When I first heard the phrase “emotional attachment”, many years ago, my focus was on the word “emotional” and immediately had a negative reaction to it. I slowly came to understand that, do to my poor understanding of “emotion”; I actually had an emotional response to that word and so established a predictable “belief” about the phrase. Additionally, I came to see that my “belief” directly affects my “world view” and my perception of reality. I knew that I had to look deeper into this phenomenon.
OK, back up;
First, I concede that our beliefs and habits play a very important role in our lives. They give our conscious mind time to focus on “survival”.
Second, I think that it would be productive to exclude religious beliefs from this essay, at least for now. Religious beliefs are too important and complex to approach without a good deal of experience.
Continue;
I have learned that, whether we like it or not, we are emotional creatures by nature. We may try to “overcome” our emotions but that really doesn’t work. What we actually succeed in doing is ignoring our emotions and that leads to more trouble. The best we can do is understand and respect our emotions, with the knowledge that emotions stem from the very complex combination of our thoughts and our experiences. Including the inevitable misinformation and assumptions we add subconsciously. I also believe that while our environment has some affect on our experience, the most important aspect to our experience is our brain chemistry. Scientists are also coming to the understanding that our view of the world is largely determined by our brain chemistry. At times I will refer to this as our world view. This is a short example of what I’m referring to;
Little Tommy is five years old and has received his first set of crayons, not the little set, no the big set with the sharpener on the back. His mother gave Tommy a very large sheet of craft paper and told Tommy to draw a picture. Tommy started drawing with passion careful to use each color. Hours later Tommy used all the crayons at least once and the paper was transformed into a sheet of color. Tommy was very proud and took the picture to show his mother. Tommy’s mother was suitably excited about the masterpiece and spent time telling Tommy how beautiful it was. When she was finished she took the picture, crumbled it up and put it in the garbage. Tommy reacted according to his “view of the world”. He could have become angry and blamed his mother for being insensitive, he could have thought that his mother was encouraging him to do even better, he could have decided that the paper was much too big to put on the refrigerator, or many other reactions.
I picked the age of five because by the age of five most of us have developed a set of beliefs and habits that will remain with us for the rest of our lives. We disguise these beliefs and habits as we grow older to “blend” with our changing position in the world. For instance we may learn, at an early age, that by throwing a tantrum, we get what we want. Later in life we may change our behavior to shows of aggression, thus meeting our “view” of what is expected by our position of adolescence.
How do our emotions fit in? Well bare with me.
We tend to assume that the world that we see is the only world there is. We subconsciously add assumptions (from previous experience or beliefs) to our present experience. This is sometimes called Confirmation Bias, where we “see” what we expect to see. This helps us “complete the story” and have it fit into our view of the world. We establish an emotional attachment to protect our “view of the world”, in short our reality, the rules that we live by. So we become emotionally attached to the belief we create from the combination of our experiences (as modified by our “world view”) and our belief that what we experience is exactly how the world is. As we go through life these beliefs are reinforced and the emotional attachment is strengthened. I suspect that this is the reason we reject the existence or at least are skeptical of things that we can’t see.
There are many examples of our inaccurate view of an event. For instance the police try to keep people in an auto crash separate. This is to get the different view points of each individual. From these separate stories they try to assemble what actually happened. Lawyers also know this and find that “eye witnesses” are very often poor historians of the crime and therefore a poor type of evidence. The “eye witness” tells the story as they interpret it to meet their world view “The kid didn’t even look!”
There are other ways that our emotional attachments to our beliefs bring us trouble. I have found during my time as a substance abuse counselor that folks who choose mind altering substances to solve problems quickly develop emotional attachments to the belief that the substance is the best solution. This emotional attachment is different only because the unnatural chemically induced emotion is more subconscious and devious. The result is that these folks have all kinds of irrational reasons to continue with their use, none of which actually work in their lives.
I observed other examples when I had regular contact with a variety of blue collar workers. I never understood why they frequently had political beliefs that caused them to vote against their own self interest. As I chatted with them it became clear that their reasons did not actually match the facts of the world. But I suspect any attempt on my part to point that out would go unheeded.
One more example, I used to show my clients a short video of two groups of tree or four individuals paying “catch” with two balls. The task given to the clients were to count the number of times one team passed their ball. The clients were not told that during the “game” a person in a gorilla suit would walk to center stage, beat on his chest, and walk off. At the end of the video the clients were asked if they observed anything unusual in the video. I have shown this many times and none of my clients have ever seen the gorilla until the second showing of the video.
I believe that these beliefs can be modified with conscious attention but “parts” of them linger in our subconscious. They show up as the “devil on our shoulder” reminding us of old beliefs and habits.
This is not to say we are not responsible for ourselves, our beliefs, and our actions. We are responsible for everything we do. We are also responsible for understanding why we do what we do and making the effort to change how we view the world so we can consciously modify our thinking. This is not easy and usually not 100% but it is possible to adjust for our world view. Remember we are not perfect, the world is not perfect and (as proven by what we are learning in quantum physics) we don’t know everything.
Before we can change nonproductive beliefs, and in turn our nonproductive behavior, we must first understand there is a strong emotional attachment to them. We must then be open to the possibility that the way we see the world is not necessarily how the world really is. Actually, by nature, we all have imperfect beliefs and would benefit from challenging them on a regular basis. I try to practice this regularly and advised my clients to do so also.
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