Bio-Emotive
16 linked references
November 10th, 2021
Coherence Coaching › re Phrases for Deepening Discovery › we don't tend to ask "how do you feel?" questions
- (I find myself thinking we could probably use Bio-Emotive tools for this, if we wanted)
metaphor
Metaphors are partially embodied in the words used for th… › eg Intend has a list of items with a checkbox next to the… › Part of what legitimizes the use of a new word here is th…
- (of course, people are so used to todos from years or decades from school, work, homework, deadlines... that it's easy for that lens to get projected onto the intentions. I don't yet know of an app-related solution for that, although techniques like Bio-Emotive have been helpful for me & others escaping being trapped in a Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings dream mashup)
thoughts on working with anger or whatever
- When I was at the Bio-Emotive workshop at MAPLE in June 2019, one of the advantages of the workshop being hosted at a rural monastery was that there was a lot of space for people to go outside and yell/howl/wail/scream at the top of their lungs.
February 20th, 2021
- and had a sense of like, yeah, in the context of trying to do observation-feeling-need-request, there's value in having the feeling be relatively meaning-neutral (eg "sad" rather than eg "abandoned") because it's a kind of weak frame and thus avoids a frame battle in the context of trying to get to the satisfying resolution of the request.
- it's very important however to be able to explore and unpack those meaning-laden feeling-words
- both
- internally (doing eg Bio-Emotive)
- interpersonally
- sometimes you notice that there seem to be meanings attached to words even if they're words like "angry"
- like maybe I or my partner have a concept of anger that says "if I'm angry, someone did something wrong"
deserve is broken
- A caveat you probably don't need for various reasons but which I'll add for my own sense of thoroughness is that trying on this viewpoint can be potent, and without processing & integrating old feelings & experiences that are encoded with "deserve" (eg Bio-Emotive "worthless" core feelings) then it's possible to end up a bit compartmentalized by internalizing "I shouldn't be orienting to worthiness at all".
September 28th, 2020
- 6. processing trauma can be a ton of fun (I tasted this a bit at the Bio-Emotive retreat last summer, then a bit more this summer and I am extremely fuckyeah about it, and have done some unlearning about the idea that it is (or should be) necessarily sucky/scary/isolating/etc)
- 6b. however, one doesn't have to avoid processing trauma if one wants to, just because one doesn't know how to "make it fun" yet.
February 14th, 2020
- Added some stuff Comparing Bio-Emotive and Focusing
Comparing Bio-Emotive and Focusing
- This writing basically assumes any reader is familiar with at least one of Bio-Emotive & Focusing; if you aren't, go read Kaj Sotala's summary of Unlocking the Emotional Brain and then you can maybe come read this at least knowing that these two techniques are both systems for doing the process described in that book.
- a whole thread talking about how Focusing is kind of dissociated whereas Bio-Emotive is very embodied etc. Similar to what Internal Family Systems calls blended
- Bio-Emotive evolved from Doug Tataryn doing Focusing with his therapy clients, with an intuitive aim towards increasing emotional activation that doesn't seem common among people doing Focusing.
- Much of this page is adapted from various sources, including some comments I made on a private slack, when people were raving about Focusing and I reflected that I thought Bio-Emotive was a way more powerful, though perhaps narrower tool.
- Someone asked if my exposure to Focusing was just from Eugene Gendlin (the original inventor, now deceased) or Ann Weiser Cornell, who has taken over the lineage and pivoted somewhat.
- Went to Ann Weiser Cornell's intro workshop Oct 2017... found it mildly interesting but it still felt fake compared to when I learned BioEmotive. I don't think it's actually fake, I just think Focusing is confused about whether it wants to be tapping the right brain unconsciousness or the limbic unconsciousness, and Bio-Emotive benefits from being very very explicit about its limbic focus.
- Oh and also the mode of facilitating is reversed!
- In Focusing (as AWC teaches) the person holding space sometimes reflects what the Focuser says.
- I often found this annoying & dissonant like "no, I feel what I mean when I say jittery, not what you mean when you say jittery".
- Whereas in Bio-Emotive's NEDERA process, the facilitator offers ideas for what the nederer might say, and then the nederer repeats them even if they don't think they're right, and gets to hear it in their own voice.
- And so a skilled facilitator can do wild magic, and even a novice facilitator can notice things the nederer is systematically avoiding noticing because inside/outside & different blindspots, and point them out.
- I've also described how the emotional energy released by Bio-Emotive makes it feel really easy to do a lot. The thought of a 20minute Focusing session is kinda like "wow that'd be a lot of work" whereas the thought of a 20min Bio-Emotive session is like "aww man I'll have a lot of momentum by minute 20 and want to keep riding that wave!"
- Also Bio-Emotive includes focusing on specific words that prior to learning them I would both never have thought of and would have rejected if I had (eg "I feel worthless", "I feel insignificant")
- And emphasizes trying them multiple times and noticing that you may have both resonance and something blocking the resonance. Whereas in Focusing I might have been inclined to shrug or move on, in BioEmotive I learned to recognize the resistance/block and work with it, such as by shifting from trying to say "I feel worthless" to saying "it feels scary to say I feel worthless" or "I don't want to feel worthless"
- I suspect that after another the BioEmotive I've done and will do, I could develop a new steelman of what I'd want Focusing to be for me that BioEmotive doesn't quite cover.
- Also
- Someone said
- > I’d put a lot of money that teaching focusing + listening is literally all you need and everyone can self guide and unknot using just those two
- Maybe in theory but I have experienced gentle pointing at my blindspots has accelerated things for me by like 100×? I tried Focusing but didn't get anywhere with it. With Bio-Emotive, just having a facilitator offer me phrases that I could then test for resonance, caused me to discover I resonated with words that I swear if I'd been asked to just come up with words on my own I just never would have thought of those, because I had blocks to the idea of feeling those ways, and I had blocks to the idea of having blocks about feeling those ways, etc etc.
February 11th, 2020
- Added some stuff I'd written contrasting Bio-Emotive & Eugene Gendlin's Focusing (which it is based on)