“I remember being so shocked that day when I saw those two people secluded in a corner.” “I don’t remember that at all!” How is it possible that two people react so differently to the same event, the same given reality? The explanation for this derives from the fact that emotional experiences and reality data are two elements that are often in contrast, and their interaction is fundamental to understanding our worldly experience. We perceive not what exists but what we are i.e. our life with a wealth of experiences and emotions strongly conditions us and leads us to interpret the same reality in multiple ways.

What did the one who reported having had a shock feel when they saw two people secluded? How did they interpretate the episode and what kind of emotion did they feel? Why does another person who witnessed that same episode not remember it as relevant at all, indeed he almost doubts it ever existed?

The risk in such situations is to search for a unique fact, for what really happened and be in opposition between two different memories.

It is better to dwell for a moment on the emotional experiences of the two people who have different memories; different emotions create different perceptions of the same reality. If I experience exclusion from the two who seclude themselves, this experience will remain firmly fixed in my mind and will make me interpret what I see as something very painful. If, on the other hand, I don’t have this experience, I probably won’t even remember the episode of two who seclude themselves.

In this regard, the cognitivist theories on emotions, fruit of the research of S. Schachter and J.E. Singer, argue that thoughts play a fundamental role in the formation of emotional states. Since the physiological activation occurs first but then the individual must give meaning to this feeling to label it as an emotion, it therefore seems essential to understand what happens between an external stimulus and our response, so that we can intervene in the space that follows the external stimulus which precedes thought, emotion and then finally reactive behaviour. We also need to become aware of the filters and emotions that condition our formulations with respect to reality. As a result of the modes of thought used (distorted attributions, predictions and evaluations, dysfunctional beliefs) in situations that do not arouse such emotional activation in most, one can experience intense and disturbing emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, sadness and shame, often already experienced in the past and difficult to manage in the present.

It could be useful to implement a technique of cognitive-behavioural origin that is called “cognitive restructuring”, and which aims to replace negative automatic thoughts with other more adaptive and realistic thoughts thus helping the individual to effectively manage his or her painful emotional states and consequently behave in a more functional way (S. Sassaroli and R. Lorenzini). On the other hand, if we do not confront the emotion that the other person feels with respect to the same reality fact, but if we tend to only want to reduce our interlocutor to seeing the world through our eyes by trying to persuade him with logical arguments, the difficulty is not solved. It is not a question of convincing the other but of looking at the world with the other person`s eyes: then choose how to react to an external stimulus that can cause shock in one interlocutor, indifference in another. As V. Frankl says, “between the stimulus and the response there is a space”. In that space lies our power to choose our response. Our growth and our freedom lie in our response; our relationships with our partner, our work community, every kind of rapport we have would be much simpler and more liberating if we used this freedom of choice better!

Author: Lucia Coco

Source: Città Nuova