
up doing it automatically.

We can let them go just by realizing that they are in-authentic and therefore
harmful or if we are already triggered by the emotion because we did not catch
it in its beginning, then we need to bring our attention to the present moment so
that the emotion can ease away.

We have in informal exercise to do that. We call it S-T-O-P:

We also have two formal mindfulness meditations that helps us regulate any difficult emotion. We can do them formally by sitting down and practicing regardless of whether we are dealing with a difficult situation or once we are familiar with them, do them for a couple of minutes on the spot while we are dealing with a difficult inauthentic emotion.

The first meditation is called:

BODY SCAN

And the second meditation is called:

TURNING TOWARDS

Click below to play the interactive game and deepen your understanding of the distinction: