The 3 Short Questions for Long-Term Emotional Change
In The Sedona Method, Hale Dwoskin talks about 3 questions we can ask ourselves to release negative emotions on-the-spot instead of letting them stir up inside and remain with us for hours.
Hale Dwoskin founder of The Sedona Method
These three simple questions — "could I let this go?" "would I?" and "when?" bring the mind back to a state of balance and stops us falling into a specific emotion.
I wrote a few months ago on how in CBT we recognize that we all have 'automatic thoughts' that we don't even control. One moment someone will do something to upset us and then 2 hours have passed and we are still thinking about that same event. Is this conscious? Often it's not a conscious decision at all. In fact a lot of our emotion and thinking takes on a subconscious process of its own.
It mightn't occur to us that we can choose what emotions we take on and which ones we can let go of. Instead we take them all on and then let the mind deal with them. This process of taking on all of that emotional processing can overwhelm and drain us when that processing ends up becoming our the center of awareness.
The trick to letting go of unwanted emotions lies in catching them as soon as each one comes up rather than letting those emotions turn into a snowball of concerns. This 3 question approach is at the core of The Sedona Method.
Often our emotional responses are at the core of a number of problems in our lives. However if we catch unwanted emotions before letting them snowball into problems the problem itself can be avoided.
