Starving Negative Emotions

This blog discusses common ways we feed negative emotions and uncommon strategies for starving them.

As humans, we think in one of two primary ways. The most common way is in reaction to the world around us. For example, we react with a thought that leads to an emotion and then a subsequent action that is consistent with that emotion. The second, less common way is active thinking, where you are constantly choosing to think positive thoughts, like 4:8 thoughts. When you choose to think 4:8 thoughts, it results in a good mood and subsequent actions that are consistent with goals and ideals that are important to us. By getting clear on your personal vision and aligning your behavior with that vision, you can produce the emotional blessings you desire. Thus, your goals should act as a filter which eliminates words, behaviors, and other emotional responses that oppose your goals.

The point is that you are not to be a passenger in your emotional life, but instead a driver. To do so, you must recognize your negative thoughts so you can eliminate them from your thought life.
RATS

These are "Really Awful Thoughts", thoughts that steal your potential for joy. They highlight crooked thinking patterns and provide insight to areas in your thought life you can address.

Amplifiers

These are patterns that use unpleasant words like "always", "never", "no one", "every time" which magnify the degree of unpleasantness. It tends to drag others below the joy zone.

Feelers

These are patterns of accepting negative feelings as true without questioning them.

Guessers

This pattern of thinking pretends to know what others are thinking and assumes the worst ahead of time. It often triggers an emotional response from the other person, which results in you becoming defensive.

Exaggerators

This pattern of thinking makes mountains out of molehills.

Identifiers

This pattern of thinking injects harmless events with personal meaning. It is an overestimation of how the even is related to them. It is an interpretation of negative events as personal attacks.

Forecasters

This is essentially pessimistic thinking. This pattern of thinking is characterized by predicting the worse-case scenario, sometimes before even becoming involved.

Cynics

This pattern of thinking finds something wrong no matter what. It is seeing the bad in everything and results in living in misery.

Blamers

This pattern of thinking involves pointing a finger at someone else for one's own problems. It is temporarily liberating but ultimately immobilizing.

Justifiers

This pattern of thinking is characterized by reminding self of all reasons why they are entitled to the negative emotion or outburst. It is essentially justifying their own negativity.

Watch for these patterns of thinking that stifle God's work in you and perpetuate a negative attitude. Don't let them persist and be active in your mind. Instead, change your thinking to positive thought patterns.

Starving Negative Emotions
For most people, they only have two options available of how to respond to negative emotions. One is to suppress them (stuff the emotions down on the inside), or express them. However, both of these options cause negativity to either persist or spread to others. The option least utilized and often forgotten is to extinguish negative emotions with positive, constructive thinking. These are the steps to extinguish your negative emotions.

Acknowledge your Negative Emotions
The first step in defusing your negative emotions is to acknowledge their presence. Determine whether any critical needs are going unmet or if this is a false alarm.

Put Negative Emotions in their Place
Challenge the authenticity of the negative emotions. Denounce negative emotions influence and power over your actions.

Own Negative Emotions
Declare "I am responsible." Take responsibility for your negative emotions. This replaces a negative thought with a positive one, and essentially enforces your control over your emotions and minimizes the influence of another on your frame of mind (when the negative emotion is due to a reaction of what another has done or said). It also helps you see situations and solutions more clearly.

Starve Negative Emotions by Tuning into the Big Picture
This is the process of moving away from the emotional response by moving away from the trees in order to see the forest. Slow down and get an accurate perspective. Remind yourself of what is truly important. Answering the following questions can be helpful in tuning into your big picture.
What is my goal here?
What outcome do I want in this situation?
What is my vision?
Will this negative state move me in a negative or positive direction?
Where is this situation headed, and is that okay?
What do I intend to create?
What is most important here?
How might my negativity affect this relationship?
Is my integrity at stake here?
Could my health be more important than proving my point right now?

Drop the Thought
You can refuse to indulge negative thoughts and thus starve them. Remember that whatever you express to others is impressed within yourself. It is the power of habit that causes us to latch on to the positive and drop the negative. Negative thoughts are no more real than your dreams last night. Thus, there is no need to focus on it. You don't have to vent a negative thought to drop it. Venting only focuses on the negative thought and passes negativity on to the other person.

Retreat
This is a good option to do when you can't pinpoint the exact cause of a negative attitude. Retreating to solitude allows the wisdom of "this too shall pass" to kick in. It limits the damage caused my negativity, thus protecting yourself.

Practice Compassion
This is a great strategy for staying in the joy zone. It involves extending compassion toward the person who seems to be the source of the negativity. How do you do this?

1. Assume the other person is struggling or in pain. Attribute the negativity of others to something they are dealing with that you don't know about.
2. Get curious. Be curious about the other person's story. This activates the law of exchange (exchange a positive attitude for a negative one) and causes you to detach yourself from the situation and not take things personally.
3. Remember the true source of negativity. Remember that most negative outbursts are conditioned responses and not really so menacing. Keep this in the forefront of your mind and remind yourself of it often. Try to be the type of person who is not rattled by the reaction of others.
4. Realize that most stress and tension is just growth trying to take place. Emotionally you are similar to your muscles. Your emotions, like muscles, require stress and tension to grow stronger. Thus, our response to resistance will determine whether we grow closer to our full potential or further from it. When you experience a difficult circumstance, remember to consider it as an opportunity for growth!

Ask for God's Help

God has the power to help us conquer our negative emotions. Utilizing a time of prayer stifles the negativity as you worship God in prayer. You can also present your requests, worries, and concerns to God, letting Him bear your burdens, and seek God's will in that situation.

What Can You Do?

1. To eliminate negative feelings and thus experience a more joyful life, change your thought life.
2. Don't be reactive in your thought life. Instead, be proactive, and focus on positive, God-willed thinking.
3. Realize your "RATS" and seek to extinguish them. Learn them so you can recognize them and thus promptly address them when they present themselves.
4. When negative emotions present themselves, learn to act (not react) appropriately. Admit to the negativity, put the negative thought/emotion in proper perspective, take ownership of the emotion/thought, step back from the emotional reaction and get a godly perspective of your attitude, the situation, and your true goals; trade out the negative thought with a positive one, retreat to solitude, practicing compassion, and asking God for help are all useful and constructive means for dealing with negativity.

My Application

Okay, so for me this was a tough chapter. Not from a point of understanding, but rather from the point of my own RATS! I utilize every single one of them every day. They are habit. The hard part is breaking habits, which requires that I constantly be aware of my thought patterns. It also means that I have to utilize the principle of 4:8 thinking at all times. I need to learn to focus on positive thinking.

When I do experience negative thinking, I have found that the things that help me best are to retreat and gain some perspective. When I am so emotionally bound up by a situation, I tend to spread the negativity in action and word. All that does is spread the negativity to others and gives them a negative perspective of me. I get so engrossed in the emotional response that I can't see the forest for the trees. Thus, retreating, being quiet, gaining perspective in terms of the situation in the world view and God's view and in terms of my goals and attitude working together helps diffuse the emotional response, focus on God and His will, and stops the viscious cycle of negativity.

Some of the things I could improve upon to work out negativity in my life is to put my focus where it belongs: on God. Often negativity is the result of disappointment experienced because my needs, wants, or desires weren't met or considered. In these situations I forget to remember that IT IS NOT ABOUT ME, but GOD. The two methods I left out above solve this problem. First, I need to learn to pray and ask God for help. Though guilty, I am forgiven, and God is my helper and strength, not only in times of need, but at all times. Secondly, I need to change my focus from myself and my needs to the needs of others. This is the second most important command as told by Jesus, to "love others as yourself." Practicing compassion is fulfilling this command. That is something I do day in and day out at my work. It is an essential element of my job. But do I consider filling out forms and getting prior authorizations for medications "compassionate work"? No, I see it as a struggle, a frustration, an insult to my knowledge. This is because I have the wrong perspective. So keeping a proper perspective at all times is vital to maintain a compassionate attitude at all times.