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(from the Ian White book "Beat Depression the Drug Free Way) 2.2 Why is your emotional attitude so important? Why people change People change because their current lives are painful, uncomfortable or not achieving their goals. How people change Earlier in this chapter I mentioned the essential aspect needed to bring about any change in a person’s mental and emotional life, and that is that we all have inherent capabilities to re-learn anything that we’ve previously learned, given new information and realization. But there’s one further requirement for that to be brought about. The misinformation that has created fixed and unproductive belief systems must be examined and reformed to avoid any sabotage of the wonderful resource that we all have to ‘change our minds’ about something as important to us as our mental and emotional lives. Why people (apparently) can’t change. You’ve gotten the brief outline on parts drivers and task drivers. You have already probably worked out that there seems to be (to date) a contradiction in terms in what I’ve written. If I am stating that the realm of these subconscious parts is inaccessible by cognitive thoughts and words, then how on Earth can this book and this cognitive knowledge help? The answer to that question lies in an appreciation of the importance of emotional attitude. In 1952 Norman Vincent Peale wrote a best-seller called The Power of Positive Thinking. In his later years (1967), he wrote, Enthusiasm Makes the Difference. He had realized that his first offering to the world only went a part of the way. In his previous book, he had focused on thinking. He later changed his focus to attitude, abandoning the totality of his ideas that centered around the thinking aspect of human minds. His ideas around Enthusiasm has the same values as the ideas of Attitude. The point is that thinking and reasoning have little power over your life without the additional – and I would propose more important – attribute of a healthy attitude that pervades the subconscious emotional mind. There is little that you can do to immediately change your emotional attitude, but it must ultimately change in order for there to be that shift in essential mental and emotional substance that runs your mind and your life from within. Putting it simply at the start, emotional attitude means an approach, on a feeling level, to who you are, how you run your life, and what the state of your subconscious wellbeing may be that is derived from how you feel about yourself: what sort of relationship you do or do not enjoy with yourself. This is in opposition to how you think about yourself and who you are. Yes, I said ‘in opposition’ because all too often, thinking issues through gets in the way of achieving productive and healthy feeling goals in life. In a later chapter we will investigate the importance of having that correct emotional goal – the state of mental being for which we should aim. As we have seen, this equates with your emotional attitude. And we will leave until Chapter Ten, that aspect of your emotional attitude that is important to how you perceive and run your life after whatever processes you employ to beat depression. At this point, it’s useful to talk about the emotional attitude that I would like you to have as you work your way through the body of this book from this point onward. We have touched on the power of those unconscious parts of you (all of us) that tend to avoid change and to sabotage processing of any change. An aspect of productive emotional attitude is to realize that this is a part of how our minds naturally operate, acknowledge that, and in the acknowledgement, realize that new information will indeed be a healthy start to the process of quality change for the better for you. And if you just let your natural commonsense overview process the information as intended, it will be the only start you need. Emotional Attitude: It’s Everything, and Why. And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. --Abraham Lincoln As a clinical affectologist, my whole approach is underpinned by the importance of my clients developing as perfect an emotional attitude as is possible. The usual term I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient) should and could be replaced by the anagram, E.A. This new take on the importance of a correct Emotional Attitude may very well be the future’s answer to a whole slew of problems and issues that are the result of us over-thinking and attempting to change important issues in our lives by rational thinking that doesn’t quite do the job. What is YOUR Emotional Attitude? We’ve previously touched on the issues around ‘coming to a place in your reading where you are prepared to at least listen to and perhaps accept the counter arguments to the seven myths.’ It is most useful, then, if you take a quiet moment and assess just what your attitude to this might be. Do you have any immediate unease to the idea of accepting new information about the myths? Or are you perfectly willing to listen and investigate, realizing that the only way forward out of your depressive state is to believe differently? If you are uneasy about the proposition, then I’d be strongly looking at whether your emotional attitude is in your best interests. Of course if you are ready, willing and eager, then I say that your emotional attitude is healthy and will help you through our project in a most productive way Emotional Attitude: its importance to this book and you I seem to be getting ahead of myself when I say that the question of the importance of emotional attitude is dealt with in Chapter Ten. But again, I’ll say that you must adopt an emotional procedural attitude in your reading of this book. When you get to Chapter Six, you’ll see that I explain how to process all the following information in a way that allows for a shift in belief systems and a consequential change in your mental and emotional condition as it relates to depression. In adopting the right emotional attitude, the way forward is to start to adopt the personal banner that says, I need change away from my depressive state. In order for that change to take place, I need new information that will help a change in subconscious self-recognition. In order for me to gain and explore that new information, I have to be accepting of new ideas and listen to facts about where the mythical ideas came from. There is no peril. I will make up my own mind after all the facts have been investigated. And THIS is the stuff of turning the tide toward a positive and healthy emotional attitude. CORE POINT: CORE POINT: Your emotional attitude drives your life. You must make a choice to let the truth be known at your subconscious level. Your emotional attitude drives your life. You must make a choice to let the truth be known at your subconscious level. |