Substitute Negative Emotion to Positive One

Sometimes it is scary to start a new life. New place, new people, new house, new school...etc  Things new can bring both excitement and anxiety.  Excitement come from expectation and anxiety come from the fact that we usually do not know what we should expect.  So both are from what expect to the new environment.  Humans create expectation from our memory, or perception acquired in the past.  We feel comfortable as we know what we are going to do, feel reassured and safe.

Here is a question, is the memory process one we "create" or inevitably just happens?

It is important to be aware of choices we always have and make, even though our expectation come from our past, we always have choices to make, which mean we do not need to expect the same thing at the same place.  People get traumatized, because of their past has lots of immersion and hard to forget about it.  Attention need to be paid to the process of what we remember and how strongly we remember the event, and what emotion we put into the event.  Because the emotion and the memory are very strongly connected, it is very hard to overcome trauma, or anything unforgettable. So it requires conscious process although nervous function happen all in a flush, but we can be aware of it and replace bad emotion into positive one.

Ingredients are:
1. emotion felt at the event
2. visual representation of the event in memory
3. awareness of the internal event
4. positive memory and positive emotion for substitution

Once we are able to become aware of these, and able to manipulate them inside us, all we need to do is changing their positions.  If you want to replace negative emotion with positive one, stay the position of the 'negative' memory and extract only negative emotion, and insert positive one.

No need to eliminate negative image and memory because it's not necessary to solve the problem.

Keywords: awareness, emotion, choices, memory, image

Reference
In the realm of hungry ghost - Gabor Mate