Page 63 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

32 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

discernible by their differing facial expressions, that create different
states of mind.
I believe that the practical implications of this point of view are enor-
mous. This means that, for example, my life long, periodic experience of
“myself angry” is a building block of my identity, a crucial part of who I
am to myself, and a separable self-state from my experience of “myself
afraid.” Additionally, this point of view envisions each fundamental emo-
tion as having characteristic effects on consciousness itself, so that, for
example, when we are angry, our focus is narrower and less free-wheel-
ing than when we are less angry or when we are predominantly curious.
Of course, this is as true for health workers as it is for everyone else. I
feel it would be hard to overestimate the significance of the emotions as
self-states. If each emotion is a discernibly different self-state, then (as I
have already suggested above) we accumulate a history (conscious and
unconscious) of how we have felt when curious, for example. We bring
this memory bank to every new day, just as we also bring memories of
what it is like for us to feel fear, or joy, and how we each tend to experience
sadness. These (formulated and unformulated) emotional profiles are a
significant aspect of who we are to ourselves.
When I start to work with someone, I want to know how their curi-
ous self-state feels to them. I assume it is somewhat like my own but
not exactly the same, since it is partially shaped by a different set of
life experiences. I also assume that intense curiosity and intense fear
have some experiential similarities for my new patient as well as signifi-
cant differences. Of course, this is all greatly over simplified because no
one is ever in a pure state of any one emotion. But, as human beings, I
believe we all have some experience of being curious, so we can recog-
nize that state in others. This is a significant aspect of our capacity for
empathy. However, it also accounts for some of our frequently occur-
ring empathic failures because my curious state is somewhat different
from yours. Empathic capacity is partially based on a skillful projec-
tion. Just as I can only know my own experience of the color “red” and I
have to assume that is largely what you see when you say you see “red,”
so it is with my experience of sadness, loneliness, and other emotional
self-states.
I assume I bring my history of emotional self states to work with me in
the morning as well as a rich personal history of being with people who
are in varying emotional self-states. How do our personal histories affect
what we each can register about the other person? While I believe none of
us has a definitive knowledge of what we can and can’t register, ongoing