Skills Class 3 - Our Four Options: Managing Mindsets in the Daily Situations We Encounter

Our Four Options is a personal mindset management tool that can be used universally in adult populations to improve rational-emotive and psycho-spiritual functioning. Our Four Options is a self-monitoring, introspective exercise that affirms personal agency, respects individual identity, and promotes psychological resilience. It can be used by professionals and lay persons alike, thus potentially contributing to a reduction in health disparity and a general increase in positivity and spirituality. Our Four Options is based on Leon James’ Threefold-Self Model, which states that the mind has three distinct and vertically arranged levels of conscious experiencing, which operate to produce behavioral outcomes which contain within them the prior causal affections and mediating cognitions. Grounded in dualism, this model posits affective primacy as the origin of behavior and behavioral change. Affective primacy is a major tenet of Swedenborgian or rational psychology, which predates modern psychology by more than a century. In this self-change exercise, subjects are provided with a systematic and objective way of perceiving and monitoring negative and positive mental states that are experienced in response to individual daily situations and interpersonal encounters. Following an observation and assessment period, bridging techniques are then employed to influence recurring negative mental states and to prime alternate, positive mental states in their stead. Meaningful implications concerning affective primacy, vertical levels, dualism, and the value of introspective exercises are discussed.