Obsessions – Five Questions Answered

• What is an Obsession?


• What Drives an Obsession?


• Why is an Obsession so Difficult to Remove?


• How Can I Remove an Obsession?


• How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

What is an Obsession?

An obsession is a secondary emotional response designed to try and remove or hold back the sensations produced by an intense primary emotional response. The primary emotional response is attached to an image of the issue it was originally produced to deal with; these primary responses are usually concerned with preventing something terrible happening.

The secondary response is created when your logical mind does not accept the need for the primary response or the image to which it is attached and begins to fight it. It fights both the emotional response by 'squeezing it down' and also the image by trying to get it out of the brain.  Both of these approaches fail to work.

Attempting to remove a thought-based image from your brain just repeatedly re-creates the thought you are trying to remove because you have to think about what you want to remove before you can remove it.  This loop goes round and round in our thinking.  Fortunately, you do not have to succeed in this goal in order to remove an obsession because obsessions are not driven by thoughts.

What Drives an Obsession?

Obsessions are driven by the trapped emotional responses held in place by the refusal of your logical mind to grant them release.  This is the only thing that drives an obsession.  Just so we are clear:

Obsessions are maintained and driven by emotional responses only.

They are not driven by your thinking – your thoughts are a by-product of the emotional response looking for a way out of your body.  Release the emotional energy attached to the image and the image disappears from your conscious mind as a side-affect.

Why is it so difficult to heal obsessions?

The answer to this question is complex; here are three main reasons obsessions are difficult to get rid of:

• Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs


• The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Your Six Minds


• Painful Physical Symptoms

Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs

The majority of your brain works with visual signals.  How you ‘see’ your overall emotional system decides whether or not you allow or block certain types of emotional responses to pass through it.

One of the first things I ask people suffering with emotional problems is ‘how do you see your response – what shape does it have for you?’.  If you regard your obsession as a predator, approaching with  an arched back preparing to once again suffocate you into submission, your unconscious will naturally try to hold it back from approaching.

As you start to heal from an obsession your visually based belief systems are unable to deny the new patterns emerging and these patterns create new thinking pathways in your brain – new physical links through which fresh thinking patterns send their signals – old neural links are decommissioned and eventually fade altogether.  The price of this re-writing of the brain, if we use Exposure Therapy, is intense emotional pain for various periods of time.

To your Unconscious seeing is believing and, if you decide to heal your obsession using Exposure Therapy, you will see quite a lot of things in ways difficult to explain to others and which may seem silly.

Your visual belief systems are difficult to access because they are spread out, and reinforced, by the conversations going on between, at least, six minds.

The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Six Minds

Your overall ‘mind’ is actually a combination of the workings of several sub-minds. A mind is a mechanism that either blocks or allows electrical stimulation to flow through it to the next mind in line.  When it comes to a particular obsession at least five sub-minds are involved in the blocking process and all 5 need to be persuaded to change how they see your obsession.

Out of your six minds only your Body-mind feels compelled to deal with the issue and the other five are at war with it.  The six minds are:

1. your Body-mind (when your Body is emotionally charged it is the most powerful mind of the six – it is the mind that generates the most emotional energy you will ever feel; once produced this energy either floods or, if held back threatens to flood and dominate, the work of the other five minds until the energy is fully discharged – when it fails to achieve discharge your body feels tense)


2. your Reptilian-mind (this mind observes both what is going on in your upper minds as well as ensuring your body is geared up to meet the challenges coming downwards – your Reptilian-mind has no contact with the external world other than what it sees second hand through your upper minds - it observes these signals in limited terms of predator versus prey and cannot tell the different between real or imagined threats)


3. your Emotional-mind (Limbic System – this mind is designed to store both specific images of threats and also general images of the environments surrounding those specific threats – the emotional-mind is the home of the mechanism that maintains both normal fears and anxiety disorders such as obsessions – this mind can be moulded and managed through indirect behaviours and is the core of your Unconscious)


4. your Logical-mind (left Neo-Cortex  - this mind thinks in words and what I like to think of as ‘low-level imagery’ built from words - this mind is the source of both the original problem in emotional blocking but can also become leader in applying the solution when dealing with obsessions once it understands and accepts a new way of seeing the emotional process as logical in its own right)


5. your conscious Pattern-mind (right Neo-Cortex – your pattern mind releases emotional energy faster and more effectively than any of your other minds when consciously applied – working with your unconscious it is able to recognise and consciously use new imagery forced into being by the healing process)


6. your Ascending Reticular Activation System (this is a net-like structure connecting your brain minds; it acts both as a resistance system and an activation system – using this system you are able to allow or block emotional responses from entering the brain; some scientists believe the ARAS is the home of your sense of self).

All six minds need retraining, both as individual minds and in how they work with each other, in order to bring about and maintain healing from an obsession.

Thankfully, if you decide to use Exposure Therapy in order to heal your obsession, only one general approach is needed to ensure this retraining happens.

Painful Physical Symptoms

Obsessions ‘pressure-cook’ your emotional responses in such a way as to make them some of the most intensely painful emotional experiences you can endure.  Should you decide to take the Exposure Therapy route to healing you can expect physical and mental symptoms like these:

• your current intense feelings get much worse (things feeling much worse is actually an indicator you’re doing it the right way)


• sleeplessness and extremely lurid, frightening nightmares


• additional emotional responses previously hidden from your conscious such as frequent panic and rage attacks – issues that did not affect you previously may suddenly start looming large


• overwhelm of your thinking processes to the point all you can do is sit or lay down and ‘feel’ – probably accompanied by intense imagery and the regurgitation of long-lost painful memories or feared imaginings


• palpitations; high blood pressure (mine doubled for several months); a change in stomach acid balance

I do not sell it well, I know.  Here is one more:

• Mammalian Disassociation Response; the symptoms of this include sensations of being pulled to the ground and, when looking at your hands getting the distinct impression they are not attached to your body.  The cause of this is a mechanism all mammals have designed to reduce the sensations of pain when being eaten by a predator.

How Can I Remove an Obsession?

Exposure Therapy can heal most anxiety disorders and simply involves changing your mental direction.  Your brain is a mapping system and the pen that draws the maps is your conscious focus.  Obsessions are maintained by our minds repeatedly trying to run away from the natural affects of our own emotional energies.  Change the direction of your focus by 'going in' and the pen starts drawing a different type of map.

By consciously taking your point of focus into the emotional response and then observing, without prejudicial judgement, what happens when you remain in the response for long enough, you will force your different minds to adjust.  You will see trapped energy begin to move; you will see that the responses hurt, but they do not kill you.

To succeed you must eventually surrender to your emotional process totally and trust your body to know what it is doing; this is difficult because we are socially programmed not to trust our bodies.

Because it is so difficult I recommend you try other options first before trying Exposure Therapy – try hypnotherapy or counselling and see if anything like that helps.  I have been told by an EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) practitioner, an ex-NHS nurse whom I completely trust, that EFT can be used to clear obsessions gently.

So try other options first if you can and then, if you find yourself at a point of despondency and extreme frustration - so extreme you are willing to try anything - then try Exposure Therapy.

A word of caution: establish a foundational support system before you begin to experiment with this approach.

Once you start the Exposure Therapy approach to healing an obsession you may find it very difficult to stop yourself.  I found myself working on this process in my sleep and because I had 27 obsessions to remove it went on for several years.

If you do exposure therapy in regards to a phobia, for example, your perception tells you the object you fear is external to you – you have to imagine yourself approaching, or actually approach, the related external object.   With an obsession you are both blessed and cursed by the fact your perception sees the problem as being ‘inside’ and, if you are desperate enough, you will work night and day to get rid of it whether you want to or not.  You literally turn your trapped emotional energy in on itself.

Once you get to this stage you will find yourself so enraged by the condition, so determined, so aggressive and attacking towards it you will want to destroy it.  You will think about nothing else but destroying it.

In order to remove an obsession you must become more obsessed about thinking about it than you previously were about not thinking about it.  Does that make sense?

How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

Three main steps:

• Get professional support in place


• Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place


• Share your plan with those who can be trusted

Get professional support in place

I recommend the following as a minimum:

• your doctor


• a counsellor


• a psychiatrist (maybe – usually recommended by your doctor)

I found the advice of my doctors invaluable – one of them was the most supportive person I had in my life until I met my counsellor.  She recommended a psychiatrist who tried to put me on heavy doses of Prozac but agreed I could stick to low doses during my self-healing programme – the psychiatrist was amazed at my progress. My doctor was able to reassure me at various times when the physical symptoms I experienced were particularly worrying (the symptoms of anxiety disorders can mask other conditions so it is important to get reassurance from your doctor).

The counsellor I found I still see today on a monthly basis – this lady supported me every step of the way during healing and has been invaluable as my ‘self-acceptance coach; milestone marker and cheerleader’.

You need the support of these people if you can get them.

Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place

For a number of reasons you may not be able to do direct work on yourself unless it is in private.  This work will be time-consuming and you do not want to be disturbed.  That is not to say you will not need a break or a distraction now and again - this work is exhausting – but the more focused and concentrated your self-work is the faster you will make progress.

A couple of other good reasons for working this way is to remove the danger of taking your moods out on others (and you will get moody – that is really the whole point!) and, even more importantly, doing this work while out and about can be life-threatening, especially when crossing roads or using machinery, as it can completely dominate your attention.

Share your plan with those who can be trusted

I have no problem sharing my experience with anyone – but there are people who are made uncomfortable by friends who tell them they have strong emotional responses to everyday inanimate objects and I have lost so-called friends due to this.

There are also malicious gossips around, so you may want to keep an eye out for those too.  However, if your primary concern is getting well you are going to have to get really courageous and be willing to pay any social price that presents itself.

Pay attention to how others react to you – but remain true to yourself.

Any questions or comments?

Regards - Carl