Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) proves effective if what has gone wrong is within recent and specific sets of life problems with clear cognitive underpinnings. In other words, CBT works well for everyday life problems, ie marital problems.
The focus of Albert Ellis’s REBT is on what you are telling yourself now. It focuses on rational beliefs (rBs) that serve self-interests and goals versus irrational beliefs (iBs) that work against self-interests and goals. Each time iBs surface, you actively challenge and dispute them. At the same time, you acknowledge life does not have to be free of hassles and mental conflicts.
Cognitive Restructuring
But this cognitive restructuring, by itself, is not sufficient – at least not by itself – with severe emotional problems that do not arise from recent events. Etiology of these problems involve primary affects or feelings that may extend so far back that few explicit memory traces remain, just imbalanced emotional states that are associated with these affects. These emotional states originate deep in your midbrain, sometimes referred to as the lizard brain, and you can’t do cognitive restructuring with a lizard.
Wordless Primary Affects
These wordless primary affects or emotions set off ruminous often paradoxical dilemmas. It is like the powerful wordless emotional feeling searching for a narrative. Your brain will always come up with disturbing narratives for you to ponder, over and over. You get a discomforting feeling and your brain goes on search mode, finding an unpleasant incident or person for you to zero in on to for the exponential time.
Though focusing on discomfiting affects or feelings can get you into a nightmarish paradoxical maze, avoidance of feelings is not possible. Emotional pain is inevitable, so rather than attempting to avoid it, you need to work on strategies to deal with negative affects. Panksepp suggests we can envision ways to use the positive affects of SEEKING and PLAY to counteract the negative effects of depression and anxiety disorders.
Seven Primary Affects
Primary Affects
It can help just knowing about the seven primary affects. I summarize them in my blog:
It helps to know about each of these primal affects, for example in terms of where in the brain the emotion emanates. But in your daily life let go and stop focusing. That is how to attain emotional balance; by not focusing on your feelings, yet at the same time not trying to avoid them; just nonjudgementally accepting they are there.
Attention Therapies
You can accomplish this with a balance of Insight Meditation, Ki Breathing Meditation, and other Attention Therapies. Insight Meditation allows yourself to experience feelings without trying to hold on to them. You can download mp3s free at Insight Meditation Center. And there is music, reading, writing, running, mp3s while running, and good old fashioned work.
None of the therapists I saw focused on anything but the cognitive. They actually reinforced the split, the disconnect between the deep primal universe of emotion and the frontal thinking, executive cortex. Psychiatrists prescribed medication on top of medication to alter and tamp down feelings.
Trauma imprints permanently affecting neural chemicals and neural connections. The imprint will be diminished with drugs, but we must understand the vast primal universe of feelings and learn to accept but not spotlight our attention on them.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
