No matter what situation a person goes through, their emotional state is a direct result of the personal and private meanings that are extracted from that situation. If a girl hits on a guy, and the guy gets happy, he has taken a meaning from that situation. If a guy asks out a girl, is rejected and feels sad, he has taken a meaning from that situation as well. A lot of times, it just seems as if we feel automatically from situations. We don't seem to give whatever the situation is much conscious thought. We all have sets of beliefs in place that underlie how we think and feel. We've built these beliefs over time and have a lifetime's worth of experience at living and processing life according to them. That is why when we experience a situation; we tend to feel without much contemplation over whatever is going on. Our underlying belief system has been tapped in these cases. Therefore, when feeling a certain way, stop and ask yourself what possible meanings you could be taking from the current situation that could account for the feelings being experienced. Be honest and objective. Once you have an idea, ask yourself what kinds of underlying beliefs could account for the meanings you've taken from whatever it is you're going through. The next step is to examine those beliefs and test them. What evidence is there that things are really the way you think they are? Is there any evidence besides your own thinking that proves that something is so? This will take time and repetition. Again, we've had a lifetime's worth of experience in reinforcing our own thinking. An important thing to remember is that there is first, the situation, and second, the meaning taken from it. These are two totally different entities. That is why two different people can experience the exact same situation and take two entirely different meanings from it.
Be careful what you tune into, because your sub-conscious tape recorder's always on. What kind of tapes are we constructing that play on us unconsciously? Every time things happen, either to us or at our own hand, the information is being entered into us. This determines how our beliefs are formed and how we will process future information. What we may not be aware of is that this stuff plays on internally. So as we go on living, just stop and ask about how your living may be affecting you. What kinds of messages are you sending yourself? What kinds of messages are you tuning into with what is going on around you? Realize that they're going to play on a tape internally because our unconscious tape recorder is turned on. We do however have a say in what stays and goes. Know that parallel processing can and does occur. We record what we tell ourselves as well as what others tell us, both with thoughts and with actions. Just what kinds of messages are you allowing yourself to process today? Our mind is like a radio tuner we can point toward the world. We have a say in what we tune in and focus on. This applies to what we focus on in our own minds as well as to the input from others. The important thing to remember is that what we tune into will be recorded and played back for us in our sub-conscious. This is important because much of our emotional state depends on the internal tapes we have playing. The good news is that we can rewind and record over what's on the tape if we examine it and discover it causes more harm than good, just like we can decide what we want to record more of in the future. The bad news is that our initial processing of situations occurs without any objective contemplation. The problem with this is that our sub-conscious is hard-wired to process shame.
Shame can come from a discrepancy between reality and the reality we want. A limit of our power/influence has been reached. The feeling of shame is triggered by a limit being reached. There are all kinds of limits we can reach. Shame comes from our interpretation of a particular kind of limit. Say you ask someone out and they say no, the limit you've just discovered is that not everyone wants to go out with everyone. That's the objective definition of that particular limit. Our interpretation of that limit could be, “I'm an undesirable person.” So shame is felt. In the case of an addiction, when one discovers they cannot control their desire for drugs, they feel shame at that situation. That person needs to acknowledge and process that shame or it will continually drive the addiction. No one wants to acknowledge shame. In this particular situation, once one accepts that addiction is a disease and they have it, that replaces shame with feelings of hopelessness and despair initially. This is better than shame, but not by much. The problem with shame is that we disown the parts of ourselves we're ashamed of. However, those parts still have the ongoing drive for expression. To avoid shame is to cause it to expand.
