Emotional OOPs

“A little boy holding a book with a surprised expression on his face” by Ben White on Unsplash

You walk into a therapist office and start your conversation with “I should not be feeling this”. And therapist informs / reminds you that feelings are neither right nor wrong, they just are.

If I had a penny for every time a client said, she should not be feeling this way; she should not be sad, or angry or upset or tired or xyz. This brings us to today’s topic: Emotional OOPs.

Lets define them first.

OOPs: Dictionary definition: used to show recognition of a mistake. Or my definition: “Out Of Place Stuff”.

Emotion: the affective aspect of consciousness

Now the thing is, emotions are not inputs, they are outputs. So if the output is not what you desire, then you don’t reject the output, you go and change the system/input. Imagine you are baking a bread, and it does not turn out the way you want it, you won’t curse the burnt bread, you will change the recipe and hopefully try again.

Similarly, if you are experiencing undesirable emotions, you need to assess your thoughts and core beliefs that are generating those emotions.

Feedback loop: The tricky part is, there is a feedback loop, where emotions do feedback into your models and if you don’t consciously catch this, it can lead to a vicious downward cycle. This is where you start feeling ‘angry for feeling angry’ or ‘sad for feeling sad’ aka feeling for a feeling aka meta feelings.

To break this vicious cycle, add a new node in your mental model: There are no emotional OOPs aka there are no emotions out of place.

Let me elaborate more on this.

Fixing mental models: There is a beautiful formula called R.A.I.N, that came from Michele McDonald (vipassana teacher) and I learnt it from my spiritual teacher Tara Brach. RAIN is the antidote to your emotional OOPs.

• R: Recognize / Awareness: Become aware of what are you feeling. Emotional Awareness is the first competency of emotional intelligence too. Awareness is a form of intelligence (AQ). If you are not good at recognizing your emotion, scan your body to see what are you physically feeling and then you might be able to pinpoint what are you are emotionally feeling. Emotional granularity aka precisely defining what you are feeling, is hugely impactful in getting control over your emotional state. If I can’t come up with a precise emotion name like“I am feeling envy”, I use colors, for e.g. I am feeling purple + green. Or I use metaphors, for e.g. I am feeling like a swaying tree floating on ocean.
• A: Accept the emotion: Just accept. No shoulds, no buts. It just is. My favorite tool is “Its okay”. So let’s say you are feeling sad, here is what you say internally “I am feeling sad.. It’s okay”. It is so simple yet powerful. Reminder: 1) What you resist, persists. 2) Acceptance is the beginning of change.
• I: Investigate mental models:
  — what were my triggers
  — what thoughts did I just have
  — what’s unique about this situation
  — what am I choosing to believe
  — what past experiences contributed to my belief
  — is this belief serving me or do I want to change it
  — what do I want to believe instead
• N: Non-identify (per Michele) or Nourish (per Tara Brach)
  — “I feel, therefore I am” — FALSE. My current emotion is not “me”, these are just emotions I am experiencing.
  — “I think, therefore I am” — FALSE. My thoughts and beliefs are not “me”, they are just thoughts and belief. They are changeable.
  — “I just am” — TRUE. I am greater than the sum of all my parts. I am loving awareness.
  — Offer compassion, kindness and love to self. And you will see you mental models get a little less rigid

Practicing RAIN moment to moment to moment to moment is what will lead to new mental models and hence new outputs. This is how you will learn that there are no emotional OOPs, which will magically fix any emotional OOPs too.

Are you ready to practice?

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