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Mercy Strategy 45

feelings put a false color upon all memories; whenever a new tool is placed
in the mental storage shed, it will be labeled with an inaccurate emotion.
We have seen how the Mercy person‟s storage shed of experiences
allows him to come up with weird and wondrous solutions. I suggest that
this mental awareness also leads to a desire for subtlety. Whenever the
Mercy person encounters a situation, he is immediately aware of a host of
similar experiences and feelings. As a result, when he approaches some
emotional topic, he prefers to beat around the bush and talk about it
delicately. For him, the mental associations are so obvious that stating the
subject directly would feel like emotional shouting. He appreciates the
same emotional sensitivity from others. A hint is usually enough: If he has
the appropriate associations, then he can figure things out from there.
The Mercy mental storage shed also creates a need for sincerity. This
trait has to do with emotional consistency. A person who is sincere
broadcasts a uniform emotional message—Mercy strategy can reach into
its mental storage shed and pick out the appropriate tool with certainty. On
the other hand, an insincere person is constantly sending out mixed signals:
His words may say one thing, his clothing indicates something else, and his
tone of voice suggests yet a further message. As a result, the Mercy person
simply does not know how to respond. His storage shed retrieval
mechanism misfires, the red light blinks, and the warning voice intones:
“Inconsistent data; unable to fulfill your request; please try again.” The
Mercy person is strongly tempted, when this occurs, to turn to his friend
and say, “I have a bad feeling about this person. Let‟s leave.”
Finally, the Mercy person‟s mental storage shed leads to a hunger for
emotional novelty. Suppose that the Mercy person is stuck with a group of
people who are socially predictable. Every situation which arises will
remind the Mercy person of some mental fragment which already exists
within automatic thought. After a while he will become famished for new
emotion, and wish for some reaction which he has not encountered before.
In response, he may do something unusual, bizarre, or even inappropriate
in an attempt to stimulate emotional dialogue. If this fails, he may try to
provoke an emotional reaction by losing his temper, shouting at others, or
even saying dreadful things. Generally speaking, the Mercy person who
reacts in this way does not really mean what he is doing or saying, he just
wants to escape from the prison of emotional repetition.
We have looked at the relationship between the Mercy person and
automatic Mercy thought. Remember that every individual, regardless of
cognitive style, has a Mercy room with an internal world in the front and a
„storage shed‟ of automatic thought in the back. Therefore, if those of us
with other cognitive styles fill our minds with appropriate situations, then
we will also develop a storage shed of experiences which can help our
subconscious Mercy strategies to operate more effectively. However, only
the Mercy person has conscious access to this storage shed of experiences.