The Full TER Applied

So then the fifth tool is this idea which I got from the Dalai Lama and the great psychologist Paul Ekman, who did this amazing work which is available online called Atlas of Emotions. And in it, they have this system which I adapt into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method called Trigger-Experience-Reaction.

So any of the emotional journeys that we go on each day — we go on thousands of emotional journeys, millions perhaps each day… whether it’s as we’re going down our timeline, which is an obvious way of illustrating this. We see pictures. I mean, all of us who are experts in filtering and responding to information in a way that perhaps we don’t understand how amazing we are at this now, simply by being on Twitter. We have so many different algorithms to filter out things in our mind and not to let them into our inner mind. But ultimately, we’re being brought on oodles of emotional journeys…

But it’s this timeline of emotions that the Ekman/Dalai Lama cognitive model describes: Trigger-Experience-Reaction. So there’s a trigger, we experience a feeling of disgust, of sadness, or these five emotions, and then we react to them. And obviously, the message is that once you separate the experience — the sadness — from the reaction, you can avoid actively falling for the troll or sharing that experience.

Source: Podcast Pensees 124

The most detailed practical explanation of TER in the corpus. The author names the Atlas of Emotions by Ekman and the Dalai Lama as TER’s source, then walks through the model as lived experience: scrolling a timeline, filtering “oodles of emotional journeys.” The key counter-technique is stated plainly: “once you separate the experience — the sadness — from the reaction, you can avoid actively falling for the troll.” Separation is the skill TER teaches.

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