Personal Mastery – Kinky Poly

Pre-order Available On Amazon!

Kinky Poly Danny — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 21:20:57 +0000

I just got my pre-order page on amazon for my book! I’m super excited!

If you didn’t already know, I’ve been writing a book on communication and releasing it as I write it on my other website. Here’s a link to those articles.

Here’s the book’s back cover text:

Asking for what we want or talking about what’s troubling us often turns into an emotionally charged disaster. Toxic behaviors surface as people attempt to “win” with yelling, shaming, cold wars, bully tactics, revenge, and abandonment. In the end, nothing is solved, no one feels understood, and everyone loses.

A Path to Happiness Using Healthy Communication

Is Now a Good Time To Talk? defines a clear, step-by-step, method for achieving happiness through mastering one’s own emotions and getting everyone’s needs met through healthy conversations. Author, Danny Burbol, shares a collection of tools that were discovered and refined over a decade of personal research and experience. This book is the culmination of $30,000 worth of lessons learned through communication workshops, emotional intelligence programs, books, and therapist visits.

The tools and methods for healthy communication are surprisingly simply and self-evident once they are clearly laid out in the step-by-step format of this book. Learn how to tame your emotions, discover self-sabotaging blind spots, and create safe spaces for healthy conversations, not arguments.

What if you knew how to simply ask for what you want and get it? How would your life change if you could walk into every emotionally charged situation with the skills and confidence to easily get everyone’s needs met, especially your own?

Again, here’s a link to my pre-order page on amazon for my book

and here’s a link to those articles.

Com101 – A Caricature of our Emotions

Kinky Poly Danny — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:32:38 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

This is an article in the Communication 101 series. Click here for the Table of Contents.

I’m going to be direct with you, this section is a mind hack. I’m going to show you how to take control of your emotions using an imagination trick. Our imagination is a powerful tool that can work for us or against us. As we will cover in this series, our imagination can turn a simple discomfort in to a reason to freak out, blame, and attack the people around us –especially the ones closest to us.

Take “worry” for example. Worry is our mind simply trying to protect us from possible future danger. However, worry can easily go too far as our imagination is used against ourselves to spiral out of control on things that may never happen. Worry is a form of mental practice. We practice over and over, how we will act when things go wrong in some imagined scenario? Worry can turn into a script that our subconscious will carry out later. We fall to the level of our training. If we use our imagination to practice getting on stage in front of others and messing up a thousand times, what do you expect will happen when we step on stage in real life? Our unconscious wakes up and says, “oh, I recognize this. I know what to do. We’ve been practicing this for months,” and we carry out what we’ve been practicing. The result? We mess up on stage. Then our “stage-fright”, something our imagination made up and practiced relentlessly, is suddenly very real.

In this section, we are going to explore a simple way to use the human imagination for our own benefit rather than letting it run the show with things like worry or anxiety. We are going to meet worry and anxiety head on in our imagination and transform it.

Personally, I am a skeptic. I don’t believe in superstition or magic. I believe in the scientific method and trying things for myself. Previously, I dismissed the use of the imagination as a big waste of time or a bunch of spiritual hippy nonsense. Having hung out with many hippies and spiritual folk in the Burning Man community, I still firmly believe that much of it is uneducated nonsense as people let a powerful tool, the human imagination, run wild without taking a moment to respect it.

As a skeptic, I believe horoscopes seem to come true because of the power of the human imagination combined with the simple concept “we find what we’re looking for” or “what we focus on multiplies.” The same goes for hexes, curses, or even blessings. An idea is injected into our imagination and our imagination cycles on it, practices it, start looking for it, and helps it become true. It’s just like worrying about stage fright only this time we’re worrying about our horoscope or the precise words of the hex someone claimed to have sent in our direction.

This little imagination trick that I’m going to share with you is a simple tool and may sounds silly. It’s still powerful. There is no magic and no woo-woo spiritual hippy stuff here. If you try it, I believe, the results will be self-evident. However, you might have to just get over yourself if you get stuck on how silly it is. In the past, I know I would have dismissed it, or even skipped a section like this as complete BS. Now I’m finding myself writing a little section intro to wake-up my younger self and anyone who may be in the same state of casual, dismissive resistance.

In short, the imagination is powerful, let’s use it. Don’t take my word for it, just try it out for yourself. Permission yourself to be silly if that that’s not your norm. Here we go.

When worry is running wild in my imagination, I give it a form and a name. I purposely create a silly caricature of the fear, anger, anxiety or whatever it is. Then I call it out by the caricature’s name.

I learned this trick from friends and then later saw it used in Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, “Whole Brain Living.” She describes the various parts of our brain as being four very distinct characters in our minds who have different jobs as they each try to help us navigate the world in specific ways.

One of the four characters in Dr. Taylor’s book is responsible for worry and our, often childish, emotional freak outs. She calls this persona, “character 2.” In my opinion, Dr. Taylor’s character 2 parallels the motives and priorities of the human ego very well. Dr. Taylor suggests visualizing the four characters in her book as whatever they tend to come up as in our individual imaginations. They will appear unique to each of us. We can also give those unique personas names to match. It’s a powerful way to understand what they are attempting to do for us and interact with them.

Before Dr. Taylor’s book, I’d previously had various friends talk about visualizing and naming one’s own ego or scared inner child as a means to understand and interact with it. My marriage counselor used to recommend this as well. Of course, back then, I thought it was BS and I only half tried it which gave me half-assed results.

Our ego is a wonderful thing that is always trying to protect us and alert us to danger, both real and imagined. This is a very important job. The problem is, 99% of the time, my ego is worried about completely made-up stuff, like getting into an argument with my boss at that job I don’t even work at anymore. However, that other 1% of the time, my ego alerts me to something real and helps me navigate a tense situation. That 1% of the time, the ego earns its place in my mind.

For me, the purposely silly character I see in my mind’s eye that personifies my ego, is Bert, from Sesame Street. It’s surprisingly powerful and delightful!

Recognizing my ego as a separate entity means I can detach a little and observe it, listen to it, talk to it, and direct it. This ability is quite powerful, especially when “it”, is Bert, a frigging Muppet. As soon as I realize, “I feel sad. It’s a 3 out of 10. I feel scared. 5 out of 10. I feel anxious. 5 out of 10.” I instantly see Bert in my mind’s eye being melodramatic and freaking out. Bert is crying crocodile tears. He’s running around beating a pot with a big wooden spoon trying to get everyone’s attention. He’s oh-so-scared and anxious! He’s making a big scene in his apartment with Ernie. It’s classic Bert behavior and I see it on stage being told in a classic Sesame Street or The Muppet Show style. There’s even a laugh track in my mind’s eye. It’s not serious at all and probably even funny.

For me, the best part about visualizing my fearful emotions as being embodied by Bert is that it is always instantly followed by Ernie’s calm, loving voice. “Hey, what’s the matter Bert? You look scared and anxious. That’s okay, Bert, we’ll figure it out together.”

It’s important to be gentle with ourselves, our ego, and our emotions. Our emotions are never “bad.” They are only trying to send us a message of “hey, pay attention to this.” They are trying to keep us safe. Some of us were taught to silence our emotions, yell at them, or even shame them. I know I was. What if we were kind to them instead? How would that work? What would that look like? I found, it looks a lot like Ernie when he’s being sincere and caring for his best friend.

Ernie would never tell Bert, “You’re stupid for feeling scared. You’re such a spaz, Bert. You’re always over reacting. You should just get over being anxious, and stop being so ridiculous.” Those words would be an invalidation of whatever Bert was going through. We wouldn’t want someone to say those things to us, would we? Hopefully we wouldn’t say them to someone we love. Yet, how often do we say these things to ourselves? When we talk to ourselves in this manner, that is toxic self-talk, also known as negative self-talk. If you do this to yourself, make a commitment to stop and start doing the opposite. If you do this to others, make a commitment to stop and start doing the opposite. Gently catch your negative words and redirect the negative feedback into a statement of acknowledgment and then gratitude. I’ll give an example of this in a moment.

Getting back to the little skit that’s playing out in my mind’s eye. Bert is freaking out. This tells me something’s up. I have one or more warning lights on my internal dashboard. When I say to myself, “where am I at?” I often see Bert overacting.

Ernie enters and says, “Hey, what’s the matter Bert? You look scared and anxious. That’s okay, Bert, we’ll figure it out together.” I follow Ernie’s lead and I chime in like a narrator. “Bert? Hey buddy, how’s it going? Are you all worked up again?” Then, every time, I see Bert stop dead in his tracks like he just realized what he was doing, he looks down at the pot and big spoon in his hands that he’s been sounding the alarm with. He realizes instantly that he might be overacting. He looks right at the camera and gives a big exaggerated Muppet shrug with his hands up in the air while a “womp-womp” sound plays in the background and the audience chuckles.

I say, “Thanks Bert. Thanks for watching out for me. Thanks for always trying to keep me safe. I appreciate you. I’ll take it from here.” Then Bert says, “alright then,” with an awkward pause, “I a, I guess my work is done here.” He puts down the pot and wooden spoon. “I’ll um, I’ll leave you to it then.”

Notice that I thanked Bert for freaking out. I treated him like my buddy. I thanked him for watching out for me and I appreciated his efforts. That’s what I meant by validating our emotions and being gentle with ourselves. I gently thanked him for doing his job. To be clear, overreacting is the ego’s job. For me, overreacting is Bert’s job, and he’s done it beautifully. Then I thank him for it.

After I appreciate Bert for clearly alerting me to whatever he’s feeling, I let him know, “I hear you. I’ll take it from here.” That’s where my emotions tend to drop by 50% or more. My logical brain basically just told my emotions, “hey, I hear you and I’m going to do something about it.” Then my emotions don’t need to alert me anymore so they tend to dissipate.

When Bert is sounding the alarm about nothing, I still thank him. “Yes Bert, if I was going to travel back in time, I would totally have to navigate my old boss with those snappy one liners you just came up with. Thanks for keeping me safe. Also, I’m not ever going back there, so you don’t have to spend any more time on this scenario. Thanks again. I’ll take it from here.”

In a case like that, Bert would probably, look surprised. “Wait, you quit that job? Really? Like 5 years ago? And you moved to another city? Oh.” He looks down at the pot and big wooden spoon in his hands, “Oooooh. I see now. Nevermind.”

What does your little protective voice look and sound like? Who do you want it to sound like? If it’s something scary, turn it into a puppet or a cartoon. I have friends who tell me they’ve started imagining their ego’s voice as super cute anime characters, internet memes, or a cute younger version of themselves in pajamas. Just about every comedy show has an anxiety-filled character who overeats. Maybe start with your favorite movies and shows. Also, who’s the loving, calming voice on the show? They might be a great example of how to gently talk to yourself in those moments.

Here are a few examples to help spark your imagination:

In Disney’s Monster’s Inc., Mike is always freaking out and Sully is gently hearing him and there for him.
In Marvel’s superhero movies, Black Widow lovingly interacts with a worked-up and irrational Incredible Hulk.
In Winnie the Pooh, Rabbit or Piglet might be freaking out while Pooh calmly engages them.
If you are familiar with anime, I have a friend who imagines a chibi (big-head little-body cartoon) version of herself who is freaking out and overacting in her mind. Then she then interacts with that caricature version of herself the way a mother would lovingly and inquisitively engage with an overwhelmed child.

Now that we’re more versed in seeing our emotions and how they can try to run the show, rather than letting our story take us for a ride of chasing false needs, we can focus on the real needs not being met. In the next section, we will dig in to translating those core signals behind Bert’s latest freak-out. From there we can find our unmet needs. ~Danny

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – Signals Are Unmet Needs

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Stories Become Our Reality

Go back to the Table of Contents.

Com101 – Choosing To Get Our Needs Met

Kinky Poly Danny — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 02:35:54 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

In my previous article, I talked about how we hide from happiness by finding ways to make it okay to not get our needs met. Next, let’s get back to communication and core needs. A lot of emotional conversations happen when someone has one or more needs from Burbol’s hierarchy of happiness that are not being met. It’s likely this person is already unhappy and emotional because of these unmet needs. Unfortunately, emotions often ensure we will fail to get our core needs met because we fail to communicate the correct core needs. This is because of everything we discussed in the previous article, Stories Become Our Reality, about how our brains automatically make up a story built on assumptions and blame.

How unmet needs turn into arguments:

I have a core need that’s not being met, like food, financial security, or trust.
My body sends a core signal to my brain, also known as an emotion, like hunger, fear, or anger.
My brain tries to interpret why I’m receiving this signal and makes up a story full of assumptions about why I’m not getting what I want and who is to blame.
An alternate need is assumed based on my brain’s made-up story. Then alternate emotions emerge as a reaction to that story.
I communicate what? A story full of assumptions and blame that is all wrapped up in elevated reactive The story pushes for an alternate need of someone else needing to change.

What comes out is an attack that doesn’t even focus on the core need we are struggling with. We do things like criticize and argue over our partner dining out too often rather than confess that we are scared of how low our bank account is and that we are in need of financial safety. We don’t have a two-way discussion about “spending less than we earn” or “how large of a cushion should be in the emergency bank account?” We end up picking apart each other’s character or falling into manipulation tactics to get the other person to change their behavior. Even if we are successful at getting the other person to change, in this case, by not dining out as much, it doesn’t fix the core need that we are struggling with which is the internal dashboard light labeled “financial safety.”

Well, no wonder our core needs don’t seem to get met, we’re not even talking about them. On top of that, it’s no surprise that some people are afraid to speak up. Speaking up often creates conflict about the wrong needs. It’s a humongous trap.

Human brains seem to come with default wiring that ensures we ruin our chances of getting our real needs met when we are emotional. From the moment we open our mouths, we are not talking about our struggle to get our core needs met. Instead, we are already in an argument about how you are to blame, and you need to change. Even if we only have this argument in our imagination, we are still focusing on the wrong things.

This is one of the main themes of the Gottman Institute’s relationship books and workshops. It’s also a core theme in the Non-Violence Communication materials. (See Recommended Resources for more details.) We truly believe we are asking for what we need, but instead we are actually starting an argument about how other person needs to change their behavior. It’s an instant argument based on a made-up story full of assumptions and blame.

Healthy communication drops the story. In doing so, the falsely assumed need for the other person to change is also left out. This removes the unconscious attacks from the interaction. Instead, we focus on just our experience, then we attempt to share that experience. We communicate our core needs from our internal dashboard, how much we need them, and that we are simply asking for help. It becomes a conversation about the indicators that are lit up on our internal dashboard and not an attack or criticism of the other person’s character or behaviors.

What can this type of communication sounds like? As an experiment, what if we tried communicating only the need and not the story or signal? We could try saying, “I need financial safety.” As it turns out, it sounds like we are making a simple declaration which may or may not be shared by the other person. Stating a need for financial safety may be flatly met with, “yup, don’t we all,” from one person and empathetically met by another with, “that’s true. Do you need help or something?” Declaring the need alone doesn’t clearly communicate that our need is not currently being satisfied or that we are asking for help. We are expecting the other person to guess that our need is not being met. Expecting anyone to guess our needs is a toxic behavior. Humans are not mind readers.

Let’s trying something else. As we’ve already discussed in the previous article, Emotionally, Where Am I At?, if we communicate the signal, and only the signal, we let the other person know where we are at and what our struggle feels like without projecting blame. We get their attention and get them on our level without asking them to do anything, and without creating any blame or obligation. From there, we can communicate the core need behind the signal.

It sounds easy, but things immediately start to get tricky. The same way we stripped out the story around our core emotions, we need to do that for whatever “need” we landed on since is may be a red herring. Saying, “I need you to leave,” is different than “I need emotional safety.” Thankfully, we can simply modify our round 2 question of, “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?” to “does this need describe just me or does it include other people or events?”

Just like our emotions, when our brain makes up stories about the wrong needs, we tend to find evidence of those wrong needs. What we focus on multiplies. This is another thing our monkey brain likes to do automatically. It tends to tune out everything we’re not currently focused on. So, when we land on the wrong assumptions, the wrong needs, and the wrong emotions, we tend to find supporting evidence everywhere we look.

Here’s a simple and fun experiment. Look around the room; name 10 things that are blue. Pause and do that now.

Got 10 blue things? Close your eyes and answer this question: How many green things did you see? It’s like the things that were blue were highlighted when we were looking for blue, while all the other colors faded into the background. Now that we are talking about green, a scan of the room will show us all the green objects standing out. That’s how our brains work. What we focus on multiples. This is the very definition of confirmation bias. Whether it is the color blue, blame, grateful things, or reasons to be okay with not being happy, we find what we are looking for. It’s almost like our brain did an internet search for “blue.” We are going to get pages and pages of blue, not green, because we didn’t ask for green and we don’t want green right now.

If we go looking for specific emotions, needs, or things to blame, we will find them. Then, as we focus on them, they will multiple. If we go looking for the wrong things, we will also find them, and they will multiply too. They will become our reality. This time, it’s like our brain did that internet search on, “reasons to blame” plus, “reasons they are wrong and I’m right.”

Say we are in a waiting room, waiting for our car to get fixed. The work is taking longer than we thought. How long is it before we’re making up stories about the mechanics not giving our car any attention. Maybe we’re already concluding that the mechanics are all idiots. How long before we are mad at the person at the counter for being lazy and disorganized for not coming through with the time frame they originally gave us?

We start to make up a story that we need the mechanics and the clerk to hurry up and do their frigging job already! They are ruining our day. We decided the workers aren’t doing their jobs and that becomes our reality. We need them to be better at their jobs and stop being so slow and lazy. Those needs become our reality. The emotions from a story that we literally made-up, start to actually surface. We are irritated and upset because our story is that we are irritated and upset. It’s all because we need those people to do their damn job already. All of that becomes our reality because it’s what we are focusing on and what we focus on multiplies.

If we label our core needs and our core emotional signals incorrectly, they will take over our reality. Thanks monkey brain, real helpful. As we pursue these incorrect needs and fuel the wrong emotions, we basically guarantee we are going to say and do the wrong things. We are going to chase the wrong needs for the wrong reasons. In our minds, we are already practicing and rehearsing the argument we are about to create.

This is why the check-in & timeout step (from the Emotions Are Real article) is so valuable for any emotion over a 2. We are literally not thinking clearly when we are emotional and the more we entertain the, often ridiculous, story in our head, the more we fuel the “they’re wrong and I’m right” emotions. Thinking that all the workers in the car shop are useless means we start acting like all the workers in the car shop are useless. The wrong words slip out of our mouth when we talk to the clerk and we imply they are not doing their jobs. Of course, they will get defensive, they’re humans too. We find ourselves arguing with the workers and standing right in the middle of the story we created in our heads. What starts out as our perspective of the world quickly becomes real as we interact with the world from this, often made-up, perspective.

If we found ourselves making a “T” with our hands and doing a check-in & timeout, we might discover that completely different needs were at play. What if we rated where we were at emotionally and found, “I’m frustrated at a 5. I’m anxious at a 6. Wait, I’m scared at a 5. And I’m hungry too. I’m a 5.” We could take a few deep breaths and regain our thinking abilities. We could drop all the stories involving other people and recognize our needs. “I’m hungry, I need some lunch. I’m anxious, my lunch hour is almost over, I need food and I need to get back to work. I’m scared about getting in trouble for not getting back to work on time. I need food and I need to address my fears about being late for work. What if I called work, let them know I’ll be an hour later than expected, because of the car, and then I go get some lunch instead of waiting here?”

We discover that it was never about the workers. When we stop and focus on the core signals and the core needs, we can break free of the stories full of assumptions. When we focus on just ourselves and purposely remove the outside forces, we can recognize our choices. We begin to stand in our power and what we focus on becomes our reality. We start to take powerful actions to get our core needs met in simple ways that don’t depend on everyone else changing their behavior. When I talk about “taking personal responsibility for our emotions and needs,” this is what I mean.

I know a lot of us have a block around “taking responsibility.” The idea has been hijacked to often mean, “who’s to blame?” That’s not what I mean when I talk about taking responsibility. Taking responsibility means dropping the stories, uncovering the core signals and core needs for ourselves, and then making choices to get those core needs met. We are taking responsibility for getting our needs met instead of blaming others for our deficit. It’s a focus on our emotional dashboard.

When we communicate after taking responsibility for our core emotions and core needs, other people can help support us, or not. We are not obligating them to do anything. We are no longer attached to the other person needing to change their behavior. At the same time, when people are freed up from our projections of blame, they are more likely to be open to understanding our situation and lending a hand.

In the last example about being at the mechanic, by the end, we could have walked up to the clerk with a clear head and asked, “Can you help me out? I was going to go get some lunch. Can you call me when the car is done? Here’s my number.” Do you think the clerk will give us what we want, which is a phone call? Even if the clerk didn’t call us, it wouldn’t matter. We will be back after lunch regardless.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in communication is to call a timeout on myself before I even open my mouth or click “send” on a message. A timeout will help me regain my thinking abilities, allow me to strip away the made-up story, and find my core signals and needs. It’s like a reset button for my brain and my emotions. I do this before I start communicating the wrong needs while in an emotional state. In the previous example, we were never really mad at the employees for not doing their job, we were struggling with being scared about not getting back to work on time and, on top of that, we were hungry. We were not thinking clearly, and we almost communicated our warped perspective of the situation. We almost turned our story into a reality.

Imagine what our communication could look like if we didn’t dump made-up stories on people about how they need to change because we made up a bunch of reasons to blame them. Imagine we didn’t dump all this on them while we were in an emotional state. Imagine if we got in the habit of getting our head straight with a check-in & timeout, identifying our core needs, from Burbol’s hierarchy of happiness, and then simply asked for support.

Asking for help to get our needs met is where our communication with the outside world begins. However, I hope you can see why “getting our head straight” before we open our mouth is such a powerful, and necessary, first step. We are setting our communication up for success by looking at our emotional dashboard first and then saying, “oh hey. Check this out, it looks like I got some warning lights here.”

Now that we’ve taken this time to self-reflect and identify our core needs, we can reach out. This marks the end of Part 1: Getting clear with ourselves. Part 2: Create a safe space to talk, will focus on how we set the stage for open communication and then keep those lines of communication open.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – Safe Space Culture

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Needs & Hiding from Happiness

Go back to the Table of Content for this section on needs.

Go back to the Table of Contents for Communication 101 series.

Com101 – Needs & Hiding from Happiness

Kinky Poly Danny — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 02:33:08 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

Now let’s talk about why I slipped the word “happiness” into the title of this tool. I discovered Rosenberg included play, fun, and laughter in Nonviolent Communication’s list of human needs while Maslow did not. Then I had to ask myself who I agreed with. We already explored all that reasoning and, yes, I agree that play is a basic human need. We reasoned our way through it all, which is great, but logic is not emotion. I want to share my gut reaction as to why play is a core human need. This is because, for many years, I fell into a societal trap where I chose to deny myself play and many other needs. I was unhappy and I didn’t know why.

When I asked myself, “are play, fun, and laughter core human needs that Maslow somehow missed?” My gut screamed, “are you kidding me! Of course, they are! We learned that lesson the hard way!” Here’s my confession to you: for about two decades, I falsely assumed that being an adult meant many forms of play were no longer allowed. It was a “conclusion” that was programmed into me through my guilt-soaked religious upbringing, living with parents who were stuck in survival mode in regards to money, a school system that insisted we behave, a society full of jobs that insisted we behave, and literal laws that attempt to limit the types of fun people are allowed to have in public and in private.

On top of that, pile on gender roles of what is expected of men and woman. I receive the message of how I’m supposed to pursue a mate through providing a luxurious life to her while my sister is bombarded with the message of “sit still, look pretty.”

I concluded that the whole point of adulthood, and life, was to work hard, get a good job, make good money, get a house, get a partner, and one day retire and “then be happy.” I had no idea what “happy” meant aside from knowing it was a far off thing to pursue. I ultimately decided that we were all supposed to “grow up,” “get to work,” and “stop fooling around already”. Many years of therapy and healing have clearly identified those words as the words of the adults in my childhood.

How about you? Whose words took residence in your mind in childhood? What were your childhood conclusions about life, how it works, and how you are supposed to be? I’m sure the voices from your childhood are different than mine, but odds are, those childhood assumptions are unconsciously running your life? We’ve got a mountain of healthy or toxic assumptions and habits in our heads that a five, ten, or fifteen year old version of ourselves decided was fact or simply never questioned. That is a blind spot. We all have many of them.

I’m going to walk you through my blind spot around not being able to play. I do this in the hopes that you can see how we can unconsciously choose to cope with unmet needs and sometimes don’t even seek happiness or self-healing.

I concluded we were all supposed to “grow up,” “get to work,” and “stop fooling around already”. From the ages of fifteen to thirty-five, I never questioned this. Unconsciously, I embraced these phrases. I tell you what, I got shit done. I got a career. I got a bunch of money. I was basically a workaholic. My life was “work hard, go home, tune out”. I was quite unhappy during that time and I had no idea I was unhappy. My life was awesome! Work was awesome! My girlfriend was awesome! Our vacations were awesome! Yet, I seemed to be searching for something.

On vacations I would read books like Tao Te Ching [1]and Stumbling On Happiness[2] trying to find some answer to “what’s the point of it all?” I spent many years reading books on happiness as a core topic. That’s not a joke. I was in this weird place in life where I wasn’t happy, but I also wasn’t depressed. At the same time, something was just, kind of, “missing.” I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had everything that was supposed to make me happy, but I wasn’t truly happy. I often questioned myself, too. “Maybe I am happy and it’s just not quite the feeling I thought it was. I mean, look around. My life is awesome. What’s not to be happy about?”

So, I’d listen to audio books on my hour-long commute to work, read Wikipedia.org in the evening, and watch TED talk videos in bed. All of it, focused on happiness. For years I did this. At first I thought a job making video games would make me happy. It was amazing, but no. In the end it was a job like any other. Then I thought money and retiring early would make me happy, so I did that. No, it left me less stressed, but lacking direction and meaning. If anything, it made it worse as I hit that classic retirement person’s dilemma, “who am I if I’m not my job title?” About that time, I was focusing on the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thinking I was missing some kind of “fulfillment,” or some “higher purpose” in my life. I focused on fulfillment for a couple years. Nope. I was starting to conclude that happiness must be more of an almost content-like feeling of “life’s good enough, I’ll just coast from here, I guess.”

In my early twenties, I game across this amazing little phrase, “happiness is a choice.” It was a neat idea; one must simply choose to be happy every day. It was a perspective thing and we just needed to choose a different perspective. The idea had two parts. (1) First, stop putting happiness after the finish line. (2) Second, focus on grateful things every day.

The first part made sense to me. A lot of us have this, “I’ll be happy when,” mind virus implanted in us at some point. I know I did. It’s the “I’ll be happy after I get something or do something,” approach. “I’ll be happy when I’m out of high school. I’ll be happy when I get to college. I’ll be happy when I pass this class. I’ll be happy when I get a job. I’ll be happy when I get a raise. I’ll be happy when I get married.” There’s no end to that. We spend our whole life chasing something that is just out of reach. Every time we almost get there, our brain uses the phrase to move the finish line to happiness out to the horizon again. “I’ll be happy after,” and “I’ll be happy when,” are both an invisible trap. A trap that we will unconsciously defend, argue, and fight to stay in. A properly brainwashed person will fight to keep their brainwashing intact.

The trick is to choose to be happy now, long before that future event. Get up in the morning and say, “wow, look at me! I’ve come so far! Five years ago, I would be ecstatic to be where I’m at today! I deserve to celebrate and be happy today!” Then dance your way into the kitchen and make breakfast. Sing loudly during your commute. Whistle your way through work, and laugh at all the silly little inconveniences that life throws at you all day long. It’s a perspective shift, and it works.

The second part of the perspective shift was naming between three and ten grateful things once a day. This practice has been life changed for me. If you haven’t tried it before. Pause and name a few things you’re grateful for right now.

Here I’ll do it, too. I’m grateful for having a creative outlet. I’m grateful for my amazing circle of friends. I’m grateful for all the laughs we had together last night. I’m grateful for memes and cat videos. I’m grateful I had food in the house today and I didn’t have to go grocery shopping. Oh man, I’m grateful for coffee. I’m grateful to have quiet time to write and get introspective. I’m grateful that all of human knowledge is a click away on the web. I’m grateful to have access to tools my parents’ generation didn’t even realize they were missing. I’m grateful for all the little trip-ups and mistakes that got me to where I am today. I’m grateful to have a moment to reflect and ground myself.

Now you try.

Focusing on grateful things is amazing because it’s just how our brains work. What we focus on multiples. It’s one of our brain’s superpowers. Another way to say that is, we find what we are looking for. This is the very definition of confirmation bias and we are using it to our advantage. I’ll hit you with another example of conformation bias later in this chapter.

Grateful things shift my perspective in less than a minute. When I’m sad or frustrated, I can simply take a moment to choose to see the things I’m grateful for and that perspective of the world tends to follow me around for most of the day. I can also do it before I go to sleep and pretty-much guarantee I have sweet dreams. I invite you to try that, it’s fantastic.

These two things combine are not quite “rose-colored glasses,” but more like “sunny-day colored glasses.” Now that feeling of “life’s good enough, I’ll just coast from here, I guess,” was much better. I didn’t feel happy, but I felt bright and sunny. Now I danced and whistled my way thought my “good enough, I guess” life.

I’m not going to hint at this, I’m just going to flat out say it. I had just found two amazing tools for reframing and shifting my mind’s perspective. Unfortunately, I choose to use these tools as coping mechanism for my unhappiness. I was very successful at hiding my unhappiness from myself using these amazing tools. That said, these tools are still wonderful and worth knowing and using every day. Also, they are no substitute for facing your shit and doing the work to heal. Otherwise, these can turn into a blind spot type of coping mechanism, as I’m about to illustrate.

So now I would always see the sunning side of life while completely missing the obvious: I still wasn’t happy. I was unhappy and instead of doing something about it, I mastered the art of seeing the silver lining in every moment of my day. I had accepted being not-quite-happy as a fact of life and I made the most of it every day. I flat-out settled for less than a happy life and I managed to find coping mechanisms to put a sunny disposition on the whole thing. I had no frigging clue that I was doing this to myself. Again, I had a huge house, phenomenal partner, and plenty of time and money.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stumbled into the Burning Man scene in San Francisco, and it was life-changing for me. These weird hippies were throwing some big festival every summer where they ran around naked and played with fire or something. They would drive out to the middle of a desert for a whole week and these adults were basically acting like children. I had to see this for myself!

I got a ticket, joined a friend’s camp, and I went to see it for myself. It was true. 70,000 responsible, self-reliant, radically expressive, community driven, highly intelligent, highly capable adults were out in the desert acting like children for a week. For 7 days, Burning Man is the third largest city in Nevada, behind Las Vegas, and Reno. Oh, and there was no money! I bought a ticket, I brought my camping gear and supplies to the middle of a dried up lakebed. Then I couldn’t buy anything but ice for a week. We also can’t sell anything. Everything someone offers is a gift. No bartering allowed. They purposely try to be as inclusive of others as possible and they use the phrase, “be here now,” to remind each other to be in the present moment.

When the week is over, they burn it all to the ground! Then, get this, 70,000 people take responsibility for themselves to “leave no trace,” and then a huge team of volunteers makes a second sweep after the event is over to ensure “leave no trace” was achieved.

Burning Man broke my brain in the best ways I never could have imagined. I didn’t just go and see Burning Man, I got to be part of the Burning Man experiment. I started going almost every year. I didn’t want to just see it or experience it, I wanted to learn how to embody it. For seven days each year I was really, truly, happy. The only other time I could say I had experienced that same undeniable happiness in my adult life was when I was cutting through three feet of fresh powder on my snowboard one time at Keystone, in Colorado.

After discovering Burning Man, I chased the idea of “being in the moment for many years.” I stopped collecting stuff and things and focused on collecting what I call, “perfected moments.” Most of them were moments at Burning Man each year, but I started figuring out how to be “in the moment” outside of the Burn as well.

I learned to spin fire and how to get lost in the flow (like fire dancing), I stopped doing all the things I was “supposed to” do and literally started doing the opposite. I started the KinkyPoly.com website. I started a kinky YouTube channel that focused on play for play’s sake and experiences for the sake of experiencing them. I started creating moments and experiences. Experiences like sinking both hands into a giant bowl of the type of tapioca pearl that are normally found in boba tea or filling an enclosed shower with balloons just so we could get in there with them and see what it actually felt like. I became an experience seeker and a sensory seeker. I found my first true “safe space,” at something called a “play party” and the ball of string that is my childhood trauma, assumptions, and limiting beliefs, really began to unravel.

I was happy at Burning Man because it was a safe space. I often called snowboarding “my happy place,” because it was another safe space. When spaces became truly safe, I discovered I could play and just be in the moment. Not just me, I notice other people would open up when the space was safe enough for them, too. People can be vulnerable, authentic, and raw when they are truly safe to do so.

Then, in the middle of a conversation about the amazing power of safe spaces, just like the one we are having right now, I met a woman who said, “the world is my safe space.” I nearly cried. The thought of feeling this happy and free everywhere I went seemed awe inspiring and impossible.

That is when it finally hit me. If I needed a “safe space” like Burning Man or a play party then that meant, I didn’t feel safe the rest of the time. By default, I didn’t feel safe to be authentic or vulnerable. I didn’t feel safe showing or sharing my emotions. I didn’t feel safe being silly or playful. The thought had never actually occurred to me.

All of this may be boring and obvious to you. Looking back, all of this is now so obvious to me. I had many needs that were not being met because my childhood survival mechanisms assumed various things were “normal.” It’s like my young brain concluded, “oh, I guess most of the stuff I want or crave must not be real needs and I should just learn to live without those things.” It’s like my childhood brain just shrugged and accepted this discovery as a fact. Then young me found coping mechanisms to survive and move me forward even though most of my needs weren’t getting met. This basically ensured they would never be met. Twenty-year-old me found more coping tools like interpreting “happiness is a choice,” completely wrong and using it to create tunnel vision that looked right passed my assumptions that a bunch of my needs will simply never be met and I should be fine with that. I diligently build myself a beautiful prison where my needs would not be met. If anyone had tried to point it out to me, I would actually fight to stay in that delusion.

My childhood traumas were neglect and abandonment. As a kid, my survival needs were mostly met, but every category after that wasn’t a survival need and I learned to work around those unmet needs. I learned to give up on most of my cognitive needs with self-sabotaging thoughts like, “grow up,” “get to work” and “stop fooling around already”. I learned to not even expect interdependence needs. Family, friendship, community, belonging, support, empathy, understanding, love, touch, reassurance, trust, appreciation, acceptance, –none of those things were a guarantee when I was younger, so I learned to live without them. I didn’t even know they were missing until I stumbled into Burning Man that first time. Most of my esteem needs were never met. Self-esteem I had in excess. I was very capable, and our society rewarded me handsomely for that. Soon, I was very “successful” too. Esteem, on the other hand, totally different story. The idea of “respect from others” and feeling safe in most social circles would have my younger self drawing a blank. The thought of things like recognition, celebration, prestige, and attention would induce a mild panic inside my chest.

Without anger or sadness, the kid in me simply adapted and survived. Many people would note my career, house, and mid-life retirement and assert that I did more than survive, I thrived. No, I sacrificed a bunch of my core needs and happiness in trade for a beautiful façade of stuff, status, and coping mechanisms that enabled me to pursue a state of unhappiness. We all deserve to be happy; we all deserve to have our core human needs met.

Everything in Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness is a need you are allowed to have. Yes, you could drop yourself into survival mode and claim the top four categories are not true needs, but you don’t have to live life in survival mode. You owe it to yourself to thrive. You get to live life to it’s fullest. You get to have everything in every category of needs. All you have to do is seek it in healthy ways and ask for it in healthy ways. For the people who have trauma around asking, know this, “you’re allowed to ask for what you want in healthy ways. Asking for what you want is a gift to the people who love you.” This book is going to teach you how to ask for what you need and how to not tolerate anyone who would attack your for making your needs known.

So, what’s your trauma? What’s your limiting beliefs from childhood that are standing in the way of your happiness or allowing you to cope with less then having all your needs met? What are the assumptions that are floating around in your head masquerading as facts but were literally made-up by a ten-year-old?

I invite you to entertain the idea that you are allowed to get all your needs met and by the end of this book you’ll have the tools to have those conversations in healthy ways. I invite you to imagine a life where you actually are getting all of your needs met, and your friends and family are also getting all their needs met because all of you know how to check-in & timeout, remove blame, and then have easy conversations about everyone’s needs.

I want to clarify that from this moment forward, when I say, “happiness is a choice,” what I mean is: (1) We get to choose to put happiness today and not after the finish line. (2) We get to choose to focus on grateful things every day. (3) We get to choose to do check-in & timeout to discover our unmet needs. (4) We get to choose to go get our needs met in healthy ways instead of finding ways to cope. (5) We get to choose to heal, not ignore, whatever baggage, limiting beliefs, traumas, triggers, that we pick up along the way on our journey through childhood and since childhood.

Repeat after me, I get to choose to be happy. I get to choose to heal my childhood wounds. I get to choose to get my needs met in healthy ways. I get to choose to manage myself and my emotions while I figure out my unmet needs. I get to choose to surround myself with people who will support and root for me getting my needs met. I get to choose to be grateful for all these opportunities to learn and grow. I get to choose to be happy today without any hurdles or obstacles in front of that.

From now on, don’t hesitate to look at Burbol’s heirary of happiness and ask yourself if all your needs are currently being met. This list is another tool to add to our checkin & timeout habit.

[1] “Tao Te Ching,” by Laozi. Written in China around 400 BC. A series of philosophical ideas that come across almost as poems that trying to describe the indescribable, “The Way.” (Then humans added deities to it, made it a religion, and called it Taoism. Ug.)

[2] “Stumbling on Happiness,” by Daniel Gilbert. He shares scientific research into happiness in an upbeat, anecdotal tone.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – Choosing To Get Our Needs Met

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness

Go back to the Table of Content for this section on needs.

Go back to the Table of Contents for Communication 101 series.

Com101 – Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness

Kinky Poly Danny — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 02:15:54 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

In my last two articles, I spent a lot of time talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and what’s missing from Maslow’s model. By now, I would expect everyone to be saying, “yeah, okay Danny. All of the Maslow stuff is great but what are we actually trying to do here?”

We’re identifying the core needs behind core emotions. Maslow’s model is a motivational theory about needs. We are concerned with needs as they relate to emotions, happiness, and communication. My primary concern is making a tool to aid with the topic of this series which is to be a guide for “how to get our core needs met in healthy ways.” Self-mastery, followed by healthy communication, are the majority of how to achieve that. Why would we care about getting our needs met in healthy ways? So, we can be happy.

The intention behind healthy communication is for everyone to get their needs met. Think about it. Say you have someone come up to you who is angry and yelling about something. What are they doing? They are attempting to talk to you because they are unhappy and they want to be happy. For some reason, their happiness seems to involve you. Hint: the reason is our monkey brains like to jump straight to blame.

Our intention behind trying to communicate when in conflict is to go from an unhappy state to a happy state. We are trying to go from lacking a need to having our need satisfied. How people communicate and what people communicate is mostly a disaster, but the intention behind the communication is, “I just want to be happy!” So, surprise! –this is a series on achieving happiness. How do we achieve happiness? We get our needs met. How do we do that? First, we get clear with ourselves about what we actually need and then we pursue and communicate those needs in healthy ways.

Right now, this series is nearly done with part 1, “first get clear with ourselves about what we actually need.” Maslow and NVC gave us a push in the right direction and now we’re going to start steering and peddling ourselves. So, let’s pull all of this talk about “needs” together in a new diagram. This is meant to be a tool you can reference when you’re struggling with emotion. I recommend you bookmark this page as it will be very helpful the next time you are struggling with alerts on your internal emotional dashboard.

Below, I started with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Then I merged in most of Nonviolent Communication’s lists of human needs to give a clearer picture of Maslow’s existing categories. Then, I added a category for cognitive needs based on our discoveries in the previous section. I’ll call it Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness so we can easily refer to it in the future. All of the changes compared to the last version of these diagrams are in italics.

(Above: the result of merging Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Rosenberg’s Nonvilolent Communication needs, and Burbol’s discoveries of needs required for happiness and healthy communication.)

Every item in the following breakdown is a valid human need. These are the needs behind every warning light on our internal emotional dashboard. As you read the following text, know that you personally deserve to have every need on this list met. You are allowed to thrive. You are allowed to have a life that includes every item on this list so long as you do so in health ways. The entirety of this series is based on how to get our core needs met in healthy ways, but it starts with recognizing that sometimes our core needs are not being me. As you read the needs below, some needs will feel good, and some might give you a little twinge. Take note of the ones that give you that twinge. Those are unmet needs that is trying to alert you. Those are needs that require some form of action or healing.

Here is a breakdown of Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness.

Self-actualization needs	Includes: achieving one’s full potential, partner acquisition, one’s legacy, parenting, creative activities, utilizing and developing talents and abilities.
Esteem needs	Includes: self-respect, self-worth, self-healing, respect from others, accomplishment, recognition, fame, celebration, prestige, attention, self-confidence, strength, independence, freedom, liberty, autonomy, agency, greater sense of self, meaning, status, reputation, social safety, and dignity.
Interdependence needs	Includes: family, friendship, community, belonging, contribution, support, shared emotion, empathy, intimacy, connection, understanding, privacy, consent, boundaries, give/receive love & affection, touch, reassurance, trust, appreciation, and acceptance.
Cognitive needs	Includes: experiencing for the experience’s sake; to discover, stimulate, and experience everything our body is capable of doing or feeling; to stimulate our mind and senses, to stimulate and feel emotions, to explore; to discover; to experience and expand the limits of ourselves, our situation, our inner world, and the world around us; novelty; spontaneity; experimentation; to fail; to learn; to invent; to fantasize; to realize fantasies; to grow; to understand; progress; to move; to dance; to sing; and to play at every level.
Safety needs	Includes: health, personal safety, physical safety, emotional safety, financial safety, employment, property, order, peace, calm, harmony, sufficient time, personal time, personal space, and resources.
Physiological needs	Includes: air, water, food, warmth, rest, clothes, hygiene, light, bodily functions, shelter, and reproduction.

What do you find yourself craving from these lists? What feels like a twinge in your life right now? Those are unmet needs. You will never be happy until you learn to address those needs in healthy ways.

A few changes to call out:

I renamed it to Burbol’s hierarchy of “happiness.” I’m breaking away from Maslow’s model which is a motivational theory while my model is a theory of needs as they relate to emotions, achieving happiness, and healthy communication. My primary concern is making a tool to aid with the goal of this series: getting our core needs met in healthy ways using self-mastery and healthy communication.
Esteem now includes “self-healing.” This includes trauma, childhood assumptions, coping mechanisms, and survival mechanisms that we’ve carried forward from childhood when our dependency on our caregivers fell short and our needs were put at risk. This is a need that often unconsciously stands in the way of us being able to satisfy many of our other needs. Those other needs could be from any of the six categories.
Belonging & love was renamed Interdependence. I want to note that “privacy,” “consent,” and “boundaries” are among the additions. These needs are crucial when it comes to healthy communication.
The category Cognitive needs has been added. I use the word cognitive as an adjective relating to the definition of cognition: “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”[1]. (Author’s note: after doing more research on “cognitive needs” and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s come to my attention that a version of “cognition” has been added to a diagram of Maslow’s model on Wikipedia.org. “Cognitive” appears between esteem and self-actualization and an article titled, “need for cognition”[2] has been sited. I just want to clarify, our definitions of “cognition” are different, and our resulting category placement is different. Their definition includes “a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world” and I’m talking about a need to use our abilities simply for the sake of feeling the experience. This leads to a need for regular stimulation of our human senses and abilities so we can experience the full spectrum of life and living. Regardless, I’m breaking away from Maslow’s model.)

When any of our core needs are not being met, we will find that we are unhappy. From there we get to choose what we do next. We can choose unhealthy things like pretending we don’t need these things, ignoring our unmet needs, or seek alternate forms of comfort like food, distractions, and other coping mechanisms. We can choose an unhealthy resolve to sacrifice some of our needs in favor of other or pressing needs, or another person’s needs. We can also choose unhealthy ways of giving away our power with assumptions and blame. We can choose unhealthy forms of communication; we can yell, sulk, or act out.

We can also choose to stand in our power and take ultimate responsibility for getting our core needs met in healthy ways. We can choose to call a checkin & timeout. We can choose to heal our situations, misunderstanding, and past traumas. We can choose how and when we communicate.

We get to choose how we respond and that is where much of our power is found. Our choices become our perspective, thoughts, actions, behaviors, habits, patterns, and personality. We get to choose what we do when our needs are not being met and those choices, toxic or healthy, will create our reality. What have you been choosing? What will you do differently?

Dear reader, let me pause here for a moment and say a few things very dear to my heart. Every need on the lists above are basic human need that you are deserving of and allowed to pursue in healthy ways. I’m not saying you are owed any of these things by the world or anyone in it, nor am I saying you must ask permission or somehow earn the right to have your core needs met. I’m saying, these are basic human needs that fall under “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Don’t sacrifice them, give them away, or give away your power to choose.

You are allowed to be happy. You are allowed to thrive. You owe it to yourself to thrive.

If you have an internal voice, an actual person, or a human organization in your life that says otherwise, then someone is or was trying to control you. You are allowed to pursue each and every one of these needs without permission or approval from anyone, provided you are considering how your actions impact the world around you and the rights and needs of others. Furthermore, be suspicious of anyone suggesting you delay the fulfillment of any of your needs to some nebulous future moment.

It often will take time, energy, coordination, and practice to get all of one’s core needs met in healthy, non-toxic, ways. You are solely responsible for that. No one owes you anything. You are allowed to be happy, but you are the one who is responsible for making it happen in healthy ways. There is no guarantee that all our needs will come together for us from one day to another, but we are all the captains of our own ships, and we all have the right to aim for the horizon. Again, you owe it to yourself to thrive.

Just as you are responsible for getting your core needs met in healthy ways, others are responsible for getting their own core needs met in healthy ways too. That means you are not responsible for anyone’s core needs but your own. I’m talking directly to the people pleasers out there, “you are not responsible for getting anyone’s core needs met but your own.” You can and you should put your core needs first while encouraging others to do that same with their own core needs. You should not put your needs second to another or sacrifice your needs. Those who would put your needs in jeopardy are not your friends. You deserve people who want you to thrive, who encourage you to thrive, and who celebrate you every step of the way.

When we all agree to take responsibility for putting our own needs first using healthy means, we all win. We can trust others won’t be expecting us to guess their need. We can trust they won’t be blaming us or asking us to sacrifice our core needs in favor of theirs. Yes, all of us will need help from time to time, but no one can pour from an empty cup. Let’s all ensure we are filling our own cup and not just everyone else’s cup. When we all fill our own cup first, it will overflow, and we can share that excess with ease. When all of us agree to take this approach, there will be an abundance of overflow to go around.

In the next article, I’m going to focus on how we can unconsciously hide from that word “happiness,” by inventing ways for it to be okay to not get all our needs met.

[1] “Cognition”. Lexico. Oxford University Press and Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2020.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition – “Need for cognition” – Retrieved 7 Dec 2022.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – Needs & Hiding from Happiness

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Needs Maslow’s Model Missed

Go back to the Table of Content for this section on needs.

Go back to the Table of Contents for Communication 101 series.

Com101 – Needs Maslow’s Model Missed

Kinky Poly Danny — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 01:48:41 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

I covered Maslow’s Model in my previous article, Com101 – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. One category Maslow seems to have left out that Rosenberg included in the book Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is: play. (See Com101 – Recommended Resources for details on the book.) NVC’s category for play includes fun and laughter. I agree with NVC, play is a basic human need. However, these needs don’t seem to slip into any of Maslow’s existing categories. So where do we put them?

The idea of play doesn’t seem to enter our mind until after our needs for safety are met, so playfulness must be somewhere after that. The belonging & love category focuses on our connection and interactions with others. Yes, we often play with others, but we can also entertain ourselves. We dance to music alone when we’re cooking and accidently pretend to be in random scenarios with famous people. The need for play seems to exist after safety and before belonging & love. So, when we are safe, we tend to play, then we can elevate that play with all the categories after this new category.

Great, a new category between safety and belonging & love. Do we call it “play”? What is “play”? More importantly, what else is missing from Maslow’s lists?

Focusing on just play for a second, the fun and laughter that come from play often come from engagement with something. This could be an active engagement or a passive engagement. Active engagement would be things like puzzles, games, and projects, as well as engagement with pure imagination, like daydreaming. Active engagement can often include a challenge as we test ourselves and our limits. It can be light challenges in safe scenarios or more extreme challenges in risky scenarios that push passed our limits to create new limits in the process. Play can be light and easy like a stroll through the park or a crossword puzzle. Play can also be intense like skydiving out of a plane or a swift ride down a mountain on a snowboard. Challenging ourselves and testing our limits seems like a major part of play. Maslow’s list doesn’t talk about discovering and challenging our limits in this fashion.

How about passive engagement? TV, theatre, and music might be considered a form of passive play. “Rest” is a need on Maslow’s list, but what about the opposite; entertainment. We can definitely find fun and laughter in TV and music, but it doesn’t stop there. We can find a wide array of emotions in various forms of entertainment. Sad songs and movies wouldn’t sell if people didn’t crave them.

Humans seem to seek out passive and active experiences of all types. Whether we are relaxing with a story or actively being the main character of our own story. We crave things that spark emotion, thought, and imagination. We seem to seek out new information, ideas, understanding, lessons, and challenges. We seek new experiences, and we revisit familiar experiences.

The same way people talk about developing their palate for the taste of food or wine, we humans seem to crave the development of every aspect of our very being. We crave the expansion of our palate for music and movies the same way we crave expanding our mind with new ideas and fictional scenarios. An interesting cycle emerges. We feel a need to hear and connect with new music, but then the music eventually becomes “played out.” So, we begin to pursue new music. Then we will long to hear that old song again. We do that with ideas, stories, visual art, food, and pretty much everything as we seek out both novelty and the familiar. We want to experience things for ourselves, and we crave a wide variety of experiences.

If there are no experiences to be had, we invent them. As kids, we jump over cracks in the sidewalk and make up stories for our favorite toys. As adults we invent all sorts of challenges and entertainment. We might decide to “shake things up” at dinner with a new recipe or by inventing our own. Our need to play and seek entertainment is so strong that we will invent new things to satisfy this need, consequences and all.

Not only is fun missing from Maslow’s model, but there seems to be a whole category of needs that involve experiencing our body, all our senses, and the world around us. These new experiences turn into cravings to find, challenge, and expand our limits with all our senses and abilities. We have a need to experience life using every means we have. Not only through site, sound, touch, smell, and taste, but also our mind, our imagination, our voice, and our emotions. We naturally crave to find and play with our limits.

The word for experiencing all of our abilities is “cognition”. Here is how Wikipedia.org summarizes cognition[1].

Cognition refers to “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”[2]. It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Imagination is also a cognitive process, it is considered as such because it involves thinking about possibilities. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.

We have a cognitive need for experiencing input, and stimulating all our senses and abilities. We have a need to experience life, find the limits of our abilities, then to experiment and challenge those limits. We need to find novelty in every dimension of our human experience. We need to discover and expand our pallet of what it’s like to be a human and an individual.

I call this new category, cognitive needs. For clarity, please know that I use the word “cognitive” as an adjective relating to the definition of “cognition” that I sighted above. I make this distinction because the current common use of the word “cognitive” seems to highlight mental abilities and lose a bit of the “through […] experience, and the senses,” part in of cognition’s definition.

Our cognitive needs include: experiencing for the experience’s sake; to discover, stimulate, and experience everything our body is capable of doing or feeling; to stimulate our mind and senses, to stimulate and feel emotions, to explore; to discover; to experience and expand the limits of ourselves, our situation, our inner world, and the world around us; novelty; spontaneity; experimentation; to fail; to learn; to invent; to fantasize; to realize fantasies; to grow; to understand; progress; to move; to dance; to sing; and to play.

In the next article, we will combine all these finding with Maslow’s model and NVC’s lists of needs as well as adding in a few items that are needed for healthy communication.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition – retrieved 7 Dec 2022.

[2] “Cognition”. Lexico. Oxford University Press and Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2020.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Go back to the Table of Content for this section on needs.

Go back to the Table of Contents for Communication 101 series.

Com101 – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Kinky Poly Danny — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 01:22:10 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

This is an article in the Communication 101 series. Click here for the Table of Contents.

Remember, we are talking about the core emotions and signals that have their own indicator lights on our body’s internal dashboard. These are the needs that can’t be argued with. When we focus on this dashboard, we cut out all the stories, assumptions, and blame that often make getting our core needs met so difficult. It is important to detect and remove those types of stories from both our internal dialogue and our outward communication to others. All of this was discussed in the previous articles, Emotionally, Where Am I At? and Stories Become Our Reality.

Now let’s look behind our internal dashboard. Behind every individual alert is an unmet human need. Each unmet need causes an alert light on our dashboard to turn on inside of us by way of a core signal or core emotion. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a list of all the core human needs behind all those core signals on our dashboard? Well, it turns out, we’re not the first to go looking for this list. Two great sources for enumerating and understanding core human needs are Maslow’s hierarchy of needs[1] and the book Nonviolent Communication (NVC)[2]. I’m going to start with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and then merge in NVC to discover a more complete hierarchical list of core human needs.

If you already know Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, feel free to skim past the diagram and list of needs. Simply pickup reading at the bold text. Otherwise, here’s a short summary of Maslow’s model.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory, a tool, that simplifies human needs into collections of needs that depend on each other. Maslow’s model is often represented as a pyramid with the most basic human needs and motivations at the bottom.[3] Starting at the bottom of the pyramid, each time a human satisfies all of the needs in a category, the needs of the next category tend to emerge. The order of the categories from the bottom to the top are, physiological needs, safety needs, belonging and love needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. This can be seen in the following diagram, which is heavily based on a diagram from simplypsychology.org[4].

(Source: the above diagram is heavily based on a diagram from simplypsychology.org [5].)

Below, is a breakdown of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Every item in the breakdown is a valid human need. As you read the following text, know that you personally deserve to have every need on this list met. You are allowed to have a life that includes every item on this list so long as you do so in health ways. The entirety of this series is a guide for “how to get our core needs met in healthy ways.” It turns out that self-master and healthy communication are major parts of that.

A breakdown of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

Self-actualization needs	Includes: achieving one’s full potential, partner acquisition, parenting, creative activities, utilizing and developing talents and abilities.
Esteem needs	Includes: self-respect, self-worth, respect from others, recognition, fame, prestige, attention, self-confidence, strength, independence, freedom, status, and dignity.
Belonging & love needs	Includes: family, friendship, intimacy, connection, give/receive love & affection, trust, and acceptance.
Safety needs	Includes: health, personal safety, physical safety, emotional safety, financial safety, employment, property, and resources.
Physiological needs	Includes: air, water, food, warmth, rest, clothes, hygiene, light, bodily functions, shelter, and sexual reproduction.

Can you see how each category leads to the next? For example: we don’t worry about personal safety or financial safety until all our physiological needs are met; things like air, water, and food. Once we have all our physiological needs met, we naturally start to wonder about personal safety and financial stability. That pattern walks its way up the pyramid.

Every one of these items is a valid human need. The needs at the top are just as important as the needs at the bottom. They all create alerts on our internal dashboards.

When prioritizing a solution to our unmet needs, our brain tends to start at the bottom and progress upwards as it manages all those dashboard alerts. This creates a blind spot regarding our high-level needs. Our brain experiences a form of tunnel vision as it focuses on how our lower-level needs are in jeopardy and it tends to lose sight of our higher-level needs. For example, we may forget all about our need for self-actualization, creativity, and freedom when we are lacking lower-level needs like air, water, or food. It doesn’t have to be a survival thing either. We can also forget about self-actualization, creativity, and freedom when we are lacking or otherwise afraid of losing attention, respect, trust, love, or any other needs.

Prioritizing lower-level needs, like air or emotional safety, does not invalid the need for those higher-level items, like creativity and freedom. For happiness, human need self-actualization, creativity, and freedom just as much as they need air and emotional safety. Notice I’m not talking solely about our need to survive. I’m including our need to thrive.

Regarding our core needs, never forget these two distinctions: (1) all our seemingly-hierarchical needs are equally important and valid; and (2) our brain experiences a form of tunnel vision when our lower-level needs are lacking or in jeopardy. This tunnel vision causes a blind spot where we can lose sight of our other needs.

Why am I making such a big deal about those to distinctions? Simply put, it is very easy to distract humans with lower-level needs while their higher-level needs are also suffering or being taken from them. We use these two distinctions against each other all the time. Our brains fool us by treating some of our own needs as less important than others. At times, our brains also tend to treat other people’s needs as less important than our own. “People pleaser” often treat their own needs as less important or secondary to the needs of others. Discounting our own needs or the needs of others leads to invaliding those needs with words and distractions that create blind spots.

On a small scale, this might look like yelling at our partner because we are starving. The yelling focuses on solving our hunger need while also completely missing how it is damaging our needs for belonging & love as well as our partner’s needs for physical safety and emotional safety. One might describe that as “seeing red,” which is quite the opposite of rose-colored glasses. In a more sinister example, an abusive person might keep their partner’s need for safety or love in constant jeopardy. While this partner is in survival mode, the abusive person may be slowly stripping them of their needs for self-worth, accomplishment, independence, dignity, family, and community. Friends and onlookers will see it so clearly, yet the person in “survival mode” may never see it.

This toxic behavior doesn’t stop with just an abusive partner. Distracting humans by putting their lower-level needs in jeopardy while also chipping away at their higher-level needs is a toxic behavior that shows up in groups of humans of any size. From governments and religions to families and partners, there is a danger of humans putting other human’s lower-level needs at risk to manipulate them and take their higher-level needs without being notice. Both historically and presently, humans create cultures that exploit our brain’s tunnel vision around needs. When we are focused on surviving rather than thriving, we can be exploited. When everyone’s livelihood is at risk because of some other group, real or imagined, humans forget about the importance of higher-level needs. When a society is focused on the threat of violence from neighboring areas, or a demonized group, the people are more likely to willingly vote away their freedoms to keep the “bad” people away. A simple review of primary school world history will make this self-evident.

Unfortunately, this form of manipulation works. Humans do it to each other because it works. TV commercials about toothpaste try to scare us with talk of cancer because it works. The news and media channels use fear and a focus on issues that hit us lower on Maslow’s hierarchy because it works. Political groups describe terrorist threats while taking away our rights and freedoms because it works.

Realizing that our brain becomes blind and vulnerable to manipulation when our lower-level needs are at risk is a superpower. Now we can see how it affects us and the world around us. We can see how it can be used in toxic ways and used against us. Intentionally or not, it is a toxic form of manipulation. For the sake of ourselves and humanity, we all need to call it out when we see it, educate each other, and resolve to never use these tactics again.

[1] Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”

[2] Nonviolent Communication (NVC) by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD. (See Com101 – Recommended Resources for more info.)

[3] Wikipedia.org, “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”. Retrieved 7 Dec 2022.

[4] https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html – Retrieved 7 Dec 2022.

[5] https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html – Retrieved 7 Dec 2022.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – Needs Maslow’s Model Missed

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Signals Are Unmet Needs

Go back to the Table of Content for this section on needs.

Go back to the Table of Contents for Communication 101 series.

Com101 – Signals Are Unmet Needs

Kinky Poly Danny — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 01:04:37 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

This is an article in the Communication 101 series. Click here for the Table of Contents.

We’ve already talked about how emotions are our bodies sending us chemical signals that something is up. Aside from the four basic emotions of joy, sadness, anger, and fear, what are some other signals that our bodies send to us to let us know we have a need that’s not being met? How about hunger? That’s a signal. Feeling cold and the need to get warm; that’s a signal. Feeling tired is a signal. All of these are valid feelings because they are telling us that we have a specific need that is not being met and they don’t blame other people for it.

I’m going to break down this topic in to a couple major articles. Here they:

Article: Com101 – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Article: Com101 – Needs Maslow’s Model Missed
Article: Com101 – Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness
Article: Com101 – Needs & Hiding from Happiness
Article: Com101 – Choosing To Get Our Needs Met

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

If you’ve read all those articles listed above, you can also check out:

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Stories Become Our Reality

Go back to the Table of Contents.

Com101 – Stories Become Our Reality

Kinky Poly Danny — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 23:19:38 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

This is an article in the Communication 101 series. Click here for the Table of Contents.

Let’s talk about how we lie to ourselves about our feelings. We are going to pick this right up from the previous chapter’s question, “emotionally, where am I at?” That usually prompts a response that sounds like, “I feel ____.” When humans fill in that blank, it’s often ripe with pitfalls, self-sabotage, blame, and manipulation. For example: “I feel unheard and it’s a 5. I feel jealous at a 7. I feel cheated. It’s a 4. I feel hurt. It’s an 8.”

For the rest of this chapter, I’m going to omit the intensity ratings so we can focus on the word rather than the number.

Remember in round 2 of “where am I at?” we ask, “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?” Using that question, can you spot the real feelings verses the blame-filled fake feelings in the following example phrases? I feel sad. I feel lost. I feel unheard. I feel abandoned. I feel frustrated. I feel angry. I feel cheated. I feel silenced. I feel tricked. I feel vengeful. I feel regret. I feel guilty. I feel bored. I feel cold (temperature-wise). I feel jealous. I feel provoked. I feel embarrassed. I feel worthless. I feel overwhelmed. I feel fed-up. I feel powerless.

That round 2 question becomes a powerful way to filter out words that give away our power while also provoking others to defend themselves. Considering how the words we choose will interact with others can help us see which words describe raw, uninterpreted, feelings and which words are mixtures of feelings, memories, and self-serving stories. We find that blame often masquerades as a feeling.

What’s interesting about blame is that it also implies a victim. A victim has been somehow “wronged” by someone or something and that other party becomes the one who gets blamed. I’m going to start using the phrase “victim blaming” to call out that “someone is acting like a victim and that victim is blaming someone else for their current unpleasant feelings.”

By taking on the role of the victim, we are giving away our power. We permission ourselves to be helpless because of outside forces. It’s convenient because being helpless also allows us to shrug responsibility and pretend we have no power over ourselves or our situation. At the same time, we get to charge someone else with the responsibility of fixing our discomfort for us.

Let’s go through all the example “feelings” from a couple paragraphs ago to really point out the victim blaming words. I’m going to pass each “emotion” through our round 2 question, “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?”

Phrase	Round 2 Results
I feel sad.	Just me.
I feel lost.	Blaming self or someone else? Lost from where? Victim blaming.
I feel unheard.	By who? Victim blaming.
I feel abandoned.	By who? Victim blaming.
I feel frustrated.	Just me.
I feel angry.	Just me.
I feel cheated.	By who? Victim blaming.
I feel silenced.	By who? Victim blaming.
I feel tricked.	By who? Victim blaming.
I feel vengeful.	At who? Victim blaming.
I feel regret.	Blaming self? Victim blaming.
I feel guilty.	By who? Or by which voice from my past? Victim blaming.
I feel bored.	Just me.
I feel cold (temperature-wise).	Just me.
I feel jealous.	Of who? Victim blaming.
I feel provoked.	By who? Victim blaming.
I feel embarrassed.	In front of who? Victim blaming.
I feel worthless.	In who’s eyes? Victim blaming.
I feel overwhelmed.	Just me.
I feel fed-up.	With who or what? Victim blaming.
I feel powerless.	By who or what? Powerless over who or what? Victim blaming.

By using words that subtly project blame and allow ourselves to be the victim in our story, we help our story come true. Our stories become our reality. We help ourselves become the victim and we help that other party become the reason. Instead of “I feel _____,” we find ourselves using phrases like, “you made me feel _____.” “You made me feel,” is a very clear statement of blame where the victim is giving away all their power and handing responsibility for their emotions over to someone else.

The victim wants the world to believe someone else is responsible for their emotions. It’s convenient because it means the victim doesn’t have to learn, grow, or change in any way. They simply give away all their power and then make a big stink about it and demand the other person give it back. Now the other person is to blame because they took the victim’s power away. Not quite. The victim gave away their power so they could demand it back. It was a quick way to make someone else responsible for their discomfort and suggest that the other person needs to fix their behavior or fix the victim’s situation. They simply blame the world around them for their discomfort and the world is expected to fix it for them.

Surprisingly, acting like we have no power and blaming others often works for manipulating people into giving us what we want. We wouldn’t see people using these tactics if they didn’t sometimes give the victim results. We see adults making big scenes in customer service lines the same way children throw tantrums about not getting what they want in the toy isle. We take our sad friends out to dinner when their boss is unhappy with them. We see politicians blaming each other and shrugging responsibility. Then, we see people pleasures falling all over each other to save these poor victims from their tragic circumstances.

These tactics seem to work pretty well until the day we find ourselves playing the victim in front of adults expecting us to also act like an adult. We get a dose of harsh reality when we realize we are acting like a cry baby or a bully, and these people simply aren’t buying it. Crying or yelling at the customer service representative does nothing if the store’s policy is, “we don’t interact with customers who cry or yell at us.”

Declaring “you made me feel” is a lie we tell ourselves so we can play the victim and absolve ourselves of any responsibility. What we’re really saying is, “I decided to feel this way because it lets me blame you for my situation and it permissions me to act out until someone fixes my situation for me.” At first, “you made me feel,” is permission to rial up our own emotions by repeating the story over and over again in our head. Eventually, it can turn into giving someone a piece of our mind or stomping off in a huff.

Things start to get scary when, “you made me feel” escalates and becomes permission to retaliate. When unbridled, this can be taken to levels that feel righteousness. We not only feel justified in blaming, but now we feel justified in seeking to hurt someone as revenge for our unpleasant feelings and unpleasant situation. The phrase, “hurt people, hurt people,” tends to come true as our stories become our reality. Hurting people on purpose is abusive behavior. When “you made me feel” escalates to retaliation and revenge, we are falsely justifying and trying to permission the use of abusive behavior.

Abusive behavior is abusive behavior regardless of the story that was told to allow it and regardless of who is telling the story. “I get to hurt them because they hurt me,” is a story that allows abusive behavior. “It’s okay. I know they didn’t mean to hurt me again. They have a lot of childhood trauma,” is a story that allows abusive behavior.

Choosing the role of the victim turns into a toxic position where the only way out of victimhood is to force someone else to change. The bigger our story becomes, the more we act out and try to exercise control over the other person. As a victim, we claim no responsibility. We claim to have no power over our own emotions; therefore, the other person must do something. We believe our own victim story and we act accordingly. Our stories become our reality.

How do we get out of this trap? How do we regain our power? What emotions are we actually responsible for? Let’s take a moment to look at what real emotions are.

Chemicals and colors

What are feelings? What are they for and how do they work? To answer these questions, let’s start with a simple analogy, a color wheel.

Let’s say our raw, uninterpreted, feelings are like the colors that an artist uses to paint a canvas with. The painter has three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. The painter also has black and white. From here the painter can make a very larger range of colors by mixing these primary colors together. On top of that, the painter can add black or white to darken or lighten whatever color was mixed. A simple example would be to mix equal amounts of the yellow and the blue paint to create the color green. Green is a secondary color. From there we could add a little black to create a nice dark forest green.

Green is a color on its own, but it’s also a mixture of two primary colors, yellow and blue. The forest green may be a little darker, but it also has a story attached to it. We named it “forest” green. We are taking this dark green and projecting onto it with the idea and the memory of the color of a forest. We’re not just seeing it for what it is, dark green. Now we are passing the color through the filter of our mind and our experiences to project some of ourselves onto it with the story, “it looks like the color of a forest.”

Our brain’s emotions work much the same way only with chemicals. We have a few primary chemicals that create some primary emotions, like joy and sadness. Then those chemicals can mix to give us more complex secondary emotions, like bittersweet. All those chemical emotions then pass through the filter of our mind and our experiences to project some of ourselves onto them with a story like, “that time I was crying at my dog’s grave while remembering all the good times we had.” In an instant, the chemical emotions get replaced by the brain’s interpretation of those chemical emotions. They are not signals anymore, they are stories. We begin to use phrases like, “I feel like ____,” and “I think I feel ____.” These phrases are red flags for someone using interpretations of chemical signals instead of actual chemical signals.

Humans are also able to imagine other people’s stories about interpretated emotions as if they were our own. We can do this even if we don’t have that particular memory. Did you recall being at your dog’s grave or an imagined dog’s grave? Did you imagine your cat’s grave instead? Did you imagine someone else standing over their dog’s grave? Did you get a bittersweet feeling regardless of which image your brain conjured up?

In the same way our brain can turn chemical signals into stories, we can also turn stories into feelings. A story may bring up interpreted emotions and then we will feel the chemical signals from that imagery. This happens all the time. This is how we relate to each other every day. It’s simply part of being human.

Scientists are still working on proving how many basic chemical emotions we have. Some theories say there are four: joy, sadness, anger, and fear. Other theories suspect six and add in disgust and surprise.[1] These emotions are also referred to as our primitive emotions. Each one comes down to chemicals in the brain that are trying to send us a signal about getting our needs met. For example, a chemical called serotonin is responsible for feelings of joy.

Remember, there are no good or bad emotions. Emotions are just chemical signals where our body is trying to tell us something. They are trying to communicate a need to our brain so we can do something about it. Our brain starts making up stories as it tries to figure out the meaning behind the signals. This is both a blessing and a curse.

Our history, memories, education, mood, perspective, and basically every experience we’ve ever had, all act as a filter that our emotions unconsciously pass through. Our brain makes up a story as we naturally try to figure out why we are experiencing these chemical signals. Our brain asks itself, “what is causing these feelings?” and “what do we need to do in response to these feelings?”

This ability is marvelous. This is how we humans are able to live from day to day. It’s why we decide to find food when we are hungry and adjust the thermostat when we feel a chill. Our brain’s ability to reason why we feel something, and imagine what can be done about it is one of humanity’s superpowers. Unfortunately, our mind is so good at this that it has also become a master at pulling the wool over our own eyes.

Our brain leads us astray by viewing our emotions through a lens that is not reality, but rather our assumptions about realty. This is a version of reality that is very easily warp and adjusted for self-serving conclusions and justifying assumptions that our imagination already decided on. This lens tints everything we experience as it looks for cause and effect. Again, this is a blessing and a curse. It’s also alarming how hard it is to even realize we are viewing the world through a lens.

A simple example of this lens’ affect is the “rose-colored glass” analogy for when someone is in love. The idea being, when someone is in love, they see everything through a rosy filter that projects an overly positive outlook on everything they experience. Their view of the outside world is tinted based on their internal state. In some cases, it’s a blessing, in others it may be a curse. Either way, it’s hard for the one in love to realize they are wearing those rose-colored glasses. Meanwhile, the presence of the rosy lens on the lover’s perspective is painfully obvious to everyone else.

Our unconscious brain does this all so fast and so often that we don’t even realize it’s skipped passed the chemical signals and landing on the interpretations of those signals. Our unconscious brain seems to drop us off on the other side of the made-up story as if it was fact. Immediately, our focus is on who or what is to blame for our decidedly unpleasant feelings. Subconsciously, we react to the story by giving it a name that sounds like an emotion but is really just a cleverly disguised criticism or assumption. From there, that made-up story becomes our perceived reality, and our perceived reality becomes the way we interact with our reality.

I want to repeat that, “our brain’s made-up story becomes our reality.” That sentence was not an exaggeration. From our brain’s point of view, “this is clearly how the world works! This is not my perspective, it’s merely an observation of that facts!” The story gets treated as if it is a fact and we start to operate as such. This is our brain pulling the wool over our own eyes. Our perspective is not a fact, it’s an assumption. In moments, we start acting on that assumption. Now we are actively making it into reality.

When we find ourselves in a cold room feeling a chill, do we assume the thermostat needs adjustment or does our mind quickly pass over a list of people who might have changed it on us. How quickly do we create scenarios of all the people who created this moment where we must stop what we were doing to get up and adjust the temperature? It would be grand if we could simply feel a little chilly and then adjust the temperature, but we don’t. We find someone to blame for our state of feeling chilly, even if that someone was our past self who touch the thermostat yesterday. We can go from feeling a little chilly to feeling blaming-soaked annoyance in less than a second. Our brain uses our limited perspectives and assumptions to become the victim.

Let’s say, for some reason or another, I feel abandoned. “Abandoned” is not an emotion, it’s a story. The idea of being “abandoned” is something that my brain came up with when trying to understand why I’m feeling a particular combination of the sad and scared signals. My subconscious realizes I’ve felt this combination of emotions before, and my brain replays the stories I’ve collected behind my memories of this combination of chemical emotions. I project my past experiences onto the emotions, and I recall being “abandoned.” It’s a story about how someone else left me alone and I felt sad and scared at that time. I jump from, “I feel sad and scared,” to “I feel abandoned.” Then “abandoned” becomes my reality as I act like the victim and point at the person who is to blame for my abandonment. “I feel like you abandoned me,” quickly becomes, “you abandoned me.”

As a small child, it’s understandable to blame someone for our feelings because we are incapable of getting our own needs met. When we are very young, we are directly dependent on our parents and other adults to get our needs met. Our parents will, inevitably, let us down. Growing out of this seemingly learned behavior of expecting someone else to get our needs met for us as we are growing up can be very difficult. Most adults, including yours truly, fall into the trap of blaming others for our feelings and for not anticipating or meeting our needs. Saying, “I feel abandoned,” implies a story of how someone did this to us. It creates blame. This is how we find ourselves using phrases like, “You made me feel.” It’s because our mind has already assumed a self-serving story and has attached blame to it. Then the story becomes our own personal reality.

As adults, we are very capable of meeting our own needs. The question is, have we grown out of looking for others, like our parents or partners, to anticipate and meet our needs for us. When our needs are not met, do we still act like children trying to get our needs met by others? Are we still using temper tantrums and sulking to get our needs met? What if we did the opposite and acted like mature adults who are capable of meeting their own needs?

Many words that we think are expressions of our feelings are actually labels for stories about our interpreted feelings. These stories almost always have blame attached to them. “I feel abandoned,” is a story made up from feeling sad and scared. “I feel unheard,” is a story made up from feeling frustrated. “I feel cheated,” is a story about feeling angry, scared, and sad. “I feel guilty,” is a story about feeling sad and scared.

Voice Emotions, Not Stories

The realization that my brain was mislabeling stories as emotions and blaming others was a scary piece of information for me. I immediately didn’t trust my own emotions or my own words. I was suddenly afraid to name my feelings because I realized I had been doing it wrong my whole life. I had been subtly blaming everyone and everything for my emotions, even when I was very consciously attempting to communicate in “healthy ways.” Well, at the time, I thought they were, “healthy ways.”

Previously I had been using communication tools and templates from the book, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” by The Gottman Institute. This included using the phrase, “I feel ____,” instead of the phrases, “I feel like,” “I feel like you,” “I think I feel,” “I think I feel like,” “you made me feel,” and “you made me feel like.”

However, the phrase “I feel ____,” often backfired on me. Sometimes, I would state how I felt, and the other person would get offended. It didn’t make any sense really, I was just stating an emotion, or so I thought. Meanwhile, the person I just subtly blamed would naturally make an effort to defend themselves. They would reply with words that felt like an attack to me. It makes sense to me now. They were defending themselves because I put them in that position by hitting them with blame disguised as an emotion.

Here’s the thing, “I feel ____,” is a very healthy form of communication when used with chemical emotions. It can also be a very unhealthy form of communication that can create animosity and damage relationships when used with interpreted emotions. The question is, how can we tell the difference if they are all labeled “emotions”?

Years later, I found the book, “Nonviolent Communication”, by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD. This book also recommended the phrase, “I feel ____,” over all those other phrases I mentioned a moment ago. However this book also came with a list of valid emotions and fake emotions. I was floored when I saw that the word “unheard” was listed as not being a real emotion. “I feel unheard,” was a phrase I was purposely trying to use more often to keep situations from escalating. Being heard was the number one thing I struggled with in misunderstandings with loved ones. I routinely felt like I would listen to the other person’s side of things but I would never get my turn to be heard. I was purposely calling out, “I don’t feel heard,” more often to try to change this pattern. Unfortunately, it only worked half the time. Why was this? Was it because it was, what that book called, a fake emotion?

I found myself using Nonviolent Communication’s lists of real and fake emotions often. I had a cheat sheet for finding better words to describe valid feelings, but I didn’t really understand why it worked and I didn’t always have the cheat sheet with me. I questioned why some emotions were labeled real and some were labeled fake. Today I know better. I can see the list of chemical signals and core emotions verses interpreted emotions and stories of blame. Now I know why “unheard” was listed as a fake emotion. Now I know that feeling “unheard” is a victim blaming story about how the other person is failing to listen. What a convenient, self-serving feeling.

It wasn’t until I made the connection to primary emotions being like primary colors and how my brain’s stories turn chemical signals into interpreted emotions that things became easy. Instead of carrying or memorizing a list of real and fake emotions, I can breakdown whatever I’m feeling until I get rid of the story. Usually this leads to either naming one of the four basic emotions of joy, sadness, anger, and fear, or naming another simple signal like hunger or temperature.

It may come as no surprise, that a lot of the time I end up saying, “I feel sad, scared, and angry.” Yet, when I find myself saying this phrase once again, I know I’ve found the bottom level of my emotions. I found the stopping point. What’s different every time is the journey that I just took through my mind to get to that stopping point. The journey from story to basic chemical signals reveals what my unconscious mind attempted to do without telling me. Now it is obvious which signals kicked started my unconscious mind only to drop me off in the land of “you made me feel.”

This is how I landed on the round 2 question of “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?” What I’m really asking is, “am I feeling a core chemical emotion or an interpreted emotion? Is this a story or a core signal?” When my emotions are elevated, I don’t find much success with asking myself an intellectual question like, “is this an interpreted emotion?” Instead, I find it much easier to ask myself to identify and remove people and events from my story. In doing so, blame also gets removed along with them.

I have also found a lot of success in asking, “who am I blaming?” Then I can remove that person from the narrative.

Sometimes, I discover that the person I’m blaming is myself. This still counts as blame and it’s an attempt to shrug responsibility by judging myself. Now I’m both the victim and the one being blamed. How is this possible? Odds are we all have internalized versions of our parents, teachers, and many other childhood authority figures. The voices from these past experiences end up echoing in our subconscious and set the tone of how we talk to and judge ourselves. If I find myself blaming myself or coming down hard with self-criticism, I can ask myself, “whose voice do I hear?” Many times, I can trace it back to someone else’s voice in my head and a moment in my memory where I had an interaction with them.

For example, say I suddenly feel guilty when I realize I’m talking loudly in the library. I feel guilty and I’m blaming myself. “I should know better,” right? I feel guilty because there’s a librarian in my memory that once punished me by shaming me in front of my friends. Now my mind has taken on the responsibility of enforcing that librarian’s rules so I don’t risk getting shamed or punished again in the future. In that moment when I realize I’m talking too loud, I’m afraid of being punished. My body is sending that core signal, “I’m scared.” Then my brain jumps in before I even realize it and turns “I’m scared,” it into “I feel guilty and I’m blaming myself for this unpleasant feeling.”

This journey from story to core signals is at the heart of personal mastery over our emotions. We don’t strive to ignore our urges and emotions, that would be invalidating ourselves and bottling up. At the same time, when we strive to feel our feelings, I’m not suggesting we replay the blame-soaked story over and over again until our emotions spiral out of control. When we feel our feelings, we are actively doing the work to take our minds on that journey from story to core signals. That’s how we can understand what’s really behind our interpreted emotions and all the urges we may be experiencing as a reaction to them.

Sitting with our emotions is not meant to be a spiral or a victim blaming pity party. It’s a path with a destination. The goal is to name our core chemical emotions. To walk this path, we allow ourselves to feel our emotions by asking, “where am I at?” Then we ask the round 2 question of, “does this emotion describing just me or does it include other people or events?” We strip away the blame and release ourselves from having to play the victim who can’t get their own needs met. We discover our core chemical signals, and on the way, we realize we have needs that are not being met.

Now we have a better understanding of how our brain pulls the wool over our own eyes using assumptions and victim blaming in the form of interpreted emotions. We also know how to detect and drop this blame by asking, “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?” in round 2 of “where am I at?”

It’s taken a lot of work to get here. We’ve faced our emotions, exposed our story, and dug down to our core signals. Next, I’d like to share a shortcut for all that work with you. It’s a bit of a mind hack. It’s a trick that can let us jump through all this hard work when we’re in the middle of an emotional moment using A Caricature of our Emotions.

Reference

[1] “A Model for Basic Emotions Using Observations of Behavior in Drosophila,” Simeng Gu, Fushun Wang, Nitesh P. Patel, James A. Bourgeois, Jason H. Huang. Frontiersin.org article.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – A Caricature of our Emotions

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Emotionally, Where Am I At? (Part 2)

Go back to the Table of Contents.

Com101 – Emotionally, Where Am I At? (Part 2)

Kinky Poly Danny — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 22:42:15 +0000

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

This is an article in the Communication 101 series. Click here for the Table of Contents.

Last time, in part 1, we compared the alert lights on our car’s dashboard to our internal emotional dashboard with core signals that pop up to alert us of potential situations. Those core signals are standard to all humans and can’t be argued with. This article is going to focus on getting to those core signals and then go over some tools we can use to hone these skills.

Use Simple Words

As stated in the last section, I ask myself, “where am I at?” Then, after picking and rating a word that describes my struggle, I ask myself, “does this emotion describing just me or does it include other people?” Then I break it down until I’m using words that only describe me. Words like, “I feel sad and it’s a 3,” or “I’m emotionally drained and I’m at a 6.”

When I share my rating, I found the simpler the vocabulary, the better the result. I shoot for words a 5 to 10 year old would understand. Instead of saying “I feel ambivalent and it’s a 7. I feel incredulous and I’m a 6,” I say, “I feel confused and it’s a 7. I feel surprised and I’m a 6.” Using a complex or uncommon word might seem extra precise to me but it often backfires. I find it can confuse the other person, especially if their emotions are also elevated. Uncommon words tend to result in even less understanding in an already tense moment.

I find complex vocabulary can also turn into conversations about what words mean rather than talking about current alerts on someone’s emotional dashboard. On the light side, this can accidently derail a conversation. On a more sinister note, it can be a tactic used to avoid the subject of emotions. Vocabulary can accidently come off condescending or insulting which can result in frustration for the other person. It may even be used to intellectual bully the other person, “I can’t believe you don’t know what incredulous means. It means I’m surprised.” Avoid complex vocabulary and you will benefit from avoiding accidently insulting or belittling your listener.

If someone is using a ridiculous vocabulary to minimize or bully you, set a boundary. “Hold on, I’m emotional right now and a little overwhelmed already. Big words are not welcome right now. I’m only going to use and accept words a 10 year old would understand.”

Another reason I use a grade school vocabulary is because we all have slightly different meanings attached to words. I might realize I’m angry and then try to interpret that into a word that describes the intensity of my anger. I could say, “I’m miffed.” Well, what does that word mean to each of us? Is it, “I’m angry at a 1,” or, “I’m angry at a 5?” It’s hard to tell. On top of that, the other person will have their own ideas of how intense the word “miffed” is. I advise keeping it simple, “I’m angry and I’m a 3.”

In addition to simple words, I also find I can rate the simple actions that my emotions want me to take. It’s often the action I’m struggling against. Again, I want to only share actions that don’t involve other people. “I want to break down and cry. I’m an 8.” “I want to run out the front door and keep running. I’m a 5 out of 10.” “I want to rage quit this job. I’m at a 6.” “I want to go hide under a blanket, I’m a 6.” “I just want to scream at a 7.”

Rating the action often lessens my body’s desire to actually do whatever I just described. As soon as I say, “I want to run out the front door and I’m a 5,” I can feel my body relaxing and the urge to run becomes less of an exclamation point and more of a question mark in my mind. Somehow saying it encourages my mind to consider, “wait, is that really what I want to do? Is that even useful?” Instead of fighting an urge to stomp off, I find myself asking, “wait, do I actually want to stomp off right now?”

Notice that I’m describing how rating my struggle helps me become clear with myself about myself. Why would it be so important to get clear with myself? It’s because it wakes me up to the fact that my body and my emotions are sending me signals and I may or may not be listening. In some cases, I may be downright ignoring the signals. In other cases, I might be already acting on emotions, possibly even overreacting. Either way, as soon as I say, “I’m scared and it’s a 6,” it’s like a light goes off and I can see myself. It’s the first step toward emotional self-mastery.

Timeout After 2

Based on everything we talked about in the previous article, “Emotions Are Real,” if my emotions are anything higher than a 2, then I know that my thinking is impaired. I say to myself, “woah, wait a minute. I’m sad and it’s a 4. Hold on here. Am I even thinking clearly right now?” I can look down at my hands and tell myself to stop typing that text message to my boss. I can set the phone down and take a few deep breaths.

When I’m interacting with other people, if either one of us is more than a 2, I now call a “Timeout. I love you.” Where appropriate, I might replace the “I love you,” with “I appreciate you.” It might sound like this, “Hold on. Timeout. I appreciate you. We seem elevated. I need to take 5 or 10 minute break.”

I believe calling a timeout when someone’s emotions are higher than a 2 is a humungous superpower that I didn’t previously possess. All my life I thought the phrase, “timeout,” was a last resort or an eject button. It was reserved for those moments where I found myself saying in my head, “I can’t do this anymore. We’re about to crash.” My “plan” used to be to wait until emotions were an 8 or a 9 before calling a timeout. With my emotions that high, my brain wasn’t working right. Half the time I couldn’t remember to call for a timeout like I had intended to. I literally set myself up to fail by planning to wait until I was overwhelmed before saying “Timeout. I’m overwhelmed.”

What’s worse, if I did call for a timeout when I was an emotional 8 or 9, I would do it very badly. I don’t know about you, but when I’m overwhelmed, I’m going to do anything and everything poorly. I would turn and walk away to another room to take my timeout, or I would go straight out the front door. In that overwhelmed moment, both options seemed like a great way to calm myself down. The issue was, I would do it without saying a word to the other person.

They would be baffled and confused. Some reported feeling abandoned or even “broken up with.” Others would chase me into the next room and continue to yell, only now it was, “don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you.” The Gottman Institute calls that the “Pursuer-Distancer Dynamic”. I’ve also heard it called a “Pursuer & Pursued” pattern. If you are familiar with attachment styles, it’s a classic pattern of and avoidant attachment style interacting with an anxious attachment style in an emotional moment.

If I did actually try to communicate that I needed space when I was an 8 or 9 (overwhelmed), I would also do it really poorly. I’d say blunt things like, “I can’t take this anymore,” “leave me alone,” or “I give up.” Then, after those brilliant words, I’d walk away or out the front door. Again, people reported feeling abandoned or even “broken up with.” That doesn’t exactly communicate, “Timeout. I love you. I need about 10 minutes. I’d like to take some space and breathe. Maybe I’ll go sit in the bedroom or go for a walk around the block.” Which version would you rather hear from someone you care about, “Timeout. I love you,” or “I give up”?

To reiterate, the lesson is to plan on calling a timeout when your struggle is anything above a 2. Aim for taking action the moment your emotions are between 3 and 5 so a timeout will always be long before you are at an 8 or 9. So call a timeout as soon as possible and practice doing it often. Your mind will be in a much better state when you call the timeout, and you will be a thousand times more likely to do it with polite respect.

I even call timeouts on myself when I’m alone. For example, say I’m driving in my car and I don’t realize that I’m playing some toxic conversation in my head over and over again. I get to my destination, a party at my friend’s house. I realize I feel a little off. Something is up with me and I’m struggling with something. I say to myself, “Woh-woh. Timeout. I feel a little bit off. Like a 5 or 6. Okay, what’s up? Where am I at? Hmm. I’m amped up. I’m like a 7. Hold on. Serious timeout now. Why is this music playing so loud?” I switch off the stereo. “I’m just going to breath for a second before I go into the party.” Then I take my deep breaths while counting seconds in my head, “1, 2, 3, 4, and, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and…”

After I’m calm, I just sit with the emotion. I rate the intensity of my struggle again and break up the phrase, “I’m amped,” into smaller pieces. “Okay, I’m freaked out about running into my exe and it’s a 7.” At this point, I’m still in round one of rating my struggle. I realize now that I’ve been playing an imaginary argument with them in my head the whole drive over here. I’m practicing an outcome that involves arguing at a party. I’m aware I’ve got some alerts that are lit up on my emotional dashboard and I know they are not core signals yet.

For round two I ask myself, “does this emotion describing just me or does it include other people or events?” Then I sit with that question for a minute. “Okay, I’m anxious. It’s a 6. I’m angry. It’s a 5. I’m sad. It’s a 5. Wow, I’m scared. That’s a 7.” From there I can sit with it and dig into why I’m feeling all these things, and I’ll talk more about that step later in this series. Time and time again, what really comes to light is that I’m not feeling just one thing. I’m feeling many things. I’m not just anxious. I’m anxious, plus angry, plus sad, plus scared. That’s a lot at once. No wonder my emotions were at a 7, they were all stacked up.

What’s even more amazing is that by the time I see the core signals my body was trying to send me, I start to see how my brain was making up a story and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the current examples, I realized I was angry, sad, and scared. I being to see that I’m afraid of a confrontation with my exe where I will have to defend myself and my boundaries. I’m scared because I don’t want to have an argument with a bully in front of all my friends, yet what was I just doing? I was replaying an imaginary argument in front of all my friend on the whole drive over here. I was practicing an outcome that was the complete opposite of what my body was on high alert about. I was beginning to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that was the polar opposite of what I want. Thanks again brain.

The core signals were pretty simple, but my brain intercepted them. Rather than just letting me feel the signals, my brain jumped two steps ahead and starting creating a made-up story and someone to blame. The story was even trying to give me justification for having an argument at a party. Isn’t that the truth? In our pretend arguments in our mind, we get to be so righteous and they are always so very wrong. Then I started practicing that outcome. I repeated it over and over again the whole drive to the party. “We fall to the level of our training,” remember? Some might call it worry, or anxiety but regardless of the word we used, we are practicing an outcome and we are way more likely to act as we practiced. We are doing some serious manifesting in an accidently self-sabotaging way.

Why not practice it all going right instead? What if I imagine and replay a version of the story where she’s totally polite and respectful and I’m totally polite and respectful? How about a version where I politely put a halt to any interactions with my toxic exe and then we both smile and have a good time while keeping our distance.

Reframing our brain’s default narrative is going to be another step in this getting clear with yourself process that I’ll cover in future pages. For the moment, I just want you to see that our communication starts inside us, long before we open our mouths to attempt to interact with someone. We get to choose the conversations we practice in our mind’s eye. Let’s choose a version where we get to practice being experts at owning our emotions and unshakably patient with ourselves and our conversation counterpart.

Next time you’re emotions are a little off, try calling a timeout on yourself and see what happens for you. Try asking yourself, “where am I at,” and “does this emotion describing just me or does it include other people or events?” You may find yourself saying, “I’m anxious at a 6 and angry at a 5. It’s no wonder my emotions are at a 7. That’s a lot at once.” This simple acknowledgement and validation of our own emotions can be powerful for owning what we do with them. Doing all this can be a step toward relaxing our emotions and regaining control of our mental faculties.

How easy would your life be if conflict interactions and misunderstanding started with being in control of yourself and the story your brain invents as a way to act throughout the situation. To do that, we must start with a timeout to check-in with ourselves.

Tool: Sit With It: Refocus On Me

This is the first part of the “sit with it” process. The process starts with “Refocus on me.” The full, “Sit with it” process can be found in the index.

Use this tool when you have a moment to actual sit with whatever emotions you are currently experiencing. A timeout should be called first if you are in the middle of something or other people are present. I often excuse myself from situations by “stepping outside for a phone call,” excusing myself for a moment to “grab something from the car,” or a restroom break.

The goal is to take a moment to actually experience whatever we are feeling and then uncover the core signals our body is sending to us. It is likely we are focused on external factors. Let’s take a moment to exclude those things and refocus on only our internal experience.

“Sit with it” Part 1, “Focus on me”

Rate your struggle on a scale from 1 to 10 with the prompt, “where am I at?”
Breathe – Whatever your highest rated item was, take that many deep breaths with the breathing technique 4 in and 6 out and: “1, 2, 3, 4, and, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and…”
Just me? – Ask yourself, “does this emotion describing just me or does it include other people or events?” Continue finding better words and rating them until you have basic emotions and signals that don’t involve other people or external forces.
Repeat? – Go back to step 1 as many times as need to. It may take a couple rounds to dial in on emotions and signals that don’t involve anyone else.
Acknowledge & validate – Take a moment to thank your human form for sending you these signals. Acknowledge and validate whatever you are experiencing with a phrase like, “wow. I’m feeling a lot of different emotions, no wonder I’m upset,” or “okay, I’m feeling all this and now I know it. I get it now. Thank you for letting me know. I’ll think about it, and I’ll take appropriate actions.”

The appropriate actions are the next steps in the “Sit with it” process, which will be explained in later articles. However, the “Focus on me” step is powerful for becoming calm and clear. It works well as a standalone tool to regain focus.

Exercise: Practicing a Self Check-in

“We fall to the level of our training” when we are emotional. The goal of this exercise is to build a habit of doing a self check-in. We are specifically focusing on doing a check-in when we are not very emotional so we practice getting it right.

1. Prep: Pick a habit

Pick a habit you already do a few times a day by default. For example, pouring a cup of coffee/tea, brushing your teeth, before the first bite of food at each meal, driving to and from work, or plugging in your phone. We’re looking for something we already do between 2 and 4 times a day. You can also pick a few habits that only happen once a day and use all of them as trigger moments. For example, “when I make my bed in the morning and before I turn on the TV to relax after work”.

Don’t pick a habit you don’t have. If you don’t already brush your teeth 3 times a day, don’t say “I’ll do a self check-in 3 times a day when I brush my teeth.” That would be trying to build 2 new habits at once. That would be self-sabotage.

Make sure you can also spend up to 3 minutes doing this exercise with the existing habit(s). For example, you may or may not have a minute to pause before you take your first sip of coffee or tea each day. Do you have 3 minutes to do this practice before putting the car in “drive” when leaving work? What about before you press the “on” button on the TV remote? All of those might be great moments for some people and terrible moments for others. Consider what is best for you.

Steer clear of rushed moments. “When I pick up my keys,” might not be the right habit to choose because you may be rushing out the door with your hands full.

If you are doing this as a group exercise, give everyone a moment to identify and pick one or more habits they are going to piggyback this new practice off of. Then go around the circle and have everyone share the habit they chose.

2. Prep: Make a note

Make a physical note to add to the existing habit you just picked that says:

Self Check-In

“T”
Rate
Timeout & Breathe
Refocus
Difference?

Ensure you can’t miss, overlook, or walk past the note. Make it a little annoying and in the way.

You can also make a “T” alarm on your phone that goes off a few minutes before you usually do the existing habit. For example, 5 minutes into your commute, or while the coffee is usually brewing.

If you are doing this as a group exercise, have everyone take action at the same time. Give everyone 5 minutes to write a physical note, take a photo of the steps with their phone, make alarms in their phone, text themselves, add events in their calendar or whatever they need to do to set themselves up for success with this daily practice. Using a phone to taking a photo of the next step, “3. Review the steps” can also be helpful for later, even though we haven’t read them as a group yet.

3. Review the steps

Don’t do these steps yet, simply read them first. If you are in a group, have someone read this section aloud to the group or take turns reading each paragraph.

“T” – At this step, make a “T” with your hands. This is the classic “timeout” signal in most sports games. Both hands are open and flat with all the fingers together. One hand is vertical, the other hand is horizontal and sitting on top of the vertical hand to make a very clear “T” shape. Think or say, “Timeout.”

Then, get the note that we made earlier. Don’t try to remember the steps. Yes, you probably can remember the steps while calm but it will be much less likely the day you’re emotional. So pull out the physical note, or navigate to the picture in your phone, or go stand next to the fridge and put your finger on the note that’s on the fridge door.

Rate – Say, “Where am I at?” Then, begin round one of rating your overall internal state and then break it down into smaller words as needed. Example: “I feel emotional. I’m a 4,” then “I’m anxious about what do make for dinner. That’s a 2. I’m a little mad at my brother. That’s a 4.”

Timeout & Breathe – At this step, think or say “timeout” a second time but ask for some space to process. “Timeout. I love you. I need a few minutes to breathe.” Then take as many deep breaths as you need, but always take at least one. A good rule of thumb, whatever your highest rated number was, take that many deep breaths or more.

Refocus – At this step, we use the “Refocus on me” tool from earlier in this article. Those steps were: Rate, Breathe, Just Me?, and Acknowledge, & validate. I know we just did some of those actions a moment ago, but this is an iterative process. We are getting in the habit of seeing we probably have to do the steps multiple times to identify our made-up stories, and core signals. (See previous heading for more details.)

Difference? – At this step, rate your internal state again and notice the difference between before and after we started. What thoughts come up now? Was there any small realizations, solutions, or ah-ha moments?

Repeat the steps as many times as you want.

The primary goal of this practice is to physically make the “T” with your hands and get your note in front of your face. Then always do the steps, regardless of how you feel. The “T” becomes the trigger. The habit we are building is, “when I make this ‘T’, I always stop and do a self check-in. I always pull my note out. I always say “timeout”, rate myself, ask for space, breathe, refocus myself, validate myself, and notice the difference in myself.”

Why? Because sometimes we become non-verbal and/or confused when we are upset. If we are practicing the “T” signal, it is more likely to become muscle memory. We are increasing the likelihood of find ourselves making this “T” unconsciously when we are upset. It’s a clear signal to us and to the other person when words are failing us. The “T” then becomes a trigger for getting the steps in your hand or front of your face. The chances of doing the steps skyrocket if the “T” starts to unconsciously appear when you’re emotional and the “T” always results in a break from the emotional moment to getting your cheat sheet.

The secondary goal is to learn how to gently bring yourself back to the steps until they are done. Yes, your mind and emotions might wander while trying to do this check-in. It’s okay. Don’t get angry or reprimand yourself. Simply noticed it with an “oops, I’m off track. No worries. Now where was I?” Then get back on track until you are done. You will glide through the steps eventual, be gentle with yourself until then.

Why? Because berating ourselves for being human or for not already having mastered something new is abusive behavior. It takes practice to build a new habit. We need to give ourselves that grace. If you do catch yourself calling yourself “stupid” or “useless” or berating yourself in any way, simply notice it with an “oops. No worries. I’m human and I have plenty of time to get the hang of this.” This topic is known as “negative self-talk” and it’s beyond the scope of this series, but I definitely recommend doing an online search about it if it’s something you find yourself doing.

4. Do the practice

Take a moment to actually do the steps described in “3. REVIEW THE STEPS,” above. This will also be the same thing you will do when your 3-times a day reminder is triggered.

If you are in a group, have everyone close their eyes and do the practice silently to themselves. Allocate 5 to 10 minutes to do the practice. When breathing, try to match the pace of the people breathing deeply around you. After you are finished with the last step, open your eyes and remain quite until everyone’s eyes are open. Then go around the circle and give everyone 2 minutes to either share about their experience or “pass” to the next person.

Now that you done the practice once. What other names do you know this by? Some people may call this, “a moment to decompress,” “a breather,” “getting centered,” “getting control of yourself,” “sitting with emotion,” “sit with it,” “meditation,” “taking space,” “quiet reflection,” “taking a moment,” or something else. It’s important to learn other names for this practice so we can recognize when other people are asking for this type of space to sit with their emotions.

5. Going Forward

From now on, when you see the note or your alarm goes off, make the “T” signal with your hands. Do this without question. If you are in a calm state, it will take less than a minute to do the practice. If you are not in a clam state, you will catch yourself and get your day back on track before you do any more damage or lose any more time spiraling in unrecognized emotion.

In the future, feel free to randomly make the “T” and do the practice at experimental times during your day. Try it before entering your job or before entering your home. Maybe before a meeting, or as soon as you get off work. Experiment with times you usually have more stress and then times when you usually have less stress. Experiment with a self check-in when you wish you could relax. Try doing it before reaching for whatever you normally use to wind down after work, like a beer, a snack, or a TV remote.

We are consciously doing the exercise often so we increase our chances of finding ourselves unconsciously doing it when we need it. Remember, “we fall to the level of our training” when we are emotional. We need to purposely make the “T” symbol and do steps a few times at low, medium, and high emotional states before we will find ourselves automatically doing it when we are in a more stressful situation. It takes time to build up to that unconscious reflex. Don’t rush yourself, just do the daily exercises. Be gentle on yourself, remember, it’s like going to the gym and building a muscle, it takes consistent repetition.

You don’t have to take this journey alone either. If starting a “practice group” or a “book club” seems right for you, do it. Send a text or email to get the ball rolling right away. You can find example text for that first message in the article, “Conscious Practice.” Look for the “Running A Practice Group” heading and you will find the sample text under step 2, Intentions.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – Stories Become Our Reality

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Emotionally, Where Am I At? (Part 1)

Go back to the Table of Contents.