Self-Criticism is at the Heart of Most Emotional Disorders

It takes three seconds.

Three seconds to look at your own, frighteningly intense emotional response and say ‘I’ve gone insane’ or ‘I’m so stupid’ or ‘I’m a monster!’ or … insert your own negative self-criticism here.

This is all you need to do become emotionally ill.  Honestly.  An intense emotional response to something followed by a nice juicy heavy duty self-critical judgement.

You see, this isn’t just a mere string of words.  This is a viewpoint – this is a self-image viewpoint; it’s a snapshot picture you produce of ‘you’.  And when you say it, because you’re in the middle of an emotionally intense moment and because our minds remember our viewpoints best when we produce them in an intense emotional state, your mind will flash this belief through your brain and body.

And because this experience is so intensely emotional, your unconscious mind believes it to be real because you’re ‘feeling’ it and suddenly you see your own emotional process as ‘a problem’.  It’s not the situation you find yourself in that triggered the intense emotional response you’re having, oh no.  It’s you.  Oh my goodness, you’ve gone wrong!

And then you react emotionally to your alleged ‘internal problem’ by producing a secondary emotional reaction designed to freeze the first reaction in place – a double whammy.  You feel bad and then you feel bad about feeling bad … and bad about feeling bad about …

And, because the first emotional response still wants to come out and then the second response wants to come out too you produce further responses designed to hold those initial and secondary responses in place … and it builds and with each additional response you keep telling yourself how much more ‘insane!’ you are.  You are now at war with yourself.  Full blown unconsciously-driven-negative-self-image war.

Three seconds.  The words that created the viewpoint are hidden by all the intense emotional energy produced as a result of the viewpoint you’ve put in place and your thinking brain is now repeatedly hijacked, fogging your mind and memories to a point you can’t figure out what you did to cause this problem.

You can spend weeks to months working through the emotional response, then looking at the viewpoint but still being unsure what’s ‘wrong’ with you, and then you get what we call an ‘insight’.

Insights tend to appear ‘out of the blue’ when we’re not quite expecting them but when they do appear we may self-criticise for not finding them earlier (don’t do that by the way, the self-criticising for not finding the insight earlier thing, this is how insights work).

An ‘insight’ is a ‘view within’.  Guess what you’ll see when you see the ‘insight’?  Those three blasted words you thought all that time ago: ‘I’ve gone insane’.  That’s what you’ll see – those three judgemental words that caused you to form an instant, self-critical viewpoint you burned into your thinking and believed without question instantly and in the heat of the moment.

And within the same three seconds you will then allow yourself to undo that viewpoint.  You suddenly realise how powerful those initial three seconds were and how you need to make sure you never do that to yourself  again.  The next time you experience an emotional response that intense you’ll spot that you’re about to self-criticise and you’ll interrupt yourself (won’t you?  Please do).

Self-criticism in the middle of an intense emotional response – don’t do this.

When you discover your husband has had an affair with your sister thus destroying two of your closest relationships in one go, and you suddenly have an enraged urge to kill them both, instead of thinking ‘I’ve gone insane’ and starting to fight your own response go get practical, professional help to get the emotions safely out of your body without self-criticising or self-harming yourself or hurting them.

Also – don’t allow abusers or people who don’t respect you to provide you with self-criticisms you then start applying as self-critical judgements.  It has the same devastating affect.

The majority of emotional disorders are caused by the basic self-critical belief ‘I should not be feeling this’.  Seriously.

Acknowledge what you feel, accept it regardless of intensity and find a constructive way to get it out of your system as soon as possible - your chances of remaining emotionally well are then much higher.

In every instance where I have helped someone with an emotional problem (myself included) I hear the self-criticisms spew out:

‘My silly behaviour’

‘My accidents’

‘It’s stupid of me …’

‘I am dangerous …’

‘I need to be locked up …’

‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with me …’

and within a matter of half an hour to an hour I get smiles from these folks simply by showing them a completely different set of viewpoints to adopt (they don’t become well straight away – but simply realising they’re not what they keep telling themselves they are makes a huge difference – they’ve got their own insights to find and they’re on the way).

You know those three seconds?  Don’t do it.  Let yourself off the hook. Allow yourself to be a fully rounded sometimes emotionally-intense human being.  We’ve been feeling this way (and safely releasing the feelings over time and moving on to happiness again) for millions of years.

When you find yourself creating a negative viewpoint of yourself on the basis of an intense emotional response – stop.

Regards

Carl

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Social Programming Versus the Organic Self - a Barrier to Emotional Healing

On your journey through life your Unconscious collects social shoulds.

As a child these go into your thinking processes automatically.  By adulthood you have developed an anti-should-shield called your 'sense of self'.  You now begin resisting new information as it arrives in your Conscious and start to assess whether or not this new material is right for you by comparing it to what you already know.

Trouble is, by this time what you already know has been built using shoulds implanted and assessed as being right for you by other people.  While doing their implanting those other people wanted you to do what was right for them rather than what was right for you - even though they did so believing they had your best interests at heart.  We are all subject to this programming and schools are designed to orientate us in this way.  I am not saying this is a bad thing - just that the socialisation training provided does not give us the programming we need to be happy - just enough programming, of the right type, to suit the needs of those around us.  Society is extremely selfish in this regard.

Occasionally you may become aware of how powerful an embedded process this is when, for example, you want to instil new thinking habits designed to make yourself happier, and your old shoulds rise up unexpectedly to challenge them.  This challenge is not a small challenge; this challenge is a painful, meet-you-outside-for-a punch-up challenge that produces strong emotional responses.  New shoulds are often seen as threatening, even when they would be good for us.  A recent example of this for me was when a friend asked to borrow a self-esteem improvement book, after openly telling me she had low self-esteem and wanted to do something about it, then passed the book back unread after several weeks because she was too frightened to read it.

There is a difference between what external society wants you to be doing and what your organic self needs you to do - your happiness is dependent on how you manage the conflicts created by the differences between the two.  Emotional illness  is a glaring signal you have got the balance wrong.

Why do we get the balance wrong?

Society is left-brain (logic) dominant and programmes us to hide our emotions because they are inconvenient; they are unprofitable; they take up ‘valuable time’ and, worst of all, they remind our dominant intellectual minds we are organic first.

Your brain was actually created by nature to serve the needs of your body – not the other way round.  You would have no idea of the meaning of words like 'profit' or 'time' if it were not for your social programming.  In order to heal from an emotional disorder your logical thinking mind has to temporarily accept and surrender to biological control.  When you do not allow your body to speak because your socially programmed shoulds refuse it the right to do so it fights back with more intense emotional responses.

In a Buddhist community you would be socially programmed to see working with your emotions as an absolute daily necessity; if you were a member of a tribe in Africa a visit to the Shaman might be expected.  In Western civilisation, however, we are only just scratching the surface of our organic reality.  In Western society we actually have to employ professional listeners and pay for expensive medication in order to return to an emotionally balanced life - this is because having an emotional issue in our society is seen as a taboo.

What we pay for when we use the services of counsellors (and I would not take these professionals away for anything, do not get me wrong) is their help in de-constructing the negative messages society has spent years shoving into our heads.  According to society you should:

• think positively - this is not possible when your body is overwhelming your brain with a powerful negative emotional discharge; positive thinking can be used as a form of denial and can block the release of emotional responses in this situation


• pull yourself together - in order to do this you actually have to let yourself 'fall apart'  first so that full emotional discharge (preferably in private) takes place leading to a return to a relaxed state - your biology is designed to work this way


• do the 'right thing' - usually something you say to yourself when in a situation where the wrong thing is being done to you - for example you may be in a painful relationship where you believe the right thing to do is make the relationship work because you have children and you have been programmed to think that way - but your partner is being unfaithful while you just live in hope that one day doing the right thing will pay off ... meanwhile you get emotionally ill because you are constantly afraid of losing the relationships with your partner and children ... what is the right thing, exactly?


• not be feeling this emotion - you have no choice in what type of emotions you feel; nature has designed your emotional system this way - emotional illness is due to emotional overcharging of the body; not to abnormal emotional type - there is no such thing as bad or abnormal feeling - our feelings are sometimes our best indicators as to whether or not we should move towards or away from something (in the case of emotional disorders our feelings are often lying to us because they are based on false unconsciously held beliefs about ourselves - that does not make the feeling wrong)


• be less sensitive - it is very inconvenient to others when you notice something, feel something and express your sensitivity to it - this common should tells you to put yourself in a nice convenient wooden box and pretend you are not human.

So What Should You Do?

If you want to heal from an emotional problem you should say hello to your organic self - and be willing to acknowledge, challenge and even trade in your old social shoulds for your own self-directed shoulds.  But who am I to tell you?  After all, as far as you are concerned, I am society.

Regards - Carl

Acceptance through Normalisation is Key to Healing Anxiety Disorders

In order to fully remove serious emotional problems and maintain a generally happier state we may need to challenge and change our ‘global view’ of emotions as a whole.  I call the transition from the globally non-accepting to accepting viewpoint of intense emotions ‘Normalisation’.  All emotional problems, including emotional disorders such as obsessions and phobias, are very normal life events.

They are undesirable, but normal.  Trouble is, sufferers are extremely good at hiding their suffering for very long periods of time (by the way, they are also good at healing and never telling anyone about it).  You may be surrounded by people suffering with emotional illness and not know it.  A survey carried out in the US a couple of decades ago produced results that shocked the government - it revealed over half the population could be classified as mentally or emotionally ill.  Think your emotional condition is an isolated and unusual incident?  Think again.

In my day job working in education I see three to four people a week with intense emotional problems such as phobias;  long term depression; anger issues and OCD - and I do not work as a counsellor or a psychiatrist.  They see many more.  I might see a person with a broken leg once or twice a year.  Yet I have never heard a person with a broken leg refer to their situation as abnormal.  Painful? Absolutely. Inconvenient? Definitely.  Abnormal with lots of self-criticism?  Never.  When I talk to people with emotional illness they make 'my condition is abnormal' comments continuously - and so do those around them.

I suspect the real reason we tell ourselves emotional problems are abnormal is because we, and society, just wish these foggy hard to sort out problems did not exist and by denying them access to our view of what normality is we can put them on hold for a future rainy day.  Unfortunately having an emotional problem makes every day a rainy day.  Broken legs have to be dealt with there and then because we cannot function in the outside world if we do not - but emotional problems?  They will keep - as long as we all decide they are abnormal.

Once we open up to the need to heal our emotional problems, however, we naturally have to declare our condition real and the transition to normalisation starts to happen - but it comes at a price that includes:

• accepting sole ownership for developing your self-management skills


• taking repeated risks


• expanding your pain barrier


• developing your learning process.

Accepting sole ownership for developing your self-management skills

Sole ownership of your emotional well-being lies with you.  You become the detective, the evil scientist experimenting on yourself, the decider, eventually your own skilled healer. There are no shortcuts and no immediate external rewards so your motivation to do this long-term work comes only from you. Let us add personal cheerleader to the list of new roles you need to develop.

Others may help with advice, with additional cheerleading and with other subtle things over time (for example counsellors support our unconscious transition to normalisation by creating an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance which you then pick up on).   Ultimately though the whole thing is your responsibility to carry out alone on a day by day basis in between seeing those helpers and advisors.  You decide when emotional healing should start and when it ends; this normal responsibility is the same for all of us.

Taking repeated risks

When you want to heal from an emotional disorder for the first time in your life you must learn how to disconnect from the outside world and risk going within - into the 'you' that is at that moment a very painful you.  When you get there you will be the only person who arrives.   As you approach these places inside they release more intense painful energies sparking ambivalence - the internally painful state in which two emotionally supported belief systems collide with each other.  I'm going in, do not go in; I am right, you are wrong; this will kill you, so why has it not killed me before?


One belief system craves change while the other wants to keep the status quo and screams 'you are making things worse!' and goes on to show you images of failure and how things could end in disaster if you continue.

This is both frustrating and frightening.  What if you get it wrong?  What if you get to a place inside and find you are trapped in a worse place than you were before you decided to take this journey and this worse place becomes your normal day to day emotional setting - would it not be better to stay just as you are?  What if you get inside an emotional response and discover you are evil and always will be? Maybe you will open up an emotional response and it will compel you to attack someone (anxiety disorders such as obsessions and phobias are built around the need to prevent these things happening - but you will not know this unless you are willing to take the risks).  We go through the same risk taking process as bungee-jumpers and parachutists do - it feels exactly the same.

We may not survivie - but we do.  Do it often enough and you will find the alleged risks just make you giggle a bit when the warning signals appear.  'Oh, that old chestnut'.  As you develop confidence in taking the 'going-in risks' you develop the understanding this is normal.   You do not remove the risk-taking process, you embrace and normalise it.  It works the same way for all of us.

Expanding your pain barrier

I have never had a broken leg and no, I do not want one thank you - but if I did have a broken leg and I recovered from it I would have expanded my pain barrier.  That is, I would have expanded my understanding of what I can go through without it killing me and would know what actions need to happen to get me back to good health.  Negative emotional responses tend to travel along the same nerve routes as our physical pain system and for this reason they register as though they were actually physically hurting us in our brain - but they do not and we can only learn about our emotional limits if we are willing to experience them.

Although what we feel is real, the pain created is actually based on our perception of an event rather than the reality of the event.  When we refuse to accept the nature of an external reality we do so with the intention of attempting to reverse the external reality and most emotional pain is about preventing or undoing something in the outside world that cannot be undone.  When we want to stop or undo our own intense response we may have limited self-management skills and make the mistake of using yet another painful emotional response designed to undo the first - now we have an emotional disorder.

All emotional responses are normal - there is no such thing as abnormal emotional pain.  It is how we work with our emotions that causes or relieves our pain.

If you had a close encounter with a lion and your fear caused you to move quickly away from it you would not stop to criticise your fear as it did the job of speeding you up and temporarily narrowing your thinking down to look only for an escape route - you would want it to do that.  You would accept both the external reality and your response to it.  You would be grateful to the response if it kept you alive.

The same system reacts in regards to other external situations but if we do not want to hear what the response is telling us about our external reality (for example it may be telling us to leave a harmful relationship but we are torn in our decision because we have a strong dream of having a wonderful relationship instead) we cling on to it; we wrestle with it and pin it down - and it fights with us in its determination to protect us but we refuse to see it for what it is and the message it contains.

It is absolutely normal for our emotional responses to transmit pain when we are in situations potentially harmful to us - if we are unwilling to experience the pain when it first appears we risk having to endure it for much longer periods later.  This is a rule of life.

Developing your learning process

Whatever you pay attention to improves learning and then what you learn improves what you are paying attention to.

Chances are the reason you became emotionally ill in the first place was because you made some bad external decisions for yourself and had no idea that was what they were - you found yourself trapped and powerless and began to self-criticise.  Learning stops the self-criticism first then it helps you release the emotional responses from which you gain insights and what you end up with is a route map for what decisions you should be making in the future according to the kind of person you are.  When you start working in this way you learn to trust yourself and the results give you confidence.

You learn a space exists between having an emotional response and taking external behavioural action.  As children we learn the limited model of 'have feelings: take action', but when we become much more powerful as adults this belief system scares the hell out of us so we turn to suppression.  Instead we need to develop the model 'have feelings; go to safe space to safely release feelings while gaining the insights contained in them and then take necessary actions'.

You learn that putting yourself first is very good for other people - how strange is that?  Strange but normal.

By seeing your emotional problems as normal and agreeng to work with them like you would any other real-life problem area you learn what lies beneath your immediately available day to day thinking is not the 'hell' you once saw it as but an amazing, commonly experienced resource most people are too frightened to access.

Break a leg.

Regards - Carl