Hidden caves in the brain explain sleep

'Hidden caves' that open up in the brain may help explain sleep’s amazing restorative powers.  Click here to read the article.







photo credit: Rio Camuy Cave Park via photopin (license)

Treasure Trove of Self Help Resources

Check out this treasure trove of self-help resources at getselfhelp.co.uk ... a colleague of mine keeps saying to me 'I can't believe what's on there' and 'it's amaaaazing; it's advanced amaaaazing' ... and so it is.

Please let me know if you find anything personally useful by leaving a comment below.

Regards - Carl

photo credit: Handpainted Treasure Chest/Jewelry Box, Ceramic, Leaves and Wicker - CalliesCraftCottage via photopin (license)

Emotional Vibrations Part 7– Attachment Versus Detachment

At full intensity attachment feels blindingly wonderful.  At full intensity detachment, its opposite, feels physically-fall-down-to-the-floor-and-stay-there helplessly debilitating.  Neither of these vibrational states is unnatural.  All mammals have states such as these organically built in.

Towards; Away From or Play Dead

Those are the options we’re given.  We hear a lot about the ‘Law of Attraction’ but there’s also a ‘Law of Repulsion’ and a ‘Law of Surrender’, with all three built into our biology.  One causes us to move towards a thing; another away while the third causes us to lie down and give up for a while (this third response is also known as the Freeze Response or the Mammalian Disassociation Response and is accompanied by a deep sense of powerlessness).  These are Nature’s Laws; whether our egos like them or not.  Every single activity going on in your body: your thoughts, feelings, actions, conscious or unconscious, is initiated by the physical connection and disconnection of receptors and ligands – organic locks and keys – millions of them interacting on the surfaces of every single cell of your body - locking into each other, exchanging messages, initiating physical affects, unlocking, detaching and moving on.  Connection and disconnection is the entire story of life.  This is a physical reality.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about our individual cells, ourselves as individuals, individuals as parts of families or organisations and even nations – we operate using the same model atoms do.  They vibrate, we vibrate.  They pull together, they split apart, we do too.  We collide and struggle sometimes finding ourselves sucked in by distractions which pull us away from our own personal journey while travelling between multiple vibrational fields producing, using and wasting a lot of energy as we go (it is our misunderstanding and mismanagement of these energies, particularly the failure to fully discharge them and return to a happy state, which leads to emotional disorders).

We follow the ‘greater mass’; get attracted to certain things within the mass, despite knowing at some point we will inevitably be rejected and feel withdrawn.  We do all this knowing everything gained in our lives will eventually be lost; everything.  Yet still we find a way to create meaning and that meaning gives us a sense of direction – this is something to be worked on by every one of us otherwise we really are ‘lost’ amidst everybody else’s intentions.  It’s a process we’re all united and equal in – this process of happy vibrational living managed through a strong sense of meaning.

First Love Attachment

Between puberty and the mid-20’s I believe we are most susceptible to ‘first love’ attachment, one of the most intense natural attachments we can have (if you have others and want to share them please tell me about it as a comment or send it to me using the feedback tab top left of the page). We regard another sexually attractive idealised person as ‘the one’ then bond to the idealised image we produce. This feels wonderful and works great if you both feel the same way, but when it’s a one way deal one of you is in for a period of suffering.

It helps to realise, when dealing with attachment versus detachment issues, you are not bonded to the actual external person or ‘thing’ or lifelong plan you have invested yourself in – you are bonded to an internal image, or to some other form of electrical sensory construct, to which you have internally attached strong ‘toward and reward’ molecular reactions – nothing less, nothing more.  The person or thing to which you attached is not responsible for your attachment/detachment process nor are they required to do anything to resolve this inner conflict.  You created it; you alone have the right to keep, transform, learn from, reduce and even remove it.

Blinded by ‘the light’ of first love attachment we are unable to see negatives in the other even when externally those negatives are glaringly obvious to everyone else. As those external negatives signals grow in plain sight we go on to develop denial strategies; desperately attempting to retrieve the bond. We suffer withdrawal symptoms whenever we perceive the internal image as being taken away from us. When the real external person or situation begins to abuse us, either psychologically or physically, the fact something is wrong in the relationship is self evident but the bonded person takes responsibility for ‘fixing things’ by assuming over-responsibility. Internal self rejection follows on from the external rejection and confused withdrawal symptoms kick in as we eventually surrender to the fact we are powerless to achieve connection.  We are organically designed, pretty much, to punish ourselves during periods of disconnection.  As I say, it’s all built in.

Our reward and punishment mechanisms (the Mesolimbic and the Limbic brains); work to ensure we get rewarded for connecting and punished for disconnecting.  The most intense feelings of reward are built around the sex/maternal/parental drives and these drives are produced by powerful bonding neuropeptides – hormones and neurotransmitters.  The degree to which we bond depends on our individual mix of genetic, social and personal programming.  Did you know there is a gene in males, for example, the length of which decides whether he will be a sexual bonder or a player by default nature?

Say Hello to Your Prefrontal Cortex

Generally speaking our reproductive drives win the battle for control over what we think about from puberty until some time in our mid-20’s.  You have to wait until then before the connections between your Prefrontal Cortex and the rest of your body become functionally connected.  The PFC, based just behind your forehead,  controls how you react to your own thoughts, feelings; impulses and actions in regards to your physical and social environments.  By the time the PFC finally connects you may already have reproduced without consciously meaning to before being fully ready for the responsibilities of parenthood.  Unless, that is, you’ve had a good relationship with another trustworthy adult possessing a fully formed Prefrontal Cortex of their own, and you’ve used their PFC as a proxy guide.

This is why (in my neighbourhood anyway) there’s necessity for so much heavy duty sexual health education for teens.  The Government is attempting to act as PFC for these young folks.  Reproducing on the basis of your sexual or maternal impulses makes Nature happy and to demonstrate it’s happiness with you it pumps you full of intensely bonding gratification responses to compel you to meet that agenda even against your own conscious will.

The maturing of the Prefrontal Cortex connection, in terms of the level of control it exerts over the Natural agenda we’re subjected to, isn’t automatic – we have to work at it all our lives.  To be happy most of the time you have to pay properly focused attention to what and how you attach to things emotionally.  To be ‘mature’ means to have a properly connected, fully functional Prefrontal Cortex and we’re all at different stages of development in this regard.

If we don’t pay attention to what the PFC tells us in private we become dependent on the external social world for managing our internal world and, because the external world rarely operates with our personal happiness in mind, we can find ourselves rapidly switching backwards and forwards between the two vibrational states of attachment and detachment, without any idea how this switching came about or how to stop it.

Amazing You to Stupid Me in Five Seconds then Back Again and Forth Again and Back and Forth Again

I’m talking with a 19 year old who’s big dream is to be lead guitar player in a band.  Right now though his problem is he hasn’t eaten in several days.  He has no money and nowhere to live.  He tells me he has a problem discussing his problems with people but I point out to him I’ve known him all of 10 minutes and I get a different impression.

From the information he’s given me so far that big band dream of his looks to be a realistic possibility; as long as he survives long enough to reach it!  When we discuss the dream you can see the dopamine-induced power it has on the way he talks and physically moves in his chair. He comes bright and alive during those moments.  Dopamine is the neuropeptide which gives us a sense of excitement about the new, the sparkly, the interesting – it is one of several important natural ‘bonding agents’ we have and a prime ‘attachment’ driver. Talking about his big dream even gets me excited and thinking about my own. Wow. Big Dreams, eh? But we have to come back to reality. In the short term, today, - and maybe for a few more weeks or months, he’s got to focus on more mundane things such as eating, sleeping and having a roof to do both under. I remember a time I was his age and having pretty much the same difficult experiences he is.

I start discussing (and drawing out on paper) the steps I regard as mundane but necessary solutions to his problems. I’ve done the same things with hundreds of people before and I know they work so for me there’s no sense of mystery or wonder to them. To him, though, it’s all new information because the problems he’s dealing with right now are also relatively new (the depression’s been going on a while, he tells me, and my personal interpretation of the reason for that is he’s feeling trapped with few immediately obvious available escape options).

As I’m outlining each and every step and how it will resolve a particular problem he goes into a temporary reaction of ‘wow’ at the end of every step discussed. He looks off into the distance, eyes glazing over as though he’s looking at yet another big dream and says. ‘Wow, if you can get that problem sorted for me that’ll be so amazing. That’ll make my life sooooo much better’.  As we finish talking about the final step his attention turns back to me, he seems to physically shrink into himself and with a sullen look on his face says ‘I’m so friggin’ stupid, I should’ve sorted this out before. It’s my own fault. I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’m an idiot, I always have been. My whole family tells me but I just can’t sort my head out. It’s this depression thing’. Throughout the chat I notice I’m getting this ‘switch from hope to despair’ response repeatedly; a kind of habitual ‘you’re cool but I’m a nightmare’ thing’s going on inside his head.

We go see a few of my other colleagues who help sort some of his money and food problems; then we have a second meeting to discuss progress so far and start talking about the way he alternates between ‘wow’ and ‘I’m stupid’ during our conversations.  He asks if I know why he has this ‘switching’ habit. I tell him I think he uses it as a motivational tool and it looks as though it’s become an unconscious habit; I tell him some of the things I’m going to say below and he nods and tells me I’ve opened his eyes and he ‘gets it’.

Using Detachment and Attachment as Motivational States

Most of us have used the ‘harsh’ approach to get something done now and again – this approach, when used against others, threatens ‘social detachment’.  Sometimes it becomes necessary to do this where people are being determinedly difficult and don’t want to change. I’ve used it as a shock tactic, admittedly sometimes inappropriately, in a bid to protect my own health or someone else or get a particular job done.  Others attempt to use it on me.  The reason most of us don’t like it, though, no matter how it’s used is because although it gets a particular job done, it damages the overall relationship (and sometimes the approach can backfire).  That’s fine if you want the relationship to end anyway or you’re willing to take the risk of paying the consequences when things go wrong.  Usually though, even if everyone involved agrees harsh motivators are necessary, the result is a social atmosphere that ‘stinks’.

The same thing happens if you’re using negative motivators on yourself, automatically, and can’t physically ‘leave’ after creating an internal stink.  What you’re doing when you negatively motivate yourself is breaking your inner bond – trying to motivate yourself by threatening to dislike yourself if you don’t achieve something.  Do you like yourself?  Your ugly bits too?  You should because liking and having compassion for yourself are the only shields you have against mistreatment from others.  Tell enough people out there you don’t think much of you; tell them your negative life experiences are happening because  a faulty you is attracting them, and you’ll soon find yourself with a ‘raving support network’ willing to confirm the theory.  That theory soon becomes a standard operating procedure you deliberately refuse to change - until the internal pain gets so great it forces you to challenge and change your interpretations.

We probably start the self-criticism habit after experiencing negative treatment from someone we’re dependent on, or currently trust, and who’s opinion is important to us.  They point out some alleged weakness of ours, such has having an ‘anger problem’, then we see evidence they may be right and ‘adjust for the better’ in order to receive their social approval.  We internalise this whole approach and start automatically associating criticism of the self with social reward, acceptance and relationship maintenance.

This is also why we unconsciously allow ourselves to ‘catastrophise’ – a posh word for ‘building mountains out of molehills’.  We create imaginary, emotionally charged negative scenarios, designed to drive us to either avoid or deal with a potential threat, should it  eventually turn out to be genuine.  Although the threat more often than not turns out to be unreal, the negative emotional charge produced to deal with it is, and once again we’re left with an internal environment that ‘stinks’ unless we take action to clear it out.

Once our self-punishment-to-motivate tactics becomes unconsciously habitual, we create a consistently negative internal world, without even realising we think that way.    Like all negative environments, the only thing you eventually want to do is leave.  You can make yourself perpetually so sad about all your alleged failings and so angry about all your alleged losses you literally nag yourself into a state of depression.  Brain scan studies on depressed people show they attempt to pull their electrical brain activity down into their lower brain areas in an attempt to withdraw from external life, and from themselves.  They are attempting to leave.  The problem with this is it’s their internal life – the pain inside – actually causing the problem and pulling back causes them to ruminate even further.

All of this, by the way, needs to be ‘accepted’ as normal if you suffer with depression and want to get better.  It is a completely normal trap to find yourself temporarily stuck in.  The way to release yourself from the trap is to understand the structure of your attachment/detachment process and work with it instead of against it.  We need to stop criticising ourselves for criticising ourselves!

The Leap

Down in the doldrums; ruminating in our lower brain; we now get desperate to leap upwards towards the relief of positive feelings again.  We use our imagination to work for us by creating an amazing wonderful sort-it-all-out-in-one-humongous-dream launch and this produces a powerful dopamine buzz.  For a short while those deliberately over-inflated expectations in the brain work but dopamine needs the feedback mechanism provided by another neuropeptide, serotonin, to balance its affects and restore its own depleted reserves.

Serotonin is our gratification inducer and is triggered when we see we have ‘arrived’ at our big dream (just note here again this is also an internal mechanism which has little to do with what’s going on in the real world – which means if you can find a way to generate your own serotonin triggers you can rebalance your emotional attachment process in regards to your imagined scenarios without needing to rely on the external world for permission). Found mostly around our stomach, but also in our brain, serotonin is the stuff that makes us feel and so think ‘satisfied’. Pump up your dopamine release too high without achieving the big dream before your dopamine depletes and your brain knows the big dream ‘failed’ and serotonin release is held back causing withdrawal symptoms to kick in (eg disappointment; feeling ‘down’). This is a simplified model – there are other bonding neuropeptides involved, but it’s enough information to develop a working mental model and use it on a daily basis.

To rebalance ourselves when entering a state of withdrawal we need to go fully through the negative symptoms for long enough to allow natural production of dopamine to top back up again. Once on the other side of withdrawal we can reduce the frequency of this ‘up-down-see-saw’ affect by lowering our daily expectations while at the same time practicing focusing on smaller daily results thereby releasing serotonin more regularly.  What if nothing particularly satisfying happened today?   You find something from another day and use that.  You trigger this gratification mechanism deliberately rather than expect some random hoped for series of life events to do it for you.

Practising gratitude by deliberately focusing on what we did do rather than what we think we should have is the answer. Big dreams are nice now and again; it’s OK to let yourself be carried along by them for a while - as long as you’re prepared to pay the price for the other side of the equation.  We have no direct control of any external big dream but we do have the ability to control our internal world in regards to how we perceive our daily experiences.

I advised the 19 year old to focus on savouring each of his daily successes – regardless of how mundane they may seem – to focus on reflecting on his guitar jamming sessions rather than always using ‘the leap to the big band dream’ for boosting his mood. This will help reduce his getting stuck in that ‘nothing’s ever good enough’ loop.

Attachment Management

Ideas; images; other people; things; plans; directions; sensations; sounds; rhythms; hobbies; experiences; beliefs; places; values; time periods; emotions; body parts; books.

We can attach to a lot of things.  Here’s a suggestion:

• Identify a big dream in regards to the kind of person you are or want to be


• What kind of daily, mundane things does that kind of person do?  Do those things


• Set daily goals in regards to carrying out those mundane actions proving to yourself you really are that kind of person – you can explore; experiment; research; discuss – while accepting you will only occasionally achieve external recognition – your true achievement is in seeing and liking yourself as you act in this mundane way; this strengthens your inner bond regardless of what others say or do


• Ask yourself at the end of every day if you’ve taken action to be that kind of person you admire then positively fester on the satisfaction gained from the slightest sign you have.

By all means, now and again, think about a big external dream and enjoy the buzz it brings, but remind yourself you do not control the actual results.

Attach to that and you will repeatedly return to a happy state; not quickly maybe; not in a ‘burst of light’; but once you’ve done it a few times you’ll learn to trust and like yourself more and more as time goes by. 

Regards

Carl


photo credit: Baby's hand. via photopin (license)

Emotional Vibrations Part 6 – What Happiness Is

How do you know when you’re ‘happy’?  I don’t mean ecstatic or satisfied or enthusiastic – happy.  What does ‘happy’ feel like?  Describe it as a vibrational state or in any other form.

And once you’ve done that – tell me how to get it not just once but consistently even if I haven’t got it or had it for a long time; we’re talking here about having lost happiness for so long I’ve forgotten what it looks and feels like. Can you tell me how to get happiness back please?

That was the situation I found myself in near the end of 2004 – with my obsessions and my phobias and my panic attacks and my depression - I had forgotten what happiness felt like.  I certainly didn’t know how to get it back.  I had been asking advice from the professionals for a while and they weren’t telling me what I needed to know.

In 2004 I was 43; I’d been emotionally ill from age 22.  Now, all this time later, I was finally giving myself permission to take proper care of myself; to get happy no matter what it took; but I wasn’t sure how to do it - or how I would even know when I’d finally ‘achieved’ it.

I am not alone in my forgetting.  People with long-term emotional disorders, or who have been in a negative environment for a long period of time, are at risk of losing not just their happiness but also the understanding of what happiness is.  They forget what it feels like; looks like; how to get it.

In this post I’m going to explain:

• Why we forget our understanding of happiness


• What causes us to lose it


• Chip Conley’s happiness formula and how we can take practical action based around it


• How we get happiness back by pursuing it directly which means:


• ending relationships; destroying pleasant memories and changing our ‘moral beliefs’ (at the bottom of the post you’ll find Amazon links for the books mentioned).

Why Do We Forget?

Happiness is our default emotional state.  That’s why.

Prior to losing connection to our default happiness we don’t really know we have it.  Like most default things in life we only notice our default happiness when it’s gone.  Like when you’re in a store and they turn the muzak off and you realise you weren’t consciously listening but now it’s gone you’d like it back please (well I would, anyway).

So if we learn to regard happiness as our default emotional state this means we understand it cannot really be permanently lost; it can always and only be blocked from access by something else getting in the way.  We gained something we need to lose – we didn’t lose something we need to retrieve.

Reconnecting to Our Default Happiness

Reconnecting to our lost default happiness means we need to do something we’ve not considered doing before.  In my case it required an overhaul of everything I was doing; aiming for and thought of as important in life.

When I had emotional problems I felt disconnected from who I really was.  I saw other people treating me as someone I wasn’t and then my reacting internally like someone I never intended to be.  Most of the time I was figuring out ways to be ‘nicer’ and not so emotionally reactive.   In reality I was reacting negatively to genuinely negative environments deliberately created for me by others but pretending I was some kind of super-tolerant person ‘absorbing the negativity’ on everyone else’s moral behalf.

As a child I had been turned into a bit of an emotional punch-bag by others; as an adult I still saw that as my role in life.  To put up with.  The turning point for me came when I accepted I needed to end or limit any relationships or situation causing me pain.  Up until then I had always been concerned about whether or not certain other people were happy; (they never were) and whether or not I was meeting my responsibilities despite the fact I had almost no rights in those areas of my life.  I was unhappy because, without realising it, I had unwittingly and repeatedly agreed to be.

In vibrational energy terms, when struggling with an emotional disorder or a painful life experience or environment, a negative vibrational state has been added to your overall tone and is blocking you from accessing your default happiness.  It is this negative vibrational state we need to get rid of and, unfortunatel,y it may mean we need to consider taking real-life, difficult, long-term action to minimise environmental causes.  Heaven forbid; you may even have to put yourself first.

Where Do These Negative Vibrational States Come From?

Chip Conley, author of the book Emotional Equations (link below), tells us the formula for achieving happiness is a question of dividing wanting what you have by having what you want:

Wanting What You Have

If you feel unhappy or have an emotional disorder it’s because your body is producing an emotional response your Pre-frontal Cortex; home to your ‘you’; does not want.  Your you is refusing to accept what your body has given it to deal with; so you do not want what you have.  You are trying to escape your organic self.  The more you do not want it the stronger the negative vibrational energy response you produce in a bid to fight or run away from it.

Things in your life you have accepted, including all the other emotional responses which did not turn into emotional problems, have quickly become, in emotionally vibrational terms, ‘awareness neutral’.   You feel neither positive nor negative about them.  You only start feeling negative if you are threatened with their being taken away or somehow they are changed into something you do not want.

By default we are not designed to automatically want what we have.  Wanting what we have – ‘gratitude’ - needs to be a deliberate practice. We need to either practice it on a regular scheduled basis or make sure, when we’re feeling negative, we deliberately give ourselves the ‘gratefulness’ response. Gratitude

There’s the straight forward approach of simply sitting quietly and focusing on different things in your life; allowing yourself to reflect on and feel good about them.  For example: think about paper.  What would life be like without paper; how much better is life with paper?  Isn’t life so much better with paper? What an amazing idea to turn trees into paper! (we don’t need to think only about the ‘big’ things in our life – anything will do).  Just think about paper for thirty seconds.  All the things we use it for.  Isn’t it amazing?  There are people who process trees so we can have paper then there are people putting things on and in paper to benefit others then billions of us are using paper for all kinds of social reasons.  All of humanity supporting each other, contributing to each others lives, simply through some thin dry plant-based material.

In addition we can insert mini-gratitude practices deliberately whenever we think it will help our mood.  For example I often practice ‘relativity-gratefulness’ thinking.  If I’m dealing with something difficult in the present and start to feel negative I’ll picture an experience from the past worse than the one I’m dealing with now and it changes my internal response (my most common relativity reference is ‘well, at least they’re not hitting me over the head with broken glass like they used to).  Some of us might say ‘I’m not doing that because it’s not ‘real’ – but you will if you’re in the habit of deliberately prioritising, and taking full responsibility for, achieving your own personal happiness.  It’s not an external reality, it’s an internal one.

At the biological level gratefulness has a significant affect on the balance between a number of neuropeptides (neuropeptides is a name describing both hormones and neurotransmitters that trigger our vibrational states).  The neuropeptide Dopamine, for example, is a our motivational driver – it gives us that natural chemical high when we’re moving towards a goal both mentally and physically.  Dopamine, however, acts in balance with Serotonin.  Serotonin is the neuropeptide designed to induce a sense of satisfaction.  Dopamine drives us towards while Serotonin tells us we arrived.  Dopamine becomes depleted when we spend too much time and effort trying to achieve a thing without success.  Depleted Dopamine makes us feel lethargic and depressed.

Practising gratitude stimulates the production of Serotonin which then rebalances the production of fresh Dopamine.

We can even create a mental framework for ensuring we practice gratitude in regards to our most intense negative life experiences and emotional problems.  When I encounter something like this I immediately start thinking about how one day I’m going to use the learning experience to help others – I plan on feeling good about the fact I feel bad right now but will learn from it and use it.  I concern myself with how it will raise my understanding about myself, life in general and how it will lead on to better things.  It doesn’t matter to me if it doesn’t all work out exactly to plan externally – for example I may offer the learning as support to others but they could reject it – what matters is I rebalance and carefully manage my own internal happiness.  Happiness is the main plan.

Gratitude is an internal happiness-control model.

Having What You Want

The desire to have what you want triggers our Gratification mechanism.  Gratitude and Gratification are similar sounding words but are the opposites of each other.

Gratification is an external happiness-control model.

Before achieving gratification we must first pursue something and then obtain it in order to trigger the satisfaction response (the gratification mechanism is also based on those two same neuropeptides, Dopamine and Serotonin, with a few others thrown in, but the balance between them is dependent on what happens outside of yourself).

Unsatisfied pursuit produces increased cravings to get a thing and then we suffer withdrawal.  Withdrawal produces a cocktail of negative emotional responses including fear and rage, triggered by the release of neuropeptides such as Cortisol and Adrenaline.

Chip Conley points out in his book that to pursue means to chase with hostility.  When we don’t get what we pursue externally we become frustrated.  Our body produces negatively charged, hormonally driven, vibrational states.

Wanting something external is fine; in fact it’s unavoidable if you want to stay alive(!) and thrive, but you have to try and ensure you don’t ‘front-load’ your Dopamine levels too high by being too narrow-minded about results because when you don’t achieve exactly what you’re pursuing the intense withdrawal symptoms kick in.  If you’ve ever dealt with someone operating with an ‘entitlement mentality’ you’ll see how they believe the external world is responsible for meeting all their internal needs.

Finding personal happiness is about effectively balancing:

• your internal versus your external dependencies


• your rights versus your responsibilities


• your dreams versus your realities

with a view to ensuring you get the happiness formula of wanting what you have and having what you want right for yourself; most of the time.

If you haven’t got happiness and haven’t had it for so long you can’t remember where or what it is there’s a journey you need to take.

The Internal Journey

Like all other animals equipped with a brain we are, also by default, creatures of journey.  Our journeying never stops.

As a young boy if you told me to sit in an armchair and be quiet the armchair became a spaceship or a racing car.  There’d be a moment when I knew I was sitting in an old armchair but suddenly it wasn’t an armchair any more.  After a bit of armchair-spaceship-flying-time I’d get ideas about different types of alien worlds or the internal designs of spaceships and the only way to get rid of the excitement going on inside was to get it out onto a blank piece of paper.   To express it.

The moment we stop moving externally is the moment we start moving, mentally and emotionally, internally.  If we aren’t travelling out there, we’re travelling in here.  We’re always on a journey – even when we sleep parts of our brain become more active than when awake.

If we stop moving, but remain conscious, unresolved social issues come up for Conscious processing.  This happens automatically in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex at the front of the brain.  This is one of the reasons sufferers of obsessions can never relax - when they stop focusing on an external distraction their unresolved internal journey kicks in automatically – an emotionally overwhelming experience they believe themselves powerless to stop.  Do this for long enough, however, and the internal journey starts to shift from being emotionally intense to neutral to unnoticeable as the energies dissipate.

Just because you’re sitting or laying down does not mean you’re not going somewhere.  In fact, in terms of becoming happy, sitting still could be the most important journey you’ll ever take.

Are You Sitting Still?

In her book In Stillness Conquer Fear: Overcoming Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Agoraphobia author Pauline McKinnon describes how she overcame anxiety disorders simply by sitting still.

We’re not talking here about meditating or focusing on positive affirmations – she did it just by sitting still.  Pauline relates how she eliminated her anxiety problems in this way but when she let the practice of sitting still slide for a while her anxiety issues returned.  She learned in order to achieve happiness she had to permanently manage the balance between journeying externally versus internally.

When we journey externally we produce primal energetic reactions designed to ensure we:

• overcome or avoid physical obstacles and threats


• obtain physical things necessary to our survival.

When life is genuinely more brutal, a case of genuine ‘do or die,’ these reactions are appropriate and tend to be released naturally and fully in the wild.

Most modern humanised environments, however, do not require us to fight off predators or chase and kill our prey (other than on the occasion it’s other humans).  These environments are dominated mostly by intellectual concerns based on arbitrary cultural and personal value systems.  Despite the fact these things are nothing more than electrical impulses in our own heads we still manage to produce full primal responses to them and we are left with an excess of primal energy to deal with because the Unconscious is unable to achieve full release in this mostly intellectualised world.  Those primal responses are often inappropriately managed – for example some of us have energetic responses we don’t know what to do with and go looking for an alleged ‘cause’ to direct them at, instead of taking personal responsibility for managing them in private and in our own time; while others develop emotional disorders because they regard their responses as socially abnormal or irresponsible and invest time and energy in stifling appropriate primal emotional release.

Sitting still, in private or ‘safety’, ensures the necessary journey can begin.  Where is it we go?

Lands of the Mind

I regard our internal journeys as journeys taken through ‘lands of the mind’.  To the biological ‘you’ – a mixture of the conversations going on between your Prefrontal Cortex and your Unconscious - these internal journeys are just as real, made through just-as-genuine brain-mapped landscapes, as the external world.  The same biological processes handle signals from both realities.  The external and internal worlds are completely separate, but they are separately real and we need to regard each with the same respect.

I got rid of 27 obsessions, 14 phobias, unreleased rage, depression, panic attacks and I’ve forgotten what else(!) by agreeing with myself to do something similar.  Using self-directed exposure therapy I ‘went into the out-of’: exploring, experimenting and surrendering to the true nature of my internal world and the need to journey through it systematically.

Our emotional responses, and memories of the environments to which those responses are connected, are mapped in layers in the brain, in chronological order.  Thought patterns reinforce the neuronal ‘roads’ they travel through in the brain whenever emotional responses drive them (by the way, if you feel negative you will have negative thoughts; if you feel positive, or even emotionally neutral, you will have positive thoughts; positive thinking is much more dependent on positive feeling than the other way round and, paradoxically, if you agree to feel out your negative feelings whenever they occur you will automatically return to feeling and thinking positively by default).

By travelling internally through our feelings and our thoughts consistently and repeatedly we acknowledge and release the negative energies driving them and those scary internal ‘lands of the mind’ disappear because the energy patterns maintaining them are removed.

Just a quick note here because I’m not sure I made it clear just now: if you release your negative feelings this removes your negative thoughts which means your default happiness can’t do anything but show itself.

Physical and Mental Expression

With some intense negative states, however, sitting still alone is not enough.  You may occasionally need to physically mimic or act out the negative vibrational state, in a safe environment, to gain a full emotional release.  A safe environment is one where neither you nor anyone else will be harmed; nor will you verbally express something to someone affected by hearing it.  I recommend you get professional support if you find it too difficult to do this alone.

I once advised a lady, frightened by her own urge to kill her long-term, physically abusive, husband, to give herself permission to ‘kill’ him repeatedly in her imagination, in private, without anyone else ever knowing about it, until the feelings had gone and she had accepted how much he had hurt her.  Her fear of hurting him or others in external reality was stopping her making progress – she had been stuck for weeks in an intense emotional state.  The fact he had beaten her for over ten years was not the trigger – she had recently discovered he had been having an affair with the only best friend she had (a friendship since childhood) but, even more hurtful, the rest of her own family had known about the affair from the start and were involved in hiding his betrayal from her.

She had physically moved away from them all and the whole experience had left her feeling isolated and, for the first time in her life, struggling to control an urge to kill both her husband and her friend in revenge.  She told me she was now afraid to be around knives because every time she saw one she was overwhelmed by the imagery of stabbing her husband to death with it.  This had become a major problem for her because she worked as a chef and had started to take time off work as a result.  Her emotional state was so painful she felt suicidal.

Revenge is a primal urge few socially responsible people enjoy experiencing; particularly when it’s in regards to someone we feel emotionally bonded to.  At the primal level what this woman’s Unconscious was telling her was that her personal, highly valued life, had been ended and her husband was the predator responsible.

I suggested that, with the help of a therapist, when she was ready, she could discharge how she felt by allowing herself in private to mimic those stabbing actions.  She agreed there were some circumstances in life, such as if she were being attacked and in fear of her life - or someone she loved was being attacked - where she would find herself doing that kind of thing and finding it more acceptable.  She was now torn between two worlds, two contexts, and at some point had to accept her natural reactions as she transitioned from the death of her old life and the development of a new life she felt worth having.  I hadn’t given her any immediately useable solutions but I had given her more options and I’d accepted her state in a way she hadn’t yet come to terms with herself.  She pointed to her own smile and said ‘this is the first one I’ve had in three months’.

I have a habit myself of writing or drawing things out.  I’ll write 20 pages about an emotional issue then I’ll filter out the important points and re-write until I achieve final closure.  I make ‘sense’ of things this way - by deliberately engaging the thinking brain in order to understand and accept both the content of my experience and my overall reaction to it.  We often don’t want to do this kind of thing, even in private with no-one else around, because we believe in some way it will cause real-life harm.  The opposite is true – by fully processing and releasing our most intense drives in private we remove the urges we’d rather not have when interacting with others.  Eventually we discover our internal emotional journeys are just harmless, temporary processes but because of how painful they are we learn to, quite sensibly, avoid people, places and situations that force us to do this internal work repeatedly.

In their book The Way to Vibrant Health – a Manual of Bioenergetic Exercises authors Alexander Lowen, M.D., and Leslie Lowen, provide a number of physical posture exercises designed to enhance emotional release.  There are also exercises in the book designed to stimulate a sense of well-being.  You may have picked up a few ‘poses’ in your life here and there of your own.  At the yoga classes I attend, for example, we are instructed to smile; laugh; hold our palms upwards in order to receive life and, my favourite part, breathe deeply and fully throughout.  These types of physical actions may seem small, contrived or even silly, but they alter my vibrational state; they stimulate endorphin release making me feel good for several days after every session.  I find it impossible to feel negative even though lots of minor negative life events occur during those few days.

I bought The Way to Vibrant Health after finally discharging a trapped rage problem I’d struggled with for over a decade by simply holding my body in a genuine rage pose while expressing my emotions and saying exactly what I wanted to say to someone not actually present.  I realised holding my body differently, and imagining their physical presence strongly enough, enabled me to tune into exactly what I would have said, agree fully with what I said and discharge the emotion driving the problem within a few hours.  The rage problem never returned.

Pursuing Happiness Itself

Happiness is a mid-point, in vibrational energy terms, where you are neither feeling:

• compelled to run from what you don’t want, nor


• compelled to pursue something you want but don’t have.

The best way of describing this mid-point for myself is I end up sitting still, looking at the world with a slight sense of wonder and thinking ‘eh, I could do anything I want next – what shall I do next?’.  There’s nothing bothering me; I am in the moment.  When I was emotionally ill getting back to this point had to become a direct goal in itself even though I had no idea what it felt like.  I was desperate to get to it.  I now know I don’t have to be achieving this mid-point all the time, I just need to know I can get there when I want to.

I advise a lot of people who have been unhappy, for whatever reasons, they must now directly regard personal internal happiness as their main goal.  Far too many of us are dependent on our external world for management of the internal.  We must be willing to spend time discharging negative (and sometimes even positive) emotional energies produced by our directional drives.  That means taking time away from others things, including other people, we think we should be with, and instead working on ourselves.  It also means we stop ‘putting up with’ people, environments and treatments causing us to produce excess amounts of those drives.

You’ll remember I mentioned above that Chip Conley tells us ‘to pursue’ means to chase with hostility.  That still applies when you decide to pursue your own happiness.  Getting happy can be really hard work.  You’ll have to start things and stop things you don’t want to; connect and disconnect to and from beliefs you’ve avoided or held on to for years; and you’ll probably find because happiness does not come quickly you’ll have those negative withdrawal symptoms to deal with now and again too.

In order to find my personal happiness, for example, I had to:

• end my most important relationships


• destroy my most important and pleasant memories and


• change my moral beliefs.

I had to be willing to end or change all three if they weren’t contributing to my goal.  I didn’t know for sure I was going to find what I was aiming for either – I was concerned I’d end up feeling even worse and get stuck there.   I was giving myself permission to explore; experiment and engage with new options I hadn’t previously found acceptable and wasn’t confident would work - most of which I sensed would be permanent choices once made.  It felt like risky stuff.

Ending Relationships

Other people tend to create vibrational environments for us – often directly but also sometimes even by their absence or by their subtle influences on our social background.

As I started to commit to becoming happy I took a closer look at all my close personal relationships – which at that point meant my ex-wife and my four now-adult children.  I accepted not a single one of those people cared about me despite having built my entire life strategy around them.  If I’d died they would have shrugged their shoulders and acted as though nothing particularly bad just happened.  I’m not exaggerating – and they weren’t merely ‘acting’ - it really was a case of how they ‘didn’t feel’ about me.

My ex-wife had waged a long term battle to disconnect my children both physically and psychologically from me – I was always the last person they wanted to speak to about things; in my head and body lived a dream of being creator of ‘the Waltons’ but in my heart I knew I was regarded as an unloved version of Uncle Fester.  I was trapped in a cycle of hope and despair.  I was pleased my family were united in fighting a common enemy (nothing unites a group better) but unfortunately that enemy was me.

Over a period of several years I tried to salvage something from those relationships but my efforts failed and it was made clear to me by all of them the future was always going to be the same - unless I got out.  One of my children actually said to me ‘it doesn’t matter how we treat you; you have no choice but to put up with it’.  Things came to a head where I decided to disconnect from the whole situation.  I sent a single letter to their mother wishing them all the best, and ended it.  To my surprise, despite watching 28 years of personal investment drift away, I got happier.  And happier.  And happier … I’d removed something getting in the way, you see.  I’d removed the triggering situations causing me to run away from what I didn’t want and I’d stopped pursuing what I wanted but didn’t have.

Now I began spending more time sitting still and working on my internal journey.

Destroying Memories

If you want to get happy but currently suffer with an emotional disorder; or you live in a long-term-abusive environment because, for whatever reason, you think you should, I’m afraid I have some slightly bad news for you.  My experience is things have to feel a bit worse, sometimes even a lot worse, before they feel better.  This is because, even after taking any necessary difficult actions in the external world to limit further negative stimulation, we still have to discharge the energy attached to our memories. Not just our unpleasant memories, either.

Any pleasantly charged memories, plans, hopes and dreams attached to a now-lost future have to go before we can move on because they keep us linked in to the unwanted negative memories of that past.  Both our positive and negative memories form a structure of ‘attachments’ our brain has no choice but to operate with, as though those memories were still real, until we’ve acknowledged, accepted and started to work deliberately on the attachment/detachment process with the goal of personal internal happiness in mind.   Emotional attachments underpin the structure of what I earlier referred to as those ‘lands of the mind’.

My marriage to my ex-wife lasted 13 years and I left her in September 1993.  When I left her I was still deeply in love with her and I didn’t want to just destroy that love by demonising her – I wanted to transform it instead into a friendship that would benefit all concerned.  She didn’t allow me to do that, however, but I hoped to adapt to whatever it was she planned on doing and have everything turned out ‘Waltons’, even if it was a divorced version, in the end.  Ten years later, every Saturday morning when I started ironing my clothes for work for the following week, I would start a conversation with her even though she wasn’t physically there and hadn’t been for all those ten years.  I didn’t want to have these ‘chats’ – they would just start in my head and run automatically.  Do you remember my mentioning earlier how any unresolved social issues start appearing in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex whenever we take our minds off the outside world?

Every Saturday morning, for 10 years.  On and on.  You get the drift of how fed up I was with having it?  I couldn’t stop it by just wanting to stop it and I had no idea how to go about dealing with it.  The conversation always centred around why I’d had to leave my wife and children; what could I have done to stop it; what was wrong with me; what had actually happened; why couldn’t we have just made it work – was it me or had I been conned?  My brain was still trying to figure it all out and couldn’t understand why or what it was I was trying to figure out.  ‘It’s over, Carl!’ I would tell myself then I would finally come out of it until the next Saturday morning came round.  I was still ‘tied in’ somehow to her and the ‘big dream’.  I wanted to move on but I couldn’t.

I read a book called ‘How to Mend Your Broken Heart’ by Paul McKenna and Hugh Millbourn and it gave me the explanation and the answer I needed.  I was tied in to all those unanswerable questions, leading to and driven by all my negative memories, by my pleasant memories and the hopes I still had for the future.  No, I didn’t want to get back with her – I’d had enough of trying to make the marriage work – but we could be friends.  Everything could still work out ‘nice’.  Getting the message this all had to go was a relief but it didn’t mean I liked the message - those memories keeping me attached were important to me.  They surrounded the births of our four children.  Four lives we’d created together.  I was present at all four births and I pretty much idolised my wife as the ‘perfect woman’ around those times; my children were ‘innocent angels’ and it was my job to protect them for the rest of my life.  I felt, at those moments, we were at our closest and most committed (we weren’t but I was).  Those memories bonded me to her and our alleged future together, despite the fact she never felt the same way about me - those moments were my life’s landmarks.  All my future plans were built around them.  Plus I was also facing the fact that destroying those pleasant memories in order to break my emotional ties to her would probably mean I would also break my emotional ties to my children.  The issue of putting my personal happiness ahead of of the bonds with my children brought up the question of whether or not I should reverse my moral beliefs.  Up until this point I’d operated under the approach that no matter what I felt my children’s needs, and my emotional attachment to them, came first.

In their book Paul and Hugh explain how, when a relationship ends, we need to overwrite any pleasant bonding memories by using negative memories to override and change how we see our ex-partners.  So I started doing it with the memories of those four births.  I went in to the pleasant memories, pictured how wonderful those moments were, such as when my then-wife squeezed on my hand during a contraction, for example, then I reminded myself of another memory when the ‘real Mrs Harris’ was acting in totally the opposite way.  Gradually I overwrote the pleasant memories and I finally started to accept the ‘dream woman’ was nothing of the sort.

Changing Moral Beliefs – the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘should nots’

I’m always concerned with ‘doing the right thing’, aren’t you?  But what is the ‘right thing’?  What if your ‘right thing’ is someone else’s ‘wrong thing’?  Do you have a right to enforce your right over their wrong?  I came to see my attempting to do this as a form of bullying on my part.  Moral beliefs form a code of conduct we live by in order to ensure no harm or minimum harm comes to others or ourselves as a result of what would otherwise be our own uncontrolled impulsive actions.  They work great as long as everyone else is roughly sticking to the same system of beliefs.  What if they’re not?

Quite often people disconnected from their happiness are giving themselves the wrong ‘shoulds’ or ‘should nots’ to operate with.  Why should you be tolerant?  Why should you ‘put up with’?  Why shouldn’t you put your personal happiness first?  Why shouldn’t you say that a bad thing happening externally is actually someone else’s fault and not your responsibility to deal with?  Why should you pay the consequences for their actions?

I found myself with a bit of a moral dilemma to deal with when I was 19 and it was to last for another 28 years.  I’d grown up as the oldest child in an unstable single parent family and my dream, at that time, was to have a stable family, just like everyone else seemed to have.  I met a young woman just slightly younger than me who told me she wanted the same thing and she wanted it with me.  I felt like I’d arrived; I felt complete; I fell in love.

My wife caught for our first child and within weeks, to my horror, began dumping me.  Every time she did this I felt my life had ended.  Everything would just shut down mentally; emotionally I was completely overwhelmed and would start grieving.  I would beg her to get back together with me and she would for a while.  Her behaviour changed dramatically in contrast to the pre-pregnant person I loved; she turned cold; began picking on me in my mother’s company.  My mother and my wife teamed up together, which at first I thought was great because it fitted in with my ‘big happy family plan’, but both combined forces in order to achieve the same agenda - separating me off from my as-yet unborn child.  My wife developed a separate relationship with my mother and would visit my mother’s, where I was living at the time, even on the occasions we had split.  They would sit in the living room, right in front of me, talking with each other, knowing I was in pieces, acting as if nothing particularly bad had just happened.  I had no idea how to deal with the situation.

I suspected my mother, who’d lived on state benefits most of her life, thought she had a right to my income once I went out to work and was engineering the situation to make sure she got it.  Every time all three of us were together she would start arguments about petty things and drag my wife onto her side.  Behind my wife’s back she would tell me ‘she’s no good for you; she’s not the right one’, but to her face she acted like a favourite sister.  My wife started using tactics with the same intention in mind. By the time my first child was born I’d been dumped about six times and there were a number of explosive incidents; the most notable being my attempted suicide, which had the desired affect; it seemed to stop their joint plan for a while.  I developed a bad temper as a result of the treatment and both my wife and mother now began telling me my bad temper was the cause of the whole problem.  Part of me was buying into what they were saying – I decided if I could be ‘nicer’ from now on we might get back to being the loving couple we’d been before, eh?  What I didn’t know at the time was the whole thing was a set-up.  My lovely wife was play acting.

We set up home after our child was born and then my wife continued with the same tactics; she would take every chance she could to humiliate or dump me.  But she still wanted to have more children with me.  But she also wanted to dump me.  She didn’t say it in a straight forward manner – she would give me the silent treatment; she would explode if I wanted to talk; she would treat me like an idiot.  I would tell her the way I was being treated was unacceptable and she would tell me where the door was if I didn’t like it.  She would deliberately provoke me because she knew I hated being angry; I’d get angry then she’d step back and work on damaging my self-esteem.  But she still wanted sex and more children with me.  I was a very confused young man.  I was also suppressing a developing rage problem which occasionally leaked out – and I was terrified of what might happen to my son if I left.  I had an inkling it would be the last time I had contact with him.  Every time I was ‘dumped’ I would fall into a deep depression and start imaging terrible things happening to him and I believed it would be my fault because I hadn’t been there to protect and guide him.  I needed to be a better man.  A more tolerant man.

In a bid to get my wife liking me again I decided to please her by having another child – in for a penny in for a pound, eh?  I felt morally trapped.  If I stayed I was doing the wrong thing but if I left I was doing the wrong thing.  But to be honest, at that time, because I was so angry all the time I began to believe the only real threat to my son; and my wife; was me.  I couldn’t remember the origins of the dilemma; I just accepted I was a bad person and needed to become more tolerant.  All I could focus on, whatever happened, was I was supposed to stay and keep trying no matter what until she made it absolutely undeniably obvious she wanted me to leave.  She never did.  Our second child was born and things seemed great for a while.  She liked me!  And then we went back to how things were before.  I was in a constant state of confused tension.

Around this time, when I was aged 22, I read a newspaper article about something truly horrific happening to a young boy.  I looked at my children, imagined it happening to them, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  It wasn’t so much the imagery but the emotional response – I felt overwhelming disgust and anger.  By this time I was so sick to death of being emotionally overcharged I had become habitually self-critical of everything I felt.  My first obsessions were created because I hadn’t accepted my reactions to a newspaper article were normal reactions: I labelled them abnormal.  I began experiencing panic attacks in regards to my obsessions because I found no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t stop having the reactions or thinking the thoughts.

A decade, and two more children, later I began to realise my wife was never going to change and my sense of morality, my set of shoulds and should-nots, was destroying me.  My wife had told me she wanted six children.  I was gradually tuning into the fact there was a definite behavioural cycle emerging and I suspected once baby number six appeared our marriage would be ‘surgically’ ended.  So I decided to test the theory and told her I wanted to stop at child number four.

Things began to deteriorate rapidly even further after that.  I developed a ‘two year leaving plan’ and began trying different things to find out if there really was nothing I could do other than leave.  I slowly got her to talk honestly without exploding.  Eventually she told me she had always seen me as nothing more than a sperm donor; had never loved me and hadn’t told me before because she felt sorry for me.  I had now served my purpose and she wanted nothing to do with me intimately ever again.  I could stop for the sake of the children but she wanted me to start seeing other women.  By this time I’d got used to the fact my wife almost always said the opposite of what she intended to do.  For years I’d been under the delusion my ‘wonderful wife didn’t understand me’ but now I was becoming slowly and painfully aware my wife was in fact more fully aware than I was about what was going on and had been deliberately manipulating me - so what I heard was ‘I’m going to start seeing other men and there’ll be nothing you can do about it; when it suits me I’ll tell you to leave’.  If I thought what I’d experienced so far was bad it was going to get much worse – and I sensed I was going to end up doing something really stupid if I stayed.

She was surprised when I told her I’d be leaving a month later.  She agreed we would do our best to stay friends for the sake of the kids.  Again, she was lying.  Over the next 15 years she carefully dissected me out of my children’s lives to the point I finally said goodbye to the whole family.  Again, she found temporary uses for me here and there.  By the time I’d finally accepted the ‘moral’ thing to do was to detach completely and stop pretending I was in any way, shape or form, being allowed to protect and guide anyone, 28 years of my life had passed.

In hindsight I should have left her the very first time she dumped me, I suppose.  That was what she actually wanted me to do but I wasn’t having it!  All because I’d got my shoulds and should-nots wrong.  Because back then my personal happiness was not my main priority.  But it is now.

Where Am I Now?

You see all that stuff above?  I’ve disconnected from it all.  I’ve extinguished it.  I’ve felt it all out through my emotional system; ended the affects it had on me and learned from it.

I am thankful to my ex-wife for what she did to me because I use that learning repeatedly in ensuring I have personal happiness and in helping others achieve it for themselves.  Her behaviours, and the negative behaviours of others, have trained me well.  Because I moved away from what I didn’t want and let go of those things I wanted but couldn’t have - and was then willing to take the internal journey needed to discharge the energies that had built up over the years blocking my conscious from connecting with my default happiness state – I now know for a fact I can achieve the happiness state whenever I want.  I can sit in stillness, not feeling a need to run away or run towards and think, in peace, about what I might do next.

I’ve learned we cannot impose happiness – we can only expose it.

Sitting still?  What might you do next?

Regards – Carl

photo credit: Harborne Happy Brick Holgafied via photopin (license) 

Emotional Vibrations Part 5 – Managing Your Social Environments

In Part 2 of this series of posts we took a look at Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; a pyramid shaped model explaining we have to satisfy our basic needs first before moving on up to meeting the higher level needs of Loving, Self-Esteem and Self-Actualisation Needs.

In Part 4 I began talking about the Self-Image as a moving picture we develop of ourselves in terms of Social Worth.  I think I explained we base this moving picture on our own observations of overall physical vibrational tone (our emotions); which itself is a product of how we are reacting to both our past and current social environments.

The part of our brain which does the observing, the Prefrontal Cortex, is not itself emotional – it acts as co-ordinator of all our sensory information.  It also performs the role of signal interpreter acting then as direction finder/goal setter.

Put simply it’s your ‘Control’ mechanism – but it can easily make mistakes.  In the case of those of us who have emotional disorders it has made the mistake of misinterpreting the signals and making the wrong decisions in what they’re telling us because there are other beliefs we have emotionally attached to.

The Biggest Decisions You’ll Ever Make

The most fundamental decisions you can start making are your social environment decisions.  You need to be willing to emotionally detach, partially detach, and re-attach, on the basis of which social connections cause you pain and which bring you and others mutual benefit.  Unless you are willing to do this you cannot achieve full emotional healing – ever - because you are not allowing you to be YOU.  This is a life-long process.

Of course I’m not talking here in terms of where the people you associate with are physically located – I’m talking about the types of people you associate with.

Your Self-Image is almost entirely based on the evidence you get from social acceptance/rejection feedback and so to manage your self-image effectively, both for your and everyone else’s benefit, you have to give yourself permission to leave, alter or explore alternative social connections when you’re in social pain.  You have to do a little accepting and rejecting of your own.  You not only have to do unto others as they do unto you – you have to do it at the earliest opportunity before they’ve even get to fully do it to you.

This is where intuition comes in.  Sometimes we can be over-intuitive; we can run from things before we’ve even had a proper look and got the facts.  That’s not my personal experience, however – 9 times out of 10 my intuition was spot on.

I became seriously ill with multiple emotional disorders because I refused to leave an environment  toxic to my emotional well-being for 13 years – my intuition was screaming at me through my emotions and I ignored it.  It took another 15 years, after I’d left the physical environment, before I finally detached from the people concerned.  I remained attached for as long as I did because I believed it was the ‘right thing to do’ and then detached fully when it became obvious it was no longer the right thing to do.  It became ‘obvious’ purely on the basis of unrelenting social rejection and my wish to develop a positive self-image.

Over the years I have learned to listen to my intuition rather than my ‘right thing to do’ thinking patterns and found myself getting happier and happier despite believing I ‘shouldn’t be really’ as a result.

Indirect Control

The Objective Mind – the mind full of models of ‘how things work’ – is the mind best suited to planning your social environments because your Subjective Mind makes decisions on the basis of old emotional attachments.  However, your Objective Mind needs to search the Subjective regarding such things as experiences you enjoyed and felt you grew as a result of; these are the places you need to go to more often in the future if you want to develop a long-term Positive Self-Image.  Your hobbies; your strengths; moments when others complimented you on a skill you weren’t aware of.

You have to manufacture a future for yourself that’s going to lead to ever-increasing stimulation of the positive social kind.  Put yourself in social environments that will guarantee a Positive Self-Image.

I’m going to have to stop writing now as I want to work on a book but below I’m going to leave you with three mindmaps to look at:

• a model of how the Self-Image develops


• Your Self-Image Enemies


• Your Self-Image Friends.

There’s a lot of information in these diagrams – if you want to ask a questions/discuss/comment please leave a comment in the comment box below!

Double clicking on any of these images will open them in a new window.

HOW THE SELF IMAGE DEVELOPS: (start at the little red arrow and follow the cycle from left to right)

The differences between a controlled and an uncontrolled self-image:

Your Self-Image Enemies:

Defeated by using your Self-Image Friends!:

Regards.

Carl

Emotional Vibrations Part 4– Managing Short-Term Situational Environments

You’re happily travelling along in life when a situation arises.

In this post we look at short term negative (or positive) situations in which your attention mechanism is stimulated by one or more triggering signals and you find yourself thinking, feeling and acting differently to how you planned your day (you did plan your day, didn’t you?).

Here are some situational examples:

• One of a group of sniggering youths attempts to nudge you off your pushbike as you pass them on your way to work


• a very attractive married friend invites you to have an affair


• a large sum of money comes into your possession


• Someone you’ve repeatedly helped with a personal issue tells everyone else they’re suspicious of your motives


• You’re offered a job at twice the pay but you’re torn because you love the job you already do


• There’s a note on the table from your partner – they’ve moved your mother-in-law in


• Bang! What the hell … ?


• You’re at a wedding party and for some reason a stranger keeps bringing you drinks


• You start a  new job in a Restaurant on Monday … in the afternoon the manager tells you to start half an hour earlier on Tuesday with no extra pay … on Tuesday he tells you he only employed you because he could see you were desperate … on Wednesday he tells you you’re self-employed and need to sort out your own Insurance and Tax contributions … on Thursday he shouts at you publicly because you threw away some mouldy potatoes …


• A once close relative who won the lottery 20 years ago and disappeared immediately afterwards, leaving you a note saying ‘goodbye’ without any explanation, unexpectedly turns up at the door and tells you they’re broke then asks if you’ll take them in …


• a group of managers you work under publicly celebrate your success but also start spreading malicious rumours about you because your successes are making them look bad in some way


• You’ve lived happily as a total celibate for 20 years but a new friend keeps offering you advice on dating with a view to helping you escape your apparent ‘lonely situation’.

Anything spark a memory?

Most Situations Can Be Typed



 

 

I’m not going to discuss each situational type or all of the example situations I’ve listed (although if you want to have a chat in the comments box that’d be good!).  In this post we’re focusing on how we’re affected by short-term situations where you haven’t yet identified your life as being the situation (we’ll be looking at those situational environments in a later post).   In regards to these short-term situations you can still remember the stages of:

• pre-situation (before)


• in-situation (during)


• post-situation (after)

and how you integrated or failed to integrate the overall affects into your learning; or you may find yourself currently in a situation and believe it will follow this pattern.

The question, when intending to return to a happier pre-situation vibrational state, is how you will work with your four main minds in dealing with the situation so you can achieve this.

Your Four Main Minds

 



 

You can use your four minds to respond to a situation as if:

• it were a mental model (Objective Mind) and/or


• it were either a physical threat or opportunity needing physical action (Subjective Mind) and/or


• it were a matter of social justice (Social Mind) and/or


• it no longer existed (Now Mind).

I’ve put the ‘and/or’ endings onto those three lines above because there’s a point at which, whenever a new situation presents itself, we hover between the minds before choosing which will most dominate our responses.

Any sensory signals entering conscious awareness about a new situation arising are sent to the Prefrontal Cortex (the PFC) – our brain’s conscious decision making area based just behind our forehead.  These signals are sent there by the Thalamus; our brain’s sensory signal router.

The Thalamus needs the PFC to make a decision about which of the four minds will deal with the fresh situation (when I say the ‘PFC’, by the way, just keep in mind the PFC is you).  Once the decision is consciously made by the PFC it is passed back to the Thalamus and if the PFC makes the same decision several times the Thalamus automatically learns to do this unconsciously; routing similar information in the same way without asking the PFC ever again unless the PFC deliberately intervenes in the process (for example, by agreeing to connect with previously unreleased feelings).

 

The Objective Mind

Think of a short-lived situation you once found yourself in but has now long gone.  Make sure it’s one you no longer feel emotional about.  Found one?

Now think about it in terms of:

• pre-situation


• in-situation


• post-situation.

This should be an emotionally ‘dry’ memory where the contents, including the people involved, are just facts to you now.  If they’re not, pick a different memory.  In regards to this old situation you learned to make a judgement of ‘this is how things work in life and I just have to accept it’ – and then you accepted it.  You must have accepted it, by the way, or you would still be emotional about it.

Done that?

This is the realm of the Objective Mind.

The Objective Mind makes management of a particular area of life look easy to those currently managing the same area with their Subjective Mind.  The reason organisations use mentoring, for example, is so a mentee’s subjective experiential process can be processed and transferred from Subjective to Objective Mind as quickly as possible with minimum trial and error experimentation.  Sometimes a mentee may never be able to make the transfer without a mentor’s help – the individual remains stuck in a subjective state - or suffers emotional burnout and gives up.

When in Objective Mind you are able to deal with ‘situations’ of a particular kind with a minimum of emotional response.  This means, in terms of your overall vibrational state, being more easily able to return to a state of happiness once the situation has been effectively dealt with.  You do not get caught up in the whole ‘story-mind’ of the situation (I’ll talk about the story-mind further down).

Let’s say, for example, you’re having trouble with your neighbours – who are abusive and threatening.  A person choosing to deal with this situation using the Subjective Mind might behave likewise in return; or lay awake for several nights worrying about ‘what’ll they do next?’ or ‘what if I snap?’.  You consider phoning the police but images of the police laughing at you and belittling you in front of your nasty neighbours fill your head.  ‘That would make things even worse!’ you decide.

Then one day another one of your neighbours intervenes and speaks to your nasty neighbours.  ‘I’ve been recording your behaviour towards my neighbour on a spreadsheet and I’ve been to the police with the evidence who tell me if I and my neighbour both give statements we’ve got a good case against you – and I’ve got some other witnesses who’ll give statements too’ – the good neighbour then recalls the dates and times of the incidents and even the content of what was said – with one particular remark being particularly threatening – so the nasty neighbours can tell they’re not bluffing.  ‘See if we care!  Call the police!’ say the nasty neighbours and they wander off.  ‘Oh no,’ you’re thinking; ‘it’s just made things worse!’.  Ten minutes later the nasty neighbours are at your front door apologising for the misunderstanding and promise they’ll never have another go at you as long as you don’t tell the ‘clever-dick next door’ who grassed to the police they’ve won.

I’ve actually used this approach in supporting some neighbours who were being abused and within 10 minutes of speaking to the individual causing the trouble they’d received an apology and no more trouble.

The Objective Mind stores and retrieves patterns to be later retrieved by the thinking minds; using them as models against which which new but similar situations can be compared and effective solutions more quickly put in place.  Our initial response to a situation may be Subjective – we feel we are being ‘subjected to’ an experience and ask ‘Why Me?’; but when we retrieve the previously learned pattern and apply it this allows us to look at the situation as if it were an external object and ask ‘Why Not Me?’ instead.

At the start of this post I gave a long list of possible ‘situations’ which you might initially react to with an intense emotional response.  Have the same situations occur repeatedly, however, and you eventually learn an automated pattern in dealing with them that becomes less Subjective and more Objective.

in Objective Mind we are accepting something.  In Subjective Mind we are not.

This does not mean to say that managing all situations with an accepting Objective approach is a good thing – ‘this is the way things are done here’ can be applied to good and evil behaviours alike.

The Subjective Mind

The Subjective Mind operates within your body; it is what we think of as the Unconscious and is the ‘survival mind’.

Think of a short-lived situation now long gone in real life but one you still feel slightly emotional about (and I do mean slightly).  Found one?

By the way, if you’re still emotional about a past situation and those emotions keep coming up into your Conscious and grabbing your attention it means you haven’t fully processed the entire memory yet and haven’t learned what needed to be learned from it (and stored the complete pattern in Objective memory for later use).  That doesn’t mean you should start pulling up every emotion-linked memory you can so you can learn and transfer the results to the Objective Mind – it just pays to stay aware of the overall affect of these various, as yet unprocessed, emotion-linked memories.  I’ve got plenty of such memories from way back in the past I don’t intend to re-visit – but you never know; I just might.  It’s a personal choice.

When managing a situation with your Subjective Mind your whole body is involved and produces ‘movement energy’ – you feel intensely compelled to move towards; away; retrieve; reject; protect; crouch; cringe; sneer; gag; faint; laugh; scream; swear (swear words are based in the emotional brain, not the thinking brain, by the way) and so on.  The Objective Mind finds itself being  gradually closed down for the duration of the emotional release by the Subjective.  If a decision is made by the individual to resist or block emotional release when alone this creates the potential for ‘projection’.

Projection occurs when we fail to discharge the excess emotional energy produced by the Subjective Mind in response to one or more situations.

One of the problems the Subjective Mind causes for us in our modern world is that intellectual issues, such as the bills coming through your door or your boss hinting your job is at risk, can trigger the same emotional reaction as you’d have to a predator’s suffocating bite on your neck.  Modern life is full of such triggers; producing one emotional stimulant after another.  At some point, if you are repeatedly stimulated and do not release the energy in a safe environment, you will find yourself ‘projecting’ your trapped responses at all and sundry in a bid to discharge the energy created by your emotional system.  This is a completely natural reaction, but it is also anti-social because that is exactly what projection is designed to do – change current society or push it away.  Any target you can even slightly associate with the initial triggering issue ‘gets it in the neck’ once you start projecting.

Recognising projection as a natural and normal reaction is an important step in healing it – but that does not mean you should therefore assume it’s harmless to do it.  Your responsibility is either to leave the environments (including people) causing you to project; negotiate a mutually acceptable solution with them so you stop reacting or accept you’ll be stimulated as long as you remain in that environment and find a way to discharge the energy in private so that projection does not occur when you’re around them.

Unless you are being held against your will ultimate responsibility for leaving is yours.

After a bout of uncontrolled projection those of us with an over-responsible social conscience usually now start regretting and self-rejecting our own emotional responses (I used to do this but no longer do).  Not managing your intense emotions appropriately – usually because we have not yet learned how to or do not even yet know there is a ‘how to’ – can lead to self-rejection of the emotional system itself.

Self-rejection of our emotions and the system creating them leads to the Subjective Mind reacting against itself; producing secondary emotional responses to fight what we see as our anti-social tendencies.   There are times, however, when the dominant nature of an active Subjective Mind is the only thing to get you out of a difficult situation. Without it you probably wouldn’t be alive and reading this so let’s not see it as a bad thing.    Deciding which of the minds should best deal with a situation is a matter of personal judgement.

Watching  all of this activity, making those judgements as to whether or not the way in which you deal with the various situations you encounter means you are a ‘good or bad person’, is the Social Mind.

The Social Mind

 



 

The Social Mind (or rather the Social Justice Mind) oversees and creates the belief-system framework operating your Objective and Subjective minds.

The reason humans have such a big brain is thought to be due to the need to survive and thrive in the multi-layered complexities of human relationships – social acceptance and bonding within a group is the single most important survival factor for an individual; even if it leads to the death of the individual!    This mind is centred in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) at the front of your brain.  When you stop deliberately focusing on other things, for instance when you ‘relax’,  the MPFC automatically kicks into action.  You find yourself mentally festering on any unresolved interpersonal social issues; even though your intention may have been the opposite.  Your MPFC calculates:

• Emotional Valence – the intensities of your different positive and negative emotional values; current and predicted – we tend to react much more Subjectively when something emotionally highly valued comes under threat or is likely to change, even in a positive way – it’s in these areas we are also most susceptible to having ‘I would not cope if …’ thoughts


• 
  
  Cost/Benefit Analysis (risk management) – we compare what we expect/intend to get against what we expect/are willing to lose and ask if the loss is worth the gain; what is the cost of doing nothing likely to be?


• Cause and affect associations – how did the situation/threat/opportunity arise; what are my enemies/friends/acquaintances working towards?  This helps in deciding next actions


• Task Co-ordination – now I have decided my overall direction what do I need to do and when


• Differences in perspectives between you and someone else – do your current social contacts display incongruent body language; do they talk about you behind your back; do they say one thing but do another?

The MPFC kicks into overdrive when we notice the deal between ourselves and others is turning out not to be what we thought it was (when dealing with informal relationships we are working with what’s called the ‘psychological contract’).  At this point we start to question ‘is it me or is it them who’s breaking the contract?’ – or ‘was there ever an actual common contract we all understood or have I been fooling myself all this time?’ - we then start recalculating our next actions.

The Self-Image

The Self-Image is a sub-system of the Social Justice Mind.

If, when a negative situation presents itself, you immediately start asking ‘how did I cause this negative thing to happen to me?’ this indicates you have a negative Self-Image.  The same thing is true when a positive situation arises and you decide you don’t deserve it or think you’re not worthy of it.

And that’s what a Self-Image is – a self-viewpoint of personal social worth.  You didn’t deliberately choose to have a negative self-image if that’s what you’ve got – you’ve been marinated in it by your social experiences to date.  Once you fully tune in to what your self-image is and how it came about you can start deliberately redesigning it for your own happiness by living your life in such a way the evidence of your positive social worth is overwhelming.  Isn’t this what you’d like everyone else to do for themselves too?  Make sure you give the same right to yourself you’d give everyone else.

You cannot just repeat a few positive mantras or affirmations to magically produce the desired positive self-image – a poor self-image has usually been embedded deep in the Unconscious and is currently being managed using the emotions by the Subjective Mind.  Your judgement about the nature of your self-image is based on your long-term vibrational state; you look at how you ‘feel’ about yourself.  If you feel good you have a positive self-image, if you feel bad you don’t.  It’s that simple.  It’s also that difficult to change and if you have one or more emotional disorders transitioning may be a very slow process.

Social signal evidence, received from others to date, tells you whether or not your life is socially worthwhile.  Your social worth is decided by the types of people you directly socialise with most often, and to whose opinion you are most emotionally attached.  The self-image is a moving thing – you see yourself from the outside as if you were travelling through space and time as a particular ‘type of person’.  That type of person is either socially acceptable or unacceptable and your judgement about which of the two you are has been mostly influenced by those you allowed to access your Unconscious.

As a child I grew up with a father who never spoke to me (he would flick me around the ear to make me go away) and a mother who, when she left him, took to practising unarmed combat on me when she’d had too much to drink (my mother was ex-army).  That went on into my teens (one of the last episodes involved her taking me into a room, locking the door, and repeatedly punching me in the nose to force me to confess to a crime I didn’t commit).  At school I was subjected to a bullying campaign for several years by a bunch of thugs and when I got married my mother and then wife combined forces to make me feel useless as a parent and husband – my mother was angry I’d got married because her plan was for me to stay with her, go to work and give her my income.  My wife began brainwashing my son against me, then the following three children, and succeeded in destroying my relationships with them over a 28 year period.  Just before we finally split, after 13 years of marriage, my wife admitted she’d never regarded me as anything other than a useful sperm donor.  The marriage ended when I’d finally had enough of how I was being treated (she wanted 6 children and I refused to have any more and things just got worse from then on).  I concluded her intention had always been to be a ‘single parent’ but I’d just refused to give myself the right to acknowledge I’d been conned and leave.

Have a guess what my self-image was like back then.  Emotionally I reacted very strongly to it all and because I couldn’t accept my own emotional responses (I thought they were ‘bad’) I developed panic attacks, rage attacks, OCD and depression in my early twenties.  I’m going to write more about the Self-Image in another post.

Latest research tells us that, just to keep our Self-Image where it currently is, we need to be receiving positive social signals at least three to five times more often than negative evidence otherwise we will develop a poor self-image whether we want to or not.  This is because, by default, we are designed to pay attention to negative signals first.  Negative signals are the things that help keep us alive.  This default setting can be used against us by others wanting to manipulate us into giving them what they want, who later declare us as ‘socially unacceptable’ when we either don’t deliver what they want or do and they’ve no further use for us.

People who are naturally empathic – who have a tendency to ‘put themselves in other people’s shoes’ - are particularly susceptible to this kind of manipulation, particularly if not aware of how the Self-Image works and not willing to cut their emotional ties from the people they need to because those people are signalling continual social rejection at them.  Some of us even regard the sacrifice of a positive Self-Image as a necessity for meeting socially justifiable goals.  I used to think that way – but the belief that punishing ourselves will make us better people doesn’t work.

Your Current Self-Image and New Situations

A negative Self-Image automatically reduces your capacity for dealing effectively with new negative or positive situations because you can’t ‘see the join’.  You cannot consciously see the pre-situation; in-situation; post-situation pattern.  By the time the new situation arrives you have already been producing a long-term negative vibrational tone – feeling bad about yourself because you unconsciously regard yourself as socially worthless.  Even during those times you start to feel good there’s a question inside asking ‘do I deserve this?’.

There’s also an in-built tendency, when suffering with a negative Self-Image, to identify your core self with it.  For example a person angry at how they’ve been treated socially sees themselves as an ‘abnormally angry person with a chip on their shoulder’ and goes on to believe they deserve negative treatment from others.  A person who suffers years of bullying becomes an ‘abnormally anxious person’ who deserves to be treated as weak and stupid.

When a new negative situation, created by other people, starts triggering further negative emotional responses it just gets added to an already overloaded ‘negativity pot’.

But let’s say, like me, you release your negativity; undo the negative Self-Image (or what we might call our Social Worth Image) given to you by others and go on instead to develop a clearly visible history of evidence showing you have high social worth.  What kind of mind is it then dealing with the incoming signals of an approaching negative situation?

That would be the ‘Now Mind’.

The Now Mind

The Now Mind is the ‘happy’ mind.  It’s the mind you should aim to be in most of the time.

In the Now Mind you are at peace and have a positive Self-Image; an underlying sense of Social Worth.  You are aware there is the potential for negativity in the world but you now have clear evidence you can bring yourself through such experiences and return to the Now Mind whenever you want so you do not worry unnecessarily about those things.  You are not self-critical (nor, by the way are you self-obsessed or narcissistic).

You are able to sit still with a sense of gratefulness for the new world now sitting in front of you wondering ‘wow – I’m alive; what shall I do next?’.  You have no hostile intent and no anxieties.  Your Subjective Mind (your emotional response mind) is quiet.  Your Objective Mind is not trying to figure anything difficult out.  You realise you feel buoyant.

And then a negative situation appears; not of your doing, and you can see, plain as day, someone or something else is creating it for you.  Unfortunately you cannot just pretend it isn’t happening; you have to respond.  The question is: how?

Well, it depends on which of the many response roles available you want to play.

Response Roles



 

Just take a  look at each of those response roles – you can respond to any situation using any one of them and produce emotional responses designed to ensure you play that role.  Then you can change your roles as you progress through the various steps in dealing with a situation.  It depends on how you see yourself in regards to the situation and how important it is for you to manipulate how others see you – and in turn how you want your Self-Image to turn out when you look at for yourself.

Are there some situations in which you act like a nervous wreck but in others respond like a tiger?  You can mix and match your roles – for example you could be a Comedian-Victim who laughs bitterly at the ironies of life as the next blow falls; a Guardian Supporter who reassures a victim everything will be OK because you know what the big picture looks like and you want to put their stressed minds at rest (“Search your feelings; feel the force” and all that kind of thing oh Wise One).

You may know people who appear stuck in one or more of these ‘response roles’ as if it were their default personality but actually what’s happening with them is they’re stuck in that role because they’ve not yet released the emotional energy provided by their Subjective Mind when dealing with an old situation.

You, however, can avoid getting stuck in a ‘response role’ by making sure you have fully discharged the emotional energies driving your response; you allow yourself to express all those emotional energies safely and return to the Now Mind.

The Now Mind is the only true mind.

And that’s how it is for every one of us.

You see, when a situation arises, regardless of who or what causes it, we get caught up in the ‘story-mind’.

The Story-Mind

Since early childhood you have been trained in the habit of engaging with stories.  All good stories involve the four minds and all of those response roles I’ve listed.

In the Now Mind state you go towards a story: you experience it; analyse it then judge it as socially worthy or not.  Then you leave the story to return to your previous Now Mind state.  Those with incomplete personal stories; particularly stories in which they cannot resolve information being processed in the Subjective Mind because we are simply not designed to accept negative Self-Image information, remain stuck in emotional turmoil.

Your life is your personal story with you it’s only writer - if it’s not working out for you – if the audience tells you your story stinks – it falls to you to rewrite the story repeatedly in a bid to please everybody else or change the audience for one that will give you different feedback.   At some point your story will come to an end.

Author Brendon Burchard, in his book ‘Life’s Golden Ticket’, tells us at the end of our days we ask ourselves three simple questions:

• Did I live?


• Did I love?


• Did I matter?

We refer to whatever Self-Image we have at that time for the answers.

Every fictional story has a goodie or a baddie with each representing an argument around a central issue and we, the audience, root for one or the other.  Success versus failure.  Intelligence versus stupidity.  Attractive versus ugly.  A choice of two opposing self-images one of which we are invited to identify with.  The outcomes of the story can be win-win; lose-lose; win-lose; lose-win - or the tension remains and we wait for the sequel.

Both goodies are baddies are supported by all those response roles listed above – which represent all the different approaches available, in any story; ‘real’, ‘fictional’ or your’s.

In reality there’s no such thing as a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’ – because truth is, anyone who does anything, harmful or beneficial, can find a Social Justification for it if they look long enough.  That justification does not even have to be based on something real – it can be a notion.  A social meme.  An idea.  Not a single, systematically evil person on the planet believes that’s what they are.

Because they surround themselves with people who support their view – which strengthens their Positive Self-Image no end.

To you the situation you’re dealing with may look as though it’s being driven by a narcissistic nutcase but to the people they socialise with they are heroes.

This is why, when you’re in a situation dealing with a self-centred trouble-causer, you cannot get them to just stop through ‘reasoning’.  Their positive self-image is based on a history of social positive self-image reinforcement and their egos would fight to the death with you to defend it.  As far as they’re concerned they feel great about themselves.

How about you?  Are you willing to do what’s necessary in any situation to get back to the point you feel great about yourself afterwards?

I’m going to write more about this later but in the meantime here’s a model I suggest you follow:

 



 

Regards – Carl