Emotions - the 4th axiom of Pain
Finding the Positive Mindset
We all know of and continue to see the growth of the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT compendium, in the science and non-science arts of healing. They are also an important factor in pain management. Believe it or not, this knowledge is relatively new to those in the field of healing chronic pain. At least how this understanding is transcended to patients and the general public is very new. In my childhood it was mind and body. In my Mom's day it was just the body. The advent of alternative medicines in the process or mix of pain management menu items is mostly new. We now understand and are learning not to fear alternative treatments such as acupuncture, massage therapy, herbal mixtures, nutrition, to name a few, and under these headings you will find a list of disciplines from mostly Eastern medicine and philosophies dividing these treatments into a huge industry in the West.
In the 1960s thanks mostly to the flower children and "back to the Earth" pedestrian hopefuls, there was a lot of interest and subsequent knowledge of the much misunderstood healing remedies. The counterculture seemed to be diving in, sight unseen, attracted by the spiritual essence and very different approach to this kind of medicine. The large majority or, the general public, took much longer to welcome eastern medicine, and alternative medicines in general, into the fray. As the rise of previously unknown diseases in the 1970s and 80’s came to the forefront, the silent majority was looking for answers that the average AMA Dr. couldn't understand. Actually, the doctor’s approach and attitude toward these helpful healers, a seemingly stern antagonism and distrust, is probably what delayed the acceptance of these treatment options for many years. Arguably, many of these are still misunderstood and not welcomed by the general public. At some point in the "ideal future alternative medicines and eastern healing arts will be included in the mix of specialists surrounding any decent pain clinic. MIND, BODY, SPIRIT will be "the norm" in all therapies.
It’s no surprise that in the socialized medicine countries in most of the free world, the powers that be were into this concept of satellite specialists a long time ago. Because everyone can get medical attention and that includes most specializations, the general public, comprised mostly of well people, are now receiving a "maintenance mix" including a lot of alternative medicines and mental health counseling. On the whole, socializing the Healthcare System brought them through an adjustment period of about 20-30 years before the benefits of this kind of system come to fruition. Our system in the United States, the "HMO, doctor's first, patients last" style of care, has gone in the other direction. 40 years ago it was a good idea in a capitalist democracy where profits account for every decision, but now it has evolved, as it should, by the way, as any structure does where profits come first, evolved into a bloated beast of expensive technology, falsely inflated and brought on by a closed system.
The insurance companies dictate everything to the clinic or practice and the doctor must adhere or pay for it himself. For example, the insurance company allows a doctor to give you a 45 minute appointment the first time you visit with 15 minute visits every once in a while for follow-ups. They will approve another 45 minute visit for consultations. The trick to get around this is called "creative billing" whereby the clinic knows how to use the coding of medical needs to submit to the carrier for payment. So you'll see some doctors seemingly a lot more caring and attentive than others because, either they know how to submit billing or they are paying a lot out of pocket. This is strictly a generalization but it's a pretty good one, one that I learned from talking to various billing supervisors in some long established, large clinics. It explains why your doctor and your insurance company seem to be against you, fighting you, even attacking you. They don't mean to, but they are guided, and stay afloat, by profits and when a patient needs more “talk time” for explanations or just trying to be heard, beyond 15 minutes, it cuts into these profits. Think of how many appointments you went to that lasted an hour or more and how many patients belong to the clinic and require more attention? The doctors and insurance companies are in a fight over money while the doctor is trying to care for you. It's crazy, especially for someone in chronic pain. Most pain diseases are hard to pinpoint or diagnose and finding a proper treatment plan and medicine routine that works takes time and patience, a luxury no one can afford. Add to this that if an insurance doctor can find you incorrigible or unable to be diagnosed, they can have your insurance dropped or severely curtailed. This causes either a rush to a diagnosis, or a long stretch of endless tests that get nowhere. You see, it's all about the money.
But I digress.
To get back to the point, anyone who has done any research into healing, eastern or western, has heard of MIND, BODY, SPIRIT and knows intuitively how important they are to healing, and to each other. I believe MBS is the basis of controlling our own healing process and also how to deal with illness and pain as a constant, or chronic, in our lives. The mind thinks, the body does, and the spirit adds the spark into both, to make sure things are peppered with our personality and are done our way. Easy to understand when you look at it simply, but you could also study each or all three (MBS) for the rest of your life.
Now think of the implications of emotions on each of these axioms. Talk about adding spark! Just name emotion, positive or negative, and think of the effect it has on say, your mind. For example, let's take sadness. Let's also assume we are suffering from a severe, chronic disease and you've just gotten the news from your primary care doctor that the illness is permanent and deteriorating but… you will live for many years. Devastating! First shock sets in, that ping in your stomach making you nauseous, a slight fever sending heat to your eyes and forehead. You can hear fine but have no idea what is being said and for all intents and purposes you won’t remember the details anyway. That night, after you stop crying, alone in the dark the shock is wearing off. The emotional effect on the mind, body and spirit is automatic. There's nothing you can do about it but let it happen. Some things you should do at this point, however, is not make any important decisions, be careful who you are around and what you say to people because your emotional response is like a flood gate waiting to burst open. This is the effect of shock wearing off and reality setting in. Cry out, or go to the gym, or for a walk, or run, either by yourself or with someone you trust a lot, something where you can let the flood gates open and empty out. For some it's yelling and screaming, for others it is quietude, meditation and peaceful surroundings.
It's now the next day.
Last night you cried, made it through a workout and had a beer with your best friend. You woke feeling crushed but also feeling like you had a good sleep. You remember the doctor telling you the bad news, well, only the important stuff. Now, add complete sadness into the mix, the entrance to grief. You will probably be grieving over the loss of your normal life to an illness. There are so many things to grieve over in one crazy 30 minute conversation that you're overwhelmed and the impact of this news will register as sadness for years unless you have help guiding you through the process.
(note: If your clinic or insurance offers counseling, by all means, take it…and be as starkly open and honest as you can. It helps a whole lot. It is not psychiatric, but illness and grief guidance.-ed.)
OK, let's add the sadness in, first to the mind. In everything in life that we face is always presented to us in a certain perspective, or, how we see things in our minds eye. We always have a choice at this point and how we interpret our thoughts is a key to the path we enter. Our mind knows what the doctor said and understood it, but the sadness that surrounds and saturates these thoughts are bringing up the crying jags again and prolonging the doom and gloom. You hold it in but suddenly the day doesn’t seem as bright, the future looks bleak. Overwhelmed, you sit down on the nearest anything, hold your head and start running through all the things you feel you must go over. “What do I tell the family? What about work, my boss, my friends at the job? Can I still work? Should I still work?”
More crying, not sobbing, not that release of shock, but a steady mourning with tears running down your cheek and that distant gaze into nothingness.
You grab control and tell yourself to think good thoughts but everything you picture in your mind erodes with this depressing feeling. What happens to your spirit at this point? It starts to move away. It finds a corner and hides from sight because you haven't said you need it yet. This is understandable. Your spirit doesn't know positive or negative. It is there to add power and energy and your personality to all that you think and do. It got you to this point, 24 hours from the doctor's news, but sadness is affecting your thoughts and your body is reacting to your mind, not your spirit. You are doing things on autopilot for now, and the longer you do, the more hidden away your spirit becomes. You'll notice that, at this point, you start doing things that seem against your own personality, against the way you would normally do them. Days, weeks, even years can go by like this, the sadness deepening, your thoughts and actions more and more affected by the depression. Think of the effect this will have on the decisions you must make, the things you must do and your feelings towards these things, your medicines and treatments, your physical therapy, your relationships with loved ones. Intuitively, you know you need to stop it. Doing this for a period of time is understandable. Shock has many levels. But, if it goes too long it will start to damage your physical health. The body is reacting to your mind, your thoughts, and it feels your emotions. The body will interpret the sadness you added to your thoughts, as action. It will start "doing sadness". Where does this lead to? Think of the physical requirements it will take to go through the next period of time. With sadness added to your thoughts, you start doing things you wouldn’t normally do, your spirit now covered and hidden in a corner, waiting, on hold. It never dies but it will wait a long time if necessary, until you call it back up. For me, this was 5 years!
First, you try doing the normal routine, but you are distracted at work, unable to show love to your family, unable to be happy around your friends. You try, but you can only sustain it for so long before you find yourself staring and thinking, and crying. Your body starts to wear down. Fatigue is setting in. How you carry yourself, how you walk, your body language is showing the sadness.
Can you tell I’ve done this before? Yes I have, many times. I had a lot of “bad news” days in my life, a lot of shocking things where, without controls, sadness was the normal response. Looking back, I realize how much I prolonged my own agony. And now I know there are steps you can take, ways to get out of the funk quicker. Education and awareness are good to start with. Watching people and deciding who you don’t want to be is another.
Try this exercise with different emotions, reacting to things, playing it out in your mind. Look at your own life, your past, bad things, or even good things, that required your reaction, your emotional response. How did your mind and body deal with the events being colored by the emotion? How could you have done things differently? How could you have shifted your perspective? What different actions could you have taken? When I think back on stuff like being laid off from a job or my divorce or finding how I had custody of my kids, or my 10 years of medical bad news it’s mind boggling. Remember, these are only the negative things that happened but it's a great way to see how emotions played their part in the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT compendium.
Usually, what the mind thinks, the body does and the spirit colors with the real “you”. In my past, dealing with these shocking events, I added sadness, anger, apathy, procrastination, and a lot of passive aggressive actions where I subtly let my anger out until I colored everything and I burst, then spent days bewildered at my own actions. I always wondered why I kept doing things again and again that I knew were wrong, that ended negatively before. Was I just that stupid? No, not stupid, more like blind, or ignorant. Actually, I can’t swear I'll never do wrong again, but at least now, I'm awake. I can see. Being awake affords me the ability to call my spirit back into things and to change my perspective, to see the big picture. Emotions are funny that way. We do not control whether we have emotions, they are automatic, a response to what we experience. But we can control to some extent the emotions that we decide to feel. Take the same scenario we added sadness to, the doctor’s bad news. Now instead of sadness, add disappointment, or surprise.
By the way, you can't add an emotion that isn't true, or if you could, you can play it out and see that you're only lying to yourself causing a myriad of problems. This is called denial. What you can do, however, is to add a true emotion, one that causes a change in perspective. Like disappointment instead of sadness. How is it different, you say? Disappointment is much more temporary for one thing. It’s a form of sadness. Sorrow is a deeper form. So I could say truthfully that I was disappointed at the news and as I thought it through, three days later I would still be able to function. My kids, who needed me much worse than I needed sadness, saw things this way. I didn’t want to teach them to be so sad every time something bad happened. To them, bad would mean I couldn’t cook for them, which would probably mean hospitalization. Anyways, the disappointment might be gone three days later. With this emotion instead of complete sadness, I might seem sad or a little preoccupied, but I can still work and have relations with people. We all get disappointed by events but it is not life changing, usually.
Now, imagine in your mind, disappointment’s effect on the body, over time. Would it cause you to not take medications correctly, or to sit and stare for hours, or even to have crying jags that come out of nowhere? Disappointment just isn't that big a deal. This is one example and a simplistic one at that. I have challenged the theory for years now and it has helped me a lot. When I was “on the road", there were many events that were very shocking to the system. I was able to change how I thought about it, a survival technique by the way, and thereby change my course of action. Even to just think about the situation, calmly, taking a small timeout to assess the damage and form a quick plan, is the best tool in a survival situation you can use. Changing how you think could change how you survive. It’s what I call "1° off center." One degree, that’s all it takes, usually.
If center is say, sadness, what would be one degree off from that, right or left? Maybe disappointment is 3° to the left and sorrow is 5° to the right. We know that 180° is “happy.” In sailing for instance, there are two ways to go very fast, as fast as the boat can go. One is away from the direction of the breeze, “the wind at your back.” The other is to aim the boat 1° off center, in either direction. The boat will go to full speed, over time, unlike a car, which has a more immediate reaction. If you want to come to a dead stop you face the boat straight into the wind. The sails will flutter and the vessel will stop, over time. This is called "reaching". Seeing an emotion differently, one degree off center, does not mean fighting your true feelings or repressing them. It is not being pretense or afraid of the truth because it is still the same emotion, the same line, but a different level of the feeling. If you look at “happy”, 180 degrees is “sad”, but what’s 1 degree off center? Well, the right side might be “melancholy”, the left side might be “over-exuberant,” whereas 20° off might be “overjoyed” or even “ecstatic.” The other way perhaps would be an “understated reason to smile.” Sorry, small joke. 90° would be “completely apathetic.” You see, you can go too far in an emotion … like love and hate or anger and peace. 1° means,” accept and understand the full emotion but try tempering it, somewhat clinically, with the truth. I'm saying all of this because this happened to me over and over until I learned how to rephrase my thoughts, my self-talk, to being a better, more productive way of thinking, over time.
I always say “over time” because when we decide something, or want or need something, we first feel it, then think about it, then do it, then it happens, but it always happens slowly. Changing something in our lives is not like steering a car, but more like a boat, or even a large ship. You must learn to set course directions. If you want to go to the left, you select the target and then slowly inch your way, sometimes right a little, then left a little, wait a bit, then left a little more. With a car, you can just steer left and immediately, it heads there. The boat slowly goes left but will keep going left for a little bit after you turn to the right. This is why a ship has a navigator. His job is to plot the best course for reaching the target destination. We are a society of instant gratification so we tend to want life to steer like a car, but if it did it would be far too crazy.
Adding emotions to the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT mix, I believe, will guide you like a navigator through the shocking events in our lives. Especially if you, like myself, suffer from a permanent disease and you’ve gone down the negative side of the Pain Cycle. You may be able to actually trace back to when your life steered off course, probably due to a tragic event. You may see how the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT played into things as you fell down the uneven steps, in the dark, not knowing what was next. Now, name the emotions that colored your thinking, affecting your decisions, your relationships, yourself. Can you tell when your spirit started going to its dark corner and suddenly you're no longer you? Emotions, like fear (a huge one), distrust, anxiety, anguish, anger, sadness, sorrow, confusion, fatigue, and on and on, need to be dissected and understood. The best way to do this is through education. Your ship was being navigated by what you couldn't know. Your navigator was on autopilot. If you are still suffering, if your future is bleak and you are overwhelmed by negative thoughts and actions, as I was at my low point in 2004, I'm here to tell you, to prove, that changing my perspective changed everything, over time. It took one year just to change course once I knew I needed to, once I was awake to the facts, once I started shifting my emotions surrounding my thoughts and actions, once I became educated to what the emotions were.
Again, as I said at the beginning, these are my words, uncut, unedited. I could rant and rave about my experiences once I started to change things, but truthfully, I know my story. I'd rather hear your story. I have met many people in my travels, shared stories, ideas, including some professionals with impeccable resumes and patients with very sad, negative tales and I learned from all of them. But please don't take my word for it. Seek your own truth. Try these things yourself. Share your stories and listen to others’ stories. Accept everything you hear, and I mean everything, with a grain of salt. Aim your ship, set your navigation, and first and foremost, find your true spirit, who you used to be before the madness happened, who you really were and will be again. Once your spirit is on board with your emotions, your mind and body will follow, and once you see how your emotions play a part in how your MIND, BODY, SPIRIT acts, you will start gaining control over how negatively you go down the tubes. Although life can never be all goodness and light, I'm here to tell you, it can be almost perfect…
… 1° off center.
Finding the Positive Mindset
We all know of and continue to see the growth of the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT compendium, in the science and non-science arts of healing. They are also an important factor in pain management. Believe it or not, this knowledge is relatively new to those in the field of healing chronic pain. At least how this understanding is transcended to patients and the general public is very new. In my childhood it was mind and body. In my Mom's day it was just the body. The advent of alternative medicines in the process or mix of pain management menu items is mostly new. We now understand and are learning not to fear alternative treatments such as acupuncture, massage therapy, herbal mixtures, nutrition, to name a few, and under these headings you will find a list of disciplines from mostly Eastern medicine and philosophies dividing these treatments into a huge industry in the West.
In the 1960s thanks mostly to the flower children and "back to the Earth" pedestrian hopefuls, there was a lot of interest and subsequent knowledge of the much misunderstood healing remedies. The counterculture seemed to be diving in, sight unseen, attracted by the spiritual essence and very different approach to this kind of medicine. The large majority or, the general public, took much longer to welcome eastern medicine, and alternative medicines in general, into the fray. As the rise of previously unknown diseases in the 1970s and 80’s came to the forefront, the silent majority was looking for answers that the average AMA Dr. couldn't understand. Actually, the doctor’s approach and attitude toward these helpful healers, a seemingly stern antagonism and distrust, is probably what delayed the acceptance of these treatment options for many years. Arguably, many of these are still misunderstood and not welcomed by the general public. At some point in the "ideal future alternative medicines and eastern healing arts will be included in the mix of specialists surrounding any decent pain clinic. MIND, BODY, SPIRIT will be "the norm" in all therapies.
It’s no surprise that in the socialized medicine countries in most of the free world, the powers that be were into this concept of satellite specialists a long time ago. Because everyone can get medical attention and that includes most specializations, the general public, comprised mostly of well people, are now receiving a "maintenance mix" including a lot of alternative medicines and mental health counseling. On the whole, socializing the Healthcare System brought them through an adjustment period of about 20-30 years before the benefits of this kind of system come to fruition. Our system in the United States, the "HMO, doctor's first, patients last" style of care, has gone in the other direction. 40 years ago it was a good idea in a capitalist democracy where profits account for every decision, but now it has evolved, as it should, by the way, as any structure does where profits come first, evolved into a bloated beast of expensive technology, falsely inflated and brought on by a closed system.
The insurance companies dictate everything to the clinic or practice and the doctor must adhere or pay for it himself. For example, the insurance company allows a doctor to give you a 45 minute appointment the first time you visit with 15 minute visits every once in a while for follow-ups. They will approve another 45 minute visit for consultations. The trick to get around this is called "creative billing" whereby the clinic knows how to use the coding of medical needs to submit to the carrier for payment. So you'll see some doctors seemingly a lot more caring and attentive than others because, either they know how to submit billing or they are paying a lot out of pocket. This is strictly a generalization but it's a pretty good one, one that I learned from talking to various billing supervisors in some long established, large clinics. It explains why your doctor and your insurance company seem to be against you, fighting you, even attacking you. They don't mean to, but they are guided, and stay afloat, by profits and when a patient needs more “talk time” for explanations or just trying to be heard, beyond 15 minutes, it cuts into these profits. Think of how many appointments you went to that lasted an hour or more and how many patients belong to the clinic and require more attention? The doctors and insurance companies are in a fight over money while the doctor is trying to care for you. It's crazy, especially for someone in chronic pain. Most pain diseases are hard to pinpoint or diagnose and finding a proper treatment plan and medicine routine that works takes time and patience, a luxury no one can afford. Add to this that if an insurance doctor can find you incorrigible or unable to be diagnosed, they can have your insurance dropped or severely curtailed. This causes either a rush to a diagnosis, or a long stretch of endless tests that get nowhere. You see, it's all about the money.
But I digress.
To get back to the point, anyone who has done any research into healing, eastern or western, has heard of MIND, BODY, SPIRIT and knows intuitively how important they are to healing, and to each other. I believe MBS is the basis of controlling our own healing process and also how to deal with illness and pain as a constant, or chronic, in our lives. The mind thinks, the body does, and the spirit adds the spark into both, to make sure things are peppered with our personality and are done our way. Easy to understand when you look at it simply, but you could also study each or all three (MBS) for the rest of your life.
Now think of the implications of emotions on each of these axioms. Talk about adding spark! Just name emotion, positive or negative, and think of the effect it has on say, your mind. For example, let's take sadness. Let's also assume we are suffering from a severe, chronic disease and you've just gotten the news from your primary care doctor that the illness is permanent and deteriorating but… you will live for many years. Devastating! First shock sets in, that ping in your stomach making you nauseous, a slight fever sending heat to your eyes and forehead. You can hear fine but have no idea what is being said and for all intents and purposes you won’t remember the details anyway. That night, after you stop crying, alone in the dark the shock is wearing off. The emotional effect on the mind, body and spirit is automatic. There's nothing you can do about it but let it happen. Some things you should do at this point, however, is not make any important decisions, be careful who you are around and what you say to people because your emotional response is like a flood gate waiting to burst open. This is the effect of shock wearing off and reality setting in. Cry out, or go to the gym, or for a walk, or run, either by yourself or with someone you trust a lot, something where you can let the flood gates open and empty out. For some it's yelling and screaming, for others it is quietude, meditation and peaceful surroundings.
It's now the next day.
Last night you cried, made it through a workout and had a beer with your best friend. You woke feeling crushed but also feeling like you had a good sleep. You remember the doctor telling you the bad news, well, only the important stuff. Now, add complete sadness into the mix, the entrance to grief. You will probably be grieving over the loss of your normal life to an illness. There are so many things to grieve over in one crazy 30 minute conversation that you're overwhelmed and the impact of this news will register as sadness for years unless you have help guiding you through the process.
(note: If your clinic or insurance offers counseling, by all means, take it…and be as starkly open and honest as you can. It helps a whole lot. It is not psychiatric, but illness and grief guidance.-ed.)
OK, let's add the sadness in, first to the mind. In everything in life that we face is always presented to us in a certain perspective, or, how we see things in our minds eye. We always have a choice at this point and how we interpret our thoughts is a key to the path we enter. Our mind knows what the doctor said and understood it, but the sadness that surrounds and saturates these thoughts are bringing up the crying jags again and prolonging the doom and gloom. You hold it in but suddenly the day doesn’t seem as bright, the future looks bleak. Overwhelmed, you sit down on the nearest anything, hold your head and start running through all the things you feel you must go over. “What do I tell the family? What about work, my boss, my friends at the job? Can I still work? Should I still work?”
More crying, not sobbing, not that release of shock, but a steady mourning with tears running down your cheek and that distant gaze into nothingness.
You grab control and tell yourself to think good thoughts but everything you picture in your mind erodes with this depressing feeling. What happens to your spirit at this point? It starts to move away. It finds a corner and hides from sight because you haven't said you need it yet. This is understandable. Your spirit doesn't know positive or negative. It is there to add power and energy and your personality to all that you think and do. It got you to this point, 24 hours from the doctor's news, but sadness is affecting your thoughts and your body is reacting to your mind, not your spirit. You are doing things on autopilot for now, and the longer you do, the more hidden away your spirit becomes. You'll notice that, at this point, you start doing things that seem against your own personality, against the way you would normally do them. Days, weeks, even years can go by like this, the sadness deepening, your thoughts and actions more and more affected by the depression. Think of the effect this will have on the decisions you must make, the things you must do and your feelings towards these things, your medicines and treatments, your physical therapy, your relationships with loved ones. Intuitively, you know you need to stop it. Doing this for a period of time is understandable. Shock has many levels. But, if it goes too long it will start to damage your physical health. The body is reacting to your mind, your thoughts, and it feels your emotions. The body will interpret the sadness you added to your thoughts, as action. It will start "doing sadness". Where does this lead to? Think of the physical requirements it will take to go through the next period of time. With sadness added to your thoughts, you start doing things you wouldn’t normally do, your spirit now covered and hidden in a corner, waiting, on hold. It never dies but it will wait a long time if necessary, until you call it back up. For me, this was 5 years!
First, you try doing the normal routine, but you are distracted at work, unable to show love to your family, unable to be happy around your friends. You try, but you can only sustain it for so long before you find yourself staring and thinking, and crying. Your body starts to wear down. Fatigue is setting in. How you carry yourself, how you walk, your body language is showing the sadness.
Can you tell I’ve done this before? Yes I have, many times. I had a lot of “bad news” days in my life, a lot of shocking things where, without controls, sadness was the normal response. Looking back, I realize how much I prolonged my own agony. And now I know there are steps you can take, ways to get out of the funk quicker. Education and awareness are good to start with. Watching people and deciding who you don’t want to be is another.
Try this exercise with different emotions, reacting to things, playing it out in your mind. Look at your own life, your past, bad things, or even good things, that required your reaction, your emotional response. How did your mind and body deal with the events being colored by the emotion? How could you have done things differently? How could you have shifted your perspective? What different actions could you have taken? When I think back on stuff like being laid off from a job or my divorce or finding how I had custody of my kids, or my 10 years of medical bad news it’s mind boggling. Remember, these are only the negative things that happened but it's a great way to see how emotions played their part in the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT compendium.
Usually, what the mind thinks, the body does and the spirit colors with the real “you”. In my past, dealing with these shocking events, I added sadness, anger, apathy, procrastination, and a lot of passive aggressive actions where I subtly let my anger out until I colored everything and I burst, then spent days bewildered at my own actions. I always wondered why I kept doing things again and again that I knew were wrong, that ended negatively before. Was I just that stupid? No, not stupid, more like blind, or ignorant. Actually, I can’t swear I'll never do wrong again, but at least now, I'm awake. I can see. Being awake affords me the ability to call my spirit back into things and to change my perspective, to see the big picture. Emotions are funny that way. We do not control whether we have emotions, they are automatic, a response to what we experience. But we can control to some extent the emotions that we decide to feel. Take the same scenario we added sadness to, the doctor’s bad news. Now instead of sadness, add disappointment, or surprise.
By the way, you can't add an emotion that isn't true, or if you could, you can play it out and see that you're only lying to yourself causing a myriad of problems. This is called denial. What you can do, however, is to add a true emotion, one that causes a change in perspective. Like disappointment instead of sadness. How is it different, you say? Disappointment is much more temporary for one thing. It’s a form of sadness. Sorrow is a deeper form. So I could say truthfully that I was disappointed at the news and as I thought it through, three days later I would still be able to function. My kids, who needed me much worse than I needed sadness, saw things this way. I didn’t want to teach them to be so sad every time something bad happened. To them, bad would mean I couldn’t cook for them, which would probably mean hospitalization. Anyways, the disappointment might be gone three days later. With this emotion instead of complete sadness, I might seem sad or a little preoccupied, but I can still work and have relations with people. We all get disappointed by events but it is not life changing, usually.
Now, imagine in your mind, disappointment’s effect on the body, over time. Would it cause you to not take medications correctly, or to sit and stare for hours, or even to have crying jags that come out of nowhere? Disappointment just isn't that big a deal. This is one example and a simplistic one at that. I have challenged the theory for years now and it has helped me a lot. When I was “on the road", there were many events that were very shocking to the system. I was able to change how I thought about it, a survival technique by the way, and thereby change my course of action. Even to just think about the situation, calmly, taking a small timeout to assess the damage and form a quick plan, is the best tool in a survival situation you can use. Changing how you think could change how you survive. It’s what I call "1° off center." One degree, that’s all it takes, usually.
If center is say, sadness, what would be one degree off from that, right or left? Maybe disappointment is 3° to the left and sorrow is 5° to the right. We know that 180° is “happy.” In sailing for instance, there are two ways to go very fast, as fast as the boat can go. One is away from the direction of the breeze, “the wind at your back.” The other is to aim the boat 1° off center, in either direction. The boat will go to full speed, over time, unlike a car, which has a more immediate reaction. If you want to come to a dead stop you face the boat straight into the wind. The sails will flutter and the vessel will stop, over time. This is called "reaching". Seeing an emotion differently, one degree off center, does not mean fighting your true feelings or repressing them. It is not being pretense or afraid of the truth because it is still the same emotion, the same line, but a different level of the feeling. If you look at “happy”, 180 degrees is “sad”, but what’s 1 degree off center? Well, the right side might be “melancholy”, the left side might be “over-exuberant,” whereas 20° off might be “overjoyed” or even “ecstatic.” The other way perhaps would be an “understated reason to smile.” Sorry, small joke. 90° would be “completely apathetic.” You see, you can go too far in an emotion … like love and hate or anger and peace. 1° means,” accept and understand the full emotion but try tempering it, somewhat clinically, with the truth. I'm saying all of this because this happened to me over and over until I learned how to rephrase my thoughts, my self-talk, to being a better, more productive way of thinking, over time.
I always say “over time” because when we decide something, or want or need something, we first feel it, then think about it, then do it, then it happens, but it always happens slowly. Changing something in our lives is not like steering a car, but more like a boat, or even a large ship. You must learn to set course directions. If you want to go to the left, you select the target and then slowly inch your way, sometimes right a little, then left a little, wait a bit, then left a little more. With a car, you can just steer left and immediately, it heads there. The boat slowly goes left but will keep going left for a little bit after you turn to the right. This is why a ship has a navigator. His job is to plot the best course for reaching the target destination. We are a society of instant gratification so we tend to want life to steer like a car, but if it did it would be far too crazy.
Adding emotions to the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT mix, I believe, will guide you like a navigator through the shocking events in our lives. Especially if you, like myself, suffer from a permanent disease and you’ve gone down the negative side of the Pain Cycle. You may be able to actually trace back to when your life steered off course, probably due to a tragic event. You may see how the MIND, BODY, SPIRIT played into things as you fell down the uneven steps, in the dark, not knowing what was next. Now, name the emotions that colored your thinking, affecting your decisions, your relationships, yourself. Can you tell when your spirit started going to its dark corner and suddenly you're no longer you? Emotions, like fear (a huge one), distrust, anxiety, anguish, anger, sadness, sorrow, confusion, fatigue, and on and on, need to be dissected and understood. The best way to do this is through education. Your ship was being navigated by what you couldn't know. Your navigator was on autopilot. If you are still suffering, if your future is bleak and you are overwhelmed by negative thoughts and actions, as I was at my low point in 2004, I'm here to tell you, to prove, that changing my perspective changed everything, over time. It took one year just to change course once I knew I needed to, once I was awake to the facts, once I started shifting my emotions surrounding my thoughts and actions, once I became educated to what the emotions were.
Again, as I said at the beginning, these are my words, uncut, unedited. I could rant and rave about my experiences once I started to change things, but truthfully, I know my story. I'd rather hear your story. I have met many people in my travels, shared stories, ideas, including some professionals with impeccable resumes and patients with very sad, negative tales and I learned from all of them. But please don't take my word for it. Seek your own truth. Try these things yourself. Share your stories and listen to others’ stories. Accept everything you hear, and I mean everything, with a grain of salt. Aim your ship, set your navigation, and first and foremost, find your true spirit, who you used to be before the madness happened, who you really were and will be again. Once your spirit is on board with your emotions, your mind and body will follow, and once you see how your emotions play a part in how your MIND, BODY, SPIRIT acts, you will start gaining control over how negatively you go down the tubes. Although life can never be all goodness and light, I'm here to tell you, it can be almost perfect…
… 1° off center.