This subject is so important, I have a big fat chapter in my upcoming book based upon one's self-explanatory style. How you interpret things happening in your world creates your heaven or hell. You see it when a woman breaks up with a man and he goes all psycho on her. His angry stalking does not mean he loved her more than other men love their women. It simply means his self explanatory style is not grounded in reality but fantasy. He's running around telling himself his life is over without her and thus he reacts as if he's trying to save his life.
There is no reality, only human interpretations about the significance of events occurring to and around him.
That being said, self explanatory style is critical in ghost hunting and also critical in regular day to day life and making it rewarding or punishing. I had a friend who was worked up and angry because her fiance brought home flowers. If you're smiling about how that would possibly be something to become enraged about, then you realize that there is self explanatory style based on reality, i.e. "My car broke down and I need to get it fixed" versus the one based on fantasy "my car broke down and it's probably going to need a new engine and I won't be able to go to work and then I'll have to pay for it with my credit card and then what if it leads to me having to move in with my mom again?"
Well, this friend was an eco-weenie. It was important to her that her fiance understand she was not into "raping the earth." So, when he brought home dead cut flowers it represented to her that he didn't get her, didn't care about the earth. Could she marry and live with someone who would raise their children with such disregard? What if it's a sign of other things, like perhaps he litters? What if he wants to buy a Christmas tree that was chopped down after decades of growth? She was getting herself quite worked up and was way off the subject of fresh cut flowers and was now into living with a psychopathic antisocial killer.
Do you see now how this might apply to ghost hunting and to real life? Having a rational emotive style and being a rational ghost hunter depends on accurate interpretations and no freestyle imagination. Once you base your feelings on as of yet nonexistent scenarios, your feelings are way out of proportion to what actually occurred. For example, when I was a kid, my father was impatient on road trips and would snarl at my mother for not reading the map quick enough. He would hint that she was not all that bright. The anger that gave us children stuck with us. As an adult, if someone were to hint I wasn't that bright, my emotions would be way out of proportion to what they just said. They suddenly became the bully my father had been and I was not standing up for just my intelligence, but my mother's as well since she never defended herself.
How do we keep our self explanatory style real? I try not to ever factor in the unknowns. If someone is sick in the hospital, I do not dance down that awful pathway of surgeries, CPR and death. I stay with what I know at the time. He is talking and not in pain any longer and we will deal with each bit of info once we get it. At least now he is tolerating it and so can I. Have you ever let your mind just runaway and you find yourself imaging something horrible and when you go back to the starting point you wonder how the hell you got down that path? You even started to feel sick in your stomach with dread and had a visceral reaction.
I use this as an example, but it's true. Imagine walking through a lemon orchard. You stop and pull a lemon from a limb and rub your fingers over the waxy dimpled surface. Take a breath of it. Now, bite into it. Your mouth waters. You were not eating a lemon, but your body reacted to the thought of it, the imagery. That is how potent your system is. It reacts to your thoughts chemically. Remember that next time you spend too much time worrying, ruminating and disaster-izing in your head.
I've seen people flee from dark buildings thinking that spirits are trying to possess them and they reacted with the appropriate fear if it were actually happening, but it was really only happening in their head. In the real world, they were standing in a damp basement and got a chill.
Now, go forth and remember to deal with the facts and only the facts and not the imagination and your emotions will be logic-based. If you ever have emotions way out of proportion to what's occurring and to the extreme, you are reacting to what you're telling yourself and not the actual situation. Get a grip on your reality versus your imagination and you will feel your emotions cooling quickly.
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