How can you end negative feelings without the danger of suppressing them?
Some time ago, I said to an acquaintance "It's possible to give up having negative emotions" and he said, "But if you suppress your feelings they'll just come back when you least expect them. They'll mess with your mind and make you sick." This wasn't the first time someone has responded that way to my message. Many people assume that "not having a feeling" means really having it but suppressing it. They think you can only push a feeling out of awareness not change it. Because a few of you might share this idea (or at least know people that [...]
What do you know that others think is untrue?
A few days ago I read a fascinating cover story in Fast Company magazine on Peter Thiel. Peter is a billionaire investor who co-founded PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Since then he was one of the early investors in Facebook; he later invested in LinkedIn, Spotify, SpaceX and Airbnb. He obviously has a knack for determining what makes a successful company. So when I found out he had written a book, Zero to One, I ordered it immediately and read it in one day. I learned a lot about what it takes to grow [...]
Suppressing negative emotions is unhealthy
A couple of days ago when I told someone it is possible to totally stop having negative emotions, he replied: “But if you suppress your feelings they will pop out when you least expect them, causing psychological damage, in addition to harm to your health.” This is not the first time I’ve had this response; anytime I tell people that it is possible to stop having negative emotions they always assume that the only way to not experience negative emotions is to suppress them. Because so many of you might make the same assumption, I thought that I ought to [...]
I spoke at TEDx: How to stop suffering
For the past couple of months my main focus has been preparing a TEDx talk that I delivered in Hoboken, NJ last Friday, June 28. TEDx is the local version of the TED talks that are given annually in Long Beach, CA and that feature some of the most interesting people in the world, talking about “ideas worth spreading.” You can find hundreds of incredible TED talks, each a maximum of 18 minutes, at http://ted.com. So it was a real honor to be invited to present at a TEDx event. I talked about suffering—how suffering is the result of the [...]
Why some get angry and others fear it.
The first time I really allowed myself to experience my anger I fainted. I was about 36 and had successfully suppressed my anger since childhood. And there I was in a group therapy session, hitting a mat with a stick with foam wrapped around it, screaming: “Mom, I’m really angry at you.” When I started the exercise I was only mouthing empty words, but then at some point the words became real and the anger surfaced. It terrified me so much that I literally passed out on the mat. I fainted the next couple of times I tried that [...]
Why do you have relationship problems?
Thanks so much for the many thoughtful responses to my post last week asking you how we can contribute to improving your life. The single most common response had to do with relationships. Unfortunately, there is no simple advice I can offer in this area for several reasons. Different types of relationship problems To begin with, many of the beliefs men have that serve as barriers to having a great relationship are different from the beliefs women have. Moreover, relationships have a lot of different aspects, such as: • men can have a hard time approaching women, • both men [...]
Why Do We Need To Create Meaning?
Why do we usually make up a meaning for events that have no inherent meaning? And how does that automatic, unconscious meaning-making process create problems for us? Why we need to create meaning As a human being, your survival is conditional—it is not guaranteed. In other words, there are some things that help insure your survival and some things that threaten your survival. As a very young child, having loving, caring parents makes us feel our survival is insured; having parents who do not love or care about us (or who we feel do not love or care about us) [...]
Why we have negative emotions … and what to do about them
For many years I had asked myself the questions: What is the real source of our negative emotions? Why do so many things cause fear in our lives that aren’t inherently scary? And why do some people experience negative emotions while other people don’t in similar situations? About eight years ago I wrote a paper for myself on the source of negative emotions. Today’s post is a summary of that paper. I think you’ll find some fascinating material here and I’m excited to get your responses and start a conversation. ***** What is an emotion? An emotion is the experiential, [...]
How to get rid of your fears
I want to deeply thank the hundreds of you who shared intimate details about how your lives have been run by your fears and anger. Your stories were unbelievably honest and incredibly moving. They reminded me of how I described my own life in my journal years ago, just before I created the Lefkoe Belief Process (originally called the Decision Maker Process) and in the early months after I created it, before I had eliminated many beliefs. Here are some excepts from my journal in the mid-1980s: During the past few weeks I have been more and more upset, afraid, [...]
