I also discussed the need to establish a support network (and you should see these people on a regular cyclical basis for their input and help to be effective).
In this post (and it's another biggie) I'm going to cover the following points:
- Focus on How You Want to Feel
- Practice Every Day
- Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop a Subjective Viewpoint
- Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers
- Establish a Weekly Cycle
- Focus on One Reaction at a Time
- Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points
- Judge Progress by What You Can Do
- Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts
- Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are.
1 Focus on How You Want to Feel
The first step of any successful system is the identification of a desirable outcome. Imagine yourself free both of the emotional problem and of the restrictions it places on you - what would you do? How would that freedom affect your relationships with others - and with yourself? Visualise a place where you want to be emotionally peaceful. A state where you can be completely content; not be festering on 'how do I deal with my emotional problem?' This kind of thing is achievable.
What if your desired outcome is not realistic? What if when you get 'there' it's not exactly how you envisioned it? It does not matter. When starting towards any goal in life, unless it's a very short-lived one such as 'putting the butter in the fridge' (and sometimes even that doesn't happen if you trip on the kitchen carpet) we have to accept that final-destination type goals are variable - we never really achieve exactly what we envisioned. What we do achieve, however, is the journey towards 'different' and 'better'. As long as we stay on the journey we will keep re-visiting our desirable outcomes and things will gradually improve.
If you have multiple emotional problems you will eventually find yourself having a greater amount of 'emotional free time' to play with and it is realistic to set a goal of having a greater percentage of time free from emotional issues. If you have a single emotional problem you could start your desensitisation plan on a Friday and be completely problem-free by Monday; but this is unusual - in most cases it will take several weeks and sometimes months.
Although you may not achieve an idealistic new 'you' all the time it will be a much happier you than who you are at the start of the process (instead of being happy 100% of the time you may have to settle for being happy 90% of the time; sigh).
2 Practice Every Day
You have to be careful when you practice, however. 'Opening up' an emotional response fully can leave you feeling exhausted and your focus of attention, especially if you're exposing yourself to an obsession, can be skewed for the rest of the day. When is your best time of the week for spending 'intense' time? Try to save the most intense work for those times. Most days you need to be just 'skimming the edges' of the response. This will teach your unconscious mind slowly that the response itself is not so dangerous - and it will prepare you to bring the intense work to easier fruition.
Additionally it is around the 'staying with the feeling but not fully going in' that you may get insights into what the response relates to. If you have had a response for a long time it's easy for the information about the 'issue' to which the response relates to be lost. For example, if you had a frightening experience in an enclosed space but forgotten the detail you may be confused when having a strong response to a new place that reminds you of it. By skirting around and exploring the feeling at a lesser intensity you can raise the memory and this gives you a bigger picture to work with. This helps.
By the time 'intense work time' arrives you will be itching to get in there and accept that the intense emotional response is linked to a viewpoint you accept. Let us say your reason for panicking in enclosed spaces is because you imagined suffocating in such a place but you've told yourself to stop being silly and refused to feel and release the panic. Would it be silly to panic if you were suffocating and had a strong fear response - no, in fact it might save your life. So we gradually figure out what the issue is (if we're not sure) and bring that and the response together.
Try not to work on your emotions when walking on busy streets or driving or operating machinery (if you can help it - sometimes the work just follows us around whether we want to switch it off or not). Keep aware of any situation in which you could be injured or killed due to not paying attention to the outside world. I came close to being hit by cars twice because my attention just wasn't on what was going on around me.
Desensitisation work is very distracting. It dominates your focus of attention and wipes your short-term memory. You can end up doing such things as not paying for goods when leaving a shop because you can't remember if you paid at checkout or not (I didn't do this but I did upset a newsagent once when he wanted my money and I'd put it back in my pocket because I thought I'd paid him already). These things happen.
So try and pick a safe place to practice and don't intend to 'open up' completely if you've got some other complex responsibility to meet. If you've got the day to yourself though, go for it.
3 Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop an Objective Viewpoint
A subjective viewpoint is that of the person affected by the emotional response - this is the viewpoint of a person believing they are being 'done to' and, I hate to say it, it is the viewpoint of a 'victim'.
An objective viewpoint is that of the person sitting on the outside of the emotional response who is able to study it; test it; re-draw it and play with it and figure out how to bring the response under control and then stop it. This is the viewpoint of a laboratory scientist who treats the subjective viewpoint as a test subject.
Transitioning from the subjective view to the objective view is very, very difficult and takes time. A Counsellor can assist in making the transition as they sit on the outside of the experience and unconsciously coach you in how to sit in their place while they also sit in your's. A Counsellor is very unlikely to tell you this is what's happening - it just happens. You get used to the idea of 'sitting outside the experience and looking in'.
Why do you need to develop the objective viewpoint? Because it's the decision-maker when it comes to the argument between two other viewpoints that are involved. When you have an anxiety disorder of any kind and you decide to remove it you've got a war going on inside of you between these two additional viewpoints.
The third viewpoint we're dealing with is that of the trapped emotional response fighting for release - this is the emotional energy contained in the anxiety disorder. In a fictional story this viewpoint would be called the 'Protagonistic Viewpoint'
The fourth viewpoint is the resistance to the release - driven by the parts of you that don't want to go through the releasing experience. When you want to keep the disorder trapped the disorder is the bad guy and the commitment to keeping the response trapped is the good guy - but when you start to desensitise the argument for and against release is reversed. The anti-release viewpoint, in a fictional story, would be called the 'Antagonistic Viewpoint'.
The Objective Viewpoint, the part of you that sits outside the experience looking in, decides which of the two viewpoints wins the fight.
4 Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers
During my healing I would constantly surprise myself as I came to realise the issues behind my responses. At first all I could see were the emotions themselves and I was 'sailing blind'. But as I repeatedly went into the emotional responses I started to see the 'issues' appear and I'd think 'well, I agree with me thinking that - I can understand it'. Once I got to this point I was ready to 'unitise'. It can be difficult to release an emotional response when you don't know what triggered it.
However, I've also released a trapped response without knowing the trigger, particularly when the response, such as panic attacks, was based around the fear of another response! It's not so easy to remove these responses because you can't clearly see the cause - it's a bit like being afraid of murky fog - you can't clearly identify things. Nevertheless, the trapped response will evaporate if you keep going.
5 Establish a Weekly Cycle
It's a good idea to build the healing cycle around your appointments with your counsellor - this way you work towards providing the counsellor/doctor/psychiatrist with a progress report. You can see your counsellor once a week and then as your healing progresses move the appointments further apart. Each week you should aim to move a little bit further forward - but remember that just being on the journey is enough most weeks.
6 Focus on One Response at a Time
Your intention should be to move towards the 'maximum intensity point' within the emotional response and regard yourself as working in small emotional release cycles. What happens, whether you plan for it or not, is that by just moving repeatedly into the most intense part of the response you force the emotional release cycle to complete.
Trapped emotional responses form 'layers' in our bodies and when you complete an emotional cycle you remove the top layer and move onto the one below - until one day they're all gone!
I have been reading recently that you should create a scale where level 1 is the mildest fear response and level 10 is the most intense and you should try and keep yourself at 'level 3' or there's a risk of re-inforcing the emotional response . This may work well with phobias - but it's not quite so simple with obsessions. I have also recently seen a report by a respected doctor that states desensitisation does not work on obsessions. Sorry but this is utter rubbish. Desensitisation and exposure therapy work on all emotional responses as long as you're willing to do the work necessary, it's that simple.
Personally when I wanted to heal from my obsessions I wanted to heal as quickly as possible - I just could not be bothered with all that scales malarkey. I was a Level 8 no matter what and it was Level 12 that finally sorted it out for me. But yes - focus on one emotional layer at a time.
7 Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points
I'm a bit of a workaholic - I like a list of 'things I did today' at the end of every day and one of my arguments against doing the emotional work was that it was not 'productive'. By combining the emotional work with some tedious and mentally undemanding task such as wallpaper stripping or ironing (mind that hot iron - ooch) I could do both the 'self-indulgent' emotional work and also find myself with a stripped wall or the ironing done at the end of it.
I could not do complex intellectual work and the emotional work at the same time - I could not even write my experiences down during the emotional work because if you're doing the emotional work right the logical mind, the intellectual, judgemental and interfering left neo-cortex, is hijacked and shut down.
Another distraction I combined with the intense emotional work was pleasant relaxing music; it took the edge off the pain - my favourite was the Theta Meditation System music from Dr Jeffrey Thompson (there's a link below) - but I bought a whole stack of other relaxing music to use too.
You should reward yourself at regular intervals (especially after completing a period of desensitisation). This all creates a more pleasant after- affect. 'Yeah, it was unpleasant, but look, I got the wall stripped'.
8 Judge Progress by What You Can Do
One of the problems with judging how well you're doing on the basis of how you feel when it comes to emotional desensitisation is it's all relative to how you feel right now. You could have got rid of thirty unwanted emotional responses but if you're stuck in the middle of response thirty one and you look to how you feel as an indicator of how you're progressing you'll come up with 'I feel terrible! It's not working!'.
This is yet another great role a counsellor can serve - acting as an external 'milestone marker' - someone who reminds you of your progress; of what you were struggling with when you first met and what you can do now as opposed to way back then when you first started.
Base progress on what you can do - on the places no longer off limits to you emotionally - rather than how you feel.
9 Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts
Trapped feelings look for, and produce, strange thought patterns in order to try and gain escape from the body. Once those feelings have left the body through the correct thought pattern that created them in the first place (the 'triggering issue') all those strange thought patterns that kept catching your attention disappear. This is how it works. Accept the strange thoughts as a part of the healing process and don't give them too much time and weight.
10 Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are
At some point your anxiety disorder will start to disappear. Your panic attacks will stop; your phobias will be gone; your obsessions will be distant memories. The question you have to ask now is: what caused them? Anxiety disorders can be caused by sudden shocking events - but I suspect it's more usual for them to appear after an anxious foundation has first been laid down for quite some time.
To maintain emotional happiness you have to be watchful for any future negative emotional responses - and hunt them down; feel and release them; at the earliest opportunity. If you don't do this you risk a relapse into your anxiety disorder. I've written a previous post called, I think, 'Get the Vacuum Cleaner Out' - when you get a hint of a negative emotional response find it and go into it as soon as possible. Having this approach will keep you free of further anxiety problems.
If you don't remove negative feelings in this way, as a habit, the dirty dogs will start nipping at your heels again and they don't go away. But then you already knew that.
That's the end of this post. Please note that because it's a generalised view of the desensitisation process there may be some parts of it that need to be adapted slightly for different conditions.
All comments; criticisms and discussion points are gratefully received and if you would like to put a post on the blog in response to this post please email me at carl@managemesystems.com and I'll gladly post it (as long as it's relevant and above board etc) with a link back to your site.
I'm thinking about taking the whole week's posts on desensitisation and producing a free pdf download and an mp3 too - would that be of any use?
Regards - Carl
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