Thanks for reading it twice. Its really important to us because it is based on fairly recent neuroscience and it postdates NLP and Mark Douglas's books. The thing I found about Mark was that he identified fears and their results very well but his solution was (to me) a little "lacking."
I will try to address your points.
No, the first paragraph doesn't say that without emotions we can't control our actions. It should be saying that emotions drive actions and that if you suppress awareness of emotions (by tight discipline and ignoring them) then some of them will sometimes generate actions against our best interest. The more "baggage" from trading or earlier events you carry the more likely that suppression will result in faulty actions.
Brett Steenbarger in his latest book talks about two types of trading issues, ones where you can see the faulty thinking and ones where you can't - you see the behaviour but can't detect what was being thought before hand. If something is coming from emotional triggers without forebrain action then you can't see the "bad thinking" you just see the "bad action"
So ANNA is about dealing with emotions in a way that doesn't suppress them but reduces their negative impact on trading. If you combine discipline, plan and ANNA then you can achieve Douglas's goals without having to suppress your emotions (awareness and naming reduce them much much more effectively than suppression without the side effects).
As you can see, I don't disagree with the need for discipline (I am a big fan of Douglas) but the modern approach offers a better way of developing it. You may not feel it but a lot of traders (myself included) have felt the stress of having great discipline in other things but doing things during trading that simply do not make sense. There are lots of factors driving these "what the fxxx?" moments including no strategy, no testing, no plan, no discipline, but when you eliminate those problems there is still a potential issue with the wiring of your brain ... which can be resolved. 🙂
I totally agree with using devices to ease the process of converting "I know how to do this" to "I am doing this" including stops and targets. ANNA is another device that can make it much easier without chasing an unachievable robot. 1st suppressing emotions doesn't necessarily work and can generate undesirable actions. 2nd awareness of your emotions can help your discretionary trading by signaling a situation to you that you can trade.
Use the devices (stops, targets, automatic placement, a good plan, focus on disciplined execution, small trade sizes when in a bad streak) ...
but instead of trying to deny and push down emotion use awareness to deal most efficaciously with them and the actions they drive.
Enough on the subject ... I've put it out there. If it helps someone, good. If not, no problem and enough typing for a Sunday morning. Cheers everyone 😉