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Chapter 14 : INTRODUCTION TO UPDATING THE EMOTIONAL SYSTEM
While the importance of a commitment to a logical approach to reality and a life-based intellectual agenda cannot be over-stressed, as living beings what we feel, our emotional state, has tremendous significance in our lives as well. In my basic medical training I observed that the role and importance of emotion with regard to medical disorders was generally ignored or at best misunderstood. As a result, most physicians disregard or have no idea how to address the emotional aspect of illness.
My experience as a doctor has led me to understand that emotional well-being is an essential component to health. The perversion of the basically-functional human ape in the process of civilization has led to extraordinary emotional destruction. Thus, the civilized human animal, this ape in a cage, is a suffering creature and is in a severe state of emotional disease.
While modern psychiatry wishes to attribute emotional disease to biochemical imbalances, my observation has taught me that virtually all emotional disorders are a function of caged existence and learned behavior intended to enable one to survive within the cage.
The pursuit of well-being involves getting oneself out of the cage. The emotional responses that we have presently are a function of the zoo and are not compatible with undomesticated life.
To become healthy you must not only think like a wild animal but you must also feel like one. The learned emotional responses that we have developed in our caged existence must be eliminated otherwise we carry the cage around within ourselves.
It is therefore necessary that we have a means to update our learned emotional responses to accomplish this. The second part of Rational-Emotional Updating involves exactly that - an effective means to update your learned emotional behavior.
When I study the emotional distress that individuals suffer from, I observe that either they are truly in a bad situation that they need to get out of and/or they are experiencing a greater degree of discomfort than they need to in their present circumstances. Generally both factors are present.
If their situation is truly causing them pain, then there is generally some best-possible solution to it but they are usually not pursuing it and instead are stuck in some self-destructive loop because of some internal block that they have which they have been unable to overcome.
Typically they are not doing something that they need to do to move forward and the reason that they do not do whatever that may be is because of the emotional pain which they perceive that they would experience if they did do it.
If they were to analyze this discomfort, they would discover that they should not logically have to feel so uncomfortable in the situation that they are avoiding but unfortunately they would in fact feel this pain if they put themselves into that situation. Therefore, they stay in bad situations in order to avoid pain that they recognize to be illogical but real nonetheless.
If, on the other hand, their emotional distress is due to exaggerated discomfort experienced in situations, either they have responded in such a manner for so long that they do not even recognize that their response does not make sense or, if they do, they have no idea what they could do in order to feel differently.
Animals do not like pain. Human animals go to the doctor in order to get rid of present pain or avoid future pain, and generally more the former than the latter. I do not recall a single patient who ever came to see me because they felt too comfortable. Therefore, the elimination of discomfort is the focus of my attention as a doctor.
Since I came to appreciate that a tremendous amount of the discomfort that I dealt with as a physician was directly or indirectly related to emotional discomfort and since my basic medical training taught me little of use to address this problem, I learned and developed an effective method myself to deal with this issue.
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