Well, getting one with the authentic self (whatever that means in the end). The idea of not identifying with one of the roles we play in our society, but actually becoming that which is our own potential. Again, Gestalt and some Jungian ideas can be incorporated here. — Kaz

What do you mean by "authentic self"? I find this concept interesting.

What do you mean by "authentic self"? I find this concept interesting. — Wallows

A self that is not engaged in playing any role. For example, I may chose to get a certain job for financial reasons, but me identifying with that role would not be my authentic self. Me identifying with my job title would be superficial at best. The authentic self is the self that realises its own potential. Again, to bring in some Gestalt from Perls, playing a societal role is something we do for practical purposes of our survival and functioning within a society. The authentic self may not necessarily be connected with that. It's difficult to define the authentic self clearly, in my opinion. The ones who really attained it may have been called sages in various traditions. So, in order to be "the sage", one has to become him. It's a developmental thing, while identifying as this or that role in society is just a choice of comfort.

Heidegger, Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly are among the philosophers and psychologists who have abandoned the attempt to separate feeling-affect-emotion from cognition and reason. And following neurologists like Antonio Damasio, enactive embodided cognitive psychologists like Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe and Evan Thompson also see affect and cognition as inseparable at all levels of functioning.
Affectivity provides the sense, direction and significance of though, how and why things matter to us.
We think of intense emotion as 'irrational' when what those experiences represent are periods of a crisis of thinking, when our way of making sense are no longer effective and the world begins to appear incoherent, That is not a capture of intellect by emotion but a crisis in the intellect itself. We are anticipative creatures, and negative affects like far, grief, anger, and guilt signal transitions in our sense-making, when formerly effective schemes of anticipative comportment toward others and ourselves break down. That is why such affects are both painful and potentially creative. They represent where the limits of our understanding lie.

Heidegger, Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly are among the philosophers and psychologists who have abandoned the attempt to separate feeling-affect-emotion from cognition and reason. And following neurologists like Antonio Damasio, enactive embodided cognitive psychologists like Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe and Evan Thompson also see affect and cognition as inseparable at all levels of functioning.
Affectivity provides the sense, direction and significance of though, how and why things matter to us.
We think of intense emotion as 'irrational' when what those experiences represent are periods of a crisis of thinking, when our way of making sense are no longer effective and the world begins to appear incoherent, That is not a capture of intellect by emotion but a crisis in the intellect itself. We are anticipative creatures, and negative affects like far, grief, anger, and guilt signal transitions in our sense-making, when formerly effective schemes of anticipative comportment toward others and ourselves break down. That is why such affects are both painful and potentially creative. They represent where the limits of our understanding lie. — Joshs

That’s very interesting. It’s as if emotional breakdowns may have some evolutionary significance. Do you think that CBT is wrong-headed?

Isn't CBT based on the idea that our cognitive appraisals trigger particular affects? The differnce as I see between CBT and writers like Gendlin, Kelly and Heidegger is that CBT likens cognitive schemes as conditioned habits that one can become stuck in, whereas the latter posit thinking not as conditioned responses but as active attempts to interpret our world that can fail when events exceed the bounds of our anticipative accounts, requiring us to act as scietists and artists at the same time, becoming experimental and creatively exploratory, testing out new hypotheses, trying them out for size.

Isn't CBT based on the idea that our cognitive appraisals trigger particular affects? — Joshs

I don’t know enough about it, but that seems to me to be the philosophy behind it.

Yes, quite true. I have had my reservations about CBT as a reflexive "band-aid" that can be applied at the symptoms of an issue; but, never really the cause of the source of discomfort or some such.

However, this all hinges on how much you think reason can be a guiding force in shaping one's state of mind. CBT, REBT, and ancient Stoicism contested contra Hume, that reason has a more dominant role in shaping one's mindset and not as a passive feature of humanity.

You have to be careful in how you're undertanding a concept like 'reason'.
Traditionally, it tends to be equated with objectivity and logic, and that's a dead end as far as understanding actual sense-making phenomenologically. Logic treats meaning within an artificially closed universe,

I mean to imply that since there is no way to reason with depressive ruminations or anxious neurosis, then one must wait for the storm to pass and clean up and salvage what can be salvaged after the storm. — Wallows

Think I see what you mean. Rumination is associated with the default mode network of the brain, so is self-referential thinking, other-referential thinking, mental time travel (which I think of as magical thinking), remembering the past or imagining the future, theory of mind, whatever else... it's thought to be associated with a whole host of mental illness from autism to depression.

What is recommended to contravene the DMN? Onset of sleep and sleep not REM, sleep deprivation, psychedelic drugs, deep brain stimulation (probably TMN and direct current TMN), meditation, psychotherapy, and anti-depressants (booo).

As for anxious neurosis, it's one type of neurosis amid myriad. Psychoneurosis is the more important, or capital affect of neuroses on mental health. This is what describes how blocked instinct returns in a disguised response or symptom (derived and disguised from the material that was originally repressed or denied). So psychoneurotic blocking often leads to mania and impulsiveness..or maybe anxiousness. Which is what I think of when I think of CBT's weakness. We ought not to seek to be disguised from our own recognition. Neurosis is as bad as psychosis, that neurosis is accepted as necessary to socio-economic functioning is a big blow to mental health of modernity. It must be something is wrong with the socio-economic values of the times they cause so much neuroses and mental illness (ego is necessary to function in the market society, where ego is essentially consubstantial with psychoneurosis). Diseases that stem from psychoneurosis, and their virulence, are fairly largely underappreciated.

Interesting. What is this Wu-wei, thing? — Wallows

It could be that effort or exertion is what leads to the tightening of the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex of the DMN. Lessening effort may lessen the open/existing paths in the brain and make them relax to more expansive routes and create new anastamotic branchings. This ceasing to try and relinquishing the struggle of existence, the fight...is possibly analogous to wu-wei (as I think of it). In the west, we've been insinuated with a false maxim you must use effort to advance in life. Violating this false maxim and unlearning that effort is necessary to get anywhere is probably beneficial to mental health. Wu-wei is a concept from Taoism.