I'm Dr Orion terban and this is psycha Better Living Through psychology and the topic of today's short talk is understanding emotional Detachment so I thought this episode might be necessary after conducting a recent consultation with a well-spoken young man who watched my episode How to Love Without emotional attachment and who came away with what I considered to be some misconceptions about my message however I reasoned that if this intelligent guy had these misconceptions then probably other people did as well and that maybe my message wasn't entirely clear so I thought I would make a follow-up
episode to critically examine emotional Detachment what it is and what it isn't emotional Detachment is an incredibly useful skill in fact it might be the most important emotional survival strategy of which I am aware and I approach the concept of emotional Detachment through a Buddhist lens namely through the realization that the universe is in a NeverEnding process of becoming everything in this world is ephemeral even now the present moment is changing is dying is transforming into something else which will itself change die and transform within this understanding everything that we have will eventually be taken
from us so why cling permanence is an illusion in the world Under the Sun your property your relationships your incarnate being you'll lose them all in the fullness of time so how will you respond when it comes time to let them go will you give back what you had with gratitude for the time that you were allowed to spend with it or will you cling to it with an attachment that is as tenacious as it is futile futile because no amount of tenacity will succeed in holding something a moment longer than you possibly can on
the other hand emotional detach attachment is a skill that facilitates surrender and surrender is something that we will eventually have to do with respect to everything that we have been given including our own lives it's a way of holding things gently and this is important because as I discussed in my episode hold people like sand the tighter you squeeze the more what you're holding tends to slip through your fingers now I need to be clear about something emotional Detachment does not mean that you have no emotions a complete absence of emotion in my opinion is
not something we should be striving for unfortunately many men do succeed in functionally divorcing themselves from their emotional experience however I believe that such men do so at Great cost to themselves this is because it generally requires some degree of self-violence in order to amputate a component of your lived experience of course most men cannot do this completely so they arrive at a place where the only emotion that they can consistently recognize is anger long periods of a kind of numb neutrality are punctuated periodically with intense episodes of anger and frustration and that is no
way to live life my friends for me personally emotions make my life richer more interesting more enjoyable more complex I like having emotions but I am also very emotionally detached emotional Detachment does not mean that you sort of dissociate from your emotional experience or that you alienate yourself from your feeling sensitivity we do not want to become unfeeling rocks this is an extreme solution that said we also do not want the Other Extreme solution which we might call emotional Fusion when a man is fused with his emotions there is no space between his felt experience
and his seat of being in Emotion Fusion the man is his emotional experience if he feels something he not only assumes that the emotion is Justified but that he must act on the emotion in some way this person has to say his peace or wears his heart on his sleeve or generally rides the honic roller coaster he's Overjoyed when things are going well and heartbroken and despondent when things don't go his way such men have no emotional Detachment and little self-control and and this is a terrible way of moving through the world for many reasons
in the first place your emotions are not always justified in as much as the model of reality from which your emotions arise may not be entirely aligned with that reality and acting on the basis of a flawed model is very likely to create pain and suffering and in the second place emotions change even when they are Justified emotions are like like the weather they're constantly shifting acting from a place of emotion often leaves you with consequences that far Outlast the emotion that originally produced the impulse to act and that's a very dangerous asymmetry like you
can make a decision in anger or fear or hopelessness once that will permanently change the rest of your life it's not fair but that's the way it is now before I go any further if you're liking what you're hearing please consider sending this episode to someone who might benefit from its message because it's Word of Mouth referrals like this that really help to make the channel grow you can also hit the thanks button and tip me in proportion to the value you feel you've derived from this message it's your support that makes all of this
possible I don't do corporate sponsorships or product placements so I really do rely on you guys to help me make all this happen and I really do appreciate their support thank you now what should we do instead it's a better idea to find some middle path between these two dangerous extremes and that middle path is emotional Detachment to begin with it helps to not treat your emotions like they're precious I discussed this in Greater detail in my episode emotions are impersonal people think emotions are personal because only they get to feel them however behind every
emotion is a thought and the thoughts that consistently create those emotions are impersonal if I were to think the same thoughts and believe them to be true then the same emotion would arise in me as well so we don't have to consider emotions to be these inherently valuable jewels that are more meaningful or significant than other aspects of our experience in my opinion it's better to hold our emotions gently and to consider them in light of multiple sources of information our reason our senses to decrease the likelihood that we're being misled in this way we
can consider emotions to be a source of information among many other sources of information and we can do this more easily by kind of observing our emotions at some remove like you can remain still and unmoving in the seat of your being while simultaneously watching your emotions circulate through your body that's what I mean by emotional Detachment it's like experiencing your emotions at arms length and this allows you to consider the information or even wisdom contained within them without allowing them to permeate your entire Consciousness if emotional Fusion is like drowning and emotional amputation is
like staying as far away from water as possible then emotional attachment is like swimming you're in the water but you're not of the water and this is useful because our emotions are actually really important sources of information for us we typically need our emotions in order to make good decisions here's something you might find interesting it's sometimes the case usually as a consequence of some tumor or growth that a person's lyic system the portion of the brain responsible for emotional processing in mammals must be surgically removed as might be expected these people don't experience emotions
after these procedures but perhaps more unexpected they also develop a terrible time making decisions like if you were to put one of these people in the cereal aisle of a grocery store they would spend hours debating what box of cereal to buy they'll think okay this box is $4.25 and has a net weight of 22 grams now this one's a bit less expensive but it's net weight is proportionally lower so the cost per gram is actually 2 cents higher that said it also has more niin per serving so the two cent per gram Savings in
the one case might be more than offset by the relative deficiency in nasin and so on and so on and so on do you see what I'm getting at in the absence of emotion there is only factual information and the human mind is actually not great at keeping a lot of factual information in its working memory at any one time this creates information overload which in turn leads to analysis Paralysis on the other hand a normal person just walks down the serial aisle and says ooo Lucky Charms and throws it in his cart and keeps
on moving people have to make like 10,000 decisions a day and most of these decisions don't really matter this is where emotions come in one of the primary functions of emotions is to serve as heuristics in decisionmaking allowing us to navigate the World by expending fewer cognitive resources people who don't have access to their emotions struggle to make decisions and that's because decision is an act of the will and has more to do with emotion than thought so that's emotional Detachment the ability to observe your emotional experience at some remove this will allow you to
access the information contained within your emotions without necessarily acting upon them you can feel the emotional impulse to act without relenting to it this requires some measure of self-discipline but like any other virtue you strengthen it by practicing it by not clinging to your own emotional experience you will increasingly learn to allow things to come and go which in turn will help you to be more present more grateful and ultimately more loving in your relationships hopefully that clears a few things up what do you think does this fit with your own experience let me know
in the comments below and if you've gotten this far you might as well like this episode And subscribe to this channel you may consider becoming a channel member with perks like the priority review of comments or booking a paid consultation as always thank you for listening
