Obsessions and OCD Symptoms – Do You Have Them?

This is a brief guide – if you suspect you have an issue of this kind you should seek local professional diagnosis and support.

Here we look at:

• Typical Symptoms of Obsessions and OCD


• Development of Obsessions and OCD


• What Drives Obsessions and OCD


• Removing Obsessions and OCD Using Exposure Therapy.

Typical Symptoms of Obsessions and OCD

The sufferers of obsessions and OCD  are stuck in a self-perpetuating sensory feedback loop.

The Conscious Mind of a sufferer is repeatedly bombarded with imagery of an imagined horrific event happening accompanied by an emotional reaction so intense it stimulates the Unconscious Mind into believing the event actually is happening – right now; repeatedly.

Knowing the event is not real the Conscious Mind refuses to allow the loop to complete and develops thoughts, imagery and beliefs to fight the initial reaction to the imagined event.  ‘Why should I allow this experience to affect me when I know it is not real?  Something is wrong with my emotional system!’.

These secondary thoughts, images and beliefs also feed into the Unconscious Mind making the condition more intense while the Conscious Mind loses direct control of both Primary and Secondary responses.  The inner fight becomes an automated experience maintained by the area of our brain designed to control repeating behavioural habits – the Basal Ganglia.

This is how obsessions and OCD are born and maintained.

OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) occurs when a sufferer finds performing a certain type of physical action reduces the tension associated with their obsession, or any other unwanted emotional response, as it partially completes the emotional loop and offers temporary cathartic release of emotional energy while also showing the Unconscious Mind some kind of reassuring preventative measure has been taken.

However, this action also reinforces the Unconsciously held belief there is a genuine threat – otherwise why would we need to do anything to reduce the risk of it?

When the relieving, preventative action is not taken the sufferer becomes increasingly tense, eventually feeling compelled to perform the preventative action again.

Typical symptoms of Obsessions:

Repeating imagery appears in the Conscious accompanied by unusually intense negative emotional responses that remain for long periods of time.  There is no pretending this is not happening.  The only way to stop the mind being overwhelmed is to find more pleasant distractions to focus on.  The sufferer is unable to ‘relax’ as this clears the way for the unwanted imagery and attached emotional responses to move in.

Obsessions are based around imagery such as:

• your harming, or others harming, those you care about and this happening due to your lack of awareness or alleged self-control


• of lashing out for no good reason at complete strangers or people you love


• of inappropriate sexual behaviour and of being shunned or shamed because you did something or because your lack of alertness failed to prevent others treating those you care about this way


• of your accidentally poisoning others or failing to prevent others from being poisoned


• of you or others being harmed with inanimate objects and these now allegedly dangerous inanimate objects (even just their basic shape) repeatedly appearing in your conscious mind accompanied by intense negative emotions (you may go on to develop phobias in regards to these objects)


• of death caused by contamination, germs and disease in situations that you could have prevented


• fear of burglary; death; earthquakes; not coping with the death of loved ones; incurring the wrath of God because we are thinking something evil


• of impulsively or accidentally dropping children out of windows; accidentally suffocating someone; causing someone we care about to choke because we were not alert enough; causing someone to be killed in a car accident because we did not advise them to be careful on the roads often enough.

The same images appear over and over again in the Conscious Mind alongside intense emotional responses such as feelings of intense disgust; fear; anger and grief.  The person may also suffer with depression and panic attacks.  In the Unconscious intense emotions drive imagined scenarios as if they were real events needing to be dealt with.

Typical Symptoms of OCD

With OCD the sufferer feels compelled to perform stress-reducing reassurance acts such as:

• continual washing; cleaning; grooming; checking light switches; water taps; cookers; door locks; brakes; clocks; bathroom pipes and showers for leaks; organising household objects for no reason (eg cups and cutlery in the houses of other people when they visit) and also


• hoarding things for protective purposes (which they never use); checking waste bins repeatedly; feeling you walked through something ‘the wrong way’ and doing it again just in case; needing to constantly avoid or touch something; re-reading something you have written over and over again; re-opening things you have sealed just to make sure what you put in there is in there and also sometimes


• avoiding certain colours because they produce negative emotional responses; associating names; numbers or certain situations with repeating negative emotions; needing constant reassurance from others that you did something the right way;  repeatedly checking your body for signs of disease; thinking about life-threatening conditions over and over again; a constant feeling of not being as good, as sensible, or as attractive as others (this being done to such an extent it is much more intense than having normal occasional self-doubts).

You do not need to be struggling with all of these conditions – just a few of them could mean you may have or be developing the symptoms of obsessions or OCD.  To the sufferer it may seem these images are warnings of personal faults but the truth is obsessions and OCD are based on a determination to prevent these things from happening – all anxiety disorders are concerned with prevention and protection.

Behind these immediate symptoms is a powerful, attention grabbing emotional drive to keep ‘looking’ at the symptoms themselves with a view to undoing them and then undoing them some more and then undoing them again.

Development of Obsessions and OCD

Occasionally I come across someone explaining how they cannot stop thinking about or doing something they enjoy, such as  planning for their wedding despite not yet having a partner or collecting garden gnomes.

They worry they have an obsession because they do not want to stop this habit and feel a bit down when they do.  They ask ‘anyone got any advice?’.

My advice is: this is probably ‘a hobby’, not OCD or an anxiety-related obsession you need to be concerned about.

The only time a hobby should be a concern is if it is being used as a distraction device to keep mental attention away from the affects of an intense, emotionally overwhelming response.

Distraction devices are a typical method sufferers of OCD and obsessions use to reduce and avoid the stressful nature of their condition.  Once they stop the more pleasant distracting action the internal tension caused by their condition returns to conscious awareness.

Anxiety Disorders

OCD and obsessions are members of the anxiety disorder family.  Anxiety disorders are caused by our having a secondary emotional response to a primary emotional response.

Our primary response is our perfectly normal response to our natural interpretation of an external real-life event or a given way of thinking in regards to an imagined event.

The defining question is whether or not our logical mind accepts the primary response as valid and is willing to find an appropriate method of releasing the emotional energy produced by the response.

If, for whatever reason, we decide a primary response is unacceptable and do not wish to feel it we may then produce a secondary response intending to hold it back from affecting us any further (that is the intention, anyway, but in reality it causes an anxiety disorder and we end up feeling both the unwanted primary and secondary feelings repeatedly).

When we produce a Secondary response it may be the same emotional response as the Primary response and so it ‘blends’ in our conscious when we look at the situation.  For example:

• panic attacks and phobias are caused by fear of situations we associate with fear responses


• depression is caused by anger at the fact there are situations in which we feel anger.

In regards to obsessions and OCD it may be we have two different emotions fighting each other such as:

• fear of disgust.

This can then become fear of the fear of a disgust response and so we have panic attacks when consciously approaching mental imagery at the centre of our disgust-creating obsessions.

It is possible to develop some anxiety disorders, such as phobias, following  a single fearful response in a single given situation, regardless of what our baseline emotional state is.  This is how our fear-response mechanism is designed – see a lion in your back garden and you will automatically nervously look for signs of the lion two weeks later when venturing outside (can I suggest it would be stupid not to?).

Repeatedly going out into the garden and finding no lion present will eventually re-train and remove the fear response in your Unconscious – but only after your Unconscious is convinced there definitely is no lion.

This is not an irrational process – this is your unconscious survival mechanism at work.  This is not an anxiety disorder developing but you can turn it into one if you refuse to accept the fear adjustment process itself and tell yourself your reaction was abnormal.

Judging the process abnormal you then refuse to go outside and experience it at all because you do not agree with the fear adjustment mechanism, sometimes referred to as ‘extinction’ or ‘habituation.  In this particular situation your non-acceptance of the fear adjustment process triggers the phobia called ‘agoraphobia’ – fear of experiencing fear in the outside world.

Conditions such as OCD and obsessions tend to develop following a series of negative life events in an area of deep concern and our continued efforts to suppress our emotional reactions when those areas of life are threatened.  It is sometimes difficult to identify what the root external causes of OCD and obsessions are.

As you can see from the ‘fear of fear of disgust’ model above the layers can be quite difficult to unravel.

Medical professionals sometimes refer to obsessions and OCD as ‘complex’ because the journey back to wellness involves the unravelling and acceptance and adjustment of and to multiple belief systems and anxiety-creating memories.

Negative feelings, at the earlier initial worrying stage leading up to the development of obsessions, may be so mild in comparison to the later intense emotional responses they do not readily stand out in our awareness – we have to go searching for these worries in order to make sense of their overall long-term affect on us and then undo the worrying habit in order to prevent a return of the more intense obsessions/OCD once removed.

On a positive note: if you have the courage and determination to remove an obsession or OCD you will more than likely have the courage to remove the lower level emotional issues that led to them.

Example: Your Family in Danger?

Let us say you have a young family and you worry about their safety.  Your six and seven year old children seem to have no road awareness and you live near a busy city road.

When you do try to raise their awareness you are labelled as a worrier or you are humiliated in front of the children by your partner.  Not just on one occasion, but every occasion for months.

In a bid to ‘protect everyone’, despite their apparently deliberate ignorance, you put yourself on a state of emotional ‘high alert’ creating a kind of imaginary ‘awareness umbrella’ to ensure you respond quickly enough should the threat occur.  You imagine yourself diving out in front of cars and lorries to protect your children as they dash into the road and so on.

You focus conversations on road safety at every opportunity and because no-one is listening to you become annoyed by the lack of respect coming your way – your alleged worrying has become the family joke.  When you go out with your children you insist they hold your hands when crossing the road but your partner does not do this.

To avoid being repeatedly humiliated you may start looking for evidence of the threat to prove your ‘rightness’.  You stick pictures of children killed in traffic accidents up on the walls.  Your partner takes them down and  your critics keep criticising and you now start to criticise yourself because you see your worrying as the cause of a rift in the relationship with your partner and children.  How are you going to protect them if they up and move away from you even further?  So you start to suppress and repress the feelings and try to hide your worrying.  You also hide the fact you have started having fantasies about hitting your partner over the head with something heavy.

You believe you are over-reacting – but are you?  If you let your guard down the feared bad thing might happen.

Then you read in a local newspaper the story of a gang deliberately targeting young children in your local area.  Because you are already on high alert this story ‘takes off’ in your mind; but you cannot share the information with your partner; you know what the response will be.

You now believe you must remain constantly alert to this new threat or it could happen.  Your mind fills with imagery and multiple negative emotions such as disgust and anger based around the feared scenario but you are also self-critical of your higher alertness level.

You produce emotional responses but then refuse to release and experience them as they rise up into your brain because logically you know the scenarios they are attached to are not real – they are imagined.

Unwanted images attached to the imagined issues now repeatedly appear in your mind automatically, accompanied by intense emotional responses you do not wish to experience.

Driving all of this is that seed of worry: in your imagination you are creating grief scenarios in which you miss your children; guilt scenarios that say their death by whatever means was your fault because you did not find the method to convince them of the dangers.  You did not protect them.

You believe you would not cope with the grief; you would not cope with the guilt.  You would die a living death.  Then you step back and tell yourself ‘eh, this is not real, what are you doing to yourself?  Look how emotional you are!’.  But because the management of this process has now transferred into your Limbic Brain you do not have direct control of your reactions.

Mixed in with all these fearful feelings is your rage at your partner for putting you in this position and you start to believe you are not a very nice person.

You have an obsession; or if you complete some repetitive physical task to calm yourself temporarily when the negative emotions start to come up, you have OCD.

Self-Criticism Plays a Critical Part

Having a certain level of concern for a valued life area is a good thing – but it is best to manage these concerns in the thinking, logical mind if possible. Unfortunately we value some areas of life to such an extent our reaction is automatically emotional when we see them repeatedly threatened.

The more intensely emotional we are about a valued threatened life area the greater the chance that management of the issues at the centre of our concern will move into the emotional brain; our lower Limbic Brain.

Once this happens we become automatic worriers against our conscious will – the Limbic brain does not think – it just automatically ‘emotes’ in relation to imagery and other sensory information at the centre of the worrying process.

Your Social Environment Plays a Part

If you are in or have experienced a social environment in which you have seen and experienced the safe acceptance and release of emotional responses, and feel confident with how you work at this level, you may heal problems such as this almost as quickly as they develop.

For example if you were raised a Buddhist you would have been trained to go through the release of negative emotions and the issues to which they are attached over and over again as a standard approach to living.

If, however, you were raised in a social environment in which not only was such training absent but your feelings were criticised and you were told you would only be ‘acceptable to others’ if you suppressed your unwanted emotions you now have an increased risk of developing obsessions and OCD.

In order to reverse and undo the process it helps if you first see what drives it.

What Drives Obsessions and OCD

There are two main drives behind these conditions:

• Emotional blocking


• Thought or image stopping.

Emotional Blocking

The most serious form of emotional blocking has already been discussed above: secondary emotional responses, the process by which we try to stop a primary emotional response affecting us by fighting it with a secondary one.

There are two other, less intense, forms of blocking also briefly mentioned above which we often use before we get to the secondary emotional response stage: suppression and repression.

Using Suppression we keep an emotional response under wraps while still having conscious knowledge of the related triggering situation.  We might do this to prevent social damage; for example being angry at our boss but not wanting to display our anger because of the potential consequences.

This is a valid and useful approach – as long as we find a ‘safe’, appropriate place to release our negative feelings later.  Suppress for long enough, though, and it becomes ‘repression’.

Repression is a situation in which we have the feelings still coming up but have lost the understanding of why they were created, the memories are hidden, yet still keep affecting us.  In repression we and others label these troubling and unwanted reactions as ‘our personality’ and make the mistake of identifying them as ‘us’.  We start to hate ‘us’ and how we work (actually what we hate is the emotional system life has equipped us with).

One day we have one negative response too many and we start to fight it using our own emotional responses with the intention of forcing the unwanted thoughts and feelings ‘out of existence’.  Paradoxically we now have two sets of feelings to work through, primary and secondary responses, fighting each other and producing a ‘pressure-cooker’ intensity in our emotional system.

Emotional blocking creates an electrically overcharged mind and body through the repeated release of high-alert hormones and neurotransmitters in much the same way building a dam across a river causes water to rise.

A Seemingly Out-of-Control Attention Mechanism

Although the brain does not ‘feel’ in the same physical way the body does we do produce an emotional, feeling-based reaction in the Limbic Brain, our emotional brain, which acts as if it were a spark-plug to the rest of the body.

When the Limbic Brain sparks it forces our Conscious to pay attention to the unwanted thoughts, images and feelings contained in our obsessions.  We may sense the backs of our mental eyeballs being grabbed and forced to ‘look’ at the imagery and the emotional response concerned.

There is a moment of panic at the start of an obsession where the sufferer wonders what on Earth has just happened to them and they fight its apparent hold on their mind – they cannot pull their attention away.

In reality, however, this is not an abnormal event – this is exactly how our attention mechanism works when we find ourselves in the presence of a predator or a threatening situation.

In the case of an obsession or OCD we have convinced our Unconscious the unwanted thought or image is a real-life threat, and have activated the attention mechanism in the same way we would if a hungry lion were approaching.

Your logical thinking mind knows this is a harmless image in reality and wants you to look at other things, but it is forced to keep focusing on the image or external object of concern again and again; because your emotional brain has registered the image as a serious threat.

Any time you enter a new place, if there is anything present that reminds you of your obsession or OCD, you keep looking at it or focusing on it against conscious will.

Thought or Image Stopping

Image stopping is exactly what it sounds like – we deliberately try to stop an image, thought or sound pattern from appearing in our minds because what it represents is unacceptable to us.

When we have an obsession or OCD the Unconscious Mind is making the mistake of believing the representative pattern is itself the real event.  It believes this because the strength of the emotional response attached to it is the same as if it were real.

Your brain contains hundreds, if not thousands, of thoughts and images related to horrible things that can happen to you and others in life – so why do they not all become an emotional problem for you?

Normally these horrible images float into conscious awareness and then go right on by and out of it.  Air accidents; news on the latest soldier killed in battle; stabbings – we think about these things; we feel a temporary negative emotional response about them; then we let them go.

This is because we are in ‘objective’ viewpoint.  But there are some thoughts and images that hit closer to home because they are ‘subjective’.  It may be we feel a valued personal life area has been threatened for some time and we are concerned about there being an actual risk to ourselves or those we care about.  When our brain receives or creates thoughts and images related to that more sensitive area of life we are therefore more prone to react with intense emotions.

The problem with using thought-stopping as an obsession or OCD removal process is it requires the unwanted thoughts to be recreated.

People with obsessions and OCD see the thoughts and images attached to their unwanted emotional responses as an enemy to be hunted and ejected from the mind.

They believe if they can get rid of the horrible thoughts they can remove the emotional responses that come with them – but it works the other way round.  Emotional problems are an emotional energy issue – not a thinking issue; they require an emotional release solution.

The logical thinking mind searches itself for the solution to what it believes to be a thinking problem and in doing so makes the imagery appear even more significant building additional neural networks to work on the alleged mental problem.

These networks have a ‘search and destroy mechanism’, spreading their influence to other parts of the brain.  As a result the sufferer finds additional horrible thoughts, imagery and emotional responses being produced.

Sufferers may develop phobias in regards to external objects and situations reminding them of their internal imagery.

Thought-stopping is not the answer to removing anxiety disorders.  The answer is to tune into, accept and then work with the natural emotional energy cycle life has provided us with.

What keeps driving a horrible thought to keep reappearing in our minds or driving us to perform a stress-relieving action is not the imagery but the emotional energy attached to it.  The energy keeps ‘grabbing’ the image, bringing it to conscious attention, because it is telling you this is the target it needs to be discharged at.

In order to remove any emotional disorder caused by emotional blocking we have to allow the emotional process, the same process used to protect ourselves against hungry lions, to complete.  We must gradually stop blocking it.

We have to allow ourselves to temporarily pretend the unwanted thoughts and images are valid and move towards them in order to trigger full release (or as near full as we can get) so the emotional attachment to the imagery is discharged and the Unconscious can see that the image is just that – an unpleasant, representative image we can let go.

Just like all those other horrible thoughts in our mind we do not pay much attention to.

Removing Obsessions and OCD Using Exposure Therapy

Exposure Therapy (also sometimes referred to as De-Sensitisation) is effective in treating most anxiety disorders – of any type - but it is painful and can be slow.   For this reason you may want to try other methods first and should approach your doctor for their support if you intend to use it.

Although the symptoms are no more than the affects of your own natural body discharging emotional energy those affects are powerful during the healing process.

Inducing full emotional overwhelm can result in symptoms such as the ‘mammalian freeze response’ – which is something that comes as quite a shock in itself when first experienced (this is also referred to as the ‘disassociation response’).  Having a medical professional who has seen this kind of thing before explain this to you makes quite a difference to your progress.

Success rates using Exposure Therapy are higher for the healing of phobias than they are for obsessions or OCD and I will explain why further down.

Exposure Therapy comes in two flavours:

• Systematic and


• Non-systematic.

Both achieve the same outcome when the process is complete: the Unconscious is retrained to no longer see the imagery as threatening and the intense emotional response attached to it is discharged and detached (or at least discharged to a point it no longer gets the attention of the Conscious).

Systematic Exposure

Systematic Exposure is:

• planned and the plan is


• graduated.

The sufferer creates a ‘risk list’, for example based on a scale of 1 to 10, starting with what situation creates least anxiety to that which creates most.  They then start exposing themselves at regular intervals to the least anxiety-creating situation and once the anxiety response has stopped in that situation they move on to the next, more intense anxiety creating situation.  Quite often the anxiety about the next situation has already been reduced due to the removal of the previous one.

Let us say you were terrified of public speaking and started by speaking in short bursts in small groups gradually moving up to actually teaching a class or taking part in a stage play with a large audience.  Terror would turn to nervousness to a state of enthusiasm and excitement (believe it or not).

Non-Systematic Exposure

Non-systematic exposure is a more intense approach.

With this approach you identify the most intense anxiety-creating situation and go straight into it.  Full throttle; come what may.  And you stay there to exhaustion – then start again, repeating until the emotional energy is discharged and the triggering situation becomes neutral, no longer pestering the Conscious.

The problem with Non-systematic exposure is the intensity of the experience can cause the Unconscious and Conscious minds to slam the neuronal doors shut again; rejecting the experience due to the pain involved.

Systematic Exposure Therapy, the graduated type, is much more difficult to use with obsessions or OCD than with phobias because the images and memories triggering these conditions are perceived by the brain to be inside the brain.  Phobias are ‘out there’ and so we only become afraid when we know we are approaching external territory in which the phobia trigger is found.

You open the neuronal doors to an obsession and it is full throttle exposure whether you want it to be or not – but still it takes quite a while to reach the main trigger of this type of emotional problem because we have built internal mental and emotional barriers.

In a bid to keep the obsession or OCD from completely dominating the mind and body the Conscious and Unconscious have made an attempt to close down and block  access to the imagery and emotional energy and when you finally decide to face it and ‘go in’ these arguments and blocks will rise up in to Conscious awareness to fight the decision.  They are based around the two drives I mentioned earlier:

• Emotional blocking


• Thought or image stopping.

To reverse emotional blocking you must begin to set aside private time and be willing to endure the affects of ‘emotional opening and releasing’ – that is, sensing what emotional responses are pushing up for release from within your body then Consciously taking your thinking mind in to meet those feelings.

To reverse thought and image stopping you must force the mind to deliberately focus on and move towards the unwanted, unacceptable imagery.

Both your Conscious and Unconscious will naturally fight this new ‘going in’ decision because both believe it will kill you – the intense emotional effect mimics suffocation by a predator.

You may have to lay down; you will at some point have to allow your thinking to shut down so you can be emotionally ‘flooded’.  This flooding takes the form of full hormonal release in the body and flooding of the brain with neurotransmitter chemicals causing the issue at the centre of the response to be transmitted on a mass scale across the brain (as opposed to the normal way in which it transmits signals through specific neural pathways).

Eventually the emotional energy is both fully released and the emotional production triggering mechanism is switched off.

But you will not believe this can be achieved until you experience it for the first time.

Regards

Carl

Emotional Healing – from Complex Resistance to Simple Release

Humanity did not create humanity – we just like to think we did.

Thinking we did and then trying to operate ourselves and our emotional responses along the ‘logical’ patterns established in our left, logical thinking neo-cortex causes us to create complex arguments for resisting the emotional release process nature has provided us with.

‘I should not be having this emotional response’ is our ego’s way of trying to establish control, using nothing more than it’s ability to resist the release of emotional energy, over what millions of years of life has put in place for us to access.

Here is an ego-busting fact: the organic connections linking our emotional lower brain to our upper thinking brain are separate from the connections linking our upper thinking brain to our lower emotional brain – and they are much, much stronger. 

It is biologically impossible for your thinking to eliminate the need to acknowledge the influence your emotions have over you.  You can work with your emotions and you can reduce their negative affects by learning to release them so quickly and to such an extent you hardly ever have to struggle with them - but you cannot permanently resist and ignore them.

As a defence mechanism for protecting our hard-won thinking structures the ego is neither good nor bad – but it needs to surrender its hold when dealing with emotional release or it causes us to live a life based on lies and denial and this leads to emotional blocking and overcharging – what we refer to as emotional illness or disorders.

You are organic.

You did not create your emotional system nor any other part of your organic being; natural life did that for you.  Your body obeys the same principles every other mammalian body on the planet has to – what you or any other person you interact with thinks about this fact makes no difference. 

As a baby you knew exactly how your emotional system worked and you worked with it – as an adult, especially if you have an emotional disorder of any kind, you have most likely been socially programmed to resist it.

Sometimes resistance is a social necessity, but this resistance can go too far, to the point it makes you organically sick as you become emotionally overcharged due to habitual extreme emotional blocking.

Let me repeat - you are organic.  You are only able to think because nature made you so you could think; you see imagery in your brain because nature designed you to see things that way; you feel because nature said you needed to feel in order to stay alive and it wants you stay alive long enough to create new life and any new life you create will also have to obey the same principles of organic living you have to.

You can train your emotional system; you can learn from it; you can see it as your greatest resource or your greatest enemy - but you cannot remove it without removing yourself from life.

When you open up to organic truth you actually open up to your true natural self – and it can hurt like hell at first – particularly if you have an emotional disorder of any kind.

The greatest blow to our egos comes when we start to accept we are powerless to change our biology – we may feel helpless and depressed about it.  If we do the ‘feeling work’ required, however, the time comes when this apparently helpless state transforms into knowledge, understanding and then successful, if very slow, emotional progress with eventual unconditional happiness being achieved more often and then almost permanently as a result.

From Complex Resistance to Simple Release

When we suffer with an emotional disorder it is because a collection of socially programmed ‘memes’ (thought patterns adopted from those around us) have combined with our own self-criticisms, alongside our unmet wishes and wants, to form a complex ‘mental resistance stew’.  

You may be or have been in a situation that created an intense emotional response or a number of emotional responses running closely together and you began arguing with the responses themselves – that they should not be happening. 

They were making a bad situation worse.  You were not reacting to the situation in the way you would wish and your emotions were driving you against your conscious will.  You hated yourself.  More truthfully, you hated your organic self.  Why could you just not react perfectly – like Ghandi or Mother Teresa or some other saintly figure might in the same situation?  Your emotions made you feel stupid.

You saw your emotional system as working against you.  Resistance Stew emerged in your body and mind.  This kind of stew contains complex arguments against feeling your feelings. 

Your logical mind continually builds resistant layers, one over the other, supporting the unconscious resistant beliefs already in place – while wondering at the same time when help is coming from some external source to stop it all.

Unfortunately the only way to get rid of this Complex Resistance Stew is to eat it.  Taste it.  Challenge it by going through it.  At first when you start to do this the whole thing looks even worse because you bring together all the feelings, all the images, all the thoughts.  Your logical mind is swamped by intense hormonally driven stimulation and it resents having to go through this because it knows these things only exist within the confines of your own mind and body and not in the real world.

What a mess.  But if you eat the mess, if you enter it and digest it for long enough, simplicity starts to emerge. 

There are only three main elements to the development and removal of an emotional disorder; but first let us look at the normal emotional process:

The three main elements of your normal emotional system

(please note this model ignores what goes on in terms of external behaviours and feedback from external sources)

• Words work together to interpret, describe, and produce
• representational Images which lead to the production of and attachment to
• Feelings triggered in your lower Limbic brain the chemical outputs of which are produced in your body as energetic drives and vibrations.

Together the overall result is ‘Experiential Reflection’.  That’s the first half of the emotional cycle and now:

• Feeling energies come back up from the body driving the production of
• images which act as release valves through which the emotional energy attached is allowed to escape through the process of full body and mind vibration and when the emotional energy has passed through our body and mind and the
• (Limbic) emotional brain sees the full emotional cycle has been completed it stops producing new emotional responses and this then leads to the revealing of the
• image-building words that initially produced them.

Finally, because we find that thinking in certain ways or being in certain situations causes us this intense emotional pain we either decide to change the way we think in those situations or instead decide to avoid those situations as much as possible and keep the word-based thinking structure we have in place.

The important thing here is that a conscious decision has to be made and acted upon in regards to future internal thinking or external actions during the emotional release process – if it is not the release process will not be completed and the response will be triggered all over again.

Add mental resistance to the emotional process though and things start to work against us.  Resistance complicates the emotional process by using the left neo-cortex to create secondary imagery that shows bad things will happen if the emotional process is allowed to run its normal path.

We refuse to make changes to our thinking or our external actions and instead go to war on our emotional system itself.

Our ego does this – it says ‘I am special, my thinking structure is more important than my biology and I should not have to listen to what my organically created emotional response system is telling me’ (our emotional system is the source of our intuition, by the way, and when we block it like this we eventually enter a state of deep self-mistrust). 

A blocking emotional system works likes this:

• Words work together to interpret, describe, and produce
• representational Images which lead to the production of and attachment to
• Feelings triggered in your lower Limbic brain the chemical outputs of which are produced in your body as energetic drives and vibrations.

Again, that’s the first half of the emotional cycle but now those:

• Feeling energies come back up from the body driving the production of
• images which act as release valves through which the emotional energy attached is allowed to escape through the process of full body and mind vibration but they are met with
• argumentative conflicting images showing either that the feared things depicted in those images will actually happen if the emotional energy escapes or even worse - as yet unforeseen terrible things will happen if the energy is allowed to escape; and now, seeing that the emotional cycle has not been completed the
• (Limbic) emotional brain concludes the initial situation that led to the production of the emotional response still exists (and is even more serious a threat than it first assessed) and therefore re-produces a more intense emotional response to deal with the perceived threat which causes the thinking mind to be overwhelmed with sensory stimulation and prevents the identification of
• the words creating the secondary images now being used to fight the normal emotional process and because it cannot see that it itself is the cause of the problem the logical thinking brain fights even harder to block the even more intense responses coming through and round and round it goes.

What we effectively end up with now is a very energetic, never-ending ‘story’ working within us.  A battle between an argument for emotional release versus a number of arguments against emotional release.  One of the two sides has to lose the argument for the story to complete – and it is an argument our logical mind can never win because it has not yet accepted the logical structure of our organic body and how the emotional system works within it.  Our relatively small, low power, low energy thinking brain wants to run the show and finds itself forced to learn a long-term lesson it hates.

If we could see the various sentences driving the argument against emotional release and put them into one sentence it would say something like this:

‘I do not like the normal emotional process’.

What it tells us is that we are organic and all we have to do in order to release an emotional problem (including getting rid of all the negative imagery and thinking that comes with it) is feel.

Detect it; feel it; watch the negative imagery and thoughts go by: acknowledge the negative elements but don’t criticise yourself or hold on to  them with questions of ‘why must I suffer with these?’. 

Accepting negative thoughts and imagery are occasionally a part of being human means you eventually stop complicating the emotional process by creating difficult to remove arguments against it. 

If you have an intense feeling go into it – stay there long enough and the imagery will appear.  Feel emotions through the imagery and then any embedded thoughts attached will appear and you then get to change them so the emotional response stops being triggered. 

Feel your feelings when you produce them and everything else falls into place.

Simple.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Healing – Are Your Memories Killing You Softly?

If I were to take every fifth or so word out of this article as I write it you would be able to replace those words using your memories of grammatical context to figure out what ‘should’ be there.

Your left, logical neo-cortex is the predictor of these missing logical steps based on your currently held grammatic contextual memories.

Now imagine you are watching television news and the presenter tells you they are about to show footage of troops massacring a village full of women and children, and some of the scenes may be distressing.

Before the scenes even appear on screen your right, pattern creating neo-cortex produces patterns with attached emotional responses based on how you feel about the context of this kind of news – you create your own private internal preview.  You may decide to turn over before the scenes appear because you already know what to anticipate you will feel as a result.

Emotional memories are drawn on to feed and re-construct this preview.

Your Conscious Mind is a Prediction Machine Fed By Your Memory

Your Conscious Mind is a ‘prediction machine’.

Your left neo-cortex predicts the future on the basis of logical stepped information patterns assembled from past unemotional memories (logic).

Your right neo-cortex predicts a non-linear all–joined-up clustered view of the future based on emotionally charged experiences related to how we feel in certain environments.  These are represented by images with attached emotional responses (feelings).

As you approach any situation, external or internal, both minds predict what you will find there and how you will think and feel about it.

While this whole mechanism is designed to keep you alive and well as long as possible it can sometimes turn against you by predicting completely false expectations.  Your past is your future for just as long as you allow it to be.

Overwhelming Memories

The Conscious Mind, the part of you now reading this, can only pay attention to between 4 and 11 pieces of information per second.

Once stimulated past that mark conscious attention is overwhelmed and the information travels down into both your Unconscious as imagery and your body as emotional response energy attached to that imagery.

Consciously these things become ‘foggy’ but the affects are powerful.  If you do not pay direct attention to what is happening you can start losing immediate awareness of the relationship between mental cause and emotional affect.

As you become more emotional your thinking seems vague; undecided, powerless, uncertain.  You may become dependent on the decisions of others to provide clarity (possibly those who have created the environment you now find yourself in).

This is a normal experience.  At this point you may not yet be ‘emotionally ill’.  You feel bad but know you have suppressed your various reactions to an event or series of events – to reality – and are still aware of doing this and your reasons why.

Those reasons may include a fear that if you allow your internal reactions to come up they will either distract you from fixing the problems in your environment while you ‘waste time in self-absorption’ or they will damage your relationships with others if you release them publicly.  So you put your internal world on ‘hold’ for the time being.

But if the external environment causing your reactions keeps stimulating you in the same way you can slip into repression.  In repression you lose awareness of the relationships between cause and affect; disconnecting the logical memories from your emotional responses

You may even do this deliberately if you are in a situation in which the only logical decision to be made as a result of facing up to the reality of your situation is a decision your current value system does not agree with.

You decide the consequences of the decision presenting itself would be emotionally worse and more complex than remaining where you are now so you argue this option out of conscious memory with a range of self-threats such as ‘I would kill myself if this option happened’ or ‘I could not cope’ or ‘they or others would suffer more than they realise if they get their way’.

This is called denial.

Having blocked logical awareness of the reasons for your emotional responses you now find strong emotions seem to be resurfacing of their own accord and you even get to a point you are unable to identify what type of emotion your reaction actually is.

Over time you end up with a painful backlog of apparently pointless emotionally charged imagery stored like a computer zip file in your Unconscious.

Repressed, and having lost understanding of why you are having these responses, your logical mind declares them ‘silly’ and actively fights them whenever they threaten to surface.

They resurface all the time.

Your Emotional Memories Dominate New Environments

Your long-term logical memories act as an unemotional information resource for predicting what should happen in the future and fill logical gaps in life as they occur and only when you want them to.

Emotional memories, in contrast, are repeating ‘now’ memories – they keep recurring in the present moment and do so until you discharge the emotional energy driving them by feeling your feelings out.

Because they are so powerful trapped emotional memories bias all your future predictions and decision making.  All environments look tainted with past experiences; all people seem suspicious.  Life just seems bad.

The only solution is to discharge.

Why do we operate like this?

We are biologically designed, like every other living creature on the planet, as an energy production and release system.

The Unconscious and your body are designed to regurgitate this stored information at a later date and use it to inform future decision making.  Until we do this we carry our recordings of past experiences round with us as if stuck in ‘experiential bubbles’.

A few horrible experiences trapped inside are enough to provide you with long-term ‘dark-coloured glasses’ when looking outwards.

If you have any emotional disorder you have two stark choices: keep moving your Conscious Awareness away from the trapped emotional response inside for the rest of your life or find a way to remove it, either to the point it no longer grabs your attention against your will or permanently so it never recurs again.

Take the former route and you sense yourself being pursued by the response continually.  Take the latter and you have a much more painful, but shorter lived, experience.  Most people spend years applying the lower level pain option as opposed to the shorter but more intense recovery process until the opportunity to heal coincides with their desperation to escape the whole thing.

Deciding to put up with the automatic bias created by trapped emotional memories means you will repeatedly make decisions based on avoiding real life.  Your emotional memories will close your real, emotionally free future, down.

The answer is to re-enter your emotional memories and surrender to the natural process of regurgitating and discharging stored experiences.

What is it we intend to do when we re-enter these memories?

When both sides of your Conscious brain turn their attention inwards and travel together towards a past experience held in memory they understandably predict a horrible experience ahead.

This experience will consist of three stages:

• Anticipatory experience (dominated by the right neo-cortex through its prediction-previewing mechanism) leading into …


• Actual Re-Experiencing (this includes both the full-blow emotional experience of the memory itself and then of the arguments against seeing the unwanted understanding and the emotional responses supporting those arguments) and then this leads into …


• Re-Appraisal (in which previously unwanted and unacceptable decisions are now accepted and made retrospectively – the decision to accept our powerlessness; to like ourselves despite how we feel; to stop criticising our emotions and release them instead).

Re-Appraisal

By following our feelings for long enough we eventually tap into the mentally translatable logic hidden at the centre of our emotional responses as ‘insights’ – like the seeds at the centre of an apple.  Once these insights are revealed it unravels the whole process.

We find ourselves understanding and accepting the reason for the existence of the emotional response, its context, what it was meant to do and which of our values it was trying to enforce, and finally we agree to letting the whole thing go.

We can still keep our values but we re-organise them.  For example, if the value of ‘protecting people we love’ has become ‘protecting people we love even against their own will’ we have set ourselves up for internal emotional friction in the future.

At some point we could turn into bullies and find ourselves at war with ourselves as we observe our own behaviour.  The resolution is to re-address how we apply our values - but first that may involve a journey through our emotional responses.

Transferring the information contained within insights from our emotional right neo-cortex memories over to our logical left-neo-cortex means that in similar circumstances in the future we will apply lessons learned to our future predictions by using logical thinking responses as opposed to emotional ones.

This transfer process as a result of re-appraisal is not easy – it can take several months to achieve and will involve going through the anticipation/re-experiencing/re-appraising cycle several times.

Eventually, however, the anticipatory stage fades away and the re-experiencing stage is no longer available to experience because the energy driving it has left your body.  The newly re-appraised and emotionless  viewpoint is all that is left.

If we do not go through this learning process we enter new relationships and other types of environments carrying the old bias-driving emotional memories and continue with the same inappropriate behaviour towards new people and opportunities.

In order to stop emotional memories from closing your future life down and open up to receiving the genuinely new experiences to be found in new environments you do not need to ‘re-write your value book’.

Just discharging the negative emotional energy from old memories is enough to get your prediction machine working for you rather than against you in the future.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Healing – Can You Find the Courage to Observe Within?

Have you ever seen a ‘back to the floor’ television programme where the senior manager of an organisation has decided to pose as a lower-level employee in order to see how things are really working out on the ground-floor of their day to day business?

Usually these managers would make their emotion-free decisions by looking at graphs and reports filtered and distorted by lower level staff in the organisational hierarchy.  What will be missing from those reports are all the little things – the faulty water cooler; the angry employee forever upsetting customers; the stink in the customer waiting room created by who-knows-what in the ventilator.

In almost all cases of these television programmes the senior manager willing to experience the nitty-gritty of the ground-floor comes away with a wealth of ideas and having a greater respect for those staff who operate ‘down below’ in the organisation.

They usually also see where their own previous attitudes and instructions, or a lack of them, dispensed to their lower-level staff have caused the problems they now have to resolve.

With a much clearer view of what needs to be done they commit to a complete turnaround in approach.

We celebrate their adventure as an act of bravery and maybe sit there thinking ‘that is what all management need to do’.  Yet not all senior managers do this – because they do not wish their minds to be changed.  Having our mind changed in this way is almost always a painful experience.  This applies to all of us when it comes to facing up to the realities in our lives.

When a senior manager goes back to the shop-floor they expect to be made uncomfortable yet are willing to do it because they associate discomfort with the sharp and necessary learning curve to be followed if their organisation is going to improve.

Not only does the senior manage undergo a change process – so does the ground-floor work force who feel a mixture of relief, mutual respect and a wish to help the senior manager further by changing the way they themselves function operationally. 

Often when the benefits of this way of working come to fruition the approach is cascaded to all other managers as a permanent change in organisational culture.  But the decision has to start at the top.

The same thing happens when we take our Conscious Point of Focus down to the level of our Unconscious Mind to observe what goes on down there when facing up to an emotional disorder.

Observation is everything.

Not just observation of the things you observe, but of the way in which you observe yourself, as you observe.  Let me ask you a question here: are you aware of the viewpoint from which you currently observe your emotional system and do you think it gets the job of making you happy done?

Put yourself in front of that television programme as you watch the manager mixing with staff on the ground floor.  Do you admire what the manager is doing?  Most likely you do.  Not often we see senior managers willing to face reality in this way, is it?

Now imagine that you watch yourself in the same way - observing what you are willing to do in order to position yourself so you can see your internal reality as it really is.  This is your self image – your view of yourself that decides whether or not you admire and like how you go about observing your inner world - or not.

When you do not admire the way you observe, because you see yourself as a ‘manager who runs away’, you develop a lack of self-confidence and a poor self-image.

When you watch the manager in the television programme taking these risks, feeling their embarrassment and being changed as a result, do you have greater confidence or less confidence in them?  Do you think of them as being stupid or courageous?

This is where confidence in emotional healing comes in.  Not from always getting things right but from having the knowledge that when things do not feel right inside you have the courage to take your Conscious Point of Focus, your brain-changing attention system, inwards so you can observe first hand what is going on.

Strangely enough, despite the emotional pain or maybe because of it, as you watch yourself taking the risks necessary to ensure the overall ‘organisation’ called you gets back on track towards becoming happier you actually end up really liking yourself into the bargain, emotional problems or no emotional problems

Once you discover that taking your Conscious Point of Focus into the centre of your emotional pain causes beneficial change to happen merely as a result of being willing to go there and observe no matter what, you become more determined to do so again in the future – and do it much earlier so you can avoid the hard slog that results when you do not do this for long periods of time.

What goes wrong in the relationship between your Conscious and Unconscious when they refuse to come together on a regular basis?

Basically the same types of things that happen when senior managers and ground-floor workers in an organisation fail to communicate effectively.  They:

• start interpreting information incorrectly
• develop a non-accepting attitude to each other and believe neither knows what is really going on producing a sense of overall mistrust and lack of confidence
• work to different value systems and
• become entrenched in unhelpful viewpoints, which they fight to hold onto when external change demands new flexibility.

In order to undo all this you have to take your Executive, planning brain down into your Unconscious ground floor brain.  You do this by entering the emotional responses being presented by your Unconscious Mind – by allowing the feelings to come through.

Now you start to:

• Re-interpret life events in such a way as to reduce their emotional impact on you (for example if you blame yourself for a life event over which you had no real control you can start to see this and let yourself off the guilt-hook)
• normalise and accept even the most intense emotional experiences (my favourite metaphor for emotional disorders is they are like broken legs: undesirable but normal; if they were not normal we would not be able to have them)
• re-prioritise your value systems (for example make your emotional happiness your priority rather than making the emotional happiness of everyone else your priority) and eventually:
• develop and alternate between different viewpoints so effectively you can see all the viewpoints available and then select the appropriate viewpoint at the appropriate time (for example if you have an obsession you have a viewpoint that says thinking about this thing is unacceptable – but you can eventually move to a different viewpoint by discharging the emotional energy attached; there comes a point it stops bothering you).

The rule of observation is whatever we pay close enough attention to automatically starts to change for the better, even when ‘better’ means something we never thought of as being ‘better’ before.

But that rule comes at a price and not all of us are willing to pay.

How about you?

Regards - Carl

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Emotional Healing – Desperation is the Requirement

No-one outside of ourselves creates a sense of desperation.  We create it.

The sense of desperation for a solution to a problem to be brought about comes from within.  To escape, to obtain, to keep.  Desperation is the point at which the emotionally driven urge not to do something is overwhelmed by the emotionally driven urge to do the thing that gets the thing.  It is the urge to win.

Desperation is the urge to do something you have never done before.

During desperation we pace floors; become angry at ourselves; others and life in general.  But we are energised.  We are passionate to the point it feels painful.  Aaaargh!  That is desperation.  Who is to blame for it?  No-one is – it is a part of the process of being alive.

During the time I was researching for a cure for my OCD, my obsessions, my phobias, my depression and panic attacks I kept reading scientific papers that said ‘incurable’ or ‘can be managed but cannot be removed’ or ‘the amygdala shrinks irreversibly’ or ‘this is due to a permanent misconnection in the brain’.

I repeatedly read how exposure therapy did not work in removing most cases of OCD and obsessions and how others like me had basically ‘had it’.

Sufferers like me were supposed to just accept our lot.

The difference between the people who write these things and myself was they were trying to please an intellectual audience while I was the desperate schmuck in the middle of the problem they were writing about.

I refused to accept what I was reading.  I would not give in.  I deserved freedom from my multiple conditions.  I had worked hard in the external world for others all my life and I would work hard for this now for myself; I had turned and gone into my experience rather than continually avoiding it.

The emotional responses inside had got much more intense because of this but my determination to succeed was powered by the urge to get rid of them.  I was desperate.

I was frustrated by the lack of good, solid information available on how to get well.  But my desperation got me through.  Desperation and the emotional fuel it generated became my launch pad.  I would try anything, risk anything, go anywhere and yes, I would even pay some money towards it (heaven forbid, eh?).

Oh, how I festered on my desperation.  But I needed it.  You see, desperation and all those painful emotions (particularly the anger and frustration) is the requirement.

Without desperation I would never have got better.  Never developed the urge to heal no matter what the ‘experts’ say.

If you are desperate to heal and find yourself whining about your suspicions of ‘those out there wishing to exploit your sense of desperation’ just take a step back and rethink – no-one else created that sense, you did.

It is the requirement for healing emotional disorders and for doing pretty much any other thing in life truly worth doing when it finally, ultimately, unavoidably needs doing.  Look at any difficult area of life and you will find that sense of desperation, when you felt cornered, was the moment that occurred just before you got yourself out of a fix.  It comes with the territory of life.

Desperation changes lives for the better.

It moves proverbial mountains; it rewires brain patterns; it makes you strong; it knocks down all those intellectual opinions telling you what you need to do cannot be done.  It makes what looks impossible possible.

Desperation: it could be the best friend you ever had.

Regards - Carl

The Good News and Bad News about Good News and Bad news

Internet Marketer Frank Kern calls it ‘the Chicken Rubber Neck Effect’.  You are driving past a car parked in the middle of nowhere and you may notice the car but you will not turn to look at it carefully as you go by – your attention will be focused on the road ahead for signs of danger.

But put a pair of legs sticking out from behind that car and you will turn your head and twist your neck to see what is going off behind it as you drive by.  So will your entire family if they are sitting in the car.  You will maybe even stop and go take a look.

Mr Kern uses this technique in some of his email campaigns and can show that by putting a ‘bad news’ heading in his email subject headers he can get a much higher email opening rate.

The reason for this is our attention mechanism is automatically set to look for ‘bad news’.  It is the reason we do not see ‘good news’ on most of our news channels – not so many people would watch.  We tend to take good news for granted.  While our attention mechanisms automatically seek out bad news, looking for good news is something,unfortunately, we have to do deliberately.

We call it ‘practising gratitude’.  If we were automatically programmed to look for good news we would be automatically grateful most of the time.  What different lives we would lead, eh?  Just think of how others would treat us.

The attention-grabbing default setting of ‘looking for bad’ is a preventative mechanism designed to pre-warn us of approaching danger but it can go against us to the point it sometimes makes us emotionally ill.  It is the central operating cause of phobias, obsessions and other anxiety disorders built around imagined emotionally charged terrible scenarios in our brains.

The good news about ‘bad’ is it has an opposite.  Everything we experience comes under the heading of ‘duality’.  There is bad in every experience, there is good in every experience, and then there is the centre of the experience which is neither good nor bad, it just ‘is’.

At the position of ‘is’ you are emotionally neutral and have a choice how you see a particular experience.  The bad news is to get to ‘is’ you have to go through bad first and discharge the negative emotions attached to get to acceptance and good and then to ‘is’.

You have the tough, painful experience of bad; then you see the good in a situation; then you take it for granted and become objective – that is, emotionally discharged about the whole thing.  You sit in the middle and watch other people reacting to the bad news in the same negative way you once did.

But do not expect them to be overjoyed when you suggest they follow the same route you did - not everyone likes to hear the good news about bad news and good news.

At this point you are able to choose your own experience and what are you naturally going to choose once you have the choice?  You will naturally choose what makes you feel good but then will return to the neutral ‘is’ position in the middle by default.

If you have an emotional problem or disorder of any kind you may currently feel quite angry or resistant to the way this works, but this is the way it works.

The bad news about all news is we contain within our experience both the painful bad and the ecstatic good.  The good news is by being willing to experience both the bad, the good and the neutral we can eventually get to choose where we sit on the scale between the two extremes.

Mentally we then stop worrying about the whole thing.

Regards - Carl

Escape Emotional Hell - Stop Killing Your Own Golden Egg Laying Goose

A friend of mine asks me to check out his CV for him as he is applying for a job.  Half way through his educational history I read he decided to leave a Science degree course and go into a career in Catering.

This looks like a genuine decision to me but he has written down ‘failed to achieve’ under the Science degree course and I notice he has also written ‘failed’ in various other places on his CV for other things that were also genuine, understandable choices.  Writing ‘failed’ everywhere has made his CV look horrible.

I challenge him on this and he argues he obviously did ‘fail’ and was not ‘good enough’.  Every time we talk I notice he keeps talking himself out of doing things – out of going for jobs he could get; out of asking people for help when he needs it – a whole range of things.  The truth is my friend is a bit of a gifted genius - others tell him so regularly but he cannot see it in himself.

I am not talking here about someone with a few normal self-doubts now and again – this is a semi-permanent, very difficult to shift mindset.  He worries so much about these alleged negatives he does not sleep nights.

He sits awake all night worrying about issues; the solutions to which are right in front of him and well within his abilities.  He has been doing this worrying-all-night for so long he thinks it is normal.  When I sit talking to this friend I think to myself ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.  Some of my other friends who know him think the same way about his predicament.

We can call this ‘Golden Goose thinking’.  Done a little bit it can be a useful motivational tool – but when it comes to a point it is your only way of thinking it has the opposite affect.  It shuts your mind down completely.

The Story of The Goose that Laid Golden Eggs in One Sentence:

A couple find their goose lays gold eggs and kill it to get all the gold out in one go but find no gold inside so no more gold and no more goose.

In the case of my friend he has either started using negative imagined motivators designed to get him to produce more of something or to be better at some particular skill - but it has killed the golden goose of creativity, learning and progress within him.

Negative self-motivators used habitually do not work because they lead to ‘catastrophisation’.

Catastrophisation, also known as ‘building mountains out of molehills’, is the process of building full-blown negatively imagined scenarios which we then emotionally react to as if they were real-life events.

The net result of doing this causes us to shy away from areas of life we need to enter, and mostly enjoy, in order to cultivate personal growth.

To stop this we have to learn to tell the difference between a real-life event and the negatively-charged imagined scenario holding us back.  When you explore your reasoning behind the existence of the false negatively charged scenario you will see that although it is designed to pre-warn you of what might happen it has no direct affect on what actually happens when you arrive.

Negatively charged motivators achieve nothing but self-destructive mind-wiping.

I am pleased to report my friend changed his CV and got the job he thought he could not get.  He still has quite a way to go though.  He has to learn to stop hurting himself in the belief it will make him successful one day.

Some sleep would not hurt either.

Regards - Carl

Escape Emotional Hell: End Your Difficult Close Relationships

The idea our closest relationships are meant to be difficult is a myth.

Life is meant to be difficult; our close relationships are meant to support us in getting through life.  In difficult times we bond closer – the relationships themselves should not be creating the difficult times.

They are meant to make us feel good despite what is going on in the outside world.  In close relationships worth having you do your best to support the others you relate to, right?

Not everyone thinks like this though.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are thinking ‘well I know relationships are meant to be difficult but I did not think they were supposed to be this difficult’, and you have been thinking this for some time, it may mean you are missing out on a fact staring you in the face but too painful to face up to yet:

• you are not in a relationship worth having.

You may not, in fact, be in a relationship at all.  Relationships are two way.  At least two people see themselves as being in ‘a relationship’; contributing to and benefitting from that relationship and each cares about the experience the other is having.  The most important factor is a sense of trust.  By thinking highly of them you have opened your Unconscious Mind to this other person and they can now dip right in and affect your feelings directly – so trust is vital.

The main criteria for developing trust in a relationship is that all participants relate.  If relating is blocked because of mistrust there is no relationship.  Do they mistrust you?

If the other person or people refuse to relate to you as you wish to be related to, if they treat you with mistrust or you find them untrustworthy, you need to acknowledge this and decide accordingly.

Your commitment, your investment of time and love and energy, the hopes and dreams you have for the future of this relationship could be yours and just yours alone.

Those negative emotional responses you might be having, the occasional outbursts of rage or crying or grief in response to how you are treated or not treated and then which you feel guilty or really bad about?  Those are signs your Unconscious Mind knows what is going on but your Conscious is refusing to listen to it.

We are surrounded by relationships working just fine without all that angst.  The people in them are having no difficulty making them work.  They just work.  You can have those kinds of relationships too – but you have to accept not everyone is suited to you; not even, unfortunately, blood relatives.

No, you cannot change your blood relatives genetically – but you can change whether or not you relate to them physically and emotionally.

If you are dealing with blood relatives who hold the threat of ‘excommunication from the family’ over your head while they act abusively towards you, relying on the myth of your having no choice but to put up with it (a myth you yourself maybe perpetuate and need to change) I would suggest you challenge those relationships.

But there is a risk you could lose them.  I have.  Two blood relatives of mine borrowed money from me continuously week after week for seven years.

One repaid me by stealing from me while the other ended the relationship when I explained I did not mind loaning the money so much as I minded the lack of warmth and communication in our family – when I loaned money I was ‘liked’ but if I did not loan money or the money was not wanted I was belittled – I wanted us to be a proper family.  I was met with a cold, heartless stare and an ‘I never want to see you again’ in response.

I respected that decision.

There are other blood relatives I have disconnected from for similar reasons  - but really I have not disconnected from them so much as made it clear what kind of relationship I was willing to have or not have and stuck to my ‘guns’.  I used to be emotionally very ill because I could and would not make this kind of tough decision – relationships that do not serve you and the others involved emotionally are a form of self-imposed torture system.

I have not come away from these things completely blameless – I often got very negatively emotional along the way.  But I have learned that when I feel helpless in getting a relationship  to work it is because usually the relationship is unworkable.

We have no power, right or ability to force others to like, respect or value our contribution to their lives.  When we feel helplessness in a situation like this it is because we are genuinely helpless!

The benefit of going through this experience is we get better at spotting, taking part in and enjoying empowering relationships as a result and avoid those potential relationships that would leave us high and dry and possibly emotionally sick again.

Testing Your Relationships

One way to test whether or not you are in a relationship worth having is to ask the other person straight whether or not they think the two of you are in a relationship worth having – when they ask why you are asking just tell them you are going through a phase of testing all your relationships.

How do each of you feel about the relationship?  Each of you should be able to explore the highs and lows and the worries and history of the relationship without either of you becoming too defensive.  This is not intended to be a slanging match – this is exploring the wonder of having a relationship at all.  How do each of you see the relationship developing?

Talk about the future of the relationship.  This may seem like a strange, frightening thing to do but we need to bust through that other myth: relationships are like magic and if you talk about the magic the magic will not work any more.

In every single relationship I have had that worked (and still works) this kind of discussion was seen as a perfectly natural and valid thing to have.  In those that did not work, and which were extremely painful to work on, these kinds of discussions were a taboo and were met with aggressive responses.

My personal experience is that making tough decisions in this area of life is of primary importance in emotional self-care (not just for yourself but for the others involved, too).

Regards - Carl

Increase Your Desire to Live – Manage Your Social Environments

How many social environments do you have?  How are you treated in those environments?  Which environments should you stay in; leave or join?

These are important questions to ask and take action on if you want to become and remain emotionally well.

Choosing better social environments will increase your desire to live; as will giving yourself permission to leave those painful to you.  Sounds simple, right?  But do you do this?  Do you manage your social environments or do you just put up with them?

In his book Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell writes about an Italian community that moved to Pennsylvania US and set up a town called Roseto.  The town underwent a study in the 1950s because its main cause of death was old age.

Towns next door had death rates from heart disease three times higher than that of Roseto – in fact it was rare to find anyone under 65 who had any sign of heart disease.

The people from Roseto had no suicide, alcoholism, no drugs, almost no crime, no welfare, no ulcers.  They cooked with lard, had a diet full of cholesterol and ‘unhealthy’ food; they were heavy smokers and had a lot of obesity.

But their life expectancy was much higher than anywhere else in the US.

The secret to Roseto was in its social structure.  Rosetans stopped to chat with each other, they cooked for each other.  They cared about, calmed and respected each other.

Can you take steps to help create a better social environment for yourself?  Are you willing to end difficult relationships and cultivate deeper ones?  Are you willing to put the effort in to offer genuine friendship to those who can reciprocate?  If you do it will increase your desire to live and the evidence from Roseto suggests this trumps all the medication in the world.

It could be the most important decisional area of your life.

Regards - Carl

Escape from Emotional Hell – Stop Trying to Be a People Pleaser

I get a real emotional boost when someone feeling stressed or struggling with an emotional problem tells me something I said or did helped them in some way.  Do you?  Most people do.

But I do not make the mistake of becoming addicted to that boost – I notice it but I make sure I do not crave it.

We have no direct control over when we receive such feedback and, if taken too far, this kind of supportive behaviour turns into an unwanted intrusion into the lives of others and they will turn on us for it.

As soon as I detect my help is no longer wanted (not when it is no longer needed, but no longer wanted – there is a difference) I am out of there.

During the times we receive social affirmation for having helped someone in this way (or social acceptance in any area of life) our brains release a neurotransmitter called oxytocin.  We feel safe and peaceful under its affects.

But we can easily make the mistake of becoming addicted to the affects of oxytocin and I have seen this in others and myself.

Folks who crave social acceptance can end up becoming either::

• easily manipulated or


• manipulating.

Easily Manipulated?

The easily-manipulated tend to advertise for and attract cruel-natured manipulators.

In the television series ‘The Martian Chronicles’, based on the stories by Ray Bradbury, there is the story of an alien who takes on the physical appearance of dead people the new human colonists are mourning for.

In this way the alien brings comfort to its human hosts while at the same time guaranteeing for itself a form of camouflaged safety and acceptance in their home.

The human family it lives with know their ‘house-ghost’ is not real but refuse to argue with it because the alien, who is telepathic, is able to physically mimic the appearance and behaviour of their lost loved ones so well it makes them happy to believe the illusion – even, for example, when they know the lost person was lost back on Earth.

This works well when the family live in isolation in the Martian landscape – but for some reason the family and the alien go into town.

The alien finds itself being followed and then surrounded by a group of people because they start seeing their long-lost loved ones in it – forced to keep changing physical form the alien turns from one person to another until dropping dead from exhaustion.

I saw that particular scene more than twenty years ago but the message is still fresh in my mind: being all things to all people kills you.

This is not to say you should not deal with individuals in the way they individually wish to be treated – it just means you need to do everything from the starting point of a strong central self-image.  You need to know who you are.

Situations in which you are ‘pleasing’ people are OK temporarily so long as you know it is what you are doing.  Assertiveness training, for example, tells us it is fine to be passive now and again – but it all goes wrong when you lose the awareness your passive behaviour has become permanent.

A couple of signs you have fallen into this pleasing-everybody trap without realising it are:

• you have difficulty in saying no – you always feel guilty when you do and you are not sure if you should


• you struggle to make your relationships work – people who are supposed to care about you do not and spend all their time sitting in judgement as to whether or not you are ‘good enough’ (they do this to get more out of you while giving the minimum in return)


• you are super-empathic – you want everyone else to be ecstatically happy and are willing to sacrifice your own happiness to bring that about


• you hold back on your real feelings – someone deeply offends you but you search for a psychological clothes hanger so you can stick in your mouth upside down in order to produce a permanent smile in response .

Manipulating?

The flipside to being easily manipulated for a while is we can ‘join the war’ and begin deviously returning the manipulating treatment.  I see this done mostly by people who are intellectually but not emotionally intelligent (yet – this can be developed).

Manipulators who lack self-awareness become increasingly narrow-minded and socially self-destructive without knowing this is what they are doing to themselves.

If we are leading already highly stressed lives a craving for these ‘oxytocin moments’ can lead to our feeling deeply hurt when not receiving them.  Getting ‘nothing’ back seems like an affront in the mind of a manipulator.

I have seen people of an age where they should know better cause social mayhem in groups when others have not met this craving.

They are trapped in a ‘reverse people pleaser’ state and blame others for the needy position they are now in.

They may fool, trap and manipulate others into feeding them the emotional boost they crave.  We call these folks ‘attention seekers’.  Consciously they are unaware they are doing this and it comes as quite a shock, accompanied by a lot of denial, when this behaviour is presented back to them as a package.

A couple of signs you have fallen into this manipulating trap are:

• you see small harmless acts as major insults – no-one else sees things this way


• you are power-mad; you undermine the work of others and put them down because you want all eyes on you; you dominate the social atmosphere and have to be ‘right’ about things – the important thing is being seen as ‘right’ rather than actually being socially right and appropriate


• you hate it when others receive positive social feedback


• you maintain a secret ‘them or me’ philosophy but do not show it because if you did the enemy would know there was a war on


• you must never reveal your true agenda – because you would have to notice it too and even the threat of this feels painful.

How to Get Out of This Trap

Decide:

Who do YOU want you to be?

Pick a version of you that you and you alone would like and stick to it.  This is what we call a strong self-image.  Generate your own oxytocin-fixes by getting all warm and cosy inside your own skin.

Develop a strong self-image of the kind of person you want to be and how that kind of person behaves, then make sure you behave that way so you can trust that person.  This way if someone criticises you you will be able to tell which parts of their criticisms are valid and which are not.

Ensure you like yourself regardless of how others treat or have treated you.  Do this and you only have the job of pleasing one person; just one.

The paradox is that this apparently super-selfish-self-obsessed-single-minded person then becomes, by default, someone naturally helpful to others because that is naturally the kind of self-image such a person will wish to develop.

Occasionally you will go off track – but that is the whole point of having a strong, central self-image.  You return to it.

Work at being, and loving, just you.  Be a ‘you’ that helps people but is not dependent on receiving positive feedback for it as a measure of self worth.  If you are anything like me you will know just how difficult a job pleasing that person inside is.  Getting feedback from others then just becomes icing on the cake but not a necessity.

By the way, if you know the name of the alien in the Martian Chronicles I am talking about above please let me know.

Regards - Carl

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Drilling for Emotional Wellness – Turn Your Anxiety Disorder Relapses into Victories

So you have established a drilling platform consisting of your professional supporters (doctor; maybe a psychiatrist and definitely a counsellor) and for several weeks, months or maybe even years now you have been drilling down into your emotional responses with the intention of releasing them using your Conscious Point of Focus as a drill bit.

You have stopped denying; you have stopped suppressing and repressing as much as you used to and now you have been feeling and releasing trapped emotional responses for a while.

Maybe if you had an obsession you stopped having that obsession and if you had a phobia you stopped having that phobia.  But suddenly they are back.  The whole thing appears to be back.  You call this a relapse.

You feel stunned and helpless.

What you have known for a while though is there was still a sense of tension inside but you could not pinpoint exactly what it was.  It was related to some kind of painful memory; to something that laid the foundation for the anxiety disorder to take root.  Suddenly those feelings are coming through but not only are you getting just the old memories and the old feelings attached to them you are also having to deal with the apparent re-ignition of your obsession or your phobia or whatever else it is you have been suffering with and thought you had finally got rid of.

What to do now you are having a relapse?  For starters stop thinking of it as a relapse.  You just hit a gusher.

What Happens When You Reverse Emotional Blocking

During emotional blocking, which is what causes emotional illness, we build complex thinking networks in our neuroplastic brain designed to hold our trapped emotions and unwanted thoughts in place.

You can think of these networks as though they were cave entrances and tunnels.  The trapped emotional responses they are designed to block keep trying to breach the defences of these blocking networks – the energy of the emotional response meets with more emotional energy determined to keep it in place.

When we reverse emotional blocking the emotional energy we force ourselves to release brings these networks fully to life temporarily raising horrific thoughts fully into conscious awareness.  This can be so effective we may feel as if we have entered an alternate reality.

Normal, happier thinking is closed down during the release process.

Once the trapped emotional responses relating to a particular set of memories is released, however, these thinking ‘caves and tunnels’ in our brains go dark and dormant.  They are no longer transporting or blocking energies.  But they are still there.  You can think using them but you do not get very emotional when you do.

Although you can discharge the energy that kept bringing them to your conscious attention It takes a very long time for these brain networks to collapse completely and sometimes they never do (but they will stop bothering you because they are no longer being energised).  Until, that is, you hit another ‘mother lode’.

Your Unconscious Acts LIke an Automatic Drilling Machine

When you deliberately and repeatedly reverse the emotional blocking process you are reorienting the direction in which your Unconscious mind travels when it detects emotional pressure.

In blocking mode you trained it to automatically avoid your emotional responses – now unblocking it automatically digs down when you are not paying conscious attention.  When it hits another layer of trapped emotional energy the energy comes up and for a while lights up all those old, unwanted thinking networks.

How to React to This

See it as a much needed gusher – see it as a release of trapped energy travelling along these old networks that will eventually evaporate just like it did before and realise that the newly discovered and de-energised brain networks will soon be joining the ranks of the other dark and dormant caves in your brain.

If you see it as a thinking problem you may start to try and block the thinking again – this only restarts the blocking process.  See it as a welcome release of trapped energy and it becomes a victory.

Regards - Carl

Escape from Emotional Hell – Stop Grieving for the Living

We are never emotionally closer to the people we love than when we lose or are about to lose them to death.

I have been to a few funerals – the two that hit me most were those of a one-year-old who died of cot death and that of a colleague in her thirties bright-as-a-button-alive one day and gone the next due to a DIY accident.

Recently I heard of the passing of a lovely ex-boss and I spent a bit of time in the doldrums as a result – but I do not mind this kind of pain.  In fact, I would be upset if I was not upset, if that makes sense?

There is no such thing as a right way to grieve.  I have found at every single loss like this my emotional responses were different every time.

My most intense emotional experience of grief is having a full-body burning pain.  I feel intensely hot, accompanied by an urge to curl up around a ball of pain in my stomach.  Alongside this appears a sense of holding onto the person lost and not wanting to let go; followed by crying.

Strangely enough, however, I have not had this most intense grieving reaction to losing others to death – but to the living who have, for whatever reason, been taken out of my life.  And then come back again.  And then left again.  And then come back again … I resent the kind of situation whereby I am forced to go through the same grieving process repeatedly due to the callous behaviour of others.  How about you?

In this situation when such folks reappear every few years and then disappear again we can end up in a state of continuous low-level mourning that threatens our long-term emotional stability.  I am talking here about such people as ‘first-loves’ and close relatives.

You can become bad tempered towards the people you care most about when they keep re-triggering this response through their carelessness or when others who do not have your best emotional interests at heart use the threat of this response to manipulate you.

In my experience there are three main levels of relationships that lead to this ‘grieving for the living’ process:

• indifference


• functionalising


• alienation strategies.

Indifference

"Never make someone your priority, when they only make you an option."

You could drive a truck through the gap between how you behave towards each other but, for whatever reason, you choose to ignore it.  Problem is, your feelings can not.

This indifferent relationship is one way.  You are useful to this person but they have no emotional link to you nor have they any intention of being equally as useful to you.

When you ask them a question regarding the quality of the relationship they become avoidant or annoyed.  They only want to talk about what they want to talk about.  They ‘butter you up’ occasionally to get you meeting their wants but turn nasty as soon as they are satisfied.  Occasionally they may do something so completely outrageous (such as steal from you or break some other form of trust) you are shocked by how obviously relationship-destroying this could potentially be – but do not worry because you will make it right again with forgiveness, eh?

You grieve for the relationship you are not having.  When you talk to them about whether or not they sense this gap they reply no.  Nothing you say or do gets through to them.

They do not see you for the sake of seeing you – they always want something and often their first words of the conversation are a put-down or a blatant insult or a request for the thing they want from you.

When they do not want something from you they ignore you – they ‘send you to Coventry’.

Would you treat them like that?  I doubt it.

You see, people like that do not read material like this.  It would mean they would have to change and they are not open to change.  They would rather the world around them changes; they would rather you keep changing to adapt to their whims.

One day, regardless of who they are, you find yourself ending the relationship because you cannot stand the discomfort of the gap any longer.

When you tell them you have decided to end the relationship you expect them not to be too bothered because after all, they repeatedly made it clear for years they do not care one way or the other.  You were always a bind to them.

You leave the relationship full of questions about what really just happened but will never receive full and honest answers from the other person.

Functionalising

In functionalising a person relates to us only because we perform a function useful to them.  Take the function away by losing the ability to deliver it or fully satisfying the need of the user and the relationship is over.

When the user wants the service again there will be a brief period of interest with the promise of the wonderful relationship you want to come but then it dies down again after the service is no longer required.

We tend to set ourselves up for this kind of relationship by validating ourselves only when we provide the given service.  This process dehumanises both parties involved.

Again, we grieve for the missing relationship.  We are so much more than just:

• parents providing money


• car drivers providing taxis


• husbands and wives providing protection and comfort


• faceless employees serving anonymous companies.

But if you see yourself or others in this way you set yourself up for failing relationships.  I call this being ‘doom-boxed’ – you or the other people involved have a set of mental templates and together you work at building a restrictive box into which you then willingly shove each other.

What you greave for is your lost humanity.  You feel crushed and invalidated every time you fail to perform the particular functions of choice and everyone else joins in on your humiliation and belittlement.

Climbing out of your doom-box is an extremely difficult thing to do because you feel ‘useless’ and you have programmed yourself to be of use.  You will find the word ‘use’ used quite a lot in such relationships (if they can be called relationships).

Once you know such potential situations exist you will spot them coming and avoid them (for example, in the dating world if the first question you get asked is ‘what car do you drive?’ or ‘do you like sex?’ I would pay attention to the doom-box alert this triggers.

Social Alienation

Alienation is a painful experience in which a member of a group to which they would naturally expect to belong is gradually disconnected from that group.  It can happen to anyone in any group.

Known as shunning when a whole group decides en masse to do it jointly from a specific point in time it can also be done subtly without the person on the receiving end being able to logically identify or accept the power of this process.  They feel terrible about themselves and everyone else in the group agrees they should but cannot quite pinpoint why.

Some alienators are so skilled at doing this the person on the receiving end believes they are doing it themselves and starts fighting their own emotional responses and behaviours when, in fact, they are doing just as they should be doing if they were in a normal caring relationship.

It can take years before they are able to see the situation they were in was not normal and when later they find themselves in a different relationship discover they are able to behave in exactly the same way but with no relationship problems arising.

Alienation can be used as a punishment or as a precursor to forcing the person out of the group completely.  One of the most painful forms of alienation is Parental Alienation Syndrome.

Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS)

The paradox of becoming a parent is the moment you create new life you become much more aware of the threat of death.  Not your own, but that of your child.

Children are clueless when it comes to life-threatening danger.  During toddlerhood you find yourself jumping out of your skin every time you find them poking something into a power socket or falling down the stairs.  The fear of losing them because you just plain failed to notice and deal with a risk can turn you into a nervous wreck.

Imagine added to this pressure is a co-parent who makes it obvious they regard you as superfluous to requirements.  Who has affairs; who every now and again ups and disappears with your child; then resurfaces again.

I have a friend who runs his own carpentry business who this happened to.  His daughter will be about ten years old now – he has not seen her since she was two.  As part of a divorce settlement he paid his ex a large chunk of money – but apparently it was not enough.

She moved to another part of the country and sends him letters regularly telling him if he ever wants to see his daughter again he has to hand over the home he  now lives in.  He is emotionally stuck and cannot move on – he is frozen into grieving for a living daughter he would not now recognise if he saw her on the street.

I came across a blog the other day where another father in a similar position had been writing for several years about his battle with an ex who had done a similar thing.  All his energy; all his life; was going into this battle.  Comments on the blog supported him in this ‘self-sacrificing quest’.  My thought after reading was if the daughter ever does come back what kind of father will she find?

It is as if these people are at a funeral that never stops.

I know of a couple, grandparents, who have ten grandchildren but have only ever met one of them because of a silly dispute with their own adult children.

What we grieve for here is the lost relationship that now may never be – even though the living child is right here; either close by or right in front of us.

How To Deal With Grieving for the Living

The first step is all yours – you must decide if it is time for you to accept and end the grieving process if you are stuck in it.

The pain of grief is completely overwhelming when you are positioned just in front of the most intense phase of the process but we are designed to experience it and there is no way around this fact.

The fear may be that by going through this process you will ‘toughen you up’ and disconnect from the relationship, losing it altogether, and unfortunately there is an element of truth in this.  Going through the grieving process ‘kills’ the previous relationship – but it also frees you up for any new relationship possible later if the other person changes their behaviour.

The starting point: Acceptance

You accept:

• you are powerless to make the relationship or relationships work – you may have tried various ways to resolve the painful state and you just get the same non-cooperation in return


• you have the same right to mutually rewarding relationships as do the people you have been attempting to relate to – give yourself the same rights you give to them – this includes the right to walk away when our relationships are imbalanced; would you want them to go through what you are experiencing?  I thought as much


• you care deeply about these relationships and you are the kind of person who values the time and lives of others but there is a time to cut the attachments – even if it means at a later date starting fresh with the same people.

The Process: Shifting Viewpoints during Emotional Release

During this process you alternate between feeling grief from a Subjective Viewpoint to observing and re-developing your self-image from an Objective Viewpoint.

We do this so that as you come through the process you fully release the pain and feel mentally good about yourself.

1. Set aside a safe place where you will not be disturbed but can have some pleasant distraction every now and again when you get a bit too tired


2. Go into the feelings and the thoughts attached to them and feel them as intensely as you can – explore everything in there including your past attempts at reconciliation and how the other people concerned responded or did not respond


3. Re-experience your helplessness in the situation; now step outside of it into the Objective Viewpoint


4. To enhance this affect imagine you are looking at someone else going through the same experience – see how much they care; see how much they value these relationships?  Then see how little the other person or people involved contribute


5. From the Objective Viewpoint tell this more distant ‘you’ how it is OK to feel these feelings and how you admire them for the intensity of their feelings – see how powerful they are?  This is the glue that binds us all – but in this situation you are releasing the glue; releasing the energy


6. Re-enter the Subjective Viewpoint and feel the full force of the feelings again – feel all the pain and symptoms of the loss; think about the wonderful relationship you might have had if things had been different – it was not your fault it did not work out


7. If you did play some part in the situation, however, feel any guilt you may be feeling but return to the person who wanted that pleasant, peaceful relationship


8. if you feel rage come up based on the resentment you have to go through this process due to the behaviour of others just feel the rage and do not self-judge; just feel it out safely and work towards achieving a state of non-blaming by the end of the process


9. Go back into the Objective Viewpoint and watch yourself from the outside – look at how much this person values their relationships again


10. rest – alternate the feeling and releasing process with periods of rest or distraction as this can be exhausting.

Eventually you will come out – and when you do come out you may want to re-evaluate how you deal with the relationships you currently have and those you have in the future.

You will lose your fear and resentment of the grief process (grieving for the living) but will create strategies to make sure you do not have to endure this more than necessary in the future.

Regards - Carl