Okay, your example of being interrupted with an unwelcome rant while studying is great for dissection. I’ll tackle it in an upcoming article, hopefully this month. (As you can see, today’s article tackled another reader question.)

“Regarding my experiences on the interrupted end, I am skeptical that my “listening skills” are really all the important, and wonder about them as a co-dependency device.”

This is really a separate issue and is pretty complex. Again, I’ll have to chew on this. ;)

Also, since “M” has dismissed discussing with me, feel free to continue the discussion forward by asking me direct questions regarding my responses that indicated to you a misunderstanding. Feel free to quote “M” or rephrase into your own words. :)

I thought “M” had points worth considering and that your responses indicated misunderstanding. Given that M replied suggests s/he was relatively pateint too. I would like to see more dialog with M.

Two cents,
Jack.

A tantrum about ‘things not going as planned’ is common in my circle, and in the moment of such, the complainer is verbalizing while…
…another is deeply engaged in studying molecular genetics. For the student, currently contemplated sub-topics occupy the mind, while meaningful recall and recombination of old memory “truths” with new info are simultaneously occurring, i.e., learning. Whammmo! The highly structured process is blasted with a sudden ping by the tantrum, and the dominos of learning all fall to the floor.
Knowing the importance of tantrum expression, the aspiring geneticist lets go of the dominoes, and connects with the loved one engaged in tantrum in order to aid in healthy balance of expression, visibility, and eventually, continuing problem solving, etc.

> Jack wrote:
>> “I hang in there in presuming the long-term
>> gains will be greater than the many
>> short-term distractions.”
>
> Has the hanging-in-there paid off for the
> most part?

I still do not know how to quantify, and to date, have been unable to duplicate myself for control experiments ;)
Though I do have a dream of cloning my genome, then raising myself (with a small tweak for better eyeball shape)!!

> If not, do you have a feeling for
> why that might be the case?

Unable to compute ;)
I am skeptical though, and so lean toward expressing self by oneself for the most part, especially if surrounded by those who have deep and numerous interests in fields outside of psych, social development, political processes, etc.

Regarding my experiences on the interrupted end, I am skeptical that my “listening skills” are really all the important, and wonder about them as a co-dependency device.

> As for a resource recommendation.
> Hmm, I’d say read a book about personal
> boundaries, since boundaries are the seams
> of relationships. And when you can trace
> boundaries — or the lack of them — with
> ease, you’ll be able to figure out more of
> what is going on during these “emotional
> interruptions.”

Understood. I like studying boundary conditions ;)

> My favorite book on boundaries,
> Boundaries: When to Say YES, When to
> Say NO, To Take Control of Your Life.
> It does have Christian overtones however,
> which I reframed while reading.

Thanks for the recommendation. As you can see, (9 full months later), I continue to be interested in this topic and will reply again once investigated (I don’t read immediately, rather, “investigate”).

Later,
Jack

When they get a name, their feeling may not be lessened, but their power to influence behavior is weakened.

It’s counter-intuitive that allowing your emotions to be — helps you experience and express them without letting them control your behavior. But like you say, this is the case.

When you are mindful of what you are feeling, you already have more choice how you will respond to the situation — after the emotion has run its course. Mindfulness is powerful stuff!

I like your distinction between labels and judgments.

Sometimes the emotional impact can make it really hard to keep the judgement out of the observation, and can even blur our ability to observe the emotion for what it is.

You and I view emotions “for what they are” in different ways. I don’t see them as things you can always dissociate from or do so (which I call suppress) without long-term negative consequences that naturally come when you shut off a basic survival circuit.

Buddhism didn’t originate in scientifically looking at emotions, how they work in the body, and how they relate to consciousness. That wasn’t possible back then because we are only now beginning to see how emotion works in the brain-body system. Buddhism is a belief system that was developed (and this is loose terming, because Buddhism branched off into many sects), and then after the fact, or in the process of explaining, it was said that emotions and “the self” (even though “the self” is also illusory) aren’t “fused.” This sounds like a neat way to explain it, but too many people take it as if it’s a scientific explanation.

It’s a philosophical way to avoid having to experience emotions, which are a natural (and useful) part of human life. The language is that you “choose to fuse” with your emotions, as if the two were disconnected in the first place. You aren’t disconnected, but if you tell yourself this for long enough, you definitely perceive it this way.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment Qrystal and for answering my questions as well. :)

To wrap up… you had asked: “How can mindfulness and emotion regulation be melded in such a way there is no contradiction? Do you think it’s even possible?”

I do not think these ideas can be merged. Emotion regulation depends on mindfulness because it is hard to regulate something without paying attention to it. Mindfulness requires emotion regulation, because otherwise the emotions may be interfering with the observations. But this does not mean that they are the same thing.

To answer your other question… yes, it does seem that the authors may be making contradictions, or at very least, trying to push the idea that mindfulness is about removal of emotion. Instead, I see mindfulness being able to be applied to emotion, if one can separate oneself from the emotion enough to just look at it. I’m not even suggesting allowing oneself to experience the emotion is necessary in order to be mindful of it, because that can interfere with the mindfulness. The trick is to put the emotional attachment on pause, even for a moment, to look at the emotion and see what caused it and evaluate the implications of it and then even if the emotion unpauses, it may be reduced in intensity or maybe there was time to leave the situation so that the emotion is experienced fully in a safer place.

One concern I have with this article is that I don’t consider labels to be the same thing as judgements. Labels assist with attentiveness, which I take to be acknowledging what is, what exists, what is happening. Most things (situations, feelings, perceptions) have names, and when we use those names we are understanding these things in a certain way. Many things can be called by different names, and some of the names may invoke a sort of judgement, but not all of them do: in fact, there may be a way to objectively describe just about everything, if the labels are chosen carefully enough.

Judging, on the other hand, is a comparison or evaluation which assists with deciding what to do about the thing to which attention is paid. It can involve rating the amount of positivity or negativity, or varying degrees of desirability, or appropriateness, or comfort, or even how much belief one has in something. Labels, on the other hand, can be completely neutral; we can say, “Hey, that’s anger surfacing,” and that is how we are being attentive to what is happening. Judgement is when we say, “the anger is making me feel uncomfortable,” or “the anger is okay and natural in this situation” or even “I am not as angry about this as I was about something else”. The way I see it, any comparative statements are the sign of evaluation occurring.

Mindfulness can be involved in both labeling and judging. In fact, being mindful of the difference between the label and the judgement will help us understand better when our own biases or thinking habits are turning our observations (objective labels) into evaluations (subjective judgements). We can be mindful of when a judgement sneaks into our observations, and call attention to that realization, observe it without judging it negatively, but instead just noting that it isn’t the same thing as an objective observation, and take note that we have made that judgement and be careful not to let it colour the rest of our observations until we are ready to make a mindful decision of what to do about them. Even though there are emotional judgements taking place, we can separate ourselves from them enough to observe how we are reacting and even observe how we are reacting to our reactions. When we get really good at that, we learn to be more careful about what judgements we make, and make them more mindfully. In this way, the mindfulness has a recursive quality: the mindfulness was used to observe, and to observe our reactions to the observations, and to notice our judgements of the observations, and ideally/eventually, to mindfully ensure that we approve of the judgements we are making as well as all of their consequences.

Sometimes the emotional impact can make it really hard to keep the judgement out of the observation, and can even blur our ability to observe the emotion for what it is. The latter seems to be what is meant by fusing: we associate so intensely with the emotion that it feels like a part of us. I suppose this also means that I adhere to that Buddist idea that the feelings and the self can be dissociated, but at the same time, I see it as the self that is experiencing the feelings, and so there really is no dissociation, although there is a way to look at the feelings impartially, even if doing so is tremendously difficult at times. To look at the feelings impartially is something many would judge to be helpful, no matter whether the feelings are judged to be worth experiencing or better suppressed for the time being. Either way, the observation must come first.

Meditation is about practicing the attentiveness, the observing, the noticing of what is happening and keeping it objective or impartial. Usually one thinks of the purpose of meditation being relaxing, but that is only because relaxation is more intense when it is done attentively. The mindful part of meditation enhances the awareness. Here’s what goes through my head in a typical meditation session: I’m relaxing by unclenching my muscles and breathing deeply, relaxing by thinking about relaxing, and then suddenly I’m thinking about my thinking about my relaxing which I judge to be okay and let it continue; I’m just thinking about my thinking, thinking, thinking; oh wait, now I’m worrying about something, and I judge it to not be helpful to my meditating, and so I turn my focus to thinking about my breathing, thinking of relaxing, feeling my body relax, feeling my body expand as I inhale, etc.