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We often seem to think that we only have two choices in regards to these emotions that we feel, and our two choices are either to suppress the emotion, meaning you keep feeling it but you hide it from other people, or you just let it out and act on it. The cool thing about recent emotion science research is that it shows that there is more than just those two choices of suppressing or acting on your emotions. There is an option to be able to regulate your emotions. You're actually changing the emotion that you're feeling and then acting differently as a result.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I wanna talk today about emotional independence or emotional differentiation, and I'm gonna start by giving you a story of something which is kind of the opposite of emotional independence. Okay, so there's a friend of mine who I'm gonna call Josh, who really likes to work out at the gym, and he contracted a personal trainer, which I'll call Mark. And this personal trainer had a lot of experience at his job, and he gave a lot of really great advice. Josh really was loving working with Mark. And besides professional competence, Mark was just a really fun, personable guy, and they had a lot in common, and they became, um, pretty good friends. They were meeting together several times a week at the gym to work out. But there came a point where Josh had some different financial issues come up and a lot of unexpected expenses, and he had a really heavy month, and he decided he would need to drop the personal trainer for one month while he was dealing with these other expenses that he had. And so he let Mark know that he was not going to be paying him the next month because he was not gonna be able to work out with him. He was gonna have to put a pause on their arrangement for one month. And Mark ended up getting really, really upset at Josh. Mark had kind of understood from things that they had talked about, he'd kind of thought that their arrangement was gonna be perpetual and that Josh was gonna be paying him every month. Mark was in a lot of financial difficulty for many different reasons, and being without the money that Josh was gonna pay him for that month was gonna mean, um, the difference between him being able to meet his financial obligations that month or not. And he felt like he had given Josh over and above the absolute necessary in their relationship because it had really become a friend relationship, and he felt like he'd done him a whole bunch of favors. And in return for this, he just expected, he, he thought that Josh also understood that this was gonna be a perpetual thing, that he was just gonna pay him every month, that he was gonna be able to count on this every month. It's really hard to be self-employed. You don't know how much income to expect, and he, he had just assumed that Josh would continually work with him every month, and this would be part of his income. Josh had not assumed that, however. Josh had assumed that, you know, when he had money that he would do it. When he didn't have money, he wouldn't do it. And Mark got really, really upset, probably because he had all these financial obli- obligations that he was not going to be able to meet, and he started sending all kinds of, just bombarding Josh with messages about, "I can't believe you would do this to me. I thought we were friends. I would have expected this from other people, but not from you." And even getting to the point where it was kind of borderline threatening Josh that he really needed to pay him according to what they had a- what they had understood. But Josh really hadn't had that understanding. He felt like his, he was in the right, and so he s- he didn't pay him, and Mark was, was really upset. But of course, the result of Mark lashing out at him and saying all kinds of nasty things to Josh and borderline threatening him was that Josh decided he didn't, he didn't want to go back to working with Mark after this month would be over. He just decided that that's it. I'm not gonna work with Mark anymore.
So I use this story as an example of not emotional independence, where Mark seemed sort of controlled by his situation. Mark probably would have said that Josh and the situation made him mad. He would have used language that expressed being controlled by the situation. And this is really common. We, we have a tendency to f- to say things like, " This situation or this person made me happy," or, " This situation or this person made me upset." We tend to think that our emotions are often determined by things outside of us that happen to us. So this is what happens when we're not emotionally independent, when we're not differentiated. We can't tell the difference between what's happening outside of us and what's happening inside of us, because what happens outside of us seems to control what happens inside of us. And then we end up being kind of like a leaf blown in the wind. We're just controlled by forces that are more powerful than us, these outside forces that have these invisible strings attached to us, kind of like puppets, and we're always being controlled by things outside of us.
Kind of along that same line of thinking, we often seem to think that we only have two choices in regards to these emotions that we feel, that we're made to feel by our outside situations. And our two choices are either to suppress the emotion, meaning you keep feeling it but you hide it from other people, or you just let it out and act on it. And there's a book called The Body Keeps Score: The Hidden Cost of Stress by Gabor Maté, who's a physician, an MD, and he talks about the terrible health consequences of suppressing your emotions, and he just gives example after example of his own clinical practice of different, terrible health consequences coming from people suppressing their emotions and the stress that this causes. So there's plenty of evidence that suppressing your emotions is not healthy for you, it's not a good way to go. But also in the story I just told, letting it all out and acting on it was also not healthy for Mark in the long term because what are, what are the consequences of alienating his client? Well, his client's not gonna come back to him. His client's probably gonna tell other people that he knows to not ever go to Mark to train with Mark because he's so volatile. So it can end up hurting him in the long term financially and not being adaptive for him either, not being healthy for him that way either.
The cool thing about recent emotion science research is that it shows that there is more than just those two choices of suppressing or acting on your emotions. There is an option to be able to differentiate or separate yourself from what is happening outside of you and be able to not suppress, not let it all out, but to the third option, to regulate your emotions. So the difference between regulation and suppression, suppression, as we said, is when you keep feeling this emotion that you're, that you're feeling, but you're just hiding it or masking it from other people. Regulation, on the other hand, though, is getting at the root of the emotion. It's looking at where the emotion is coming from, and it's addressing its cause, and it's changing the root of that emotional response, and it also points the brain toward generating a more helpful emotion. So it's not only rooting out the feeling that is not adaptive, the emotion that is not adaptive, and getting that out of your experience, but it's actually helping you get into a different emotion that is adaptive. So you're not suppressing, you're not acting while feeling this emotion and just trying to keep it down. You're actually changing the emotion that you're feeling and then acting differently as a result.
So this is what is involved in differentiation. This is being able to not have other people outside of me and other situations outside of me do my, all my emotional work for me, but to actually be able to do that emotional work myself so that I'm not depending on external forces to regulate my emotions, but I can self-regulate. I wanna emphasize three different things that are really essential if you wanna be able to regulate your emotions when you catch yourself in that situation where you feel like your only choices are suppress or express or act on your emotion, to be able to make progress toward that third option, which is to regulate your emotion, to actually generate a different emotion, So that you feel differently in this situation. And there are three things that really have to happen in order for you to be able to regulate your emotion.
And the first thing that has to happen is to be able to identify the emotion generation process that is happening in your brain. So in Mark's case, all of this happened with Josh so quickly, and Mark acted without thinking really. He just felt like Josh made him mad. And often in the situations that we encounter, this is how quickly things happen. We can generate emotions consciously, but more often than not, our emotions are generated unconsciously because our brains go through the emotion generation process so quickly, so automatically, almost instantaneously, that we don't even know that it has happened. But if we wanna get to where we can regulate our emotions instead of just suppressing them or acting on them, then we first need to be able to identify the fact that our brains have generated an emotion and to be conscious of how that happens.
So we've talked about this several times before. We've talked from the beginning of this podcast about how your emotions are really organized by your perspective or the way that your brain sees your situation, the story that it tells, the glasses that you see your situation through. And we've talked about how in every appraisal, your brain is asking and answering three basic questions. It's basically, basically asking how good or bad is this particular thing that just happened in relation to my goals? Whose fault is this particular thing? And how is it gonna develop in the future in relation to my goals? So in Mark's case, as we said, it, it happened all so quickly that Mark didn't even realize that his brain had done this. But if he had been able to stop and look and ask himself, "How is it my brain has answered these questions?" He might have been able to figure that out. So in his case, obviously, his brain asked how good or bad is this and answered, "This is really bad in relation to my goals because I have these financial obligations, and I'm not gonna be able to meet them this month because of Josh failing to pay me this month." so clearly in answer to the question, how good or bad is this? It's bad. Whose fault is it? It's Josh's fault. And how is it gonna develop? I'm not gonna be able to meet my financial obligations, and that's gonna be really bad. So probably if he had analyzed it, he would be able to see that his brain had answered these questions in this way. And the reason why it's important to identify this emotion generation process happening in your brain is so that you can stop thinking this person made me mad or this situation made me mad. Instead, you can, you can start to say, " Oh, I'm feeling mad in this situation because of my goals, because I feel like this situation conflicts with my goals, because I feel like it's somebody else that has prevented me from re- reaching my goals, because I feel like the way that things are gonna develop in the future, it's going to continue to be really bad in relation to my goals. I feel this way because of the way that my brain is seeing how this situation is going to im- impact my goals." that's a very different way to tell the story of what just happened to you. Rather than saying, "This person made me mad," you are recognizing that your brain had a role in seeing your goals interacting with the situation and predicting how it's gonna happen and how it's gonna affect your wellbeing. And so then it comes back to that prediction, that assessment, that appraisal that your brain made of this particular situation.
So once you're able to identify that your appraisal is what created your emotion and not the outside situation, then the second thing that is necessary in order to be able to regulate your emotion and create a new emotion is to find a different meaning to attach to your situation. So you have already discovered that the appraisal that your brain made is what is generating your emotion. If you attach a different meaning to these questions, then you're gonna have a different appraisal, and you will have a different emotion. You are going to have a regulated emotion. But there's a million different ways to change the meaning of a situation, to change the meaning of the way that your brain is seeing a situation. How in the world are you gonna know which meaning to choose, which way to go? There's so many different r- roads to take.
So that's where we come to step three, and this is really what clarifies to help you to know how to go forward. And that's to ask yourself, " What is most important to me long term?" We've talked about this over and over again about in many different ways, about determining your values, about interming-- determining your purpose and your meaning in your life, and how this ability to look long term really helps you to see what your most enduring concerns are. So you're not just acting in a way that's gonna benefit you this week, but also that's gonna benefit you in five years, in ten years. So Mark, for example, he was, in this moment, he was acting in a way that he felt would benefit him probably in the next couple weeks. He thought by blustering and being aggressive toward Josh that he could intimidate him into paying the money, and then that would help him to be able to meet his financial obligations in two weeks. But it damaged his ability to meet his financial obligations in the long term because Josh isn't gonna come back to work with him anymore, and Josh is gonna n- not gonna recommend friends to come and work with him, and Josh is probably even gonna tell friends to avoid him altogether. But if Mark had been able to sit down and say to himself, "Okay, let me think about myself in 30 years happy. What does that look like?" He might have said, "Well, in 30 years I probably want to have a situation where I feel really financially secure and stable. I've had financial success. I don't have to worry about my finances anymore. And he also probably would have said, "And I, I also will wanna have a, a great social support network around me, good friends." so if he had been able to picture his future self, what would benefit his future self most in that moment, then he would've been able to see, well, it's actually more important to me to treat my client well right now, even if it means having a bad month, so that I can, in the future, have a stable financial situation. It would have changed the way that he would have answered those questions, that his brain would have answered those questions in the beginning. For example, how good or bad is this? He was answering that it was terrible, that it was awful, that it meant absolute disaster. But if he had first been able to ask himself, "What's most important to me in the long term?" it would have changed that first answer a little bit because it wouldn't have seemed all bad. This situation is partly bad, but it's maybe also kind of good because it's a learning experience for me. It's a chance for me to see how to manage my finances better. Maybe I need to learn to make contracts with my clients so that my expectations are really clear and explicit, and they know what they are. Maybe I need to know how to live within my budget, to set a budget, and to be able to live within my expenses so that I don't end up in these terrible situations. Maybe this is also good because it's a chance to invest in a long-term client. Maybe if I treat this client now, then he will come back to me after this month of when things are tight. And a long-term relationship, maybe this friendship can continue and, you know, I wanna have good friendships long term. And so it would, it would have changed the way that his brain was answering that first question and how it, your, his brain was predicting how things would, could develop in the future. But it would also tweak the way that his brain saw whose fault it was. He would start to see that maybe it was partly his fault for not being explicit about his expectations or for not managing his finances well.
In any case, this is one of the best questions for being able to change the meaning that you're giving to a certain situation, is to be able to ask yourself what is going to be most important to me long term? Because when we have our l- enduring concerns in view, then we, uh have a chance to be able to act in a way that is most adaptive for those enduring concerns, so that we're not just acting in a way that's adaptive for next week, but it's actually adaptive for the next five years or 10 years or 20 years. So we've talked about lots of different ways to be, be able to identify what is most valuable to you, what your values are, what your purpose is, and I'll link all of those episodes in the show notes. So that you can review all the different types of questions you can ask yourself to identify your most enduring concerns. But one of my favorite go-to questions is basically just to ask myself, "Okay, I picture myself in 20 years looking back on this. How will I wish that I had behaved right now?" somehow when I ask myself this question, it just starts to ... I start to be able to discard and throw a- throw out all of the things that are not very important to me in this moment anymore. Because I can see what it is that's gonna matter to me long term.
So this is, these are just some steps to help you when you are stuck in that bifurcation where you feel like you've only got two choices. Either I can suppress my emotions or I can act on them. Just remember, you have a third option, and that is to regulate your emotions, to actually generate an, an emotion that is going to be more adaptive for you right now. The things that have to happen for you to be able to do that are to be able to, first of all, recognize that your brain is generating this emotion by asking and answering certain questions to identify that subconscious process going on in your pr- in your brain so that it's not subconscious anymore, so that it becomes conscious, 'cause then you can work with it. Step two is that you're gonna need to assign a different meaning to the way that your brain is answering the questions that determine your appraisal. But how are you gonna know what meaning to assign to it? Well, by asking yourself, " What's most important to me long term?" So differentiation is liberating. It's not easy. It means that you are, you're gonna have to do your own emotional work rather than having outside people and situations do your emotional work for you. But the good thing is that you're not determined by outside forces anymore because you're conscious of the power that you have to change your own emotions in this situation. It allows you to be autonomous, to not be controlled, to not be blown around like a leaf in the wind or like a puppet's, a puppet on a string. And an autonomous person has the freedom to be able to choose what is gonna be most beneficial for you in the long term. So yeah, you don't wanna suppress your emotions. That's gonna create a type of stress which can be really unhealthy for you, really bad for you, can create all kinds of different diseases even. And yeah, you also don't wanna act out your emotions and become your emotions in a lot of cases because it can lead to you destroying relationships and harming your own good, working against your own good. It can end up being very unadaptive. But you have more options than just these two. You can actually regulate your emotions. It's not easy. It takes work. It means understanding your emotion generation process, and just because you wanna change your appraisal doesn't always mean that it happens just by snapping your fingers. But you can do it if you work through these different steps that we've talked about. And the cool thing is that with certain choices, you can actually influence the emotion that you're feeling that is , at the root cause of all of your motivation and behavior and feeling. You can actually influence the way that you feel, not just the way that you act. But it entails understanding how your emotions are generated and what is most important to you long term, and finding a different meaning for the situation that you're in right now.
So we've talked about all of these things before, but thanks for going through it with me today in this new way. Thanks for joining me today, and we'll see you again next week