Hello, I guess this going to be more of a philosophical question arising from mbti and psychology. You said in post/633444575891079169/hello-i-hope-youre-well-id-like-some-advice-on, that our beliefs come from having particular emotions. Your Emotional Health post, under emotional responsibility, you said that our emotions come from having certain beliefs. There is a chicken and egg problem here, so which came first? Or maybe neither, like the cycle of thought, feeling and actions like in CBT?
1) Human psychology is complex and CBT tries to capture this by talking about how thought, feeling, and action are interrelated and constantly influencing each other. The mind rarely works in the form of single cause to single effect - this oversimplification is one source of your confusion.
I didn't say beliefs come from emotion; I said that people come to their beliefs through emotion. I'm not describing a straightforward cause-effect mechanism. Emotions are an indication of salience. As a general rule, strong/intense negative emotions are designed to be uncomfortable so that they prompt some sort of ameliorative response/action.
To ameliorate negative emotions, people with low emotional intelligence oftentimes create a narrative in an attempt to explain their cause or origin (rationalization). This is not an effective strategy. Why? One reason is the unfortunate side-effect of creating a false narrative that enables the formation of faulty beliefs (about the world). Let's say, early in life, someone you trusted hurt you quite badly. The situation would've triggered intense negative emotions like sadness or anger. Some examples of ameliorative narratives:
You might've crafted a story about how bad that person is. This would make people's misbehavior more emotionally salient to you. Gradually, with every slight and insult you witnessed in life, you'd start to form stronger and stronger beliefs about how terrible people are and/or how cold the world is. How would this affect the development of your personality? You'd likely develop anxiety issues and become very closed, avoidant, detached, or defensive.
You might've crafted a story about your status as a victim. This would make people's judgments of you more emotionally salient. Gradually, with every slight and insult you experienced in life, you'd start to form stronger and stronger beliefs about there being something fundamentally wrong with you and how you might actually deserve to be victimized. How would this affect the development of your personality? You'd likely become passive, helpless, and eventually expect/accept mistreatment.
The negative emotions you experienced didn't "cause" you to formulate specific beliefs or dictate what your beliefs should be, rather, they only served to create conducive conditions for your beliefs to arise. Notice how it's possible for two different people to respond very differently to the same negative situation and subsequently develop very different belief systems.
2) The other source of your confusion comes from having an oversimplified idea of what beliefs are. To be fair, in everyday speech, "belief" is used in an incredibly rough and broad way to encompass many different kinds of mental phenomena, so it's easy to get confused. Since I'm speaking mainly to laypeople, I avoid technical jargon whenever possible, but this sacrifices precision.
In the EI article, the word "belief" is not being used in the same way as in the above examples. Rather, I'm referring to a person's proneness to believe certain things due to their personality type (see the examples I gave in the article). For instance, being Ne dom primes one to believe that the world is full of wonder and possibility, or being Ni dom primes one to believe that the future is now. Why would two people respond differently to the same negative situation and come to different beliefs in the end? One important factor is having different personality traits that prime them to perceive and judge the world differently. Because of personality differences, people don't exactly begin at the same place, so it should come as no surprise when they end up with different belief systems.
Belief systems are quite complicated. There are various kinds of beliefs, various paths through which beliefs arise, and various ways in which beliefs influence emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. Being prone to certain beliefs because of your personality type isn't the same as the beliefs you formulate through accumulation of personal experience. If you want to get technical, you may call the former a "predisposition" and the latter a "schema". In type theory, while your personality type doesn't change, your predispositional beliefs can eventually change as you interact with the environment and formulate certain schemas in response to your experiences.
Everyone knows that what we experience and learn affects us; it forms our associations, knowledge, and bias. What you think of when you see something is based on where you’ve seen it before, the same can be said for ideologies and situations. This should come as no surprise to anyone...
Adoptee Jaxon Willard:World of Dance.. An Adoptees Perspective
I don't know if you are watching World of Dance but I just saw an adoptee confessed his love and grief and share his adoption story on national television through a beautiful contemporary dance. When he shared his story I began to cry because of his emotional expression of the love that he has for his mother that raised him and the forgiveness that he has for his birth mother. He says that he doesn't know the full story... but he can't hold anger in his heart towards his birth mother. Jaxon Willard is very brave to openly express his thoughts on his adoption story in front of millions of people. I called my birth mother yesterday and was relieved when she answered the phone. I thought she forgot about my birthday but ask me about it. She apologized to me for how things went when I was a bady down and I forgave her in my heart and I told her seriously that I forgave her which now opens up room for genuine authentic healing.
"I took pride in finding Chloe more beautiful than a Platonist would have done. The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm and crookedness. There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula. The more tempting kind of beauty had only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination. My imagination enjoyed playing in the space between Chloe's teeth. Her beauty was fractured enough that it could support creative rearrangements. In its ambiguity, her face could have been compared to Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit [see picture], where both a duck and a rabbit seem contained in the same image. Much depends on the attitude of the viewer: if the imagination is looking for a duck, it will find one, if it is looking for a rabbit, it will appear instead. What counts is the predisposition of the viewer. It was of course love that was generously predisposing me. The editor of Vogue might have had difficulty including photos of Chloe in an issue, but this was only a confirmation of the uniqueness that I had managed to find in my girlfriend. I had animated her face with her soul." Alain De Botton, Essays in Love
This may be the hardest letter I have written. To say that I have deep valleys of rage in my heart feels like an understatement. You many not know or even understand what that feels like but I can assure you it is one of the worst feelings I have felt in my twenty five years of life.
I am heartbroken to tell you about the ways mental health issues has ruined my relationship with you and now my two older sisters. Tee and Quan are so different now. I can’t even get a cohesive conversation out of them. I don't know what the hell happened to Tee while she sat in the hospital over and over and over again...and what happen to Quan when she tried to take her own life. I know this sounds selfish but dammit I get to be selfish at this moment in time. For eight years, I worked really hard to form the relationship I wanted to have with my sisters. I thought maybe they would treat me better than the siblings I was raised with and they did. I wanted to be around my older sisters every waking second I could. But that all changed at the end of March. All of it came to a spiraling screeching halt.
I was drowning in what is now irreversible grief and sadness. Before this all happened P, I could talk to my sisters about anything. I didn't have to hold back anything at all. Now, Tee barely responds to what I say and Quan is wrapped up in this new guy and can give me any type of conversation outside of that. \
It’s really hard not to get angry at them. I know it is not them. I know it something that they are dealing with. It is a part of them. Sometimes I feel like they think I don't understand what they are dealing with but that is far from the truth. I want to talk to both of them about what they went through and what is going on with them but I feel like it is going to be triggering.
Honestly I just don't want to deal with it anymore. I am tired and I if I am not careful I can end up the same way as my sisters...sad but the truth. I refuse to be next.
I wish this letter could have been positive but I am not feeling very upbeat and positive. I haven’t over the last few months. I have been feeling stuck, down and more so trying to separate from all of this. There is massive grieving going on and of letting go I have to do but I am doing it.
'Predisposition' (2012) by Team Evanesco (Hack)
An entry to the @SHContest that year.
https://archive.org/download/sonichackingcontest20121/%5BSHC2012%5D%20%5Bcompo2012%5D%2031%20-%20Predisposition%20-%20By%20Team%20Evanesco/
