EMOTIONAL DETACHMENT TECHNIQUES PART TWO
How to Achieve Emotional Detachment
I’d like to start off by saying that as of the writing of this post, my personal journey to emotional detachment has only begun a few months ago. I’d also like to mention that by no means have I mastered this. I don’t know if a person could ever really master it unless they were naturally the type of person that cared less about what most people care about or are influenced by.
What I will say however, is that I believe that achieving emotional detachment is one of the secrets to being able to thrive in this world mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In the short amount of time I have been working towards emotional detachment, I have had glimpses of a better version of myself and where I would like to be ideally all the time. From experience, it’s something where if you don’t keep the mental ‘click’ conscious in your mind during different situations, you can easily forget to be intentional and aware of your thoughts and emotions in real-time and therefore fall right back into your default programming with no awareness of it.
I did another video where I mention what I believe is the secret to reducing the underlying stress in your life and finding true happiness. These two concepts go hand-in-hand. Fundamentally, being emotionally detached means that you don’t care as much about things as you used to. That can include expectations, peoples’ opinions and criticisms, societal “norms”, trends, etc. These are all things that affect and influence the very large majority of peoples’ lives. These also significantly negatively impact peoples’ lives as well. That’s where the purpose of becoming emotionally detached comes in. Emotional detachment means freedom. It means independence and enlightenment. How many people say, “I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” and actually believe that themselves? To achieve emotional detachment is to have reprogrammed yourself and to have made the decision to be unique and to be in control of yourself.
What Are the Benefits of Emotional Detachment?
There are so many opportunities for application as well as benefits to being emotionally detached in our every day lives. Achieving this would solve significant issues we deal with in our society. Examples of these are depression, lack of confidence, and anxiety disorders. These can become so severe that they ruin the entire lives of people and even lead people to addiction and even suicide. It all stems back to emotional detachment. If you are in control of yourself, no one or no thing can affect you that much. When I look back at my own life, I see a past riddled with experiences that would have been different had I been aware and in control of my own emotions. I would’ve laughed at people instead of allowing them to change my emotions, I would’ve taken things less personal, and would have not internalized experiences.
How Can You Apply Emotional Detachment In Your Own Life?
I heard this quote a few days ago; “Your anger should be so expensive that no one can afford it and your smile should be so cheap, you give it away for free.”
I find that in order to take something from the conceptual which may make sense to you for a minute and then will never be useful to you, you have to hear it in such a way that it makes something click for you. As I mention in the video above, if someone were to criticize you, imagine taking that criticism and putting into a ball, and placing it in the center of a table. This way, you can visualize something that someone said as being external to you and now you can look at it from different angles. You may then look at this ball and say, “this person is just mad about everything”, or “how adorable”. This allows you to much more easily keep it separate from you and not internalize it.
If you are in a relationship, being less emotionally attached to someone ensures that you don’t give them all the power to ruin your day or the ability to control when you are happy or stable. It allows to you understand that no matter what, you are your own person and even if you are close to your significant other, they will do as they please and make their own decisions therefore, your emotions shouldn’t be tied to their decisions. In a way, you are protecting yourself from all the roller coasters that everyone rides every day of their lives. It allows you to not take people or situations seriously, therefore, they don’t affect you. Whether things are bad, normal, or great, your emotions are stable because you won’t be reliant on an outcome or on ever-changing events that are outside of your total control. That’s where you want to be.
A very large part of moving closer to emotional detachment and making it a part of who you are is to understand that you operate based off a subconscious programming. Past experiences shape your beliefs and your automatic responses to situations without you knowing it. This is crucial for you to know because in order for you to change your own programming, you have to be aware of it especially when you are operating on old, repeat-programming in a real-time situation.
For example, if you are a guy who has been rejected before by a woman in public and were significantly affected by that experience, chances are that the thought of putting yourself in that position again makes your heart race and makes you nervous. Even if happened one time and it was a long time ago, you will physically feel the changes in your body if the situation arose again. That’s operating off of an old programming. If your teacher made fun of you in class and you were embarrassed, you may avoid public speaking. It only takes one negative experience to affect you for your entire life.
Being emotionally attached allows you to make a joke of the past experience and any experience that arises in the future because you don’t care about the outcome. If you’re feeling daring, you can even encourage and play with the situation just for your own personal amusement as if to be mocking the idea that it ever had any affect on you. I do this frequently.
Your enlightenment allows you to be above everything and everyone. When you can watch your thoughts about to arise and the feelings in your body about to change in a situation that you are in and have been in before, instead of fighting it, let it pass through you as if you were on a roller coaster. Just simply watch your own reaction like you were watching someone else go through it. If you can be aware of it while it’s happening, then that means you are above your own mind. Now you can decide and act how you want in that situation instead of simply pressing play on an old, repeated reaction that you always have in that situation and that doesn’t serve you.
That’s how you take your control. That’s how you change the habitual torment of situations that normally really affect you. At that point, you are literally watching your mind have thoughts while having a separate and intentional stream of consciousness that allows you to watch yourself. If every time your significant other does something that annoys you, instead of automatically getting annoyed because you are tied to what they do or don’t do, you can look at them as someone outside of you that doesn’t affect you. If you are not fond of speaking in front of people but one day you are having a casual conversation with several people and feel the tension arising, you can detach from it by stopping it in its tracks and asking yourself, where is this feeling coming from?”. Or you can realize to yourself, “I didn’t put that thought there” and say, “be quiet”. Eventually, you can find a groove or zone that allows you to instantly put yourself in the right place mentally in preparation for a familiar situation that usually affects you too much or for uncertain and unexpected situations.
It helps to be playful with it. Whenever I realize old programming kicking in, I say, “how cute” and make fun my human ‘self’ aspect of it, because I know that I am not my human body or my mind.
“Peace of mind is when the worst that can happen is no big deal.”
