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I've been through a process of changing my emotional reactions, and I think my experiences are interesting enough to share. Just to situate you, I'm in secondary 5 (I'm 16), and back when I was in elementary school, I was super shy (I rarely ever said a word, and I hated talking because I would always notice some imperfection in what I would say which would make me feel stupid), and I was quite empathic (if another kid would cry, so would I). Also, I'm much happier now than back in elementary school. In grade 5, I realized that life was meaningless and I might as well stop caring and just enjoy myself. So I started a long process of emotional change. The easiest thing to get rid of was my empathy, which I got rid of in grade 6. I can still feel sad or happy for others, but it's by choice. I can easily stop myself from emulating their emotions, and in fact I don't anymore by default. Then there was the huge stress that came up whenever I had to get into a social situation. That took a much longer time to remove. For years I would tell myself "who cares what other people think of me?", and try to get myself to do something which would put me into a social situation, but it had very slow results. It wasn't until secondary 4 that I had (mostly) gotten rid of my shyness. And interestingly enough, the first thing to go was the emotion, and then the physical reaction. At some point in secondary 4, someone insulting me would not make me feel a thing, but it would make my eyes a bit waterry, and it would make me gulp. Though I am now mostly not emotionally affected by bad situations, I have not been able to get rid of the effects of emotion that come from physical things, like pain or being tired. Being tired just zaps the joy out of me. Perhaps you can learn to withstand pain by trying to replace it by better emotions (for example, by cracking jokes), though I haven't experimented with that. |