Are You Addicted to Negative Emotion? How to Think Like a Professional

One of my favourite authors, David Grove, wrote a book called Emotion Anonymous - and I would include The Untold Story in this list. I'd read it several times and liked it, until one day I noticed that there were very few references to Emotion Anonymous in it's bibliography. There were a couple of people who'd mentioned it in passing, but the bulk of the book was written by other authors, most of whom did not have an interest in understanding the issues of this amazing and powerful spiritual tradition. It may be that some of those people felt uncomfortable involving themselves in a group which focused on issues of the nature of negative emotions.

If that's the case, then you may be more addicted to the perceived "power" of anger than you think. Reading the list of names will tell you that it's not an exaggeration when I say that The Untold Story is about "how" to stop being angry. I was shocked to discover that Emotion Anonymous is all about how to change the way you feel about whatever issue is gripping you at the moment. I suppose that I should explain what exactly the "issue" is that is gripping you - and if that makes it sound easier, I'd be happy to do that. Suffice to say that it's not as easy as learning to let go of anger and being angry once or twice for just a short while.

I was equally surprised to discover that Emotion Anonymous is not, in fact, the "one true path". This list does make that claim, but it is only one of many possible paths out of a deep emotional problem. What you have to do, as an individual, is to find your own unique way to deal with whatever issue you're facing. This book is about discovering those unique ways, but not about providing instruction on how to do them. This book is about finding a way to overcome a negative emotion... but isn't that what addiction is really about?

To answer this question, we must think about what addiction is. Addiction, according to John Locke, is "the passion, which in certain cases accompanies reasoning, so that the one cannot reason against the other". It seems that in Emotion Anonymous the reader is supposed to use their own imagination to figure out how to overcome their negative emotions... but why is that so? It is because of the "chain of causes and effects" that results from the addiction. If those chain of causes and effects is understood, it's much easier to grasp where the addiction is coming from and why it's so pervasive.

When I finished reading this book, I wanted to look more closely into what "Emissive Thought" means and how it relates to Emotion Anonymous. After all, the purpose of the book is to use an example of how to get unstuck from a negative thought process. However, when I read the following comments by Edward C. Debrecht, Ph.D., about the value of Eudan therapy in the 21st century, I was surprised to see that he didn't see value in the book at all. He wrote that the book's purpose was to teach "a bunch of folks who have never been hypnotized anything about getting a good therapist." And that's the problem with Dr. Pelham and his approach.

The problem is not that he thinks hypnotism is bad, or even that it's not effective. Rather, it's that he presents hypnotism as being a simple matter of telling a person to think a certain way. In fact, in many ways that's exactly what happens when a person becomes addicted to negative emotion, and the primary technique for "hypnotizing" someone is to tell them to think certain things and feel certain things. Because that's what the client is thinking when they meet with their "therapist".