The kinaesthetic is the final arbiter of your personal experience.
What this means is that however you feel in your mind-body at the time is going to determine your judgment of whether an experience is "good" or "bad"."
I'm basically going to replace "good" with engagement and curiosity, and "bad" with repression.
Let's take the mind out of the equation for a second.
You're happily putting golf balls across your living room rug. You're engaged.
Whether or not you feel good or bad doesn't occur to you.
A bear walks in through your front door. Your heart races. All bodily systems prepare for whatever will happen next.
The bear isn't interested in you and leaves.
Your body relaxes after awhile and you go back to putting, happily.
Now let's take the same situation with a mental reaction added to the mix.
You decide that your intense physical response to the bear was painful.
You want the pain to stop and you set out to make sure it never happens again. You repress you own reaction.
You buy guns, set up an electric fence etc. You're on guard for another bear everyday so you've stopped happily putting golf balls.
Here's a different mental reaction. You not only accept your intense physical reaction
but you wonder (curiosity) how it can help you to deal with your bear problem.
Since you're not repressing your reaction, you're more open, and curious, about all options for dealing with bears coming near your home.
You consider guns and an electric fence but you decide motion detectors that turn on bright flood lights is a better option.
You happily go back to putting in your living room.
"
I am going to leave all these things to one side and just have a good time tonight, and not plan anything."
That, I think, activated your curiosity and engagement and that's why you had a fun Friday night.
The ghost in the machine is repressing your own experience.
"
So what happens is people come up with all these zany ideas to stop things making you feel bad"
Any attempt to stop feeling "bad" is inherently an attack on the self, an attack on your own reactions.
Using any "therapy" to attack yourself will cause more problems than it solves.
"
anything that has you visiting memories, or changing reactions -- really become redundant as far as feeling good is concerned."
Yes and no. If repression is an engrained part of a memory, then revisiting the memory with curiosity and engagement can remove the repression.
Achieving that removes the habitual anxiety response whenever you're reminded of the memory.
Revisiting a memory tends to activate engagement but not necessarily. If it doesn't than revisiting is pointless.
Drugs, exercise, meditation, etc. make you feel better but if you still have a habit of repressing the pain just comes back.
"
The second most important realization in this post is the idea that feeling good is a choice we MAKE."
Well, yes but without a concerted effort to engage and accept, we tend to repress by default.
The antidote is engagement and curiosity.
Most of the above is from the book in my signature (that isn't showing up at the moment, it's.
Core Catharsis)
From following your posts here and your forum I think you would find it interesting.