6 Egostates and 4 Kinds of Emotions
The Thoughtmap of Egostates is related to the Thoughtmap of Emotions.
(An emotion is entirely different from a feeling. It can change your life to learn the difference between emotions and feelings...)
Either you understand that:
"Feelings are for handling things. Emotions are for healing things."
or you are thrown around in your daily interactions through emotional reactivity.
There are 4 kinds of emotions: Parent Emotions, Child Emotions, Gremlin Emotions, and Demon Emotions.
Each emotional source requires a different healing process.
When you notice that you are experiencing an emotion... and you know about Egostates...
you can easily detect which Egostate the emotion comes from...
and this tells you which healing procedure makes best use of your emotion.
There are 6 Egostates: Parent, Child, Adult, Gremlin, Demon, Archetypal.
The Archetypal Egostate is only accessible through the Adult Egostate.
This is why so much of Possibility Management is designed to support you being in the Adult Egostate.
Parent Egostate in action...
Experiments For Parent Egostate
There is only one conversation to have with Voices: Bang!
EGOSTATE.01: Use your Voice Blaster!
'They' probably never told you about your Voice Blaster.
Each of us is born with a Voice Blaster on our hip. Reach down; pull your Voice Blaster out of its holster and hold it in your hand. It looks like your hand pretending to be a pistol, but it is actually your own personal Voice Blaster.
Your Voice Blaster has always been there, ready for you to use. If you have never before used your Voice Blaster it is probably because it never occurred to you before. Expanding what is possible to occur to you is the business of this book. What you get here is the possibility that for the rest of your life it could occur to you to use your Voice Blaster.
The Blaster holds an infinite number of charges so you never run out of ammunition, and a blast from the Voice Blaster never misses its target. Here are your Voice Blaster Operating Instructions: Shoot quickly in the direction of the voice and the “hunter seeker” function of the blast always finds its target. (“Hunter seeker” comes from Frank Herbert’s incredible book Dune, and in A. E. Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher, guns that protect the bearers by jumping into their hands and shooting whenever there was danger.)
Please take note that voices that seem to be 'in your head' are actually NOT in your head. Voices flutter around your head 'out there' like a vampire bat flutters about its victim before it strikes for blood. The instant you sense a voice coming, whip out your Voice Blaster and “Bang!” Say it out loud. “Bang!” as you blast that voice right out of the sky. End of conversation. No reasons needed.
The voice either falls dead “Blop!” on the floor in front of you, or it flutters raggedly off, trying to come around for a second attack.
Any voice that returns “Bang!” . . . dead again!
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
Blast away, however many times it takes.
EGOSTATE.02: Authenticate Inauthentic Emotions
To do at your Possibility Team!
In order to survive, you may have adopted inauthentic feelings, either from a parental authority figure or from a political, financial, cultural or religious belief system. Feelings from others are one of the two kinds of emotions, not feelings. By taking on the feelings of a source of authority you take on its authority, but that authority is inauthentic. Authenticity starts when you take responsibility for abandoning your inauthenticity. This is a five- to fifty-minute partner-process that will help you to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic feelings.
- Monitor your feelings in your conversations. Authenticating a feeling means to test if a feeling is your feeling or not. The test is to apply this question: “What is the purpose of this feeling?” Use part of your attention to stay in the feeling and another part of your attention to find the purpose of the feeling. Ask yourself: “Where is this going? What is its intention?” If the purpose is anything other than being in relationship through vulnerably sharing myself, it is probably not your feeling, but a foreign feeling with a purpose like:
- Surviving by reenacting abusive behavior (physical / psychological / emotional / or sexual abuse).
- Surviving through identifying with someone else’s authority (father, mother, boss, teacher, movie/rock star, political leader).
- Surviving through identifying with institutional authority (police, religious believer, political party, brand name, professional title).
- Proving that you were abused so as to validate being a victim, thereby justifying taking revenge.
- Proving that you are right and the other person is wrong, thereby validating the superiority of your beliefs, and so on
2. In the instant you detect that your feeling is not about responsibly sharing yourself, STOP the conversation, mid-thought, mid-sentence, mid-gesture.3. Say, “Excuse me. I just noticed that what I am feeling is not authentic. It is an emotion, not a feeling. It does not actually come from me. I adopted it from someone else." (Name the person). Or, “I adopted it from an institution." (Name the institution). "The purpose of this emotion is . . . " (Name its purpose, perhaps one of the purposes listed above).
4. Shift and start an entirely new conversation, an adult responsible conversation. The way out of inauthenticity is to be authentic about your inauthenticity. For example, even if the source and purpose of your emotions is not immediately clear to you, be as clear as you can be and then admit what is not clear. Say, “I feel angry about the ecologists because this is my political party’s dogma. But I don’t know why I need to follow their dogma. I don’t know what I actually feel about environmental issues. Probably scared.”
5. This is not psychotherapy. This is becoming authentic at a new level. You do not have to process everything. Simply say, “This is not my authentic purpose. My real purpose is to let myself be known in this relationship.”
6. Then create a new future for yourself by taking on a new practice. Say, “I promise not to empower that emotional rage again.” The promise means new behavior for you. Practice your new behavior with fierce diligence.
Experiments For Child Egostate
Getting back into the present.
EGOSTATE.03: Prove to yourself that you have no power to change the past.
Make it so that you did not just read this sentence. Can you do that?
No.
Why not?
Because reading the sentence already occurred in the past. Even though you read the sentence only a few seconds ago, you cannot alter the fact that you already read it. You have no power in the past. The only place you have the power to do anything is NOW.
How much time and energy have you spent trying to make things different in your past? Trying to re-have a conversation in a better way? Wishing that you had made a different decision? Trying to find a solution to a problem that you had a long time ago?
It is silly, actually, that you try to change the past. But you do.
The illusion of reclaiming the 'free and natural child'
EGOSTATE.04: Become a Gremlin Hunter
The 'free natural child' has a 'great time' making messes without a care in the world, but that 'great time' is an illusion because the responsible Adult is the one who must clean up the mess.
The concept of 'reclaiming the free natural child ego' state has been frequently misunderstood. The concept has been somehow distorted to imply that the only real freedom of expression and joy in life comes through the free natural Child Egostate.
The desperate delusion says that to finally experience freedom and fun you need to drag that little guy or girl out of being abandoned in the basement of memory and then to place them into the driver’s seat of your present life. Then you can go play with the other 'kids' and eat ice cream.
The embarrassing aspect of this distortion is that your life as an Adult is an Adult life, not a child’s life. The child neither knows how, nor wants to take responsibility for, your Adult life.
Shirking responsibility and trying to live your adult life through the Child Egostate is a choice that can be costly in terms of life decisions. For example, what Man wants to have sex with a little girl? What Woman is attracted and turned on when in bed with a little boy? Don’t let years go by while you try to figure this out.
Gremlin Egostate
When your Gremlin Egostate slides in and takes over, your purpose diminishes to mere Survival, at whatever the cost, even if Survival includes making things familiar, such as beating the shit out of yourself, hating yourself, being self-critical to the point of suffocation, making yourself small, or the opposite, making yourself superior and better than anyone else even if this means loneliness and isolation, making yourself vomit to be skinny enough or to be in enough control.
There is a lot we are learning about Gremlin recently. It is more than can fit in this Egostate website.
Please continue your Gremlin Egostate discovery journey on these websites:
Experiments For Adult Egostate
Getting back into the present.
EGOSTATE.05: Anchor yourself in a small NOW.
Anchoring yourself into the short-now moment of the Adult Egostate creates a startlingly clear perspective. All of a sudden a lot of extraneous psycho-emotional baggage from the Child Egostate drifts effortlessly away from you. It is possible to graciously let this baggage go. All of those memories and conclusions are only one of your possible identities: your child identity.
When you affirm that you are no longer a child, you let your child identity go back to where it belongs – in the past – in the Child Egostate - and you step into your Adult Egostate. Sentimental nostalgia interferes with the enjoyable lightness of being that characterizes the Adult Egostate. There is a difference between reflecting on memories from time to time, and indulging in memories to try to relive them.
Memories are memories. You can experience memories in the present, but what happened in your memories is in the past. Whatever happened then, good or bad, cannot happen now. Only what is happening now can happen now, and we can only change what is happening now NOW.
Movies & Books
MOVIE107.00 Avatar by James Cameron. To watch (again!) from a perspective that Western Modern Culture is centered on the Child Egostate, and the Navi' culture is centered on the initiated Adult Egostate. Especially the scene when Neytiri meets Jake Sully for the first time and begins taking him through his initiatory processes.
Thoughtmap Of Enmeshed Egostates
The Thoughtmap of Egostates is also the Thoughtmap of Emotions.
(An emotion is entirely different from a feeling. It changes your life to learn the difference between emotions and feelings...)
"Feelings are for handling things. Emotions are for healing things."
When you have an emotion...
you can easily detect which Egostate the emotion comes from...
and this tells you which healing procedure makes best use of your emotion.
Each emotional source requires a different healing process.
Enmeshed Egostates Are Contaminated
We discovered that as a Survival strategy, often very young as a child, many of us contaminate our Adult Egostate with one or more of the other four Egostates.
Decontaminating the Egostates is a very clear procedure.
Enmeshment of Your Adult Egostate.
'Enmeshment' is a contamination of your Adult Egostate by one of the other four Egostates: Child, Parent, Gremlin, or Demon.
We have not yet encountered the enmeshment with the Demon Egostate. Please let us know if you do.
EGOSTATE.06: Decontaminate Your Egostates.
We have developed a straightforward procedure to decontaminate your Adult Egostate from being enmeshed with other Egostates. Even if this procedure is straightforward, it is not easy. The process demands your relentless unceasing attention and disciplined efforts for one to three years. This process can give you a decontaminated Adult Egostate through which you can interact with the Universe with a far greater freedom of movement and more energy. Decontamination feels like floating in a helium balloon and throwing out sand bags.
We live in an Adult Universe. The Universe is waiting for you to clean up and inhabit your Free and Natural Adult Egostate so that you can come out and collaboratively play.
According to reports from people we know who have made the efforts to decontaminate their Adult Egostate (including ourselves...), the results are well worth the Liquid States, the loneliness, the groundlessness, and the struggles which may arise while doing it.
The de-enmeshment procedure begins with ongoing Self Observation. To observe yourself you split off a piece of your attention, say, 10% of your attention, hold this part of your attention outside of your Box, turn this part of your attention around to face your Being which is inside of your Box, and dispassionately and with complete nonjudgmental neutrality, notice what is going on and what you are up to in every dimension. Notice your reactions, your strategies, your inner conversations, your purposes, your behaviors in each of your 5 Bodies.
Just notice. Make absolutely no stories. See precisely what is going on in the full horror of the situation.
If you make no stories about what you observe about yourself Self Observation will not be overwhelming. What you observe is just exactly what is, your 'X on the map'. Since this scenario is where you actually are and what you are actually up to, this is where you have the leverage to make new experiments.
If during Self Observation you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, depressed, ashamed, guilty, embarrassed, or self-critical, you are adding stories to your observations. If you interpret what something means or add comparisons or criticism, this is NOT Self Observation. Instead you are feeding your Gremlin.
As you observe yourself, you will start detecting, for example, Child Egostate behaviors taking place in your small HERE, small NOW Adult Egostate. You will simultaneously notice that the Child Egostate behaviors do not belong there. This is excellent. It is not good or bad. It is how it goes.
The decontamination procedure goes like this: One behavior at a time, move the behavior back into its appropriate Egostate.
For example, if you feel small and have the urge to complain to, or blame, some 'external authority figure' for 'hurting' you, or 'ignoring' you, or 'rejecting' you, this is Child Egostate behavior. Simply move this one selected behavior out of your Adult Egostate back into the Child Egostate where it belongs and where it fits perfectly. The behavior is simply out of place. Move the behavior back to where it naturally belongs. Bring it home.
Keep putting that one behavior back in its right place over and over, for weeks... for however long it takes... until it stays there by itself.
Keep part of your attention and energy alert to the tiniest hint of feeling powerless and wanting to complain or blame as a child would, and in that instant move it over to the Child Egostate and hold it there until it relaxes.
Repeat this procedure with radically-responsible unceasing vigilance until the behavior stays in the Child Egostate all by itself. Keep breathing.
Wait for a day or so. If you can keep this first behavior where it belongs in the Child Egostate, then go back to your Adult Egostate and identify and isolate your next Child Egostate behavior that is contaminating your Adult Egostate, such as perhaps, having a cute 'good girl' or 'good boy' smile on your face even during completely inappropriate moments, such as when you feel angry or scared, or, for example, being too shy or afraid to speak out and say "Stop!" or "No!" even if what is happening to you is not okay with you. Grab this next Child Egostate behavior with your Adult attention, then, with your Adult intention, move this next behavior back over into your Child Egostate where it belongs.
Keep repeating this simple and exact procedure with each tiny contaminating Child Egostate behavior until your Adult Egostate - with your own Voice, your own Authority, your own Presence, your own Feelings - remains free and clear of enmeshment from your Child Egostate.
The same procedure works to Decontaminate your Adult Egostate from:
Gremlin Egostate behaviors, such as: making evil little comments or jokes about people, trying to make people look bad so you look good, lying, cheating, stealing, invading the energetic space of women or men and slurping up their sexual energy, leaving messes for others to clean up, being late to appointments, speeding, trying to be right or make someone wrong, feeling resentment, holding expectations, etc. etc. etc.
Or to Decontaminate your Adult Egostate from:
Parent Egostate behaviors, such as: demanding obedience, criticizing, making comparisons, making threats, trying to control others, dominate, or manipulate, using false authority, using reasons as if they were real, bestowing praise as a 'reward' when someone does what you want, hearing voices in your head such as: "You are not good enough," "You are stupid," "You will never make it," "You are the best," "You are more beautiful, smarter and faster than the others," etc. (ad nauseum) and believing these voices instead of instantly shooting them with your Voice Blaster.
We wish you all the best in your practice of decontaminating your enmeshed Adult Egostate. There is a big exciting world out here, waiting for you to come co-create a new future.
