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The New Science of Stress Management©
For Increased Joy, Integrity, and Peace of Mind!
By
Charles Lawrence Allen, MSW
Adapted from the book -
Why Good People Make Bad Choices:
How You Can Develop Peace Of Mind Through Integrity
Available through Loving Healing Press
The Method Change The Big Picture Painful Feelings
The Method
This is a method for managing feelings. By using this method, you may be able to reduce or even eliminate the painful feelings that lead to stress. Your experience of feeling could be described like an on/off switch – you are either feeling, or not. At other times however, feeling is experienced like a dimmer switch – it ebbs and flows with a variety of intensity.
When we are not experiencing a particular feeling, the energy potential for feeling is maintained in a dormant state. It is when we focus our perceptual attention on something, either inwardly or outwardly, that we experience feeling. You can learn to influence feeling intensity though your thinking – you can choose to either turn up the intensity, or turn it down.
FEELINGS ARE CHOICES MADE BY YOU.
The Method Change The Big Picture Painful Feelings
Internal vs. External Change?
To make optimal use of the problem solving strategies it will be helpful to simplify your feeling experiences. That is, conceptualize your feelings as having roots in one of four physiological points of origin: anger, sadness, guilt, or fear. With little effort you can ask yourself, “Am I feeling mad, sad, bad, or fear?”
These feelings are divided into sections below, and each has a series of “challenge” questions* that you answer before going on to their resolutions. An important function of each of the feeling challenges is to determine a direction for resolution. That is, “Will I pursue an external resolution, or an internal resolution?”
External resolutions - you do or say something different.
Internal resolutions - you change your thinking.
(*Cognitive Challenge questions are meant to help to clarify your approach to emotional problem solving and it is recommended that you attempt to use them. However, it is okay to skip directly to the resolutions if you get stuck, or the questions become too burdensome.)
The Method Change The Big Picture Painful Feelings
The Big Picture
In order for the challenge questions to work, it is critical to be honest with yourself, and with regard to all of the relevant elements of the big picture. In other words, you need to identify all of the people, places, and things affected in your appraisal of the situation and related decisions.
When you make choices based on consciously chosen values and morals, you are making integrity-based choices. These choices result in you feeling self-respect. Your personal integrity is an outcome of making these types of choices consistently. Think about your own values and morals when going through the cognitive challenges.
Ultimately, feelings are not willed away -
they are transformed through your thinking.
The Method Change The Big Picture Painful Feelings
What are you feeling?
MAD?
SAD?
BAD? ( guilt )
or
FEAR? |
