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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 2 months ago
What if I told you that the various polarized emotions you feel are not the whole or actual truth but instead incomplete awarenesses, distortions, or lies – merely subjectively biased interpretations of your complete reality?
Say, for example, that you meet someone you're attracted to, infatuated with, or that you like, and you're conscious of their upsides but blind, ignorant, or unconscious of their downsides. Like most people, you may have experienced a moment like that when you first meet someone and think, "Wow, this individual is different. This one is going to have more positives than negatives." In these instances, you could become enamored with that individual. They represent food or prey that you desire to seek and consume.
What you may not be aware of is what happens physiologically when you’re infatuated.
The amygdala, the emotionally reactive survival area located in the lower subcortical part of your brain, gets activated whenever you perceive more benefits than drawbacks or more drawbacks than benefits. This is the rest and digest or fight-or-flight part of the brain that drives you to seek prey and avoid predators.
When the amygdala lights up upon identifying potential food or prey, it creates an impulse, assigning a positive valency to your sensory perception. In other words, it attributes a positive or negative value to what you're experiencing, labeling it as either something to seek out (positive valency) or something to be avoided (negative valency), both of which are based on your incomplete and biased perceptions. It then stores this information as an episodic memory in the nearby hippocampus and gives you an impulse to move towards or instinct to move away from something or someone.
When you’re infatuated with someone, you tend to perceive more advantages than disadvantages, more positives than negatives, and are likely more conscious of their upsides and unconscious of their downsides. This unconsciousness is a form of ignorance. As a result, you tend to feel joy because you (in ignorance) perceive them exceeding your expectations. You feel happy and may believe they are the cause of this feeling with your false causality or false attribution bias, "You make me happy" when you're first with them.
But then, days, weeks, or maybe months later, you likely start discovering some of the downsides you initially overlooked or were ignoring. Even though your intuition may have initially whispered some of these downsides to you, you may have ignored it with your impulse and animal passion, seeking this individual out.
Slowly but surely, day by day, you likely start noticing a few of their downsides, and the impulse to seek them out and the infatuation starts to wane. This is referred to as hedonic adaptation. Anytime you get a little happy, your system automatically counterbalances it to bring you back to a set point. The same thing happens if you go in the opposite direction and perceive more negatives than positives; your intuition will then try to bring you back up to the mean or set point.
So, what tends to happen is that if you get infatuated and are blinded to the downsides, then over time, you begin discovering some of the downsides, thereby calming down the infatuation, attraction, and impulse to have them. As a result, the "I can't live without them" and the fear of someone taking them away tends to calm down, bringing things back to equilibrium. Over time, you most likely discover that they have both upsides and downsides equally, because everybody does. The behaviors you once thought were upsides also reveal some downsides. Eventually, you come to see both sides of that individual simultaneously and finally love that individual for who they are as they are not the one-sided fantasy of them that you started out perceiving.
While you're infatuated - seeing the upsides without the downsides – you create a polarized emotion. That emotion activates your cerebellum, giving you the motor coordination to seek them out. You initially have an impulse to seek them out, you are attracted to them and have a positive emotional infatuation with them.
It’s for this reason, anytime you perceive more positives than negatives, more pleasures than pains, more gains than losses, more advantages than disadvantages, you have an impulse towards it, and this incomplete awareness or misinterpretation runs your life.
As such, any time you’re having a lopsided (charged or polarized) emotion, YOU’RE higher cortical executive center is not running your life, instead, your subcortical brain's impulse is running your life. You're out of your executive center, the seat of your more authentic and governed self, and down in your amygdala, reacting like an animal trying to capture prey.
You quickly and impulsively try to pursue them and then, within days, possibly weeks, or months, realize how gullible you likely were to your misinterpretation. You had an incomplete polarized emotion because you unconsciously lied to yourself about what was there. You saw the positives and ignored the negatives. Now, seeing both sides, you realize that polarized emotion was a distortion in your perception that you chose to believe.
So that emotion was a lie about what was actually present. Emotions are polarized perceptions - positive without negative or negative without positive.
Eventually, hedonic adaptation and the hedonic treadmill and desensitization bring these emotions back down to a balanced set point where, instead of being infatuated, you get to just love them. When you love somebody, you see both sides of them simultaneously, the things you like and dislike, you also see the up of the down and the down of the up simultaneously and you honor BOTH sides of the individual and both sides of that which you once judged positively or negatively in their behavior.
This same thing can occur on the opposite side. You can meet somebody and think, "Whoa, stay away from this individual!" You may resent them because you are more conscious of their downsides and unconscious of their upsides. Slowly but surely, you may become more conscious of their positives, and aware of blessings in an individual or event you perceived as being terrible. In other words, you find out that there were upsides to the perceived downsides.
You may also realize that your initial interpretation, which was all or nearly all downsides, is just like being infatuated, which is all upsides. In other words, there are actually BOTH sides.
When you see both sides simultaneously, you perceive things more objectively and more neutrally.
When you see only one side and are polarized to seek with an impulse or avoid with an instinct, you have an emotion.
As I mentioned earlier, emotions are feelings that are polarized due to incomplete awareness, and are therefore, in a sense, lies. A lie is an exaggeration or minimization of some perception. You're exaggerating the positives and minimizing the negatives - a false positive; or exaggerating the negatives and minimizing the positives - a false negative. This distorted perception results in an emotion – and emotions are misinterpretations of what is actually before you.
Over time, if you are wise and take the time to balance your perceptions, you will likely discover that the very predator you perceive as being terrible may instead have served to strengthen you, made you independent, driven you to master certain areas of your life, and perhaps resulted in your becoming more entrepreneurial in nature. On the other hand, the individual who overly supported you participated in helping you become overly or juvenilely dependent.
Maximum growth and development occur at the border of support and challenge, positive and negative. You need both.
Anytime you label one or the other good or bad, nice or mean, kind or cruel and you don't see both sides simultaneously, you tend to distort the whole picture. Inside the individual you think has all positives, you discover negatives over time. In that so-called terrible event, if you look you’ll find equal positives.
What is the wisest way to do that – to balance your perceptions and learn to perceive both positives and negatives simultaneously?
When you perceive both the positives and negatives simultaneously, you can have the wisdom of the ages without the aging process.
And you do this by asking quality questions to help bring your mind into more complete awareness or balance.
For example, “What's the BENEFIT or UPSIDE to you or others of this so-called ‘terrible’ event or action?" and "What's the DRAWBACK or DOWNSIDE to you or others of the so-called ‘positive’ event or action?" These questions will help bring yourself back into balance, stabilize your polarized emotions, see things objectively, and not let external circumstances run you. They will also help you neutralize false attribution biases and contributions like "they're the cause of my happiness" or "they're the cause of my sadness."
Self-mastery involves realizing that YOU’RE the cause of your own ‘happiness’ and ‘sadness’ because of how you perceive it. It’s also realizing that both of these states are polarized states and incomplete awarenesses. Change the ratio of your perceptions from either all positive or all negative to equally positive and negative synchronously, and you will change the polarized emotional feeling into more transcendental and synthesized feelings of gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, certainty, and presence
I'm not against feelings. Feelings are magnificent, but I'm interested in feelings of gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, certainty, and presence. Feelings such as joy and sorrow represent distortions of what actually is present because they mean you've exceeded expectations or not met them with your perception. These expectations may not even be sound; they may be moral hypocrisies projected onto you and the world around you about how life is “supposed” to be one-sided. Life isn't. Life has two sides. If I told you, "You're always nice, never mean," you “likely wouldn't believe me. If I said, "You're always mean, never nice," you wouldn't believe it. If I said, "Sometimes you're nice, sometimes you're mean," you would believe it immediately.
Anytime you have an imbalanced ratio of perception, it's not believable to your brain. It's believable when you see both sides.
Instead of letting polarized emotions, which are incomplete awarenesses and distortions of reality, run you and cause your autonomic nervous system to fire, making you seek and avoid and react to misinterpretations, why not ask new sets of questions? Bring yourself back into balance. Approximate the objective truth that people and events equally have both sides.
As such, instead of being a victim of history and being run by the outside world, you can be run from within and be a master of your destiny.
When I conduct my signature 2-day Breakthrough Experience seminar, which I’ve been doing for over 35 years, I hold people accountable to look for both sides. After working with 125,000 people in that program and helping them see that there are two sides to every story, they realize that these emotions running their lives and the drama and stories they tell are not real. They are not even complete awarenesses. The second they see both sides, their story changes to, “Thank you, I appreciate you, I love you,” and they love themselves.
That’s why I teach the Breakthrough Experience - to help people neutralize and transcend their polarized emotional baggage they carry and the incomplete awarenesses, by asking astute questions that balance the mind and liberate it.
When you are not run by external things, life transforms.
Like most people, you have had a moment when you were highly resentful and couldn’t sleep, or highly infatuated and couldn’t sleep. The more extreme the emotion, the more likely it is to disturb sleep.
Polarized emotions are stored in your hippocampus as a way to avoid and protect you from predators, or to seek prey. But if you balance and transform them, every experience in life has the capacity to be something you can love. Then you don’t have the baggage, and you don’t act like an animal with predator and prey mechanisms, letting the world run you from the outside.
Instead, you get to run you from the inside. That’s what I teach people in the Breakthrough Experience. I’ve yet to see anything someone has experienced in their physical body that I can’t show them how to turn into something to be thankful for and feel love for. This brings more MEANING to life - the mean between the pair of polar opposites.
Emotions are distortions or lies. They are incomplete awarenesses that make you emote and dramatize these incomplete perceptions. I show my attendees how to turn those emotional polarities into synthesized transcendental states of gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, certainty, and presence.
If you are inspired to achieve a masterful and balanced state where you feel gratitude for life, I would love you to join my next Breakthrough Experience so I can show you how to use a powerful process I’ve developed called the Demartini Method which will help you to balance emotional experiences you think are the cause of your problems, liberate you, and free you from them.
To Sum Up:
The emotions you experience are not truths but subjectively biased interpretations of your reality. When you are infatuated with someone, you tend to be conscious of upsides/ positives and unconscious of their downsides/negatives.
Physiologically, this infatuation triggers your amygdala, which drives you towards seeking/having an impulse towards what you perceive as being positive, while ignoring potential negatives.
Over time, as hedonic adaptation sets in, you tend to begin to see both sides more clearly, leading to a more balanced perspective.
Emotions are polarized perceptions - positive without negative or negative without positive.
When you see both sides simultaneously, you perceive things more objectively and more neutrally.
To achieve a more objective view, it's wise to ask quality questions to help balance your perceptions. For example, “What's the benefit of that so-called terrible event or action?" and "What's the drawback of that so-called positive event or action?" These questions will help bring yourself back into balance, stabilize your emotions, see things objectively, and not let external circumstances run you
By seeing both positives and negatives simultaneously, you can run your life from the inside instead of letting the world on the outside run you.
Join me at my next 2-day online Breakthrough Experience seminar where I can teach you the Demartini Method - a systematic pre-determined series of mental questions directed toward the objective of assisting an individual to neutralize and transform polarized emotional feelings into integrated feelings of gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, certainty and presence.
When you learn the art of governing your mind, through developing your self-governing executive center, you become the captain of your ship, the master of your destiny, an unborrowed visionary and an inspired leader, an individual of authenticity and influence.
Join the Breakthrough Experience so I can help you on your journey to self-mastery!
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