“Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.” ― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Perhaps you picture emotions like clouds. No matter the color of the cloud, there is always the sun shining behind it; there is always some higher, genuine purpose behind it all. We should appreciate the presence of emotions, as well as of other parts of our being. They are trying to give us a valuable message.
To make our dealings with emotion much clearer and easier, let’s examine the very nature of emotion and possible methods of classifying them.
An emotion is energy-in-motion within our being. It is our primal response to a significant situation. As Eckhart Tolle said, “Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet”[i].
Definitely, the role of emotions in human life is huge. If we really want to integrate our personality and achieve inner peace and outer success, we must face our emotions in the first place.
In this system we will use Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions to determine the opposite emotions.
[i] Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Perhaps you picture emotions like clouds. No matter the color of the cloud, there is always the sun shining behind it; there is always some higher, genuine purpose behind it all. We should appreciate the presence of emotions, as well as of other parts of our being. They are trying to give us a valuable message.
To make our dealings with emotion much clearer and easier, let’s examine the very nature of emotion and possible methods of classifying them.
An emotion is energy-in-motion within our being. It is our primal response to a significant situation. As Eckhart Tolle said, “Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet”[i].
Definitely, the role of emotions in human life is huge. If we really want to integrate our personality and achieve inner peace and outer success, we must face our emotions in the first place.
In this system we will use Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions to determine the opposite emotions.
[i] Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
“Robert Plutchik's psycho-evolutionary theory of emotion is one of the most influential classification approaches for general emotional responses. He considered there to be eight primary emotions—anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, and joy. Plutchik proposed that these 'basic' emotions are biologically primitive and have evolved in order to increase the reproductive fitness of the animal.”[i]
Plutchik’s wheel of emotions and theory of emotion will prove pretty useful throughout our Reintegration practice. When we work with an emotion, we can find it on the wheel (or a similar emotion under a different name), and therefore immediately determine the opposite emotion. In this way we are able to get a pair of polarities to work with the Inner Triangle process.
Every emotion has its own trigger which launches it. It’s usually a situation which occurs from time to time in our everyday life. The connection between the trigger and the emotion is very tight and habitual, which often means that we need to deal with triggers too, in order to avoid the manifestation of their emotions, unless we integrate the emotion itself. That’s commonly done with anger, for example. Since anger outbreaks are common for almost every human being (and even some animals), it is one of the most basic emotions and in that sense the most difficult to integrate. That’s why we also have to deal with its triggers.
But if we were able to remove all triggers of anger (or any other unpleasant emotion), we wouldn’t remove the anger itself from our psyche. It would pose a dangerous situation, because that emotion would need to express itself in some way, which would lead to some uncontrolled outbreaks or even to personality disorders.
Thus, if we deal with triggers, we must deal with their emotions concurrently.
I recommend that you make a list of negative emotions together with their triggers. Go through the list and try to reintegrate all emotions as well as triggers.
Emotions are complex entities within us, with the original intention of appropriately reacting to a particular experience. They are never inherently unfavorable to us. Our experiences are usually filtered by negative beliefs or other elements of personality, which create distortions in our perception of the experiences. Therefore, if we have a negative perception of an event, an unpleasant emotion will emerge.
In this way, the emotion could be regarded as a valuable indicator of a deeper defeating or limiting element of personality which is affecting our view of reality. We must not fight emotions. We have to reintegrate them and take advantage of them as pointers to the parts of our psyche that are the real sources of our troubles.
In accordance with the above conclusion, the most appropriate procedure for dealing with emotions in this system is the Inner Triangle process. The recommended tactic is to have the unwanted emotion as the first polarity, and the second polarity as the opposite emotion which you could find on Plutchik's wheel.
If you are short on time, you may use the Single or Double Chain technique for the reintegration of emotions. However, if you use some of the basic Reintegration procedures, keep in mind that they probably won’t be successful in the long run with stronger recurring emotions, though they will surely help to decrease emotional charge.
Always remember to remove their triggers as well, because even though you integrate an emotion, the trigger itself will continue to re-generate habitual reactions and, in some cases, re-create the whole structure of a negative behavior, sometimes in a new and unexpected way. Re-live the trigger, do the Dissolving the Temporary I (DTI) procedure on it and then do the Gentle Touch of Presence (GTP) technique (described here) with the same trigger as well.
There are many emotions that deserve our serious work. Fear, rage, anger, sorrow, resentment, guilt… a better and complete list of various emotions can be found on the Plutchik's wheel shown in the above figure for use within your work.
All these negatively perceived emotions often generate unwanted actions and unpleasant consequences, but they are inherently good. They originally have had the highest intentions for your well-being. They certainly deserve to be welcomed back to you.
[i] Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrasting_and_categorization_of_emotions#Plutchik.27s_wheel_of_emotions.
Plutchik’s wheel of emotions and theory of emotion will prove pretty useful throughout our Reintegration practice. When we work with an emotion, we can find it on the wheel (or a similar emotion under a different name), and therefore immediately determine the opposite emotion. In this way we are able to get a pair of polarities to work with the Inner Triangle process.
Every emotion has its own trigger which launches it. It’s usually a situation which occurs from time to time in our everyday life. The connection between the trigger and the emotion is very tight and habitual, which often means that we need to deal with triggers too, in order to avoid the manifestation of their emotions, unless we integrate the emotion itself. That’s commonly done with anger, for example. Since anger outbreaks are common for almost every human being (and even some animals), it is one of the most basic emotions and in that sense the most difficult to integrate. That’s why we also have to deal with its triggers.
But if we were able to remove all triggers of anger (or any other unpleasant emotion), we wouldn’t remove the anger itself from our psyche. It would pose a dangerous situation, because that emotion would need to express itself in some way, which would lead to some uncontrolled outbreaks or even to personality disorders.
Thus, if we deal with triggers, we must deal with their emotions concurrently.
I recommend that you make a list of negative emotions together with their triggers. Go through the list and try to reintegrate all emotions as well as triggers.
Emotions are complex entities within us, with the original intention of appropriately reacting to a particular experience. They are never inherently unfavorable to us. Our experiences are usually filtered by negative beliefs or other elements of personality, which create distortions in our perception of the experiences. Therefore, if we have a negative perception of an event, an unpleasant emotion will emerge.
In this way, the emotion could be regarded as a valuable indicator of a deeper defeating or limiting element of personality which is affecting our view of reality. We must not fight emotions. We have to reintegrate them and take advantage of them as pointers to the parts of our psyche that are the real sources of our troubles.
In accordance with the above conclusion, the most appropriate procedure for dealing with emotions in this system is the Inner Triangle process. The recommended tactic is to have the unwanted emotion as the first polarity, and the second polarity as the opposite emotion which you could find on Plutchik's wheel.
If you are short on time, you may use the Single or Double Chain technique for the reintegration of emotions. However, if you use some of the basic Reintegration procedures, keep in mind that they probably won’t be successful in the long run with stronger recurring emotions, though they will surely help to decrease emotional charge.
Always remember to remove their triggers as well, because even though you integrate an emotion, the trigger itself will continue to re-generate habitual reactions and, in some cases, re-create the whole structure of a negative behavior, sometimes in a new and unexpected way. Re-live the trigger, do the Dissolving the Temporary I (DTI) procedure on it and then do the Gentle Touch of Presence (GTP) technique (described here) with the same trigger as well.
There are many emotions that deserve our serious work. Fear, rage, anger, sorrow, resentment, guilt… a better and complete list of various emotions can be found on the Plutchik's wheel shown in the above figure for use within your work.
All these negatively perceived emotions often generate unwanted actions and unpleasant consequences, but they are inherently good. They originally have had the highest intentions for your well-being. They certainly deserve to be welcomed back to you.
[i] Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrasting_and_categorization_of_emotions#Plutchik.27s_wheel_of_emotions.