You are not your emotions, except when “you” disappears
A friend published a friends-only LiveJournal post titled “What makes you… you?” in which she says “I know (or think I know) intellectually that the feelings I have do not make me the person I am. But when I dig a little deeper I’m not totally sure” — and elaborates, very articulately, about what this experience is like, the fears it evokes, and the personal-intellectual challenges it poses. Below is my response.
The most valuable skill I’ve acquired through meditation is the ability to experience the sense in which I am not the same as my emotions. We have a tendency to unconsciously identify with thoughts and emotions, but it is also possible to dis-identiify from them, much as you might look around the theater and dis-identify from a scary movie. It is liberating.
I suspect this is is why Marsha Linehan et al have found mindfulness to be so effective in the treatment of BPD [borderline personality disorder]. Many of us have a tendency to identify too strongly with thoughts and feelings, or perhaps with the wrong thoughts and feelings, and it causes us to go out of balance. But if we can learn to step back and see ourselves through a slightly different lens, we see the illusions involved and don’t get so easily ensnared.
The process by which we identify with emotions, and can also learn to dis-identify from them, is probably the single most interesting thing to me in all of psychology. I’m convinced it accounts for a huge percentage of not only strong unpleasant emotions like rage and guilt and fear, but also for more long-term stable experiences like our self-esteem and the average success levels of our relationships.
The strength with which schizophrenics and other psychotics identify with their thoughts and emotions could potentially be a defining characteristic of psychosis. They appear to identify so strongly with every thought that pops into their noodle that they lose the ability to step back and reconnect with reality. I’ve heard that some schizophrenics (such as Mr. Beautiful Mind) do develop this very skill, to step back, and it helps them cope and maintain some sense of reality.
So what is the alternative? If we’re not our emotions or our thoughts or our actions or our experiences, what are we?
Buddhists — who have the most experience with this stuff, and taught Linehan the basics of what has become the most promising treatment available for borderline personalities — would say the trick is to identify your self with the witness or perhaps the flow of experience, rather than with the contents of any particular experience. You are process, not content.
So — you are not your anger; you are your capacity to observe your anger as it grows, tempts, and dissipates. You are not the new car you bought, or the thrill you get when you drive it; you are the observing presence that sees you are a little out of balance as you do it.
This is not a trick of semantics. It is a qualitatively different experience, and getting more familiar with it has saved me from doing all kinds of stupid things that cost me dearly in my youth.
I totally want to write a book about this.
Interesting post, thank you. This is just a side thought, but one alternative to identifying oneself with the process is to identify oneself with the organism, which still avoids identifying with thoughts, actions, emotions. Maybe it amounts to the the same as identifying with the process – not sure.
John,
Identifying one’s self with the total organism makes perfect sense to me philosophically, and I think that’s the definition I would want in a political context as well.
I am not sure how it would work psychologically or experientially, though.
I know how to switch from “I am this emotion” to “I am the watcher of this emotion,” but I don’t know how to switch to the perspective of “I am the organism.”
Conceptually it makes perfect sense, but experientially I don’t know what it is like to view experience through something that is not inside my own mind.
It’s analogous to modifying a camera so that it views from the perspective of the whole camera, and not just the lens or the photo-sensors. What would that … be like?
Or, returning to the movie metaphor, it might be like like switching from “I am the movie” to “I am the watcher of the movie” to “I am the whole theater.” Suddenly the frame of reference is too large for a single perspective to still be applicable.
It may be that “organism” works fine as a philosophical definition, but won’t work as a psychological or experiential perspective because it’s no longer internal to consciousness; the total organism includes much more than just consciousness.
Does that make sense?
Joshua
PS. One thing fully enlightened people often say is that they no longer have the experience of a separate self. They might have an interesting, er, perspective on this conversation.
Thank you for your thoughts, Josh! I have to give this some mulling.