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Existential Review Part 6: VALUE PAIN & ANXIETY - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103
[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]
Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 5 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model with Ideal 6. Share your reactions to the existential explorations and let others benefit from your explorations.
VALUE PAIN & ANXIETY AS CHANCES TO LEARN (Ideal 5)
One of the keys to self-disclosure (Ideal 4) is exploring your negativity or pain. Your pain and negativity has forms for each level of consciousness. At your personality level, you experience emotional pain when any of your subselves is denied integrated expression. At your bodymind level, physical pain demands you abandon exclusive attachment to your personality as though it is all you are and that you integrate your body into your experienced self. At this level, your pain also demands you accept your decision to die (your archetypical decision for finitude.)
At social levels, your pain (the loneliness of exclusive identification with your bodymind as all that you are) leads you to include another person in your sense of you. You overcome the pain of separation from others further when you extend your love and care for your family, network, culture and all humanity. At higher transpersonal levels your pain points to your artificial separateness from nature and finally to you as your own final resistance to unity consciousness. At each level, your pain signals that you are separating yourself and that you can discover and include another in your awareness.
At each level of consciousness, use your pain to point to the apparent alienated, unacceptable truths about yourself, how you limit your awareness, and how you really are. You expand your consciousness when you extend your self-definition to include these resisted truths in your consciously experienced existence.
Koestenbaum summarizes the existential ideal that pain is useful for your growth, maturity and development as follows: "I choose to value my pains. Pain is unavoidable ... Anxiety and depression help me understand the meaning of life. I can successfully cope with the fact that evil is an integral part of life."
* Note a time when you experienced pain and used your experience to grow, mature, expand your consciousness, notice a neglected part of yourself or come closer to other people, nature or God.
Emotional Pain: Identification-Disidentification With Addictions (Archetypical Cathexes) - Preferences, Personality Integration
Ken Keyes writes that when you are hurting emotionally, you are giving yourself a signal to expand your narrow identification with one role, subselves or mind-tape and expand your self-concept to include wider roles, other subs and new mind-tapes. Keyes suggests you do the following exercise when you feel pain, unhappiness or negativity. To explore the addiction (how you tell yourself things must be for you to feel okay) you choose to upset yourself. You uplevel (reprogram) your addiction into a preference (a desire which, if unmet, does not hurt you.) Upleveling addictions to preferences allows you to accept, express, and disidentify with your unexpressed subs' demands, to accept their deeper needs for recognition, love and integration and to experience your personality as whole.
Do the exercise below with a partner. Take turns taking each other through this process. Locate yourselves in a private space where you won’t be interrupted for an hour or so.
Place nearby a plastic wastebasket or bucket large enough to completely cover your head and also allow breathing. Have your partner tell you (or tell yourself) the following:
Lie down on your back with your eyes closed and your legs and arms open. Breathe deeply through your mouth, allowing your belly to stick out when you breathe in, fall when you breathe out. Make a soft "ahh" sound with each breath as you let all the air out of your mouth.
Let your mind float back over the last week or earlier until you see, hear and feel a time when you are upset, suffering, uncomfortable, tense or critical.
Name the people involved in the incident. Tell me where the incident takes place. Describe the incident and the dialogue in the present tense, as though it is happening NOW.
How does your body feel during the incident?
Name the emotions you feel during this upset. Make sure they are feelings--like anger, hurt, jealousy, loneliness, fear, boredom--not thoughts.
What’s the internal dialogue that goes along with this scene? What’s really bugging you?
Go back through time to when you had similar feelings. Name the people, place, and time. Relive this incident in the present tense, telling yourself aloud how you feel about yourself during the incident.
Relive another incident from your past when you had similar feelings.
Return now to the recent upset with which you began this exercise. How did you want the people and things in your upset to have been or acted?
If the incident had gone the way you wanted it to, what would you get? What do you really want in this situation? State the demand linked to your suffering.
Tell me how your demand causes you suffering.
Say how this demand caused your suffering in the past.
Point out how this demand will cause you suffering in the future.
Tell me that you’re ready to drop the demand and stop suffering.
Create short, simple sentences, reality reminders, which free you from
the demand. They should feel right when said rapidly with intensity.
Keep your eyes closed, kneel on your knees with the top of your head
in the plastic wastebasket or bucket on the floor. Tense all your muscles. Breathe deeply and fast, keep your upsetting scenes in your mind. Say your reality reminders loudly and intensely.
Say your reality reminder louder. Yell. Louder! LOUDER!
Keep emoting your reality reminders in the bucket. Express them with
your whole body. Continue this as long as you feel emotional intensity from your upsetting scenes.
Take your head out of the bucket. Keeping your eyes closed, sit up. Breathe deeply. Imagine that you’re a hollow tube within which a ball of light moves up with each in-breath, and down with each out-breath. Allow a few minutes.
Let the ball of light within you move less and less until it comes to rest somewhere in your body. Put your hand where the ball stops.
Visualize the same scene which upset you, except this time imagine your new emotional response to be according to your reality reminders.
Open your eyes and tell me what this experience was like for you.
* Relate your experience with the exercise above to the existential idea that pain teaches you to grow .
Bodily Pain: Identification-Disidentification - Bodymind Integration
Physical pain gives you the chance to realize you have exclusively attached your conscious identity to your personality. The exercises to follow allow you to extend your self-identity, using physical pain as a guide, to your body. Begin with apparently trivial pain, and realize that this model can be extended to severe pain, and is a basis of holistic healing.
Focus your attention on a strong but bearable pain you or a partner are currently experiencing--a splinter, toothache, headache, infection, burn, indigestion, etc.
Experience the physical pain right now. Imagine this paragraph contains a subliminal, magical microclonal generator process which makes a small you who will explore your body's pain. You are generating a small you.
As very small you, enter your large body in a safe and convenient way and proceed to the source of the pain. Notice the shape, energy and appearance of the pain and the areas around it. Notice its color, temperature, smell and tension. Now become the pain. Identify with it. State your existence.
As little you, manipulate the pain in some way--do something to it. Be the pain again and respond.
Establish a back-and-forth dialogue with your pain. Find out from it what it wants from you, why it is hurting you, what it is trying to tell you, whether it is angry at you, how it is helping you, how you are dependent on it and for whom it is a spokespain.
When you reach closure of some sort, exit the pain's area and return outside your body. Walk up to this page. Look down right here at the words "clonal reintegration process" and feel yourself reabsorbing your little clone and the knowledge the little one gained within.
* Evaluate (using your experience "dialoging with your pain” the existential idea that your physical pain stimulates you to grow.
sashalessinphd@aol.com
[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]
Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 5 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model with Ideal 6. Share your reactions to the existential explorations and let others benefit from your explorations.
VALUE PAIN & ANXIETY AS CHANCES TO LEARN (Ideal 5)
One of the keys to self-disclosure (Ideal 4) is exploring your negativity or pain. Your pain and negativity has forms for each level of consciousness. At your personality level, you experience emotional pain when any of your subselves is denied integrated expression. At your bodymind level, physical pain demands you abandon exclusive attachment to your personality as though it is all you are and that you integrate your body into your experienced self. At this level, your pain also demands you accept your decision to die (your archetypical decision for finitude.)
At social levels, your pain (the loneliness of exclusive identification with your bodymind as all that you are) leads you to include another person in your sense of you. You overcome the pain of separation from others further when you extend your love and care for your family, network, culture and all humanity. At higher transpersonal levels your pain points to your artificial separateness from nature and finally to you as your own final resistance to unity consciousness. At each level, your pain signals that you are separating yourself and that you can discover and include another in your awareness.
At each level of consciousness, use your pain to point to the apparent alienated, unacceptable truths about yourself, how you limit your awareness, and how you really are. You expand your consciousness when you extend your self-definition to include these resisted truths in your consciously experienced existence.
Koestenbaum summarizes the existential ideal that pain is useful for your growth, maturity and development as follows: "I choose to value my pains. Pain is unavoidable ... Anxiety and depression help me understand the meaning of life. I can successfully cope with the fact that evil is an integral part of life."
* Note a time when you experienced pain and used your experience to grow, mature, expand your consciousness, notice a neglected part of yourself or come closer to other people, nature or God.
Emotional Pain: Identification-Disidentification With Addictions (Archetypical Cathexes) - Preferences, Personality Integration
Ken Keyes writes that when you are hurting emotionally, you are giving yourself a signal to expand your narrow identification with one role, subselves or mind-tape and expand your self-concept to include wider roles, other subs and new mind-tapes. Keyes suggests you do the following exercise when you feel pain, unhappiness or negativity. To explore the addiction (how you tell yourself things must be for you to feel okay) you choose to upset yourself. You uplevel (reprogram) your addiction into a preference (a desire which, if unmet, does not hurt you.) Upleveling addictions to preferences allows you to accept, express, and disidentify with your unexpressed subs' demands, to accept their deeper needs for recognition, love and integration and to experience your personality as whole.
Do the exercise below with a partner. Take turns taking each other through this process. Locate yourselves in a private space where you won’t be interrupted for an hour or so.
Place nearby a plastic wastebasket or bucket large enough to completely cover your head and also allow breathing. Have your partner tell you (or tell yourself) the following:
Lie down on your back with your eyes closed and your legs and arms open. Breathe deeply through your mouth, allowing your belly to stick out when you breathe in, fall when you breathe out. Make a soft "ahh" sound with each breath as you let all the air out of your mouth.
Let your mind float back over the last week or earlier until you see, hear and feel a time when you are upset, suffering, uncomfortable, tense or critical.
Name the people involved in the incident. Tell me where the incident takes place. Describe the incident and the dialogue in the present tense, as though it is happening NOW.
How does your body feel during the incident?
Name the emotions you feel during this upset. Make sure they are feelings--like anger, hurt, jealousy, loneliness, fear, boredom--not thoughts.
What’s the internal dialogue that goes along with this scene? What’s really bugging you?
Go back through time to when you had similar feelings. Name the people, place, and time. Relive this incident in the present tense, telling yourself aloud how you feel about yourself during the incident.
Relive another incident from your past when you had similar feelings.
Return now to the recent upset with which you began this exercise. How did you want the people and things in your upset to have been or acted?
If the incident had gone the way you wanted it to, what would you get? What do you really want in this situation? State the demand linked to your suffering.
Tell me how your demand causes you suffering.
Say how this demand caused your suffering in the past.
Point out how this demand will cause you suffering in the future.
Tell me that you’re ready to drop the demand and stop suffering.
Create short, simple sentences, reality reminders, which free you from
the demand. They should feel right when said rapidly with intensity.
Keep your eyes closed, kneel on your knees with the top of your head
in the plastic wastebasket or bucket on the floor. Tense all your muscles. Breathe deeply and fast, keep your upsetting scenes in your mind. Say your reality reminders loudly and intensely.
Say your reality reminder louder. Yell. Louder! LOUDER!
Keep emoting your reality reminders in the bucket. Express them with
your whole body. Continue this as long as you feel emotional intensity from your upsetting scenes.
Take your head out of the bucket. Keeping your eyes closed, sit up. Breathe deeply. Imagine that you’re a hollow tube within which a ball of light moves up with each in-breath, and down with each out-breath. Allow a few minutes.
Let the ball of light within you move less and less until it comes to rest somewhere in your body. Put your hand where the ball stops.
Visualize the same scene which upset you, except this time imagine your new emotional response to be according to your reality reminders.
Open your eyes and tell me what this experience was like for you.
* Relate your experience with the exercise above to the existential idea that pain teaches you to grow .
Bodily Pain: Identification-Disidentification - Bodymind Integration
Physical pain gives you the chance to realize you have exclusively attached your conscious identity to your personality. The exercises to follow allow you to extend your self-identity, using physical pain as a guide, to your body. Begin with apparently trivial pain, and realize that this model can be extended to severe pain, and is a basis of holistic healing.
Focus your attention on a strong but bearable pain you or a partner are currently experiencing--a splinter, toothache, headache, infection, burn, indigestion, etc.
Experience the physical pain right now. Imagine this paragraph contains a subliminal, magical microclonal generator process which makes a small you who will explore your body's pain. You are generating a small you.
As very small you, enter your large body in a safe and convenient way and proceed to the source of the pain. Notice the shape, energy and appearance of the pain and the areas around it. Notice its color, temperature, smell and tension. Now become the pain. Identify with it. State your existence.
As little you, manipulate the pain in some way--do something to it. Be the pain again and respond.
Establish a back-and-forth dialogue with your pain. Find out from it what it wants from you, why it is hurting you, what it is trying to tell you, whether it is angry at you, how it is helping you, how you are dependent on it and for whom it is a spokespain.
When you reach closure of some sort, exit the pain's area and return outside your body. Walk up to this page. Look down right here at the words "clonal reintegration process" and feel yourself reabsorbing your little clone and the knowledge the little one gained within.
* Evaluate (using your experience "dialoging with your pain” the existential idea that your physical pain stimulates you to grow.
sashalessinphd@aol.com
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