How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions)

The biggest barrier to rational thinking is organizing your mind such that it's safe to think

Related: besides being slapped down, another thing which may discourage subagents from speaking up is if one is too willing to share their reports with other people [EA · GW]:

For many years, I thought privacy was a fake virtue and only valuable for self-defense. I understood that some people would be unfairly persecuted for their minority sexuality, say, or stigmatized disease status, but I always saw that more as a flaw in society and not a point in favor of privacy. I thought privacy was an important right, but that the ideal was not to need it.

I’m coming back around to privacy for a few reasons, first of which was my several year experiment with radical transparency. For a lot of that time, it seemed to be working. Secrets didn’t pile up and incubate shame, and white lies were no longer at my fingertips. I felt less embarrassed and ashamed over the kind of things everyone has but no one talks about. Not all of it was unhealthy sharing, but I knew I frequently met the definition of oversharing– I just didn’t understand what was wrong with that.

I noticed after several years of this behavior that I wasn’t as in touch with my true feelings. At first I thought my total honesty policy had purged me of a lot of the messy and conflicted feelings I used to have. But there was something suspiciously shallow about these more presentable feelings. I now believe that, because I scrupulously reported almost anything to anyone who asked (or didn’t ask), I conveniently stopped being aware of a lot of my most personal and tender feelings. [...]

I now think privacy is important for maximizing self-awareness and self-transparency. The primary function of privacy is not to hide things society finds unacceptable, but to create an environment in which your own mind feels safe to tell you things. If you’re not allowing these unshareworthy thoughts and feelings a space to come out, they still affect your feelings and behavior– you just don’t know how or why. And all the while your conscious self-image is growing more alienated from the processes that actually drive you. Privacy creates the necessary conditions for self-honesty, which is a necessary prerequisite to honesty with anyone else. When you only know a cleaned-up version of yourself, you’ll only be giving others a version of your truth.

Here’s an image that’s been occurring to me. Privacy creates a space in which unexpected or unsightly things can be expressed. It’s like a cocoon for thoughts and feelings. A lot of ugly transformational work can take place there that simply couldn’t occur in an open environment (the bug literally dissolves!). The gnarly thoughts and feelings need to do their work undisturbed by any self-consciousness or fear of judgment, just like caterpillars need a tight encasement where the wind won’t scatter their components as they reassemble into butterflies.

What would you recommend to people who are doing this (or to people who aren't sure if they're doing it or not?)

I relate to this a lot. Gonna skip over the young childhood stuff that started me on this path, but this really became an issue starting in high school. I was really stressed out trying to manage my girlfriend's fragile mental state. Developed acid reflux and thought I was having a heart attack because I ate through the inner lining of my esophagus and breathing was extremely painful. So I picked up meditation. And without a teacher I only focused on quieting my "monologue of upsetness". I had some symptoms of depersonalization before, but this is when it really developed into a full on disorder. And honestly until I realized it was a disorder I was quite proud of it. I'd leave my body and then I wouldn't feel any pain, I'd just observe "notme" handling it. A downright superpower if you ignore all the horrible side effects.

Some thoughts on the "..and now?" I've been wrestling with

1) Much like how I went "idk, I'll just learn to stop feeling bad and then I can keep dating her" I'm now going "idk, I'll just learn to stop worrying about the things that trigger me to feel nothing" which seems like it might just be a bandaid

2) Metta meditation seems to help a little. Focusing on having feelings instead of stopping them. It ended up having me come to my own parent-child model and when I offered notme to be his father that led to him calming down a lot. (notme ~= my system 1? I know there's not actually another me, this is just how it ~feels~)

3) I've found a core belief of "People are fragile, I must be resilient or I'll damage people" that is at the base of it all, but it's not so easy to just knock out the belief at the base of yourself. notme still doesn't believe that everything isn't about to come crashing down because of someone else's fragility. My internal double crux always gets down to this point and then notme says prove it and I don't know how which leads me to...

4) Progressive overload is normally my answer to everything, but how? I can't just sort people I know by how triggering they are to me and ask them to trigger me. It's not the same in that context, and that's not the most compassionate thing to ask someone to do. I'd have to find some way to naturally be in an environment I find triggering without feeling like I was using the people there. I'm probably not just being creative enough; or maybe I'm losing sight of the end goal by focusing on this and not trying to find other ways to convince notme everything is fine

The parent-child model is my cornerstone of healthy emotional processing. I'd like to add that a child often doesn't need much more than your attention. This is one analogy of why meditation works: you just sit down for a while and you just listen. 

The monks in my local monastery often quip about "sitting in a cave for 30 years", which is their suggested treatment for someone who is particularly deluded. This implies a model of emotional processing which I cannot stress enough: you can only get in the way. Take all distractions away from someone and they will asymptotically move towards healing. When they temporarily don't, it's only because they're trying to do something, thereby moving away from just listening. They'll get better if they give up.

Another supporting quote from my local Roshi: "we try to make this place as boring as possible". When you get bored, the only interesting stuff left to do is to move your attention inward. As long as there is no external stimulus, you cannot keep your thoughts going forever. By sheer ennui you'll finally start listening to those kids, which is all you need to do.

Strongest upvote. My life story is very similar— what I thought was just discipline totally handling my emotional and personality issues was actually an internally (and sometimes outwardly) abusive system that imploded after enough major life stressors.

I’ve written about the self-righteousness and judgment that came ultimately from not respecting my own vulnerabilities and needs here:

https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/06/self-righteousness-imo/

My model there is that I had a strong internal critic that I thought was protecting me from sucking and being unlovable. I liked to turn that critic on others (self-righteousness) because it gave me a break and made me feel safe, like at least I was better than them. But the real problem was how overpowered the critic was and that it had access to my feelings of self-love and self-acceptance at all.

This is an excellent post, with a valuable and well-presented message. This review is going to push back a bit, talk about some ways that the post falls short, with the understanding that it's still a great post.

There's this video of a toddler throwing a tantrum. Whenever the mother (holding the camera) is visible, the child rolls on the floor and loudly cries. But when the mother walks out of sight, the toddler soon stops crying, gets up, and goes in search of the mother. Once the toddler sees the mother again, it's back to rolling on the floor crying.

A key piece of my model here is that the child's emotions aren't faked. I think this child really does feel overcome, when he's rolling on the floor crying. (My evidence for this is mostly based on discussing analogous experiences with adults - I know at least one person who has noticed some tantrum-like emotions just go away when there's nobody around to see them, and then come back once someone else is present.)

More generally, a lot of human emotions are performative. They're emotions which some subconscious process puts on for an audience. When the audience goes away, or even just expresses sufficient disinterest, the subconscious stops expressing that emotion.

In other words: ignoring these emotions is actually a pretty good way to deal with them. "Ignore the emotion" is decent first-pass advice for grown-up analogues of that toddler. In many such cases, the negative emotion will actually just go away if ignored.

Now, obviously a lot of emotions don't fall into this category. The post is talking about over-applying the "ignore your emotions" heuristic, and the hazards of applying in places where it doesn't work. But what we really want is not an argument that applying the heuristic more/less often is better, but rather a useful criterion for when the "ignore your emotions" heuristic is useful. I suggest something like: will this emotion actually go away if ignored?

The post is mainly talking about dealing with your own emotions, but this criterion is especially useful for dealing with others' emotions. When you are audience, it's relatively easy to remove the audience. Sometimes, another person's negative emotion will just die down if you walk away, but will sustain itself if you hang around trying to "help". The key thing to ask is "will this emotion just go away if it doesn't have an audience?".

Post is very informal. It reads like, well, a personal blog post. A little in the direction of raw freewriting. It's fluid. Easy to read and relate to.

That matters, when you're trying to convey nuanced information about how minds work. Relatable means the reader is making connections with their personal experiences; one of the most powerful ways to check comprehension and increase retention. This post shows a subtle error as it appears from the inside. It doesn't surprise me that this post sparked some rich discussion in the comments.

To be frank, I'd be very wary of trying to suggest edits. I don't want this post to lose that feeling of unfiltered thought-to-page, when it's a crucial element of its magic. Maybe I'd add some doodley illustrations to vividly supplement the textual imagery. I imagine it *could* get clearer benefit from light restructuring and expansions. The most authentic-*feeling* writing does not perfectly align with with the most *authentic* writing, after all.

(Maybe edit the bit at the end of "Relevant context" so the ironic 'stands out' better... It was perfectly clear from context that this was ironic, but it could have been clearer from ?structure?wording?. idk "yeah nopes" felt kind of weak as the turning point.)

What I would like to see: It's a year later now. Write a postscript with updated thoughts since then. How has your model, and your use of it, evolved since you wrote this post? Does the basic practice of "sit with the fact that I'm feeling something, and hug the child that brought that emotion instead of slapping them" produce the same results for you it did at the start?

Also expand on the 'related'. See if you can find specific posts and quotes to support the sentiment of safety as the biggest barrer to rational thinking/discourse. If you can collect and quotes some small anecdotes of other people's experiences with needing or finding emotional safety to improve their thinking, I believe that would make it feel more... ?connected?. Increase safety not just by providing a skill but also generating a sense that 'i am not alone in this'.

I have one niggling question: Is it actually true that most people have all the machinery to move their ears? I thought there was a piece missing or something in the median person....

Looking up the facts, it looks as though that whether conscious control can be taught is under contention but the function is all there.

It seems like there's something missing here and I don't know how to add it. You make your childhood behavior of not being upset over things sound bad through framing, but you don't offer many (or maybe any) examples of it being ineffective. You mention that more recently you've been experiencing a sense of general malaise on the weekends, but the extent of that problem isn't clear nor is it obviously linked to the fix it mentality. Many people have malaise on the weekends and sometimes that's just because they're tired from the week and need to recuperate. I don't think moving away from a major life strategy is a good response to experiencing weekend malaise unless you have a very good reason to believe they're connected.

I only make this comment because I too practice the "fix it or stop complaining about it" method and don't find many problems with it. I don't think the angry parent slapping their kids framing is accurate. Stop complaining doesn't mean mentally slap yourself every time a negative emotion comes up. It means OODA loop a bit, and if you realize fixing the problem is going to be worse overall than not fixing the problem and suffering the consequences, suffer the consequences lightly because complaining will make you feel worse.

Kid comes up to their parent and says, "I'm hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy."
"Ok, well when was the last time you ate? Can you get a snack here?"
"No we're in the car and I just ate our last snack."
"Well would it be better for us to take a 15 minute detour and get some more snacks or suffer the hunger a little bit and eat a nice meal in 30 minutes at home?"
"That's right, I'll wait until we get home."
This framing is more in line with how I view "Fix it or stop complaining about it."

I think this post would greatly benefit from explaining how "Fix it or stop complaining about it" didn't work for you. Maybe you have in later writings, but I'm not quite sure how to find them because I don't see any relevant pingbacks.

Promoted to curated: I think this post is describing a real error mode that I think many people benefit from identifying. I also particularly appreciate that this post tries to provide concrete evidence in the form of personal experience (though obviously externally verifiable evidence is even better, but also even harder to come by). I think a frequent error mode for posts on LW is to not be grounded sufficiently in even personal experience.

I'm the author, writing a review/reflection.

I wrote this post mainly to express myself and make more real my understanding of my own situation. The summer of 2019 I was doing a lot of exploration on how I felt and experience the world, and also I was doing lots of detective work trying to understand "how I got to now."

The most valuable thing it adds is a detailed example of what it feels like to mishandle advice about emotions from the inside. This was prompted by the fact that younger me "already knew" about dealing with his emotions, and I wanted to write a post the plausibly would have helped him. 

I think this sort of data is incredibly important. Understanding the actual details of your mind that prevented you from taking advantage of "good advice". I want more of people sharing "here's the particular way I got this wrong for a long time" more so than "something other people get wrong is blah". This feels like the difference between "What? I guess you weren't paying attention when you read the sequences" and "Ah, your mind is in a way where you will reliably get this one important aspect of the sequences wrong, let's explore this."

I still reference this post a lot, to friends and in my own thinking. It's no longer the focal point of any of my self work, but it's a foundational piece of self-knowledge.

"Does this post make accurate claims" is the fun part :) I tried my hardest to make this 100% "here's a thing that happened to me" because I'm an expert on my own history. But real quick I'll try to pull out the external claims and give them a spot check:

• Everyone could learn to wiggle their ears
  • Not exactly a booming field of research, but this [LW(p) · GW(p)] had the little research I could find. I think I'd put 80% or something on this being true.
• Certain mental/emotional skills that you haven't practiced you're whole life have the same "flailing around in the dark" aspect as learning to wiggle your ears
  • "Flailing around in the dark" is defs a possible human experience. Maybe a better example would be bling people seeing through sensors on their tongue. It takes time to learn how to use such a device.
  • I'd expect most people to agree with me that as a developing infant, learning to actuate your body and mind involved a lot of time "flailing around in the dark". Though I imagine one could also say "yeah, but after you grow up that's not a problem any more. There aren't parts of my body that I'm mysteriously unable to move but have the potential to." Wiggling ears was supposed to be an example of such a part, but I still want to address this. Why wouldn't you have learned how to actuate all the parts of your mind? My answer is longer and I'm going to punt it to another comment.
• The parent child model, and parts-work in general
  • Kaj's amazing sequence [LW · GW] is where you should look for exploring the literal truth of these sorts of models.
  • pjeby and kaj had a great comment discussion [? · GW] about when and where parts models help or get in the way of self-work. The central paradox of parts work is that even if you sensibly identify conflicting parts of yourself, it's still all you. It always has been. Mostly in accord with what pjeby says, I did in fact find the parent child model very useful specifically because the level of self-judgment I had made it really hard to not attack myself for having these wants and needs, but when I frame things has a group I can tap into all the intuitions I've built over the years about how of course you need to listen to people and not beat them into silence.
    • In summary, parts models can have the effect of putting distance between you and desires and needs that you have. It is possible that you are currently self-judgemental enough that you won't be able to make much progress unless you find a way to distance these desires, at least long enough for your judgement to shut up, and possibly allow you to figure out how to deal with the judgement.

Right, onto follow up.

In a comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], raemon said he'd appreciate an exploration of "what bad stuff actually happens if you ignore your emotions in this or a similar way?" There are 3 great response sharing snippets of diff people's experience. I think the most compelling extension I could add would be exploring more how "ignoring emotions" and "ignoring my ability to want" blend together, and how these processes combined to, for a long time, make it really hard for me to tell if something actually felt good, if I liked it or was interested in it, and as a corollary this made it easier for me to chase after substitutes (I can't tell if I like this, but it's impressive and everyone will reward me for it, but I also am not aware that I can't tell if I like it, so I now do this thing and think I like it, even though my motivation/energy for it will not survive outside the realm of social reinforcement). I'm currently writing a post that explores some of those dynamics! I could certainly add a paragraph or two to this post.

In some comment Lisa Feldman's work on emotions was mentioned. This also highlights how I don't really look at what emotions are in this post. I've since built a waaaay more detailed model of emotions, how to think about mind-body connection, how this relates to trauma, and how it all connects to clear thinking / not being miserable. Again, this would be a whole other post, possibly many.

Another follow up on how I relate to parts models. I think in parts way less often these days. Pretty sure this is a direct result of having defused a decent amount of judgement. But I can also see a lot of that judgement flare up again when I'm in social situations. So I'm generally able to, when by myself (which is often), feel safe accepting all of me, but I generally don't feel safe doing that around other people.

A few people have told me that they really wanted a section on "and here's what healthy emotional processing looks like", but I don't think I'm going to add one, because I can't. I think the most valuable stuff I can write is "here's a really detailed example of how it happened to me... that's all." And while I have grown better at processing and listening to emotions, I've yet to gain the distance to figure what I've been doing is was most essential for me, and what the overall arc/shape of my progress looks like. Plus, this would be a whole nother giant post, not an addition. 

Reminds me of this...

https://youtu.be/Of5cgecGIhg

Errata.

the thing were you're legs... absorb shock?"

It's hard to know how to give queues that will lead to someone making the right mental/muscle connection.

Where your

cues

Just commenting since this is on the front page again, but this was and continues to be one of the most important concepts to share with people who are dealing with burnout, akrasia, and emotional issues I have ever come across. I link it to people all the time, so thank you again for writing this it extremely impactful for me and for others who I've helped with similar issues over the years.

I'm trying to decide to what extent this applies to my lived experience, but finding it difficult to distinguish between maintaining a healthy tranquility and cultivating habitual impassivity. My intuition is that I've had both experiences, but the internal feedback for either is very similar. Both seem to involve putting a functional amount of distance between yourself and your emotional response, and - in my experience - the healthy habit does reinforce itself, just like the negative version. But then, sometimes, I find myself noticing the lack of an emotional response in certain situations where I used to have one. Internally, it's difficult to say whether it's truly absent or simply impotent, but whether through healthy practice or perverse self-denial it's lost its power over me.

Neither seems to stem from a particularly unhealthy cognitive locus. I wouldn't say it's maladaptive, for instance, to watch somebody lose their temper and subsequently decide you'd rather not embody that particular vice. Although it's probably pernicious to foster latent contempt towards anybody who fails to exhibit perfect self-control. So, if the impetus and effects are similar then what are we left with? Because I really do feel like there's a difference, and it's one that feels obvious in hindsight. Unfortunately, "deep down in your secret heart of hearts you'll just know" isn't a very satisfying heuristic and, as I mentioned, it only seems obvious in hindsight.

For anybody who understands this better than I do, the question is: Can you articulate what internal heuristics you're using to ensure that you can practice healthy stoicism without accidentally running over into unhealthy repression?

Oooooh man, I relate to this too hard.

While your specific examples of things you were ignoring are different from mine, and I never developed the judgemental worldview you mentioned in "…and now?", I realized a while ago that this was something I was/am doing, and that it'd been causing me to ignore important things.

I think it might be more common with AMABs, due to the way they're generally socialized. Toxic masculinity's a bitch, y'all.

Also, I specify "AMABs" instead of "guys" because apparently one of the things I was ignoring is that I'm trans; yay me for managing to intentionally miss THAT for 22 years.

I'd like to give this post a second nomination. I'm also trying various experiments in tracking down and listening to hidden/ignored emotions and find other peoples' accounts of this very helpful - it was well worth a reread. I also like the vivid real-life examples.

It seems to me that one of the trickier parts of this issue is that you don't know what you don't know. You've got the places in your emotional landscape that you're used to visiting, and that's where your attention naturally goes when you try to do a self-assessment. Reminds me a bit of something I learned in adolescence that when you're playing hide and seek, people are really bad at remembering to look up; I've even had a friend that eluded police chasing him in the park by simply getting out of immediate few and then climbing up into the foliage of a tree. He saw the police walk right underneath him.

How do you break outside of the familiar? I think there are several, at least.

1. Don't hold yourself back from floundering around. Babies engage in Fairly random motions in order to learn how their body works. It's a kind of search routine even if it does seem haphazard and pointless. A true random walk may not be optimal but it does tend to cover unfamiliar ground eventually.

2. Put yourself into situations that are unfamiliar and don't shut yourself off from them. You don't necessarily have to pick the most unpleasant or aversive things that you've never done. But there should be good and bad novelty, and probably a whole lot of just weird. Give yourself a little bit of time in the new place so that you know What feelings emerge after your initial wariness to new situations.

3. Spend quiet time with yourself, meditation or other reflective times and simply concentrate on feelings. Abstract emotions and just feelings in your body and look for the small things oh, the things that you would normally ignore and let them emerge. They may be the tip of an iceberg.

4. Look to those times in your life that you seemed to have a diminished range of emotions compared to what people are supposed to have in those situations. If you don't know what people are supposed to have in those situations oh, you probably should read more classic fiction from a variety of authors. I suggest both male and female authors because for whatever reasons it seems that there are different parts of the emotional spectrum that get covered. A lot of the Nobel prize-winning authors are quite good explorers of The Human Condition. For me, I've enjoyed Hermann Hesse and Doris Lessing oh, a lot of people like William Faulkner and James Joyce.

Wiggling your ears is a nice concrete version of a) movement most people's bodies are capable of and b) one that most people feel like is impossible.

Do you have a source for that claim that most people's bodies are capable of it? If so, is their any good way to learn it?

Related: Just Suffer until it Passes [LW · GW] 

This is a pretty simple and important point, told memorably through a real story of Hazard's life, with a simple internal-parts monologue. I think it communicates some important points well.

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett makes a compelling case that emotions are actually stories that our minds construct to explain the bodily sensations that we experience in different situations. She says that there are no "emotion circuits" in the brain and that you can train yourself to associate the same bodily sensations and situations with more positive emotions. I find this idea liberating and I want it to be true, but I worry that if it's not true, or if I'm applying the idea incorrectly, I will be doing something like ignoring my emotions in a bad way. I'm not sure how to resolve the tension between "don't repress your emotions" and "don't let a constructed narrative about your negative emotions run out of control and make you suffer."

Wow. I relate seriously to the first half of your story - the "read lots of books, learn about traps, don't fall in" part. 
But instead of completely ignoring emotions, I had decided to find the source and fix it. But just like you said - a kid doesn't have much power to fix things outside of themselves. But I had another piece of advice from family - it's not the outside that affects your emotions, you affect your emotions. If you're bored, just make yourself feel less bored by doing something (singing, drawing, thinking about what you're going to eat for dinner, AKA making your brain do work instead of whining). 

I guess the main idea I got from books was that whiny idiots are idiots and are highly annoying. I try not to complain too much, and now I'm this horribly excitable person because when you have to make everything interesting yourself [didn't have a phone, so I couldn't be the kid who just sits down in the middle of a museum to play video games or whatever], everything is NEW! and EXCITING! (even though you've seen this same exact building fifty times)

I agree completely with the sentiment "The biggest barrier to rational thinking is organizing your mind such that it's safe to think".

What works really well for me is to treat my emotions as well-meaning but misguided entities and having a conversation with them: "Anger, I get that you want to help me by making me explode at and punch this person. That would have been really useful in the ancestral environment. Unfortunately, the police exists. So how about you calm down for now and preserve your energy, so that you can better help me when it's more appropriate? For example, if society collapses and everything turns into a lawless wasteland, then Anger would be much more useful."

The result? I am basically never angry, because the Anger emotion in my brain is rerouted to only trigger in a scenario that wont actually come up. But at the same time, I'm not suppressing anything, because I acknowledge scenarios, however unlikely, where anger would be appropriate. It's rerouting instead of suppressing.

In your child metaphor: "I understand that you are hungry and I will get you food later. But I need to finish this work first, and it will take longer the more you complain."

Can anyone relate to the fact of having 100% confidence but like 0% social skills?

Since I am the complete opposite and am more like, if you want to continue that metaphor, „Ok child, are you sure it‘s hunger? Where does it come from? Will simply eating solve your needs?“ I am more the kind of person, that hugs its inner child all the time but sometimes forgets its is only a child (if we continue that example). I am highly sensitive and it feels really unnatural and weird not to completely analyze every little feeling. My brain basically is overthinking because of that all the time.

So long story short, now I know what not to do, but what should I do instead? If anybody has some literature about that, I would be grateful!

Great post. It also looks amazing on your blog - that picture goes with it well.

Is this related to risk aversion?