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.
