Obsessions and Phobias - How We Can Lose Direct Control of Our Emotional Process

You have total control of your emotional process up to the point you start trying to take total control of your emotional process.

You may want to read that again.

This paradox is difficult to see by the tired mind of someone who’s been at war with their own emotional system for a prolonged period of time.

Have you ever lived or worked with someone who had a desperate need to prove they were what they already were?  Exhausting, isn’t it?

The moment you see your own emotional energies as a problem is the moment your unconscious mind starts the internal battle of freezing those energies inside your body to prevent the ‘bad stuff’ from leaking out.

We do this ‘freezing’ by using our brain’s built in organic electrical resistance system to hold back the electrical signals coming up from the body (starting with the Reticular Formation in your brain stem) .

In order to directly control your emotions you must first understand you cannot directly control them.  You can delay them – but you should do this in the knowledge the only thing you can control directly is the process by which you manage their appropriate release later.  Once an emotional response is produced in the body you have no choice but to find a way to release it or it will make you sick.  So let me say that again:  the only aspect of the emotional process you have any control over is that of appropriate release.

It’s one of those areas in life where doing the opposite of what you may ‘think’ you should do is what gets you where you want to be.

The ‘Loss of Control’ Tipping Point

There is a tipping point at which the management of an emotional response shifts from being consciously and deliberately managed, by the thinking brain, to being an automated reaction driven by the emotional brain.  In the case of someone suffering with an obsession or a phobia this kind of reaction occurs whether you want it to or not and before you can consciously interrupt it.

This tipping point is reached when the management of the emotional signals coming into the brain shifts from what’s known as the ‘long processing route’ to the ‘short processing route’.

The ‘long route’ involves incoming sensory signals being sent upwards into the upper thinking brains for processing.  Here we have ‘association areas’ where incoming sensory signals are matched and mixed with information already known and trusted.  After full association has taken place (through good old ‘thinking’) we have integrated the new information and can make ‘sense and meaning’ of it.  Any emotional energy attached to the issue is discharged through the activity of your right pattern-making brain and any valid ‘data’ information is processed by your left ‘rational’ brain.  The issue is then either forgotten or stored in our long-term memory and we no longer pay attention to it.

It can take some time for this association process to complete.  However, if we are not willing to complete this process, if we are not willing to think about the sensory information coming in,  there is a risk we will ‘deny’ it and denial can lead to us forcing the new information to go through the brain’s sensory ‘short route’.

The ‘short route’ means the raw signals get sent downwards into the emotional brain for emotional processing.  There’s no ‘association and integration’ processing going on down there unless it involves an emotional response being released somewhere along the line.

Repeatedly refusing to consciously accept and release an emotional response when it comes up from your body into your brain causes the shift from long route to short route processing. This shift in processing is very difficult to reverse.  Difficult, but not impossible.

At the Centre of Both the Long and Short Routes Sits the Thalamus

Two Thalami , resembling the appearance a half-walnut, sit between the upper thinking brain and the lower emotional (limbic) brain. They  act as the centre-point of your  Perception – how you ‘see’ things.

Your Perception is a culmination of all the discussions and relationships going on between several of your brain parts, all of which have a slightly different way of ‘seeing’.  Your most powerful brain part in this decisional process is your left neo-cortex – your conscious logical thinking brain.  This brain part has the power to refuse permission for an emotional response to be processed by your upper thinking brain.

Problem is, once permission for release ‘upstairs’ has been refused the logical brain loses the right to influence how the emotional signals are processed by the lower brain.  It’s a question of losing the rights because at some point we refused the responsibilities.

The Thalamus is the brain’s main sensory signal ‘router’ – it receives all of your visual, sound and touch signals before either your thinking or emotional brain parts get to see them.  The Thalamus filters incoming signals on the basis of what the brain parts around it are telling it they see.  They also tell it what kind of signals they’re looking out for – and it goes hunting for them in the incoming signals.

If your conscious thinking dislikes one of your own emotional responses so much you refuse to accept it as a part of ‘you’ you may then refuse it permission to enter your thinking brain, this forces those signals downwards.

Your emotional brain now tries to manage your emotional process using other emotional responses – as a result your internal emotional system generates a self-perpetuating internal war making you constantly tense and, because your conscious brain is no longer involved in the process, your thinking becomes totally perplexed about what on Earth is happening.  The emotional responses are taking place without your conscious involvement other than you being informed ‘you’re having an intense emotional response!’.

This confusion further reinforces the idea that something is ‘wrong’ and the Thalamus will continue to identify your own emotional responses as an urgent, threatening issue requiring a repeated urgent emotional response – and it will send any and all related signals coming in straight down into your emotional brain for processing.

In order to resolve the problem you must reverse what you did.

You must allow for your emotional energy to come up through your body and enter your brain so you can start the association process.  Doing this will allow you to regain a sense of control because it forces the sensory signals back up the ‘long process route’ and the thinking brain regains the ability to say no to producing the emotional responses in the first place.

Unfortunately by now you will have established a very effective unconscious set of arguments as to why this is a bad idea – and these ideas are absolutely committed to the belief that what you are about to do will kill you.

I’m not joking – your unconscious believes that taking your thinking into the emotional response will kill you and it believes you just don’t ‘get it’.  Your unconscious believes you’re about to do something that’s the equivalent of going into a cage with an unfed lion.

But if you’re willing to go ‘into the cage with the starving lion’ step by step, through the process of exposure therapy, it can be done but the transition involved is a much more intense and painful journey than if you had processed the issue using thinking in the first place.

The question is: how much do you want control of your emotional process back?

Regards.

Carl