Emotional Reconstruction

Playing with Energy Work

Post Summary: Using energy work as a way to navigate difficult emotions. Get out of your head and embrace embodiment, using these mental health strategies to increase psychological well-being. Use emotional reconstruction and cognitive reappraisal to increase your emotional intelligence.

In my previous post, I presented my current model of emotions, based on the Theory of Constructed Emotion by Lisa Feldman Barret. According to my current model, emotions are interpretations of non-conscious processes, including physiological states, value judgements, etc.

Thinking of emotions as interpretations opens up for reinterpretation. If emotions are constructed, we have the power to reconstruct them.

Cognitive Reappraisal

Let’s say you’re in a situation that usually makes you nervous. Your body responds by going into a high-energy state that you usually interpret as anxiety, butterflies in your stomach etc.

According to research,¹ the worst thing you can do is try to suppress or avoid it. Paradoxically, this increases your level of activation, drawing you further into anxiety.²

A better approach is to accept it and try to be with it. This stops your activation from escalating. Unfortunately, you’re left still feeling anxious.

An even better approach is called “cognitive reappraisal”, a technique where you try to shift your mindset in the situation. You might think things like “this isn’t that bad”, or “I will be fine either way”.

My Approach - Emotional Reconstruction

I’ve been playing around with a tactic I haven’t found in the literature.³ It is related to cognitive reappraisal since it tries to “redirect” the emotion rather than suppressing or accepting it.

I call the “Emotional Reconstruction”, and it’s all about reinterpreting your physiological signals. Let’s say you’re about to hold a presentation at work and feel the butterflies sneaking in. In the “Emotional Reconstruction” approach, you would reinterpret the high-energy state as enthusiasm - reconstructing the emotional interpretation to something that serves you better.

Energy Work?

I hope I don’t offend spiritual sensibilities by writing this, but I have a hunch that this might be related to “energy work”. In my understanding, energy work is all about shifting your physiological state and the interpretation thereof, using techniques involving:

• Practices to shift your physiological state to another. Might be something as simple as raising your level of alertness, or relaxing tense muscles⁴

• Changing the way you interpret your physiological state - emotional reconstruction

• Change thoughts, actions, perspectives etc to affect your physiological state - related to CBT/Stoicism.

Historically, I’ve been repelled by the language/theory surrounding “energy work”. Why use the same term for wildly different things? I’ve heard “energy” being used to refer to emotions, muscle tension, the “mood” of a group, sensations, tonality (how you speak), word connotations etc. This conflation of concepts used to drive me crazy.

I’m moving towards a more curious stance. The more I experiment, the more I realize that the things I historically treated as different are entangled to a large degree. As such, a framework that highlights the interdependencies and fuzzy boundaries might help me navigate some aspects of life better. “Energy work” is such a framework. It might increase my ability to shift around the state of my immediate situation - my mindset, social environment, physiological state, etc.⁵

Rationalism and Antitheism

As I’ve touched on previously, there are some great stuff to be found in the realm of the hippies. Unfortunately, there is a lot of “cruft” as well - you might find a practice that has a lot of potential but is embedded or clustered with non-functional “vibey” elements.

The hippie rabbit hole

I have observed an increased attunement to emotions - and the ability to regulate them - when I hang out with people who are into energy work. I’m curious, but the concepts and terms used in these circles cause some allergic reactions.⁶

Some examples of energy work jargon: “energy”, “chakra”, “yin/yang”, ”shakti/shiva” etc.

Ick!

The most damning thing? I don’t know what aspects of the practices are functional, and what parts are historical fluff. Given that the domain of energy work is largely mental, I expect mentalizations to play a key role. If the tried-and-true mentalizations are based on frameworks involving historical religious concepts, I might just need to bite the bullet and play along.

The alternative would be to try to reconstruct energy work to fit my epistemological aesthetics. A tall order, given I know very little at this point. It also seems somewhat misguided, being based on an instinctual ick-reaction rather than a sound argument.⁷

I’d rather find some other way of relating to the practice.

Metamodern Energy Work

To make things more concrete, I’ll provide an example of how I want to relate to energy work. Let me set the scene…

I’ve had occasional recurring ball pain that I’ve never managed to handle except through painkillers and rest. I felt the pain and tension creep up on me at an event a while ago, caught it early on, and decided to try something new. I decided to think in terms of energy, with the pain/tension being like a ball of stuck energy. I then proceeded to “breathe it out”, taking deep breaths and mentalizing energy flowing from my ball, to my head, and back. After some time, the pain went away! Amazing!

Past me would have dismissed this story, citing the placebo effect as the explanation. Dismissing the scenario in this way misses the point, and is an example of a semantic stop sign. The interesting question is not “Does this prove that ‘energy’ exists?”. Making claims about the nature of reality based on ball-pain breathing treatments seems ill-advised, to say the least.

The interesting question, according to me, is “Is this way of managing ball pain reproducible?”. My goal is to not be incapacitated due to pain. If a visualisation combined with breathing does the trick I’m very happy to do it.

Slippery Slope into Woo?

There is a lingering fear⁸ here. Maybe this “testing out mindsets” is a slippery slope⁹ that will end up with me becoming deluded, accepting jumbled hippie worldviews with religious fervor. When I sense into this fear, I stumble upon rejection and judgment directed at my past self.

I’ve used judgment of my past self as a way to spur myself to evolve and move past who I used to be. Distancing myself from who I used to be involves a distaste directed at all things spiritual. I want to let go of this distaste, seeing as it doesn’t serve me anymore. Part of letting go is to reject the idea that I’m likely to flip and become a “true believer” once more.

Instead, I want to reframe my energy breathing by comparing it to a mentalization I use when squatting weights at the gym. A big part of weight-lifting is getting the right muscles to work together in harmony. One way to facilitate this coordination is to use “cues”. One such cue is to imagine a thread pulling my butt straight up, right when I push the weights up.

A squat

Now, am I afraid that I will start to literally believe in the thread? Hell no.

I want to hold the same frame when relating to energy - a group of mentalization practices that can help me shift my state with more grace. I’ll play with energy work in an utterly serious way, analyzing and adjusting my approach as I go along.

Let’s see where this takes me…

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I still have some slots for philosophical inquiry open in early January. Pretty much all of the people who have tried it this far have come back for round #2, and slots tend to close quickly. I’d love to inquire with you and help you navigate patterns of stuckness in your life.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2674518/

2. Personal experience agrees with these findings. I’m sure I’ve written about it, but I can’t find it.

3. This is likely to be a me-problem, rather than a literature-problem. But you never know.

4. extreme example: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation-changes-temperatures/

5. I’m leaning a bit on social proof as well, many fantastic people I’ve met in recent years are into energy work, enough to make me reasonably sure that there are some benefits to it.

6. I’m using an old metaphor of an “epistemic immune system”, responsible for rejecting potentially harmful ideas based on a prima facie categorization. Likely to slip into tribalism?

7. Also problematic because I’d lose out on potential knowledge by distancing myself from prior work

8. I thought about writing “unpleasant energy”, but was afraid the humour would get lost in transmission

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope