A FIVE-STEP SYSTEM FOR EXPLORING DEEP FEELINGS

This system of deep-feeling exploration is designed to get the best outcome as cheaply as possible.

Step One, Making a Decision

This step takes only a moment and you have to do it entirely by yourself. But it is the most important step of all: Make a firm and conscious decision to explore your deep feelings. This decision will give your exploration force and direction.

If you "drift" into deep-feeling exploration without making such a decision, then your exploration has neither force nor direction and two extreme and undesirable outcomes become possible:

• You could lose interest in the exploration and drop out.
• Your helper with deep feelings could become a paid friend for life.

In the latter case, the helper practices a form of exploration known as "growing old together."

Step Two, Learning Three Languages

Learn at least three languages. Say what? Yes, three languages that you can use to talk about your life--your challenges, motivations, struggles, victories, defeats and so on. You learn these languages by reading self-help books. Go to the library or book store and pick out some authors who seem to be talking about your way of life. Master at least three authors whose points of view differ from one another. It's easy to find three authors whose viewpoints diverge because the authors of self-help books seldom agree on anything. But pick writers who address your lifestyle in a meaningful way.

If you have no idea where to start reading let me make some suggestions:
(The following URIs tested valid on April 6, 2001.)

• Harvey Jackins' little book The Human Side of Human Beings. Harvey's writings, available from Rational Island Publishers, are both useful and clear (and cheap). Harvey's little book is also available on line.

• Eugene Gendlin's book Focusing. There is a Web site devoted to focusing.

• For a third author who is more thought-based than Jackins or Gendlin, Eric Berne. Use this link for an overview of Berne's life and work. Berne was an excellent writer who wrote about a broad range of human experience. But leave Berne's very popular Games People Play for later. It's actually a synopsis which contains too little explanation for a beginner.

Step Three, Getting Your Story Out

After you have learned three languages and possess a vocabulary with which to present your experiences, tell your life story to someone. Listening to your life story demands much work but little skill from a helper. He or she must do two things only: listen to you patiently and ask questions when you fail to make sense to him or her. Step Three of exploration sounds easy and it is; but it takes lots of time.

So get someone who works cheap to hear your life story. Maybe a minister or a student of psychology, social work or counseling at a local university or clinic. (A counseling professional should be supervising the student. If you are unsure, ask about the student's supervision. It's a proper question that should offend no one.) You might try a local self-help group. But these groups may fail to provide you with someone who both listens patiently and avoids advising, judging or soothing you.

You should like your Step Three helper. You'll know whether or not you like him or her within the first minute of your first session together. If, after the first session, you dislike your helper or you are unsure about your liking for him or her, ask to be assigned to a different helper. It's a proper request that should offend no one.

You can enhance your Step Three exploratory experience by telling your life story all over again to a helper of the sex opposite your first helper's. You will probably find that you have told two very different stories.

If you have access to a word processor, do some work for yourself and for your Step Four helper by writing out your life story, using the spell-checker on it and printing it, with reasonable margins, on one side of standard sized, plain white paper. While you are telling your life story to your Step Three helper or on paper, be sure to reveal ALL of your deepest, darkest secrets.

Step Four, Opening Up and (Maybe) Deep-Feeling Contact

This is the heart of exploring deep feelings. The Step Four helper should pay attention to your difficult deep feelings almost exclusively. He or she should guide you to experience what they are, where you find them and how you feel them. Then he or she should make you acknowledge your difficult deep feelings until you reach the mid phase of your exploration.

If you are a noncommunicator and if the risk to you is minimal, your helper with deep feelings should make deep-feeling contact with you at this time. After deep-feeling contact, you become a communicator for the rest of your life. Deep-feeling contact takes only a moment to occur and NEVER involves body-to-body touching between adults. It is likely that deep-feeling contact will put you immediately into the mid phase of deep-feeling exploration.

The mid phase of deep-feeling exploration happens to you when you can stop searching for your difficult deep feelings because they find you. In other words, you lose control over your difficult deep feelings and they come into your awareness continuously and uninvited, much as they do with young children. Mid phase is always a good sign because it means that the exploratory process will proceed to its conclusion with or without further intervention from a helper.

By the way, some persons--all of them women--enter mid phase spontaneously or "out of the blue" after little or no prior exploration. This represents a great gift to these women but they seldom think so. They often believe that they are going crazy. They need a brief intervention from a skilled, Step Four helper with deep feelings.

Let me assure you that Step Four of exploring your deep feelings is quite unpleasant. It demands great skill from your helper and great forbearance from you. That's why you prepared yourself so carefully in Steps One, Two and Three.

If you are unprepared for me to act as your Step Four helper, you will force me to do one or more of the following things:

• Press you to decide if deep-feeling exploration is for you.
• Teach you a vocabulary for articulating your experiences, both internal and external.
• Listen to your life story.
• Hear you confess your deepest, darkest secrets.

I know all too well how to do these things. However, entering Step Four deep-feeling exploration unprepared is the equivalent of asking (and paying) a master mechanic to check your car's tire pressures and oil level. You are assured of good work but you are wasting the mechanic's skills and time (and your money).

Step Five, Cleaning Up

In Step Five you simply continue to acknowledge your difficult deep emotions until they are gone. The process takes several months, but never years, to complete. You can use a helper to support you but a helper for Step Five is more of a luxury than a necessity. A Step Five helper should work inexpensively because he or she has to do two things only: accept what you are going through and support you. Pick an older person to be your helper in Step Five. Older helpers are better at tolerance and support. (They exercise their grandparenting skills.) Younger helpers want to intervene too much in a process which is already self-sustaining.

	Cognitive Personality Disorder
	Appendix 1: Social Concomitants of the Difficult Deep Feelings

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