What might such an approach require of us? To help me convey a possible answer to this question that might also be valid for you, please consider the “I have 'X emotion' now“ linguistic (IHXEN), where 'X emotion' is limited to a noun or a modified noun, such as anger or concern, or rising hope, or growing doubt. The IHXEN linguistic, pronounced Eye-Zen, is actually the verbal expression of a gnosis and Authentix Coaches has been testing the IHXEN linguistic format for more than fifteen years now. We have found that not only is it a way of verbalizing one's own truth of the moment, it is also a safe way of being authentic in even very trying circumstances because it does not intimate any insult nor does it imply any presumption to know what is in another's mind. Thus IHXEN expressions empower one to be authentic without danger of insulting or attacking the self-image of another. We have also found that, in challenging (and potentially explosive) situations, use of IHXEN expressions is a way of relieving emotional pressure without triggering distrust or any desire, let alone want or need, to "pushback". Indeed we have invariably found that its use always engenders a renewal of trust. In other words: IHXEN personal truths build trust, while also relieving emotion! To make use of this discovery, however, most us will need to expand our vocabulary of emotions, so following is a starter list of emotion nouns: |
| But a mind is not an object. The convention of repeating the means, objective analysis, of the success we have had in manipulating the physical world may be a natural one to follow, but it is worth calling into question when we find ourselves doing it with minds. A Cambridge friend of mine tells me that the ancient Greek, Hippocrates, said that mind and body are not separable, but that Plato and Aristotle maintained that they were. Today, although we frequently use the words "mind" and "body", no scientist has ever been able to define in words the boundary between a physical body and a non-physical mind. After glibly using these words for two thousand years since the fathers of Western medicine, philosophy, and science disagreed over whether the mind and body are distinguishable scientifically, we must, I believe, today accept that, scientifically, they are not. Yet people, and not just lay people but professional people like doctors and psychiatrists, appear still to be using the words "mind" and "body" as if what these two words symbolize were actually separable. Fortunately, some writers, mainly from the fields of psychotherapy and alternative healing modalities, but not often from traditionally trained psycho-analysts, have begun in the last generation or so to use the words "mindbody" and "bodymind". This nomenclature reflects much better what scientists have so far been able to clarify with objective evidence; but, as is the case of many profound linguistic advances, the new nomenclature is only slowly catching on. |
Perhaps we can find clues in these two songs. I have discussed their motifs with quite a few people. Few women recall the man’s song. All of both genders recall the woman’s song. All agree that the material lot of women improved substantially during the 20th Century and that women’s thirst to escape the boredom women were experiencing in lives confined to the home has been substantially, but by no means entirely, quenched. Some wonder whether, given the hectic pace of our currently market-driven lives, this signal improvement won by women and the men aware enough to be their political supporters has gained anyone participating in family life – whether as a parent, child, or grandparent – anything worth having. Most women and some men wonder why men continue to “feel misunderstood”. A problem common to both genders is, I believe, that we live in an "age in which the word diagnosis is grossly misused". Our habit of using the tools and skills of objective science to making a diagnosis, a habit widely held to be the source of much progress, may now be an under-recognized source of discord. I write this essay to elaborate this idea, and also to propose what I believe can be a solution for many, if not all, of us. The way of thinking and conversing practiced by objective scientists has enabled the Western- oriented world to have great success in manipulating the world of objects through mechanical, chemical, electrical, electronic, electro-magnetic, and nuclear means. So what could be more natural in our evolution as a civilization than for people to utilize a way of thinking and conversing proven successful in manipulating the world of objects to addressing issues arising in personal relationships? Given that we now know that the field of experience in which most mental-emotional turmoil occurs is indeed personal relations, the natural path for thinkers on the subject of relationship to direct their attention has been to use constructs already proven successful in science. Indeed, we began applying the techniques of objective science to this field in the 19th Century, and by the end of the 20th the profession most identified with that approach -- psychiatry -- had grown to have great influence -- especially in language communities where diagnoses have become a key factor in the profession's system of compensation by government. |
| Clarity from voicing a gnosis |
| Opportunities for a Gnosis? Balancing the Motifs of Gender & Self-Image (c) 2008-10, all rights reserved, by Angus Cunningham Principal, Authentix Coaches angusc@authentixcoaches.com |
| Do you recall the song “Killing me softly with his song”? It was a hit a couple of decades ago and is still today a regular on popular music radio shows. The singer is always a woman and the song enables her to give voice to a hard-to- explain complaint: her man’s way of being is seriously suppressing hers -- but so softly she scarcely can find social justification for protesting. “I’m just a guy whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood”. A hit at about the same time as Killing me softly, this song is of a man voicing quite another plea: for release from the agony of having his good intentions misinterpreted as malevolent or insensitive. In the traditionally held gender stereotypes of the psychology of the 20th Century, women were widely assumed to know their emotions and to be oppressed by men who didn't, and men were assumed to be thinkers whose thoughts were often disconnected from their emotions. How can these core motifs of genderism, or the "war of the sexes", be reconciled for the trials that we are all having to confront in the wake of the "Great Recession"? |
This list includes all the emotions that clients of Authentix Coaches have experienced as a step toward discovery of profound and practical new insights into situations they had, until then, been experiencing only as extremely troublesome. We can use this list to gain the relief that scientists of emotion have shown is available from labeling one's emotion (rather than another person!), as you can discover from an Abstract of a study concluded in 2000 involving fMRI brain scans by the UCLA Unit of the United States National Institute of Mental Health. If we do, we are practising what Authentix coaches term IHXEN authenticity statements of self-monitoring and self-expression. One has then become the observer of one's emotion rather than is being helplessly "driven" by it. One has, in fact, begun to master the world of Rational Emoto-Linguistics, a branch of psycholinguistics whose essence respects universal ethics. And we are then empowered to begin safely and accurately to process the feelings associated with the emotion noun label we have chosen. Practising the IHXEN linguistic, we have found that both our clients and we arrive at remarkably valuable insights. A series of such insights empowered, for example, one enterprise owner and CEO to win an offer of $3 million in a stalled debt recovery process. (A short narrative of this Authentix Coaches engagement, complete with its ROI, is available at the following link). Another client used the technique to find a productive new role for an employee who had become locked in acrimonious personal controversies that were stalling his company's productivity growth but in whom the company had invested 10 years' learning in a rare specialty vital to the enterprise. Others have learned to manage bipolar mood swings without drugs and found a whole new world of stability, intimacy, and better metabolic health. We can begin to stimulate a shift toward a more gnostic focus and expression amongst the people with whom we have rapport by offering an IHXEN. This will encourage, if we are not too insistent, reciprocal exchanges of curiosity concerning what each others' gnoses are. When one has consciously in mind a label for one's emotion, one has not only begun to relieve it; one has also begun to discover much of what we need to know both of our emotional "bias" and also of the direction that our innermost being is “organically telling” us is necessary now for well-being. Such knowing facilitates honesty in the evolution of relationships without exposing us to the risks of naturally frank speaking, which often manifests as diagnoses and frequently leads to breakdowns in communication. We thereby minimize the risk of inadvertently setting off painful divisions and crises that so often are triggered by mind-reading judgments. By such means also, we minimize the distractions and dangers of serious misunderstandings. In sum, by shifting the balance of focus from diagnosis to gnosis, we acquire the skills to express our own particular authenticities and gain opportunity to have our worries about others' intents relieved by the requested availability of data -- rather than by the guessing of potentially problematic mind-reading. In other words, we find new ways to grow in the partnership skills of empathy and acknowledgement. In the Age of Gnosis now dawning, might we find the ancient "war of the sexes" slowly subsiding, in due course, into "a peace of gender coherence"?! |
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| Awe, joy, rue, ease, hope, bliss, debt (see note 1 below), hurt (see note 2 below), love, need, rage, dread, glee, grief, guilt, jeal, mirth, peace, poise, pride, trust, shame, shock, scorn, stress, want, thrill, angst, fear, worth (see note 3 below), zeal, alarm (see note 4 below), anger, anguish, boredom, caution, challenge, concern, contempt, delight, disgust, dismay, distress, envy, fury, fatigue, horror, hurry, panic, passion, pleasure, pressure, regret, rancor, relief, resolve, sorrow, surprise, torment, upset, worry, tension, trial, yearning, approval, assurance, confidence, defiance, dilemma, distraction, elation, ignorance (see note 5 below), impotence, intensity, injustice, interest, jealousy, misgiving, potency, suffering, gratitude, confusion, dejection, exhaustion, frustration, obsession, vexation, ambivalence, despondency, expectancy, anxiety (see note 6 below) difficulty, hilarity, perplexity, solemnity, tranquility, agitation, excitation, apprehension, concentration, contemplation, disconsolation, trepidation, curiosity, fascination, indignation, irritation, protestation, satisfaction, anticipation, equanimity (see note 7 below), vulnerability (see note 8 below). (The notes referred to in this list are elaborated in my upcoming book). |
A List of Emotion Nouns |
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Toronto, (c) 080723-100701, excerpted from a book manuscript tentatively entitled "Presumption Free! Solving Problems Together -Equanimously!", planned for publication in 2010. Permissions |
The serious nature of this issue becomes clearer when we think about how we are accustomed to communicate abstract ideas. We usually employ metaphors derived from descriptions of concrete objects – for example, "he has a sharp mind" – for this purpose. Such common sayings draw on our senses of a concrete object, in this case that of a knife or a sword, to indicate a quality of a person's personality. OK, so we all know what a knife or a sword are, but what would be the affect on a troubled person's experience in a relationship if, for example, he or she had been diagnosed by a third party as "having a sharp mind"? How would your spouse's/partner's opinion of you be affected if such a diagnosis were made of you? Well, you and your partner might well be able to work out a solution if a friend were to offer such a "natural diagnosis", although there is a risk you might not. But what if your partner were to pick up such a notion from a psychiatrist whom you and your partner had visited? Would your partner consider a psychiatrist to be an unimpeachable authority? Many people do, but what's crucial is whether you would too. And suppose also that you and your partner were having difficulty agreeing what schooling to give your child and you had reached your wits' end trying, perhaps without formal knowledge or understanding of communications skills, to find common ground and then a psychiatrist "diagnoses your mind as sharp"? Would that affect the outcome of the issue with which you and your spouse were grappling? It surely would – although not in very predictable ways. Following the tradition of the medical science out of which psychiatry was born, psychologists and psychiatrists have invented ways to categorize the habits of behavior and thought they perceive in people experiencing emotional pain into commonly occurring psychological and psychiatric types. But, what truly are the habits of thought observable in another when only the outward consequence of some bodymind process, and not the thought itself, is directly observable? Unless we remain very aware of these subtleties, and we can only be so if we have a clear distinction between an emotion and a feeling, we will be very likely to try to carry over into personal relationships the successes our culture has had in the realm of manipulating objects by means of diagnoses. If that happens, we can easily fall into the habit of referring to each other diagnostically, i.e. as being an example of one or another psychological or psychiatric type. If so, we would then be treating each other as having the characteristics of objects rather than of personalities capable of honest growth. Psychiatrists are often ingenious in finding ways to transcend the mental and linguistic limitations within which they and the rest of us make use of the science of their profession. For example, Ron Charach, a Toronto psychiatrist, has published eight books of poems – the latest being "Selected Portraits" (available from Indigo/Chapters and Amazon) – to convey his healing messages to psychiatric survivors and their family members. But many if not most of the rest of us are still at the stage of studying popular books on psychoanalytic theories and its various applications in popular clinical psychology -- books in which the linguistic limitations of quintessentially diagnostic psychoanalysis are rarely, if at all, made clear. When one tries the skills of analysis learned from success in predicting what will be the consequences of actions one takes in the objective physical world of houses, cars, kitchens, and machines, into desires for success in predicting the implications of diagnostic categories upon another, one is dipping into mind-reading. Indeed, listening closely, one finds much presumptive mind-reading occurring beneath the surface of many ordinary conversations today. To return to the two songs with which we began. In the first song, a woman – apparently assuming that power resides largely outside herself – has resentful anxiety about the subtle, but nonetheless oppressive, influence a man has over her. Perhaps the woman is extending our species' traditional successes in predictive thinking in the world of domestic objects by presuming that the intentions of a man have not evolved much from his predecessors. In the second song, the man may be aware that the sensitivity to women's feelings of his male predecessors was abysmal and is bemoaning his angst that, as a consequence, women so often incorrectly presume his intentions – now much evolved from the days when man entirely dominated public life – to be only as insensitive as that of his predecessors’. These are only hypotheses, of course. What the songwriters actually had in mind, we can only know if we have both the curiosity to ask and the means to gain satisfaction. If we fail in one or the other, we are prone to try to meet our needs for certainty by falling into the presumptive habit of believing we can mind-read. |
| Let us note here that the woman singer is quite openly blaming her man. But what, actually, is his intention? Will she make the effort to ask? Or will she fall into the trap of presumptive mind-reading? If the latter, she may, depending on her predisposition, either make herself feel worse or miss an opportunity for clarifying her feelings and so miss giving him a chance to change his behaviour so that both she and he feel better. Although our guesses of another's thinking can sometimes seem to be true, rigorous testing of this notion invariably reveals that we cannot safely or fairly expect our guesses of another’s intentions to be entirely accurate, no matter how widely and deeply we have studied psychoanalysis and its many offshoots. Given this ineluctable truth, is it not now time to start letting go of diagnostic thinking in our approaches to developing and maintaining relationships? Well, yes, but how? Well, if we want to emerge from an "Age of Inappropriate Diagnosis", what about exploring an "Age of Gnosis"? The term "Age of Gnosis" sounds quaintly and esoterically pretentious to many, and, if it does to you, please try to keep an open mind while I bring in a few other pieces of data that I feel you will find to be relevant to the issues posed by this essay. Gnosis is a Greek word meaning an "incidence of knowing". "Dia" is a Greek word meaning "across", or sometimes "connecting". Thus the word "diagnosis" is distinguished from the word "gnosis" as being, often but not always, an incidence of claiming to know what is in another's mind. This being so, wouldn't your diagnosis of me, or my diagnosis of you, be prone to the errors of mind-reading? Well, yes, of course, they would. So, instead of believing that we know what is in another's mind, we might now try sharing what we ourselves truly do know. Well, what do we actually know, and will sharing it be safe? We all have some ideas in mind that are properly not others to know, and so sharing some ideas will not be safe, let alone wise. We shall, therefore, have to develop the means to protect ourselves both from "giving ourselves away" – whether by excessive generosity or by accidental insult. If we can find such ways, we would be able to leave the inaccuracies and presumptions that are at the root of mind-reading mental diagnoses to the worlds of inanimate sciences like engineering and physics and astronomy, and thus permanently be able to avoid the often insulting and unnecessarily tragic and painful building of accidental walls in relationships that resorting to psychologically diagnostic skills inevitably and tragically erects. For that is indeed what such diagnoses do: they block our best efforts to grow trust and/or intimacy. Let us instead, therefore, find ways to express, safely, our own gnoses more often, our own authentic, but yet non-diagnostic, knowings and intuitions. Let us, in other words, find again the vitalizing paths of truth by practising empathic expression of only what we authentically know, our gnoses. Let us lay off diagnoses of others – at least of others still alive and feeling!! |
| And finally, what about the man singer? Well, he's pleading with his saviour. Will he be saved? Perhaps he will be. We can certainly hope so and wish him well. But what if his saviour is too busy, or doesn't think the time is ripe, for whatever reason, to do the saving requested? What can he do then? Because Authentix coaches believe that by sharing experiential wisdom on the topics of learning and leading we all grow in ways salvational to our planetary civilization, we have contributed a series of essays on profound issues such as this one on our website. You can find them by clicking on the Site Traffic Analysis option below. |
| Click on the image below for a sneak preview of the proposal site for Angus' new book -- on, amongst other subjects "Father & Daughter Well-Being" |