They normally say; you are more than your emotions, don’t allow your feelings and emotions to dictate your day or determine how you feel. But this is easier said than done. Acting more than how your feelings command you to, takes courage. In fact, it calls for so much wisdom to act a certain way (the right way) when your feelings say otherwise. “We become so entangled with our thoughts that we get disconnected from our environment and the present (here and now) experience. Similarly, our thoughts also have a big impact on our behaviour and capacity to be effective,” says Dr Gabriela Sadurní Rodríguez, a psychologist. Our minds tell us different stories because that’s what minds do. For example, if a person has the thought “I’m useless,” and is completely fused with it (i.e., giving it their full attention, believing it, getting caught up in it), then they might feel sad or bad about themselves and avoid doing things that are important and/or meaningful to them, she notes. Benny Ineza shares how often she finds herself battling with thoughts that convince her how she isn’t good enough; that she isn’t smart or good-looking enough. This, she says, gives her mood swings every now and then, yet much as she tries to ignore them, she finds herself believing what her mind tells her. “It is discouraging yet it feels so real. Since it’s a person’s mind forming these beliefs, it is so natural to believe them,” she says. When growing up, as children we absorb behaviours and patterns of our parents or the people and society we grow up with, Enock Muvunyi shares. Our beliefs, opinions of us and others, are not always our own per se, he says. But these have capacity to influence our thoughts and patterns in life, consequently determining our choices and how our lives turn out. How does one defuse from that? When we are fused with our thoughts, we might believe them as an absolute truth, thus, thoughts dictate or rule our behaviour. Believing thoughts such as “I’m useless” is not helpful and it will not be conducive to living as we want, according to Rodríguez. Additionally, while fused with our thoughts or emotions, we have difficulty separating them from reality and our direct experience; which leads to labelling, evaluating, categorising, judging, comparing, etc. On the contrary, viewing thoughts for what they are (i.e., passing words, pictures, sensations), facilitates letting them go and being able to be present and focus on your broader experience. This is what the skill of defusion is essentially about. Defusion is defined as a skill or technique that is primarily used to detach, separate, or get some distance from our thoughts and emotions. In order to detach from such negative patterns, Rodríguez mentions looking at thoughts rather than from thoughts, noticing thoughts rather than becoming caught up in thoughts and letting thoughts come and go rather than holding on to them. A story on breaking up with harmful childhood patterns displays how humans are born absolutely helpless and dependent on their parents and caregivers for survival. In childhood, to know that we will be taken care of, we bond with them emotionally. In order to feel love and belonging we indiscriminately absorb their ways of feeling and behaving and make them our own. Out of our need for love, we emotionally bonded with them in whatever experiences they offered up, the story shows. No matter how much our parents may have loved us, they were by no means perfect; they had their own patterned ways of being that they learned in childhood. And, unfortunately, we bonded with them in their counter-productive negativity as well as what was life-affirming. These negative ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving are what we call “patterns.” Patterns are always inauthentic and result in unwanted consequences. They include beliefs, perceptions, judgments, needs and desires about: How to get love and approval, what life is about, how to relate to others, what is spirituality, the role of work and family. Apparently, we often find later in life that these parental patterns end up working against us as adults. “We are looking for our patterns that cause suffering and negative consequences to ourselves and others, and that have been there throughout our lives. The goal is not to get rid of all our patterns, but to diminish their power over us and to increase our choice and will to act.”
