「How to Develop Emotional Health」笔记

What is Emotional Health?

Emotional health is the sense that what is happening, is happening now. It is experiencing the world as first-hand, immediate, rather than only knowing what was experienced when you reflect upon it later. You are, as the sports commentators put it, ‘in the zone’.

You feel real rather than false. You are comfortable in your skin: you do not wish you could be someone else, nor do you look down on others for not being like you. You know what you are thinking and feeling, even if sometimes that only means knowing that you don’t know.

You have your own consistent ethical code which enables you to distinguish right from wrong. You are stoical in the face of adversity, realistic in your ideas and often seem to be wise in your judgements. You have the capacity for insight into your own actions. You can sometimes spot in advance when you are about to make a mistake and avoid it, or can see when you are reacting irrationally to a situation and correct yourself - so having crashed the car, you do no do it again; you can notice that the lights have changed or a wall is approaching, and turn the steering wheel. This gives you the nectar of the soul, the capacity for choice, and therefore, for change. Such self-awareness is what sets us apart from other animals.

In your moment-to-moment dealings with other people, you are a good judge of what they are feeling and thinking. You are able to live in the place where self and others meet, without tyranny. You do not get either ‘jammed on transmit’ or ‘jammed on receive’. You live without flooding or dominating others, nor are you flooded or dominated.

You are adaptable, but without losing yourself. When in social or professional situations which demand a measure of falsehood, you can put on a face to meet the faces that you meet without losing your sense of authenticity. Your real self is as close as possible to the one you are presenting to others, depending on what is feasible. For if a lie is necessary, you lie.

Your vivacity is striking, there is a liveliness you bring to any situation, but it is not frenetic and does not smack of ‘keeping busy’ to distract from bad feelings. You are spontaneous and always searching for the playful way to handle things, retaining a child-like sparkle, a conviction that life is to be enjoyed, not endured. You are not bogged down in needy, childish, greedy, game-playing manipulation.

You may suffer depressions, rages, phobias, all manner of problems, from time to time. You make mistakes. But because of your emotional health, you are able to live in the present and find the value in your existence, whatever is going on, and this makes you resilient.

When people leave your presence, they often feel better able to function, more vivacious and playful. Your emotional wellness rubs off on them. You are no martyr but you are widely regarded as a valuable contributor to your social and professional circles.

Have you ever met anyone like this? No, nor have I.

But this is what I mean by emotional health. None of us are emotionally healthy at all times, in all these ways. Most of us achieve it only in some of the respects outlined above, and only some of the time; very few manage this kind of emotional health in many of those respects and most of the time - perhaps 5 or 10 per cent of us. Helping you to edge closer to emotional health is the object of this book.

Who has emotional health?

Processing emotional health has nothing to do with how intelligent or attractive or ambitious or rich you are.

Most of us are born emotionally healthy. It is usually when children go to school, especially from ages seven to nine, that the challenges to emotional health arise most visibly. As the pressure to fit in and compare themselves with others builds, it becomes increasingly normal not to be emotionally healthy. Not until late middle age or old age, after a long period of being largely defeated by the challenges, does emotional health begin to return, if at all.

What emotional health is not

Emotional health is not defined by either mood or sanity. It is a different matter from mental health.

Nor should emotional health be conflated with ideas like ‘life satisfaction’ or ‘well-bing’, nor with happiness. This latter is usually a fleeting state, the feeling of pleasure you gain from sex or a cigarette, or the satisfaction on hearing of a successful exam results. It is psychological snake oil.

Nature versus nurture

In developed nations, emotional health is clearly linked to our life experience, and there are four main experiences that, individually or combined, lead to emotional health in adulthood.

1. The first is being loved in the early years, and wisely nurtured subsequently.
2. The second is receiving the right kind of supportive, loving assistance in the wake of childhood adversity, such as the loss of a parent, so that the person is able to convert the lead of such adversity into emotional gold.
3. The third is to be prompted by a radical, severe shock in adulthood to undertake a complete rethink of life, resulting in a sudden appreciation of the gift of life itself.
4. The last cause is profound spiritual or therapeutic experience.

The key elements of emotional health under five headings:

• Insightfulness: the ability to understand, by looking to the past, why you might think, feel and act a certain way.
  • • Childhood history, friends and family, society.
  • Conviction that through insight, you can colonize the past in your present, and start to live.
• Living in the present: the ability to have a strong sense of self, to own your own identity and live in the present instead of living ‘as if’ you are you, playing a role.
  • Inner identity derives from our earliest relationships.
  • For weak-selfed, 1) Start from playfulness and vivacity. 2) Community and group membership.
• Fluid, two-way relationships: the ability to interact freely and comfortably, with a good sense of tact and an assertive manner, neither dominating nor passive.
  • Steps: 1) Look at your own childhood; 2) Accept that separation is the last resort; 3) Seek more intimacy.
• Authenticity: the ability to live by values you identify with and believe in, rather than values you take on unthinkingly by default, often manifesting itself in your attitude to work and career.
  • Identified values (good); Introjected values (bad) <-> High achievers.
• Playfulness and vivacity: the ability to approach life with liveliness and joy.
  • Be loving intimate parents, and choose co-parent wisely.

Meeting the Challenges and do this Exercise:

Write down all the aspects of your life which you feel deplete you. These may be negative traits like being bad-tempered or lazy or feckless, but also, perhaps, things that you feel you do not appreciate enough - your partner, say, or your children. Now you need to find a place that you can think of as your symbolic grave. It could be a quiet corner of a field, if you live in the countryside; or perhaps somewhere in your garden, if you have one. Or it could just be a place in your house, like a floor in a peaceful room. Now lie down in that ‘grave’ and imagine the worst possible scenario.

Picture yourself as having died, looking up from the grave in which you have been lain, and imaging that you have completely squandered your life, wasting your talents and all the goodwill that those who love you offered. Looking down on you are all the significant people in your life, from partners to children to parents to friends to valued teachers to colleagues. Now imagine that they are expressing all their fury and resentment at the terrible waste that your life has been. They feel not a shred of pity or regret at your death, only outrage at your foolish failure to make the most of what was there. Listen to their voices, picture them screaming and shouting at your dead body, as you lie there. Imagine precisely what they would be saying. Your child might be shouting, ‘How could you have spent so much time working when you could have been playing with me?’, your partner might be saying, ‘You would never let me know what you were thinking; it’s too late now, you fool!’, your valued teacher might be berating you for ‘all that wonderful skill you had in writing essays, squandered by dissipating drink and drugs’.

Only when they have given full vent to this frustration should you let the sound die down. In its place, start to picture the vows you will make to yourself to do the things that will prevent it being like that when you truly die. Write down at least five things, and every morning for the next month, before you start your day, read through them and vow to live by them: promise to start loving yourself, attending to others, and all the other things that most of us fail to do.