“David Viscott has reduced emotional complexity to a single cycle that gets repeated countless times in everyone’s life. This cycle begins in the present, where only pain and pleasure are felt, and ends up with complex feelings centered exclusively in the past, such as guilt and depression. The cycle of emotions is as follows:
- Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.
- Pain in the past is remembered as anger.
- Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety.
- Unexpressed anger, redirected against yourself and held within, is called guilt.
- The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.
What this cycle tells us is that stored hurt is responsible for a wide range of psychological distress. Buried hurt disguises itself as anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression. The only way to deal with these layers of pain is to find out what hurts as the pain occurs, deal with it, and move on. 
Living in the present means being honest enough to avoid the easy emotion, which is anger, and expose the hurt, which is harder to confront. When hurt is not resolved in the present, the vicious buildup of anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression can only grow worse.
The steps of how to feel in the present:
- Realize that hurt is the most basic negative feeling. You cannot be in the present without the willingness to feel hurt.
- Be with your sensations. Resist the impulse either to deny what you feel or to turn it into anger.
- Say what you feel to the person who caused the hurt.
- Resolve your emotion and move on.
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind – The Quantum Alternative To Growing Old, Deepak Chopra M.D., pgs. 186 – 187.
