LEARNING DEEP FEELINGS CLEARS UP UNHAPPINESS

Deep Feelings Emerge Spontaneously

I believe that it's natural for us to experience our deep feelings. That is, without any effort on our part, our deep feelings will naturally move into awareness by themselves. Learning Deep Feelings exists to give this natural process a helping hand. With nature and Learning Deep Feelings working together, what stops the emergence of deep feelings? In a word, cloaking.

Cloaking

Cloaking pushes and keeps certain feelings--the deep feelings--out of awareness. Because deep feelings enter awareness naturally and spontaneously, cloaking demands work, sometimes lots of it, to keep them out. If you are pushing and keeping your deep feelings out of awareness then, by definition, you are depressing them. In doing so, you become unhappy. So by cloaking your deep feelings, you are expending great and ongoing effort to make yourself stressed and miserable.

Remember this about cloaking:

Cloaking is always a cover-up,
never an eradication, of deep feelings.

I see unhappiness caused by cloaking as the base of all the mind's diseases and some of the body's diseases as well. And the one process of Learning Deep Feelings--directing attention to deep feelings and bringing them into awareness--is the direct opposite of cloaking.

Is Unhappiness a Feeling?

No. Sometimes unhappiness is reported as an emotion like "feeling blue" or "feeling depressed" or "feeling down" or "feeling low." However, unhappiness is a body-condition which comes from the act of cloaking or covering up deep feelings. And unhappiness always "feels" worse than whatever difficult deep feeling that the cloaking is covering up.

How do I know that unhappiness is a body-condition and not an emotion? If I guide a person's attention to any feeling, surface or deep, I ease the stress and misery associated with that feeling. On the other hand, if I guide a person's attention to his or her unhappiness, I increase the stress and misery associated with that body-condition. This difference leads to the clinical fact that unhappiness cannot be addressed directly. That is, trying to "cheer up" an unhappy person is doomed to failure.

Besides covering up deep feelings, cloaking can cover up some surface feelings, particularly the surface feeling of anger. (Cloaking never covers up surface feelings like anxiety and guilt.) When cloaking holds both surface and deep feelings out of awareness, the resultant unhappiness is more intense than when cloaking holds only deep feelings out of awareness.

Cloaking Rituals

In order to shut a current deep feeling out of their awareness, people engage repeatable, rigid sequences of behaviors, thoughts and surface feelings that have successfully produced respite from deep feeling in the past. I call these repeatable, rigid sequences cloaking rituals. So cloaking itself covers up deep feelings and a cloaking ritual is the first of many tools used to carry out the cloaking.

Where Do Cloaking Rituals Come From?

From infancy and childhood. The difficult deep feelings are near-universal aversive stimuli (that is, unpleasant sensations) for human beings. Difficult deep feelings are unavoidable because the social environment abounds with events that accompany these feelings: broken promises, callousness, competition, cruelty, death, exposure, gifts, illness, injury, isolation, losses, meanness, need, restraints, teasing, threats, violence, unfulfilled wishes, withholding, yelling and so on. Furthermore, difficult deep feelings are inescapable because they arise within the person.

Because difficult deep feelings are both unavoidable and inescapable, especially for small children, people develop rituals that cloak these difficult deep feelings. The development of cloaking rituals begins in early infancy and proceeds by trial and error. The cloaked deep feelings never go away but are merely depressed out of awareness. With extensive and intensive practice over the years, cloaking rituals become automatic and unconscious. And difficult deep feelings connected to some environmental event continue to reinforce negatively the cloaking rituals developed against them.

To understand a negative reinforcer, we first have to look at the idea of reinforcer. Karen Pryor (1999, p 1) defines it this way: "A reinforcer is anything that, occurring in conjunction with an act, tends to increase the probability that the act will occur again."

With feelings, we put the definition to use in this way: "Anything" is the REMOVAL of a difficult deep feeling from conscious attention and the "act" is a cloaking ritual. Because the reinforcer is a removal rather than an addition, the reinforcer is named negative rather than positive.

So difficult deep feelings negatively reinforce their cloaking rituals like this: Some event evokes an unpleasant (that is, difficult) deep feeling. That feeling, in turn, calls up its cloaking ritual. That ritual, in turn, gives the person respite from the unpleasantness of the deep feeling. That respite from unpleasantness, in turn, reinforces the cloaking ritual. The word "reinforce" means that the cloaking ritual will occur again because it worked.

More Cloaking Tools:
Obsessions, Compulsions and Addictions

In addition to cloaking rituals, there are a great many cloaking tools used to cover up deep feelings. One general tool for covering up deep feelings is to go over the same thought again and again. This unchanging thought is named an obsession. A second general tool for covering up deep feelings is to do the same act again and again. This unchanging act is named a compulsion.

Obsessions and compulsions may have a connection with someone or something in the environment. Some examples are alcohol, drugs (including caffeine and nicotine), excessive exercise, gambling, overwork, compulsive sex, compulsive spending, sugar, video games and so on. These more complex cloaking tools are named addictions.

But in a person's lifetime, obsessions, compulsions and addictions come into play very late in comparison to cloaking rituals, which have been in use since the start of life. So cloaking rituals are more important and more powerful than obsessions, compulsions and addictions.

How Crisis Comes About

If a person suffers a cluster of traumatic life-events, then the ensuing difficult deep feelings may overwhelm his or her cloaking rituals and other cloaking tools. The person then goes into crisis. If the crisis persists, several serious outcomes are possible:

1. The person may avoid further deep feelings by isolating himself or herself from any social interactions that might release more deep feelings.
2. A person in persistent crisis may become "psychologically paralyzed" with severe "depression" (or anxiety) as the aversive stimuli of difficult deep feelings relentlessly assail him or her, even in sleep--provided that sleep occurs.
3. A person in ongoing crisis may convert his or her deep feelings into a physical symptom like body pain.
4. Finally, a person in persistent crisis may become psychotic. In other words, he or she finds a new cloaking ritual that is literally "out of this world," that is, outside the culture to which the person belongs. The new, psychotic ritual provides refuge from the person's difficult deep feelings, probably because psychosis is both a novel and an engaging experience. Unfortunately, the person can no longer function in his or her culture because he or she is autistic, crazy or demented.

A cloaking ritual against a deep feelings forms a system of activities that includes a person's biochemistry, physiology, surface feelings, imagery, thoughts, words, facies, gestures, postures, behaviors and maybe odors. To cloak the unwelcome deep feelings that accompany social interactions, a person is repeatedly obliged to engage this system. This recurrent obligation is Freud's repetition compulsion.

All forms of treatment address one or more aspects of this system. And because a cloaking ritual is systemic in nature, whatever modifies one part of the ritual also influences all its other parts.

It should be obvious that many of the stereotypic behaviors in autism are cloaking rituals. Some of these stereotypic behaviors may be "hard wired" into the human brain in order to provide us with respite from deep emotions which are difficult and intense. Examples include flapping, spinning oneself or objects, and walking on one's toes. (You might try some flapping. Keep both wrists positioned near their respective shoulders. Point your hands sideways, away from your chest and move them up and down quickly. I find flapping to be relaxing. Maybe you will too.)

The Linchpin of Cloaking Rituals

Following the work of Ellis (1977) and Beck (1977), I say that a tie binds the cloaking ritual together and keeps it working as a unit. That tie is a statement. According to theory, we have to utter these binding statements, mostly unconsciously, every few seconds, awake or asleep, twenty-four hours a day, every day of our lives in order to keep our cloaking rituals strong. And anything that weakens a cloaking ritual also lets loose the cloaked deep feelings because it's their nature to emerge spontaneously.

Healing Statements

So, in order to weaken learners' cloaking rituals and get the cloaked deep feelings free, I have them say a statement that contradicts, exaggerates, removes the doubt from, or simply makes explicit the statement which appears to hold their cloaking ritual together. I call these statements healing statements.

For example, clients may cloak their embarrassment by endlessly repeating within themselves,

• It's wrong to blush in front of people.

So I ask them to say,

• I love to blush in front of people.

Few people can say the latter sentence without smiling, laughing and turning red. That is, the healing statement releases their cloaked embarrassment. More healing statements appear in the section devoted to them.

An Interpretation of Interpretation

Balint (1979, p 14) gave this account of interpretation:

Obviously working-through is possible only if, and in so far as, the patient is capable of taking the interpretation in, experiencing it as an interpretation, and allowing it to influence his mind.

Like a healing statement, interpretation may make an attack on the automatic and unquestioned truth-value of the (mostly) unconscious statement which keeps a cloaking ritual working as a unit. So interpretation may make changes in a person by weakening his or her cloaking ritual and letting out the cloaked deep feeling.

The Value of Cloaking Rituals

Cloaking rituals sound like the scourge of human emotional life. Not so. Cloaking rituals are absolutely essential for our survival.

When we were small children, deep feelings could become so intense that they might cause brain damage or even death much as continued epileptic seizures do. Or intense deep feelings might destroy our perceptual grasp of reality and make us psychotic much as high fevers do. Or, at the very least, intense deep feelings might render us non-functional much as viral infections do. Cloaking rituals cover up these intense deep feelings and protect us from any damage these feelings might do physically, psychologically or socially.

Cloaking rituals, at first necessary for our survival, later cause problems because we continue their use well past the time we need them. As we grow and mature, we become more and more capable of handling an intense deep feeling. But instead of handling it, we fall back on cloaking rituals to handle it for us. The outcome is a host of emotional difficulties.

The Partitioning of Consciousness

Keep in mind that with cloaking, the underlying deep feeling never goes away. So, almost by definition, cloaking rituals partition consciousness with the awareness of everyday life on one side of the partition and the deep feelings on the other. Internally, partition manifests itself as denial. Externally, partition manifests itself as trance. Trance presents the most obvious outer sign that a person is using cloaking rituals in order to avoid deep feelings. Partitioning of consciousness also implies that parts of a person's personality are conflicting with, or in opposition to, one another.

People who are labeled impossible remain entranced most of the time. An ongoing cloaking ritual causes their trance. So no one can reach them emotionally through the intense and repetitious behavior they maintain. If I do get these impossible people to acknowledge a deep feeling, they often become mute. It is as if their emotional core either stopped talking long ago or never learned to talk in the first place.

Cloaking as Anesthesia

Another view of cloaking is to see it as anesthesia. So cloaking is like a drug that numbs a person's deep feelings and keeps them away from the person's conscious attention. As always, the deep feelings simply get covered up and they never go away.

How Acknowledging Deep Feelings Works
(Pure Behavior Modification)

When a person gives full attention to long-depressed difficult deep feelings, then the he or she becomes habituated or desensitized to these difficult deep feelings. (Becoming habituated or desensitized to deep feelings means the same thing as working through the deep feelings which, in turn, resembles getting used to them.) Consequently, the person's cloaking rituals are extinguished (that is, they become extinct) because they have lost their function and reason for existence. Then the energy consumed by cloaking rituals becomes available for other purposes.

Instead of modifying aspects of a cloaking ritual, I prefer to uproot it completely by getting at the deep emotions that the ritual is covering up. By guiding attention to them, I expose a person to his or her deep feelings, almost entirely the difficult ones. Then I interfere with his or her rituals which cloak deep feelings, "un-cloak" those feelings and expose the person to even more deep feelings, the ones that had previously been cloaked.

Learning Deep Feelings does deliberately what most treatments do adventitiously: it deals with deep feelings. Someone once defined long-term counseling as finding ways to kill time between naturally occurring episodes of emotional crisis; it is during those crisis periods that most change takes place. Learning Deep Feelings eliminates the time-killing by putting people into crisis and keeping them there without respite. Consequently, change occurs constantly and rapidly because people start Learning Deep Feelings in crisis and stay in crisis throughout Learning Deep Feelings. So Learning Deep Feelings is quickly awful and awfully quick.

The Ultimate Goal of Learning Deep Feelings

Learning Deep Feelings addresses the deep emotions because they are seen as the means that the brain uses to differentiate, modulate, articulate and integrate here-and-now experience and connect it with past experiences. So a person's deep-feeling development determines his or her degree of perceptual-conative-behavioral coherence, that is, wholeness or health.

A complication arises because, by expending monumental amounts of time and effort, people can learn coherence in their lives. But the nature of their coherence is cognitive rather than emotional, calculated rather than spontaneous, contrived rather than intuitive. So their coherence resembles speech by the deaf--an astounding achievement but still not beautiful.

Neurophysiologically I am saying that people can substitute cortical function for arrested limbic-cerebellar function. Further, I say that deep-feeling contact and subsequent deep-feeling acknowledgment develop limbic-cerebellar function which then supplants its cognitive counterfeits.

	An Outline for Learning Deep Feelings
	Deep-Feeling Contact

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