Experience
Film “The World of Emotions: The Art of Being Happier. The lesson is conducted by Prof. N.I. Kozlov"
Experiences are a natural background of our lives, and we don’t always need to pay attention to them.
Experience is the bodily experience of mental states. What happened can be comprehended, that is, passed over your head and obtained analysis and conclusions. Or you can go the other way: launch it into the body and embody it in the body, during which a joyful event will fill us with joy and a difficult event, embodied in crying, will burst out with the whole body and leave.
As a rule, people tend to experience negative states, although those who are inclined to worry in principle experience everything.
The process of experiencing in women's culture is perceived as something difficult, but obligatory for any living (that is, feeling) person. For people prone to experiences, this is not just excited physiology, but a special inner life of the soul, which has its own ethics and aesthetics. These are internal movements of charged and very living events: a thrill of anticipation, a flash of joy, torment with doubts, an impulse of rage, a replay of loss.
Please note: internal events are not dead, but quite alive, charged, interacting with each other and influencing other internal processes in a person. And sometimes they are so alive that people begin to perceive them as subpersonalities. Following psychotherapists, people begin to believe that Fear takes care of us...
Those who create experiences for themselves, pay serious attention to them, who often spin them first, and then nurture and cherish them, first of all, their physiology is shaken, but people think that they have a richer inner world...
People prone to experiences know how to trigger them, but the resulting experience already lives its own life. There is already an involuntary visual, auditory and kinesthetic replay of the same emotionally charged event several times, returning in circles over and over again to what has already happened. As a result, experience is a lasting living emotional state,
Experience is often synonymous with feeling, and this is legitimate to the extent that the feeling is accompanied by kinesthetics, a restless body. Cm.
The ability to experience is formed during life, experience is social in origin and semiotically mediated, which makes it possible to classify it as a higher mental function.
Types of Experiences
More often (apparently due to traditional negativism) by experience they mean something negative. “Oh, I was so worried!” - meaning I was experiencing trouble. At the same time, it is quite legitimate to talk about positive experiences: by “peak experience” we mean an unconditionally positive and one of the highest personal experiences.
Experiences vary in internal temperature, intentional and random (involuntary), empty and meaningful, far-fetched and serious... See.
Psychological analysis of experiences
As a rule, the experience is accompanied by tension in the body. If the body is calm, there is no talk of experience. Experience is kinesthetic, it is always about the body.
If Stirlitz, in a situation of danger, thinks without an increased heartbeat, he does not worry, but only thinks: weighs, estimates... In the worst case, he gets fixated.
For people who are not used to thinking, experiences replace thinking. Strong experiences turn off thinking, a person descends to previous stages of intellectual development. Cm.
Sick experiences seem to be closely related to engrams. An engram is a recording of a mental image-picture imprinted into us and stored in memory associated with the experience of pain, fear and other painful emotions. It is thought that the engram is the mental basis of the experience.
There are people who are naturally inclined to worry, and people who are inclined to act. Cm.
Experiences in life
Experiences are a natural background of our lives, and we don’t always need to pay attention to them. However, in women's culture it is common to experience, it is interesting to experience, and experiences are elevated to the rank of special value with their own serving rituals. Cm.
Experiences are a traditional way of managing people who are in personal relationships with you. See Experiences as a way to control others
The culture of experiencing is knowing what emotions when and how to best experience them. And what emotions - when and how not to worry. And not just knowledge, but also the ability and habit of doing it. Cm.
See Working with unpleasant experiences and What to do with the experiences of loved ones and others,
The quality of the emotional experience is unchanged
It is important to understand what we mean when we talk about the immutability of emotional experience. The claim that the quality of an individual emotional experience remains the same from infancy to old age may seem strange, but there are good reasons to believe that it is true. When you say that your feelings towards someone have changed, you most likely mean that this person now evokes different emotions in you. Perhaps the person who once made you angry is now simply amusing you. This does not mean that your experiences of anger or joy have changed; rather, your emotions towards this person have changed.
What allows us to say that sadness is experienced by a small child in the same way as it was experienced by his grandfather? First of all, you need to keep in mind that we are talking about the experiential component of emotion, about experience as such. In a child, the experience of sadness is not associated with the complex set of images and memories that surround the same experience in his grandfather. Associations between feelings and thoughts are indeed subject to change. They change as a person grows and develops, under the influence of certain events and depends on many reasons, but the experience of a specific emotion itself, be it the emotion of joy, sadness or anger, remains unchanged. One proof of the constancy of emotional experience is the fact that in both a newborn and an adult we can observe the same prototypical pattern of facial expression of sadness (see Fig. 9-1), the same basic configuration caused by the contraction of one and the same muscles. The only difference between an adult and a baby is that the baby's skin is more plastic and has more fatty deposits underneath it; therefore, where the skin of an adult wrinkles, the skin of a baby may bulge, inflate, but the overall facial expression does not change from this. It must also be borne in mind that an adult can consciously or due to circumstances restrain the facial expression of emotion, while an infant has not yet learned to do this.
A newborn expresses anger differently than he expresses joy or sadness, and he expresses joy differently than he expresses fear. Each individual emotion tends to be expressed in specific actions, and these tendencies remain unchanged throughout human life. The experience of disgust, both in a child and an adult, leads to rejection of an unwanted object. The experience of joy causes a reaction of acceptance and approach, while the experience of fear performs a protective function, prompting the individual to look for ways to escape from a threatening object. If the experience associated with a particular emotion were variable or contradictory, we would constantly make irreparable mistakes, such as swallowing spoiled food or walking into danger.
Another proof of the constancy of emotional experience can be those specific human traits that directly follow from emotions. Humans are characterized by affiliative reactions, the ability for social attachment, empathy and altruism. It is obvious that these properties, which are an integral part of humanity, are mediated by emotional experiences, which not only do not change throughout human life, but have not undergone any significant changes throughout human evolution (Hoffman, 1981). When you talk to someone who is upset or sad, you can share their feelings, feel what they feel, and this ability to empathize is the basis of altruistic behavior. Research has shown that when adults do not create artificial barriers between a child and sad experiences, the child grows up to be more altruistic than one who was protected from such experiences. It follows from this that such important human qualities as the ability to empathy and altruism are mediated and supported by emotional experiences that do not change over time.
Social attachment is one of the most important human characteristics, and it appears to be a function of emotions. There is no longer any serious doubt about the statement that man is by nature a social being and that without social relations and some form of social organization man would not be human or would cease to exist altogether. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, building on the work of behavioral researchers such as John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and Jerry Kagan, argues that innate social fears play an important role in the formation of mother-child attachment (Konner, 1982).
We can name at least two more distinctive characteristics of a person, the origin of which can only be explained taking into account the law of the invariability of emotional experience postulated by us. One of them is the sense of continuity of the Self, a feeling thanks to which each of us knows that today he is the same person that he was yesterday and that he will be tomorrow. We grow, mature, age, our lives are constantly moving and undergoing changes. The process of human ontogenetic development itself is a series of dramatic transformations, transitions from one stage to another - the child begins to walk and steps from infancy to childhood, then from a child turns into a teenager, from a teenager into a young man, from a young man into an adult, and then into old man. But, despite all the changes that happen to us, each of us has an inner core, our “I”, which remains unchanged, and this core is emotional in nature. Each of us knows for sure that the face of a loved one gave joy yesterday, causes joy today and will bring joy tomorrow. In the same way, we associate the loss of a loved one with grief and suffering, and everyone knows that whenever a loss occurs, it will cause exactly these feelings in him. The constancy of emotional experience, its independence from the changing conditions and circumstances of human life gives a sense of the constancy of one’s own “I” and helps in the formation of a stable self-concept.
Emotion is always with us
There are three common misconceptions that prevent many people from believing that emotion is constantly present in the mind, constantly influencing perception and behavior. The first of these misconceptions owes its origin to the work of early physiologists, who studied mainly episodes of pronounced, intense negative emotions. Walter B. Cannon and his students studied the emotions of rage and fear and spoke of emotions as extreme reactions to extreme situations of stress or danger (Cannon, 1927). However, it is obvious that emotions organize and direct our behavior not only in extreme situations. Thus, the emotion of interest encourages us to learn, develop new skills and abilities; the emotion of joy, moderate and mild, serves as a kind of reward for those small achievements that mark our everyday life. Moderate fear, and sometimes even anticipation of fear, helps us avoid stressful or dangerous situations before a real threat arises.
The second misconception that prevents many people from recognizing the constant presence of an emotion in consciousness is associated with the idea that then a person should constantly be able to name this emotion and talk about it. It is enough to turn to everyday experience to understand the fallacy of this idea. Surely every person can remember moments when he knew for sure that he was experiencing a certain emotion, but was unable to define or describe it. Freud's early work and subsequent research convinced many clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as personality theorists, of the unconsciousness of many motives of human behavior. It seems that these unconscious motives can be interpreted either as emotional experiences that a person is not able to express in words, or as very weak experiences, or as experiences that have not come into the focus of attention.
The third misconception that prevents people from agreeing that emotion constantly influences our consciousness is associated with the fairly common idea of emotion as an experience that is necessarily short-term and intense. The spread of this misconception is due in no small part to the attention paid in both scientific and popular literature to the topic of stress and the emotional response to stress.
In addition, the very fact of the short duration of a person’s expressive reactions (which last on average from 1 to 4-5 seconds) contributes to the perception of emotion as a short-term and transient phenomenon. However, expressive response is only part of the emotion; the duration of emotional experience is not comparable with the duration of emotional manifestation. So, for example, a person can be oppressed, depressed for a very long time, but at the same time not show his depression in any way.
In addition, both positive and negative emotions differ in their intensity - they can be either very weak or very strong. Everyday experience shows us that the same act of a person can cause us to have different reactions: when you are calm and feeling good, tactlessness towards you will only cause you irritation, but it can make you furious if you are nervous or tired. Obviously, irritation and rage can be considered as phenomena of different intensity within one continuum - the continuum of anger.
FEELING, PERCEPTION, KNOWLEDGE
So, emotion is always with us, and the experience of emotion largely determines our perception and interpretation of the world around us. You only need to listen to your inner feelings to understand that our perceptual system - the system that tells us what is happening inside and around us - does not function in a random or disorderly manner. Whether you are sitting at home on the sofa or by a stream in the forest, walking in the park, or walking along a busy street, what is happening around you is perceived by you with varying degrees of clarity, you look at the surrounding objects and people with varying degrees of attention and interest. Two people who have spent the same amount of time in the same place will see it in their own way and will pay attention to completely different things; if you ask them to talk about what they saw, it is quite possible that they will tell you about completely different things and events, as if they had visited two different places.
The reason why two people perceive the same situation differently is largely due to differences in their feelings and interests. In the next chapter we will talk in detail about the mysterious, changeable and almost imperceptible influence that the emotion of interest has on our lives. For now, it is enough to emphasize that the emotion of interest has a motivational significance, has a powerful influence on the process of perception, serves as the basis for the selectivity of perception and the focus of attention, and in addition, maintains the tone of attention in research and cognitive activity.
What Inner Experiences Teach Us
Inner experiences
All people try to avoid situations that cause negativity - the cause of feelings of physical discomfort or mental pain. The first type of problem is a consequence of wounds and problems in the body, to combat which effective means and procedures have been proposed. Moral feelings are another matter. It's not that simple with them.
The meaning of mental anguish
The following phrases are often heard: “It hurts inside”, “The heart contracts with fear”... People with such complaints have pain in their very soul, emotions go off scale, provoking pain, often physically tangible. There is still no clear answer to the question - why does the fragile human soul need negative feelings, suffering, worries, fear?
We have long ceased to be representatives of the animal world. Unlike animals, we have memory and feelings. In addition, we accumulate a store of knowledge, including negative and even cruel experiences, which helps in the future.
Having been born, a person first experiences the first quarrel with a friend in kindergarten, unrequited love at school, betrayal of a friend in adolescence, the collapse of some hopes at the age of 25-30 years. Thanks to all this, we endure subsequent troubles less painfully and get along with real life. Our brain would refuse to obey us if our soul and heart were not trained and accustomed to losses. In the end, our whole life consists of acquisitions that delight us and make us happy, and losses that plunge us into despair.
Often pain, sadness, anger, loss, and negative emotions indicate the need for change. And as a result of the latter, we grow up, become wiser, more independent, better. Below we have provided criteria by which you can determine the timeliness of changes in life.
Feelings of discomfort and dissatisfaction
This is the same pain, but camouflaged by everyday activities, worries, responsibilities and anxieties. We can ignore these feelings, convince ourselves that everything is fine... but the discomfort does not go away and overtakes us again and again.
Sudden childhood fears
People begin to experience fear in the dark, in a closed space, in front of an audience at a talk, etc.
Feeling of purposeless existence
The mechanical repetition of the daily routine is noted, the longing for fleeting time is haunted, and the futility of existence is noted.
Excessive emotionality
Feelings begin to take precedence over common sense and rationality.
Poor quality sleep
Sometimes constant drowsiness is observed, or, on the contrary, insomnia begins. We can stay up until two in the morning or jump up “before dawn” at four in the morning and again drive fears or unpleasant thoughts about our problems into our heads.
Exhaustion
In this case, there are not enough resources even for current daily activities.
Desire for privacy
You may suddenly have a desire to be alone, go somewhere in nature, immerse yourself in your thoughts, memories, take long walks, or just stay at home and cover your head with a blanket.
Reluctance to communicate
There is no point in maintaining formal friendly relations. Superficial friends, on whom strength and energy are wasted, turn out to be unnecessary.
Understanding the lasting loss of a dream
Suddenly it becomes clear that what we were thinking about just recently is not at all what we really want. And the reality is far from what it seemed a month ago.
Diffidence
We understand that we were going somewhere in the wrong direction, or there, but now we need to dramatically change course.
"Epiphany"
I want to hide it, move it away, forget about relationships that have long since exhausted themselves, about a job that I don’t want to work at, about responsibilities that have long become a heavy burden on my shoulders.
Anger at yourself that comes out of nowhere
We cannot come to terms with the fact that we floated with the flow, remained blind, deaf, indifferent to our own fate. We cannot believe that we allowed other people and events to decide for us and direct our lives. The realization that there is still a lot to be done, decided, changed, is a rethinking of goals and values.
Conclusion
All these feelings, thoughts, desires cause us discomfort, are a source of sad thoughts and potential or already real problems. Like any baby, we want to hide from suddenly surging negative emotions and “insights,” because no one wants to go through trials, fear, pain, hopelessness. But life turns out the way it does.
There comes a time when burying our head in the sand like an ostrich becomes simply impossible, and then, despite feeling pain, we must courageously step forward and open ourselves to negative feelings. It is by experiencing changes in ourselves that we grow up and open a new path in our lives.
