[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #13 EMOTIONAL INTERRUPTIONS

Sun Mar 17 15:46:47 EDT 2024

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #13

March 18, 2024

Emotional Intelligence Series #13

Managing Your Emotions V

EMOTIONAL INTERRUPTIONS

5) Interrupting Emotions as Necessary.

Because emotions involve motions, movement, energy going out-emotions will
sometimes seem to have "a life of their own."  That is, once initiated they
move us as they do, and if strong enough, will move us even when we do not
want to experience them.  So sometimes, just sometimes, you will want to not
let an emotion play out.  You will want to interrupt it and stop it dead in
its tracks.

A state interrupt or an emotion interrupt then becomes a tool or skill in
your repertoire for managing your emotions.  This is not to be confused with
rejecting an emotion.  In this instance, you are accepting the emotion, you
are simply putting a time or place limit on it.  Just not now, later.  You
may be suppressing the emotion, fully conscious of what you are feeling and
simultaneously feeling that right now in this place and time, it is best to
not feel it or express it.  In NLP we call this a state or a pattern
interrupt and it's an extremely valuable tool when helping yourself or
someone else maintain control of one's responses.

In human experience, the psychological phenomena of an interruption is a
common and regular everyday occurrence.  From morning to night, all of us
experience all sorts of interruptions.  Usually they are momentary and we
quickly handle the interruption and then get back to what we were doing.
Sometimes the interruptions are more problematic.  If sometime dramatic
occurs, something really out of the ordinary, something threatening or
upsetting-then the interruption may be such that we are completely set off
our course.  If intense enough, we may later suffer amnesia.  "Where was I?"
"What were we talking about?"  

Talking about interruptions, some people are especially skilled in
constantly interrupting themselves.  Because they are highly distractable, a
stray thought can pop into their mind and take them complete off course.  In
stress it is common to experience thought intrusions to such an extent that
a person cannot stay on the same subject to hardly complete a sentence.

While I first learned about therapeutic interruptions when I was studying
clinical psychotherapy, it wasn't until I learned NLP that I really
understood the concept and learned to use it effectively.  That's when I
learned that to protect a client from himself, there are times when it is
not only useful, but necessary, to interrupt his line of thinking and
emoting.  This is especially true for someone "caught up in a strong
emotion."  It could be anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, shame, guilt, despair,
etc. 

Now typically it occurs for the person who tends to always associate into
whatever they are talking about.  When the conversation turns to a subject
that triggers them, they go into the experiences that they have had as if
they are there again.  They see what they saw then, they hear what they
heard then, they feel what they feel then.  And because they are completely
associated into the movie that's playing in their mind, they are not
present.  They are not in the here-and-now with your in your office.  They
are back in the war zone.  They are being raped.  They are being beaten by a
drunken parent.

Time for an interruption!  "Hey!  Is that a snake climbing up on your leg??"
"Opps ... I didn'/t mean to spill water all over you!"  Anything outrageous
will do.  Slam a book down on the floor; stand up quickly, "I can't wait; I
have got to pee!"  "Is that a burger in your nose?"

In RET (Rational Emotive Therapy) which I learned in the 1970s, someone
wanting to break a habit (smoking, over-eating, intrusion of suicide
thoughts, etc.) would wear a rubber-band on the wrest and every time the
intruding thought or feeling occurred, they were to snap the rubber-band so
it would hurt.  It was a self-interruption-a way of shifting state.

In the Meta-Therapy training that I do, we typically use more gentle
interruptions. "Oh by the way, did you eat breakfast this morning?  What did
you have?"  "Did you notice anything different about the office when you
came in?"  It's a small interruption.  Then, "Now you were talking about
being scared ... what was the last thing you said?"  You then let the person
talk a little bit more and as soon as they seem to go deeply into the state,
you pull them out with another distraction, "Is purple your favorite color?"
In this way, they go in and then you bring them out, and you do this going
in and coming out until they can do it themselves.

The significance of this is that a person can then have his emotions rather
than his emotions having him.  She is in control rather than the associating
process of going into an emotional experience and getting lost in it.  Now
the person has two ways of processing an experience.  She can step in and
experience it from the inside and she can step out and experience it as an
observer on the outside (this is meta-program #20, associated and
un-associated).

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