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Disassociate from Experiences – 2 Exercises for Emotional Control

Let me provide you with one of the most valuable tools you will ever hear about: the skill of disassociation. This tool is nothing new. Tony Robbins calls it “dissociating” and Jocko Willink calls it “detachment”. The ability to disassociate is a skill used by every master of emotion.

Essentially what it involves is separating yourself from your current emotions. you look at yourself as an outsider would see you. Then you try to direct the various ways you are acting or feeling. You poke and prod the specimen that is yourself, searching for inconsistency or irrationality.

When we have negative experiences, we tend to get sucked into the moment. We feel the worst of the worst when it comes to our emotions and our inability to manage them. This leads us to make poor decisions and act illogically. That is not the type of behavior befitting men.

What you need to be able to do is separate yourself from emotions so you can make good decisions. Or you can disassociate from emotion in order to lessen the pain of certain negative experiences. There are limitless benefits to dissociation and very few downsides.

Here is a simple exercise: when you find yourself in an emotionally painful situation, complete the following steps.

Stop. Take a mental step back and a deep breath.
In your mind, dissasociate yourself from your physical body. See yourself as if you were looking at someone else.
Turn the picture of yourself to a black and white photo.
Turn down the brightness on the image of yourself.
Now with the highly stimulating pieces of your emotions quieted, ask questions about yourself. Ask yourself if you are beeing rational. Ask yourself these questions ina calm, cool, collected manner.
Take inventory of everything that the person you are looking at (you) is feeling and analyze it objectively. There is no need to feel emotion here.
Wait until you are calm.

Another option is to take this exercise even further if you find you are not doing well.

Stop. Take a step back and a deep breath.
Disassociate from yourself again and look at yourself in your mind’s eye as if it were a movie.
Once you change the photo to black and white and make it less bright, solidify the picture in your mind.
Then disassociate again. You should be looking at a version of yourself who is also looking at a dim, black and white picture of yourself. This is called “double disassociation”.
Make the second disassociated verson of yourself black and white, dim and a small picture, then push the picture far away from you, as if it was on the other side of a 100 foot room.
Then analyzse your emotions from the afar off perspective that you have created, and you will find you are better able to be rational.

What this does is put our emotions within our own control. It allows us to separate ourselves far away from what we are currently feeling. When we do this, the old painful emotions start to fade, they lose their power and the feelings themselves become far off.

It may take a few attempts for you to learn how to do this, but it is an incredible technology that you can learn to start taking a firm hold on your emotions. you do not want to run around your whole life having your emotions dictate your day-to-day existence. You do not want to wake up saying “I hope today will be good“. Instead, you have to learn how to make the day good by taking control of your emotions. If you can control your emotions, you can control the world. Impose your will on reality and bend it to you.

Everything we are after in life is some variation on emotional control. If we can control our emotions, and in turn learn to control ourself, we will have everything we want in life. We will be able to feel the way we want to feel and think the way we want to think. Who does not want that?

You can learn to get that if you start by using these two simple exercises to disassociate from your emotions.

The Practical Consequences of Sin

Sin separates us from God. For most Christians, that is the end of the story. The introspection and analysis of evil go no further. There is nothing wrong with this. Knowing that sin separates you from God is all you really need to know to justify avoiding sin. But there is more to evil than meets the eye. More potent and long-lasting consequences to a lifestyle of sin and self-service. There are practical consequences of sin that we need to understand.

Some Christians call themselves virtuous because they stop analyzing sin once they realize it separates them from God. They apply the same nobility to themselves that the “God says it, that settles it” group does. There is no nobility in choosing to remain ignorant.

A further study on the consequences of an evil lifestyle is extremely helpful in multiple scenarios.

It is first helpful in learning how to communicate with people of the world. They need to see that there are practical consequences to certain behaviors that God has forbidden. The rules God makes are not arbitrary restrictions designed to spoil our fun, The regulations exist for a purpose, to protect us from unintended, practical consequences of sin.

And secondly, it helps with yourself and in modulating your own behavior and motivation. I find that I am more motivated to engage in specific behaviors when I understand the depths to which I can be affected by those behaviors. If I know that I am not only avoiding separating myself from God but also am avoiding consequences that affect me in the physical world, I am one-thousand times stronger and more committed to staying away from that behavior.

The Practical consequences of sin are those which are experienced even by the non-religious.

When a man contracts an STD because he slept with multiple women who were not his wife, that is an example of a practical consequence. You do not have to be religious to understand it. Even secular people understand the risks inherent in sleeping around and they know there are unintended consequences for certain actions.

Whether you are religious or not, consequences for your behavior exist. Every behavior has a resultant effect on your life.

Now I use the STD just as an example. I do not want to jump on the bandwagon of annoying Christians whose only marketing strategy for sexual discipline is fearmongering.

We all can understand that every action has a result. This is the law of cause and effect. While religion allows us to make moral and ethical judgments about behaviors, even the secular can benefit from studying religion. By understanding what behaviors are sinful, you can inadvertently uncover what behaviors will have negative practical consequences in your life.

For example, sexual discipline is about much more than restricting sexual access to one woman. It is also about avoiding the dozens of practical consequences that result when you indiscriminately engage in sex with women.

Every command in the Bible is more than just behavioral restriction.

It is about protecting humanity from the unintended consequences of immoral behavior. Behind each command is a guard rail that prevents us from decreasing the quality of our life on earth.

If you want a peaceful, tranquil life with reduced stresses and problems, you need to study the commands of God. These commands are the blueprint for excellent living.

The secular of the world will call it restrictive, but we know better. All the behaviors that secular people engage in leave them with emptiness in their souls. These people will continue to try to fill the void with whatever they can find, but it will not matter. At 2 a.m. when they get up to go the bathroom and see themselves in the mirror, they will know the truth. They may never admit it to anyone else as long as they live, but they know their life is meaningless.

Even on earth, we can understand the benefits of self-restriction. Diets restrict us from eating certain enjoyable foods. But we know that avoiding those foods leads to better results down to the road. We know we will be fit and healthy if we eat in a specific, albeit, restrictive manner.

The same is true for physical training. We have to restrict a few units of our time and dedicate them to exercising the body. This restricts us from spending that time elsewhere. Physical training has an opportunity cost. But we all know that the benefits in the future outweigh the temporary cost and discomfort of the present moment.

Study the commands of God.

You will find in those commands, if you study long enough, all kinds of traps that can be avoided. You will earn more money (and keep more of your money over the long term) if you study the teachings in the Proverbs.

Importantly, you will keep the wrong women out of your life if you study the Proverbs and teachings of Christ.

Worldly men like Stefan Aarnio are students of the word of God. Perhaps they do not believe every word is from the mouth of God and perhaps they do. However, they are taking the time to study the Bible because along with being from the mouth of God it contains timeless wisdom. The kind of wisdom that men both secular and religious cannot afford to ignore. Ignoring the teachings in the ancient text make men prone to making errors.

Wisdom comes when study is combined with concentration, rational thought, and application. Most people skip the study component and rush right into the action. While I am certainly a fan of taking action and charging into the fray, it also pays to do a little thinking beforehand. It is important to take some time and plan out the action before pulling the trigger.

Take the time to do some study. Study the Bible, even glance through other religious texts. I do not believe that any other religious text is from the mouth of God, but that does not mean it cannot contain some degree of insight.

We have to take advantage of the knowledge of those who have lived before us. We can only do this through study and application.

Through study and wisdom comes foresight. By understanding the practical consequences of sin, we can tailor our behavior in the present. We can take actions now that will help us to avoid consequences later in life. That is true wisdom. Being able to act in the present with the future in mind. It is not the only definition of wisdom, but it is one perspective with which to think of wisdom.

The wise man looks into the future, plans accordingly, and follows up his plans with action. Even the best plans are useless without action. This is the critical component. Action built upon wisdom is the key to a good existence. Wisdom and foresight help us avoid the practical, earthly consequences of sin.

Leverage the Darkness

It is very common for people in religion to want to do away with the darkness that lives in the heart of men. This is understandable because we see all the negative behaviors men engage in when they give in to the darkness.

Instead of learning to harness this power, they use it for evil. They use it to rape and pillage, or to destroy and kill. I have no problem with destruction or killing when it is directed towards those men who practice evil. And the God of the Bible has no problem with it either, as He rewards all according to their actions.

But when people in the church see the results of the darkness they instantly assume that everything about it is bad. They assume that anything and everything that is related to or is the result of the darkness is evil. The problem with this is that it robs religious people of great power. Specifically, it robs religious men.

Men are gifted with an incredible ability to go to war or to engage in the hunt. They are able to call upon tremendous energy reserves when necessary. These energy reserves are composed of the various “hot” emotions: rage, anger, hatred, and violence.

Contemporary, feminized religion will try to label these items as “evil things”, though, in reality, they are powerful energy sources that could be directed towards constructive pursuits. A man who learns to leverage these hot emotions on the battlefield is a ferocious warrior. The man who learns to leverage these emotions on the hunting ground is honored at the feasting table. The warrior who protects the group, society, or civilization is honored, respected, and held in the highest esteem.

When society becomes too safe, these warrior virtues are not prized. Who needs the great warrior when there is no great war? Where is the need for the great hunter when there is more food than anyone could eat in a lifetime and men eat themselves to death through the disease of obesity? Where is the demand for a man to protect the tribe when every feminist saturated university provides safe spaces for people whose feelings are hurt?

When there is no demand for masculinity, then there is no supply of men.

When there is no demand for the proper application of the darkness, then a generation of men will cruise up who do not have the ability to leverage their hardwired violent nature.

In the place of strength, we have a weakness. We have generations of men who have been taught to act like girls, and they fulfill that role well. Men are excellent at doing what they are told and serving society.

If society tells men to act like girls, they will do it. If society wants men to “be vulnerable”, they will do it. If men are asked to get in touch with their feminine side, they will gladly oblige. Some men do this out of their nature, as men are designed to serve a group. Other men are simply doing anything they are asked so they can have sex.

What could be a great tool for acquiring personal power becomes what religion complains about. Instead of raising men to be castrated from the womb, why not teach men to leverage their own internal power source? Why not learn to tap nearly unlimited energy reserves and concentrate them on constructive pursuits?

What God gave to man as a gift has become unnecessary. The population feels safe so the men have no need to hunt and fight, so they lounge around watching football and complaining about the world. Even older adults wallow in a victim mindset.

Since the men have taken a backseat, women have taken the role of building men into their own hands. They are making men in their image.

Women treat boys like malfunctioning girls and attempt to educate the darkness out of them.

And unfortunately, they are in a position of power where this is possible. The vast majority of school teachers are women. Therefore, schools will be built with women in mind. The school system is built by women, for women, and is meant to produce women even if it means converting men into women.

This has gone on for a few decades now, and these same women are wondering where all the real men went. About the time they or their daughters reach marrying age, they finally lift their heads above water to see the world they have created. They never bothered to take a moment to look at what they were turning men into. They were waist-deep in play dates and parent-teacher conferences. When we become immersed in a process, we sometimes become blind to the direction we are sailing in. This can be advantageous if we lose ourselves in our work. This can also be a serious disadvantage if we start building feminized men and do not stop checking our progress until they are already fully built.

Men today are built by women, for women. But not to be attractive to women, only to be useful to them.

Unfortunately, women make men into the very people they hate. Women think they want to build a woman-like man when in reality they truly want a masculine man. But how is a man going to learn to be masculine if his first two decades of life he is programmed to seek the approval of women? He first seeks the approval of his mother, then his school teacher, and finally his wife. By the time he gets to his wife, he is unrecognizable. He is so feminized that it is almost unrecoverable. Fortunately, there is a difference between mostly feminized, and completely feminized.

Women educate the darkness out of men. Men have to rely on one another to relearn the age-old principles of using darkness to their advantage.

There is the background. Here is a functional definition of the darkness for us:

“An energy source made up of the hot emotions: rage, anger, hate, violence, aggression, and frustration”.

Obviously, any of these emotions could be used for evil. And they often are, because most men do not know how to manage them. They have had poor behavioral examples growing up and never had a man teach them how to take their most powerful energy and direct it towards something meaningful. Here is a step-by-step process for how to use the darkness. This example will start with something simple: training the body.

It is easy to learn how to use the darkness in training because it is natural. Training is a war against the body and against gravity. You are battling with your weakness and you change into simulated adversity. This strikes a chord deep within us and powerful energy begins to overtake us. When men train, many times they will realize that this is one of the core activities that they were built to perform: warlike work.

In fact, it is only the men who are built for war.

The battlefield does not fit women despite what the feminized modern societies are trying to push. The only reason female warriors are even a consideration is that we have no real war. The wars we have are so depersonalized and far away that we are willing to entertain any harebrained idea with regards to how those wars should be carried out and about who should be on the front lines of them. The darkness is useful in war and it is in training. Here is the protocol:

Be alone.
Start training. Begin your workout in your typical fashion.
Progress to the difficult sections of the workout and prepare your mind.
Put your head down and begin breathing heavily through your nose. Keep your eyes elevated but your head down.
Lift your shoulders. Make yourself feel bigger.
Move your arms slightly away from your sides and clench your firsts.
Tighten your stomach.
Activate your mind. Call on whatever dark emotions you have been suppressing (not repressing). Recall the situation that angered you or the event that stirred the darkness.
Take another deep breath through the nose and visualize electricity flowing through your whole body.
Unleash your fury.

This protocol only works if you have been successfully controlling your emotions. You cannot repress emotions. To repress an emotion is to bury it, to pretend like it does not exist, and try to convince yourself that you are fine. To suppress an emotion, however, it is simply not allowed to be expressed in the same instant that it is created.

You are able to recognize the emotion when it arises and quickly bottle it. You do not want to waste that valuable energy source on some petty individual or social situation that is angering you. The secret mantra of thought is this: suppress and redirect. Concentrate that power somewhere else. If you can learn to take the energy of the darkness and put it towards something valuable, you will be unstoppable.

This darkness is the energy that allows you to push just a little harder in your training. Or perhaps it allows you to study a little longer or a little more intently for your school. This is the darkness that allows you to put in that extra hour at work or deliver that project before schedule. It is the power that overcomes fatigue, and it can only come from darkness. No light emotion could ever compare with the raging power of the darkness. But it is the gift of men to learn how to manage these emotions, control them and use them to serve the societal unit. The darkness is your secret to limitless progress, achievement, and success. You can listen to the people in religion who have asked you to cut off your gonads and be a woman. Or you can listen to the Creator who has gifted you with the unrelenting power of the darkness. Your choice.

Pictures: Pixabay.com

Breaking the Horse of Emotion

Most people are carried around by their emotions. They are pulled by them as if the emotion is a horse that has not been broken. If you have seen footage of a herd of wild horses, you know they run free and relish that freedom. When men capture them and try to domesticate them there is a process where the animal is completely resistant to being controlled. It concentrates all of its power into ridding itself of the rider who would subjugate it.

But given enough time, the horse will surrender and learn to obey the commands of the rider. You can learn to do the same thing with your emotions. Even though your emotions currently run free and wild, you can learn to put bits in their mouths and turn them where you want. You can be the one in charge of your emotions rather than having your emotions be in charge of you.

Working to control your emotions is painful at first. It contains the risk of being thrown from the horse and injured.

Many riders cannot hold onto horses and are thrown off. They break arms or legs and sometimes sustain more serious injuries. There is a basic, inherent risk in attempting to break a horse. It is the simple risk of pain. Since we are humans are trained from an early age to avoid anything painful, we continue this trend by avoiding the pain of personal change. Rather than gritting our teeth, accepting that attempting to change ourselves will be painful, we instead sit content in our own mediocrity.

Instead of turning our focus inward, pursuing personal excellence, we say that where we are is “good enough”, though there is no such thing. One of our many responsibilities as men is to shoulder difficulty for some greater good. And I argue to you that outside of God the greatest good is the improvement of the self. Because without the improvement of the self, you cannot take care of your family, lead others or accomplish all the other tasks that society imposes upon you. While some people focus on their families and on everything but themselves, you must learn to focus on and improve yourself. By doing this you will bring much greater value to others than those who focus exclusively on others without ever bothering to improve themselves.

The man who focuses only on his family is limited in how well he can truly serve them. Your ability to serve others is limited by your skill level. Take some time and invest in yourself and alter you will be of greater value to others.

Improve yourself by taking a firm grasp on your emotions. You cannot be moved by external events. This is the state of mind you should be training to achieve. The man who is unmoved by external circumstances is like a mountain or the stony cliffs facing the ocean. People build homes and castles on mountains or even on the edges of these stony cliffs because they trust their strength. You need to be the type of man who is the stone, who is the unmovable rock face on the ocean’s edge. With that degree of self-control, you provide a sense of peace and security to everyone around you. They all begin to relax and feel calm because you, because of the man who is the leader, the man who is in complete control of his emotions and cannot be moved by circumstance.

Most men choose not to control their emotions. They are pulled around by them because it is easier to do so. As hard as life is when you are pulled by emotion, that period of time where you work to break the horse of emotion is even more difficult than that. But on the other side is absolute freedom. You have the power of the horse combined with the power of self-control. This makes you the free, independent man who has the strength to stand on his own.

With that newfound power, you can concentrate it into any facet of life that you want.

You have harnessed the horsepower of emotion, now all you have to do is decide what to do with that limitless energy. Will you continue to work on yourself or perhaps concentrate more on that career? Whatever you decide to do, you can do it with newfound energy and focus. You are no longer losing energy through the leak of emotion.

As a man in perfect control of yourself, your energy system is flawless and perfectly sustainable. You cannot be moved by external events and on top of that, you have massive personal power. The benefits that come from being able to control your emotions cannot be understated.

Also understand I do not mean that you should not feel emotions. I am not trying to rob you of your humanity. Again, you must learn not to divorce emotions completely, but rather to use them as fuel.

Embrace the pain of change.

All change is difficult because we are reconstructing who we are all the way down to our brain cells. When changing who we are, we literally change at the cellular level. We adjust the way our hormone and emergency systems respond to events. By being in control of our emotions we limit the time we spend being stressed or in fight-or-flight mode. That not only saves buckets of personal energy but is inherently masculine to the core. The ability to resist emotion, control it or be unmoved by external circumstance is a demonstration of strength.

Be disgusted by others who have no emotional self-control.

One of the ways to continue to be motivated on the path to any change is to be disgusted by others around you who show no regard for emotional control. You can apply this to any type of change you want. Before anyone misunderstands, I am not saying that you look down on others or hate them for their actions, but rather that you simply be disgusted by the action itself. Love the weak but hate weakness.

You can apply this to diet and training by being disgusted at what the majority of people in the world decide to do with their bodies. Rather than training them and taking care of them, they live sedentary lives and pack on enough fat to last them a year-long famine.

Learn to be disgusted by people who show a complete lack of emotional control. Recognize it is total weakness and effeminacy and promise yourself that you will never be like those weak men. This is critical: you need to have a goal to aim at combined with something you want to avoid if you want maximum motivation for change. Most people do not spend enough time developing the appropriate anger and disgust at particular actions, so they simply wallow in their lifestyle. Many men live in obesity, pornography addiction, and mediocrity because they do not have the proper amount of hatred for those things. Not that simply having hatred is a cure-all for conditions, but it is a very important piece of the recipe.

Hold on tight and be persistent during your change.

You may be thrown from the horse. That is okay, remount and work again. Breaking a horse is about breaking its will and making it willing to obey a master. You also have to break your need for comfort, and your desire to be mindlessly pulled by emotions and external circumstances. Take ownership of your emotions then dominate them.

No more are you content to live a life where you are not in complete control of everything. You are unwilling to live a life dominated by emotion. Understand though, that this change will take a great deal of time as any change does. It starts with awareness of emotionalism and finishes with the complete subjugation of emotion.

Maintain gains – the consolidation.

Whenever we learn something new, there is a period of time where we are consolidating the memory and organizing it so it can be retrieved later. There will be a moment when you break the resistance of your emotions and everything seems easier to control. It is critical that at this moment you do not let go of the control you have over your emotions. You have to consolidate that victory and cement it so that it becomes permanent.

Do not be the man who finally loses all that weight and then falls right back into his old habits of overeating and laziness. You have to maintain your gains; this is of critical importance. Everything in life has to be maintained simply to mitigate the effects of the law of entropy.

Feed and water the horse. Keep up with your victory over yourself and maintain the virtue of self-control.

The Weak Go Home

Then Jerubbaal (that is, Gideon) and all the people who were with him rose early and encamped beside the well of Harod, so that the camp of the Midianites was on the north side of them by the hill of Moreh in the valley. And the Lord said to Gideon, “The people who are with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel claim glory for itself against Me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me.’ Now therefore, proclaim in the hearing of the people, saying, ‘Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him turn and depart at once from Mount Gilead.’ ” And twenty-two thousand of the people returned, and ten thousand remained.
Judges 7:1-3

“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Isaiah 41:10

The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”
Proverbs 29:25

One of the first battles under the leadership of Gideon, a judge chosen personally by God, was the ambush-like assault on the Philistines with a mere 300 men. When Gideon was initially assembling his army, however, the number was much greater. 32,000 men gathered before Gideon prepared to go to war. God told Gideon he had too many men, they needed to reduce the size of the army to prevent the troops from thinking they won the battle due to military strength alone. So, Gideon told the army that any men who were afraid should go home. More than two-thirds of the army left, leaving 10,000. The army would then reduce to 300 based on a combat-survival behavior test.

Moral of the story: There is no place for fear in the army of God. Fear is weakness. The weak are to go home.

You do not see fearlessness promoted in modern religion because it is easy to be weak yet remain in the church. There is no real violent persecution in the U.S. and no accountability for people who are not progressing spiritually. In fact, most people use the church as a convenient social gathering. They walk into the assembly with their worldly problems and thoughts, discuss them with their friends, “worship” for an hour (are angry if worship goes five minutes over the scheduled time), then fellowship while again complaining about their worldly problems and leave to go back to the world. This is the extent of the faith of most men. These are the men who would have left Gideon’s army out of fear, but they remain in the church because it takes no courage to do so.

Weak men have done more to damage the church than the so-called “persecution” facing Christians in the modern world. I argue that fearfulness damages the reputation of Christians and makes it harder to evangelize because fear is anti-masculine.

Secular men do not want to become part of the church because they believe it will require them to become emasculate, effeminate eunuchs.

No man wants to be weak but being weak and effeminate has been popularized by modern religion. Megachurches and evangelists have made faith a matter of emotion, and as a result, have made it weak and unstable. One blow to the “faith” of these men and they crumble. These men have dead-tree faith. The tree still stands upright, but it is dead, and one good kick or a light storm will topple it. Do not be like these fearful men. Reject their weakness and embody the strength and spirit of the Spartan.

“We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular”.
Edward Murrow

Affirmation

Fear is worse than death, therefore I am fearless.

Application

Consider yourself and look at areas of your life where you are fearful. It is okay to be fearful, but it is wrong to stay that way. As always, our nature requires progress in order for us to be satisfied, so we have to work on reducing our fear over time. At the very least our goal should be to take courageous action despite fear. Because even though fearlessness is the goal, is it truly something that is attainable? The 10,000 men who were left after Gideon sent home the afraid – how many of them do you think were truly fearless? Some perhaps still felt a twinge of fear but stayed out of courageous action.

The way we reduce fear is through training.

Think back to all the times you have been afraid and try to think of the root of that fear. You were afraid about taking a test in school, but by studying you reduce your fear. Through preparation, you increase your level of control over the situation and that reduces the anxiety associated with tests. Or perhaps you are giving a lesson in your church and you are afraid. You can reduce your nerves by rehearsing the speech many times and immersing yourself in the moment of practice.

Training and rehearsing are natural anti-anxiety medications. They force you to exist in the present moment, which is a place that anxiety cannot exist. Think about this, anxiety can only exist in the future because it is a mental prediction of a negative outcome(s). So by involving yourself in the present moment through training or meditation and by preparing for events in advance, you ensure that you become fearless. One day you may even be fit for the army of Gideon. But it is imperative that you train this ability now so that if difficulty or persecution does arise in your lifetime, you will at the very least be better mentally prepared than your peers.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

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