Processes
- For more details on this topic, see Self-help groups for mental health: Group processes and Twelve-step program: Process
Emotions Anonymous views mental and emotional illness as chronic and progressive, like addiction. EA members find they "hit bottom" when the consequences of their mental and emotional illness cause complete despair. Twelve-step groups symbolically represent human structure in three dimensions: physical, mental, and spiritual. The illnesses the groups deal with are understood to manifest themselves in each dimension. The First Step in each twelve-step group states what members have been unable to control with their willpower. In some cases the emphasis is on the experience in the physical dimension; in AA the First Step suggests admitting powerlessness over alcohol, in Overeaters Anonymous (OA) it is powerlessness over food. In other groups the First Step emphasizes the experience in the mental dimension; in NA the First Step suggests admitting powerlessness over addiction, in EA (as well as NAIL and EHA), it is powerlessness over emotions. EA, NAIL and EHA focus on deviant moods and emotions, not just a craving for mood alteration. The subjective experience of powerlessness over one's emotions can generate multiple kinds of behavioral disorders, or it can be a cause of mental suffering with no consistent behavioral manifestation (such as affective disorders).
In the Third Step members surrender their will to a Higher Power, this should not be understood as encouraging passiveness, rather its purpose is to increase acceptance of reality. The process of working the Twelve Steps is intended to replace self-centeredness with a growing moral consciousness and a willingness for self-sacrifice and unselfish constructive action; this is known as a spiritual awakening, or religious experience.
Read more about this topic: Emotions Anonymous
Famous quotes containing the word processes:
“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied.... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)