Obsessions Develop in the Fertile Ground of Intense Worry

I had a chat with a friend over lunch last week.  She and her husband had been planning a big holiday abroad but a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland had grounded all flights and they had to cancel – she told me she felt guilty because while her husband was gutted she felt nothing but relief and she could not bring herself to tell him.

She explained their dog was old and had health problems.  She had worried for several months that leaving her dog with someone else while they went on holiday would cause the dog to die prematurely.

Just before talking about this she had been discussing my interest in helping people cure obsessions and told me she had once had obsessions but they had faded away of their own accord.  Since starting to worry about her dog, however, she had started to get repeating images in her mind about his anticipated painful death and wanted to know if I could shed some light on what might help stop her previous condition developing again.

Her first question was what causes the problem?

I explained the repeating imagery in her mind was driven by unreleased emotional energy; the body is a battery that has to be fully discharged in order to stop the repeated stimulation of the mind in this way.  All we need to do to stop this is feel our feelings for long enough and eventually they fully discharge and the condition clears.

The next question she asked was but what is my brain doing to cause that energy to be produced? Is it a mental illness?

No, it is not a mental illness but it can create emotional illness and emotional illness produces thought processes and reactions in the brain we can interpret as mental illness.

Emotional illness is simply an indicator we have a body-battery overcharged with emotional energy.  If you are in an angry mood your brain thinks angry thoughts and this pattern is similar with all our emotional states.  See things this way and you stop seeing emotional illness as a thinking problem – although it is initially caused by incorrect understand the thinking processes are completely normal and you are able to change them both by working on the way you see your feeling processes and, even more importantly, by working with your feelings directly..

Intense worry is based around anticipatory fear, rather than fear produced by an actual event.  What we anticipate is a failure to cope with an approaching situation in terms of our own emotional response to it.  Intense worry is a precursor to developing obsessions.  The structural thinking and feeling pattern in obsessions works in exactly the same way.

We could be thinking things along the lines of ‘I would not be able to cope if such and such a thing happened – I could end up killing myself to escape the pain – it is that unacceptable to me’.

Because our belief system involves the possible threat of our own death the Unconscious gets involved.  It associates the images we have of the life-threatening situation with our most intense emotional responses and it uses these to warn us we have to prevent the feared situation arising – it believes the situation could kill us.

The evidence we would cope with our responses to the actual event is presented to us over and over again but we cannot see it.  The intensity and prolonged nature of these protective negative anticipatory responses far out-performs the actual reactions we would have if the horrible event happened in real life.

The Unconscious does not have the ability to judge whether or not what it does is based on reality because it is connected to the outside world through the processing taking place in our upper brains – it cannot tell imagined threat from real threat.  It simply pays attention to what your upper thinking and feeling minds are doing and responds automatically to your imaginings.

The truth is you will cope with the anticipated event when it actually occurs. The only way you would not cope is if you decide not to.  If you look around you there is plenty of evidence of people coping with losing far more than a loved dog or even a loved parent or a loved partner.  We can cope with much more than that – we just wish we did not have to.  I did not say all of this to my friend using exactly those words, by the way, but she soon got the gist!

So if I want to stop myself going through this again what do I have to do?

Because the emotional responses are already being produced it means your unconscious already operates as though the belief you would not cope is proven fact.  It believe your upper thinking minds have seen the evidence.  So you have to do several things:

Set aside some private time in a place you feel safe in and will not be interrupted and tune into your feelings with their attached images.  Move your focus as close as possible to the feelings first and you will usually find the imagery appears of its own accord (in full-blown obsession the images appear whether you want them to or not).

As you feel the emotional pain tell yourself the following things every now and again:

• I do not like these feelings but I can cope with them


• if this horrible event occurs I would not like it; I will find it difficult; but I would cope with it and I would eventually come out the other side


• these horrible feelings will eventually pass through my body and I will be relieved of this pain


• the reason I have these feelings is because I care deeply about the loss of my dog (or whatever it is) and I like myself for being the kind of person who cares this much

You should repeat this process as required until the emotional release has been completed to a level you feel ‘at peace’ with the anticipated event (discharging emotional responses completely can mean you lose emotional attachments and memories and you may not wish to do this).

So what does that do then? my friend asked.  Will that stop me from getting obsessions again?

Yes – and if you are a worrier it will help you relieve and remove your worrying habit.

The Unconscious is ‘show not tell’ – it needs to see evidence you can cope with a thing, often more than once, before it will stop producing an emotional response to the threat of it.  Once the anticipated ‘I will not cope’ belief has been demonstrated to be false by the fact you went right into the worst of your reactions and, obviously, coped (!) it will switch off the alarm bells and stop bringing the previously alleged dangerous emotions to your attention.

All of your minds, including your rational thinking mind, will see your emotional process in a completely different way.  They now see it as having an organised structure (it may be different in small ways for each of us but your emotional process will become much clearer and rational to you) and like all things clarified in this way you become more confident in working with it – next time you will know what to do.

Your Self-Image will be strengthened by repeatedly telling yourself your painful feelings are based around how much you care – caring is the basis of all emotional pain.  An incorrect understanding of our caring mechanism leads to self-criticism and self-criticism leads to non-acceptance of ourselves.

Non-acceptance of ourselves leads to emotional blocking – worrying is low level emotional blocking.

Worrying for long enough lays the fertile ground for full-blown obsessions to develop.

Regards - Carl