Emotional Disorders and Fictional Stories – Four Viewpoints Travelled

External fictional stories mimic how your internal emotional system works.   When your mind travels through a fictional story, in a book or at the movies, it shifts you through four viewpoints without your being consciously aware of it.

The four viewpoints you travel through when going through an external story or an internal emotional journey are:

• the Objective viewpoint


• the Subjective viewpoint


• the Acceptable viewpoint arguing for the ‘acceptable’ solution (which you believe will lead to mental and emotional Congruence)


• the Unacceptable viewpoint arguing for the ‘unacceptable’ solution (which you currently believe is the cause of your mental and emotional Ambivalence).

If you are consciously aware of the journey through these viewpoints when observing an external story you are probably either a student of fictional story structure, a critic, or feel the writer of the fictional story is not very good at their job.  To get full enjoyment from a fictional story you need to be carried along and willing to ‘suspend your disbelief’ long enough to travel the story journey as if it were real.

If you are struggling with an emotional disorder, however, the reverse is the case.  You need to be consciously fully aware of these four viewpoints in order to stop the negatively charged internal stories currently running you.  They may have the power of conveying a sense of reality but the truth is they are nothing more than emotionally charged internal stories.  You need to become writer of your own internal experience to heal from them.

A person with a phobia or obsession is being dominated by an incomplete story running through their body.  The only thing you need do in order to complete such an internal story is travel through the four viewpoints enough times in order to fully discharge the emotional energy attached to it.  Unfortunately this is not a simple mental exercise – it is a very difficult physical experience.

The most effective way to travel through these viewpoints is to begin discharging the energy (not by trying to think your way out of it).  Shifts in viewpoint are created this way -  through ‘feeling’.  In order to do this you take your conscious point of focus into the centre of your feelings much like you would first have to go to a cinema if you intended to watch a movie.

Just a caveat here – make sure you have a professional support network in place (eg doctor; counsellor) before you decide you are going to start going towards your inner internal negatively charged stories.  When working on internal stories not only do you watch your own ‘movie’ you also play all the characters involved at the emotional level.

We enjoy fictional stories, and other similar external journeys, because they mimic the full experiential path we follow when we produce and release an emotional response in relation to a real or imagined triggering event.  External fictional stories allow us to do this while staying in control of how emotionally involved we become with their theme.

Think of a fictional story you really enjoyed.  You enjoyed it more than others due to the degree of emotional satisfaction you gained.   The story built your emotional responses up (with your co-operation) and then provided the means for emotional release by story end.

We deliberately avoid external fictional stories where we judge they will either produce no emotional content for us whatsoever or they will produce emotions so intense we will not be able to release our response by story end.

Unfortunately when dealing with a trapped and incomplete internal stories they are usually the kinds of story we would not wish to observe in the outside world.

Let us take a closer look at the four viewpoints now, but as we do I would like you to keep in mind – I just realised this while writing and it may do your head in a bit – we will travel through the four viewpoints while looking at the four viewpoints.  It is holographic in nature, this viewpointy thingy.

The Objective Viewpoint

The Objective Viewpoint is the most peaceful viewpoint of the four – you feel emotionally neutral here – when you do not feel peaceful here it is because you have tipped over into the Subjective Viewpoint.

The Objective Viewpoint actually appears twice in the viewpoint cycle – at the beginning and after the cycle is completed – so we could say there are actually five viewpoints with the first viewpoint being the pre-story Objective Viewpoint and the fifth viewpoint being the post-story Objective Viewpoint.

In the post-story Objective Viewpoint you have completed the external or internal story journey and the overall Objective Viewpoint has been changed.

The Objective Viewpoint has you sitting on a hill looking down on the story battle ground like a proud military general.  As you watch the different characters below struggling to fight it out you have a current opinion of who should win and who should lose based on moral arguments - in fictional stories main characters act as representatives of arguments in a theme (in internal emotional turmoil you are struggling with these arguments in the state known as ambivalence).

You are distanced from events.  As the story unfolds you develop a logically stepped understanding of the whole picture and are able to work with expectancy in regard to what should happen next to the characters and arguments involved..

You may understand the motivations of each side of the argument but you know one of the arguments has to surrender its hold and the other must win.  If this is not achieved in an external fictional story you expect to see a sequel ensuring it is later - or you class the story as a bad story.

If this story completion does not happen in regard to an internal emotional story you remain stuck in crippling tension until it does.  You are emotionally blocked.

With fictional stories you sit in judgement at the end as to whether or not the outcome was appropriate given the different paths of cause and affect.  If you find the story outcome does not match your current moral framework you change your framework or again judge the story a  bad story.

When you have an internal, unresolved emotional issue you believe just will not complete, as your current Objective Viewpoint wants it to, you may do likewise and also declare it ‘bad’.  My experience of being someone who once suffered with obsessions and phobias, and of working with others who have had similarly intense emotional problems, is not only do we declare the individual internal story bad – we believe our entire emotional system is bad.  We go to war on ourselves over it without realising that in the majority of our experiences our emotional system is working just fine.

Your Objective Viewpoint of a thing, of anything, is fed both by your left logical neo-cortex and also your pattern making right neo-cortex.

Time-Out for Emotional Disorder Sufferers: The Data Stripping Process

If you suffer with an emotional problem, or are trying to help someone who is, the following six short paragraphs may be some of the most important paragraphs you ever read:

The job of your left logical neo-cortex is to organise unemotional information in chronological order and link it up to other unemotionally charged informational structures in your brain.  To make sense and meaning of it, and then to let it go and stop paying attention to it.

Your brain must make sure this process is completed in order to let go of an emotional experience.  This information is then stored in your unemotional memories for reference purposes later.  To help this process your left neo-cortex is able to ‘name’ the data and record the data chronologically.

‘Naming’ the data means your logical brain is able to put a fence round it.  It is the difference between looking at a glass of water you believe you control and looking at a choking fog you believe controls you.  We call it ‘fog’ and we instantly feel differently about it.  Does this make sense?

If you cannot name a thing your logical brain will repeatedly ask the rest of your brain to look at it because until you are able to fence it in like this your logical brain cannot deal with it and you will not be able to let go of the experience – you will keep experiencing it until you can fence it in in this way.

The job of your right patterning neo-cortex is to strip emotional energy from your emotionally charged experiential scenes and then transfer emotionless data over to your logical neo-cortex so it can organise it logically.

By moving your Conscious Point of Focus either towards a pattern (image) held in your right neo-cortex, or towards a trapped emotional response held in your body (towards intense feeling) you immediately start triggering this emotional stripping and data transfer process.  Once the emotional stripping; data transfer; naming and storing process is complete an emotional disorder is removed because the different parts of your brain will stop paying attention to it.

OK – back to the Objective Viewpoint:

At the point the full model of a story has been built in your logical mind, and experienced by your pattern creating emotional mind to the point it no longer finds experiential enjoyment in the story, you have completed the journey and achieved a different Objective Viewpoint which becomes set. You now ‘let go’ of the story.

I was a teenager when the movie Star Wars first came out.  I saw it at the cinemas six times in as many weeks – first as an individual and then because all my friends were going to see it.  After the sixth time I no longer wished to see it.  Emotionally it was ‘bone dry’ for me by then.  I saw a re-run a couple of months ago and all I could think was how the flashing lights on the walls of the Millennium Falcon spaceship looked like pointless flashing plastic lights.  And I realised that was what they were.  A very different experience from when I went to see the movie those six times!

This process exactly matches the process you go through when working to remove obsessions and phobias through exposure therapy.

You do not consciously control this process – it occurs as a side-effect of the way in which our attention system works.  In order to complete the process you just ‘go to the movies’ – especially those now showing in your nearest emotional world.

Regardless of how intense or problematic your own internal emotional issues may be they operate in this way.  You will see this in others when they have a fixed opinion changed by external forces and then resettle into a new opinion (by the way, if we were to say they should think more flexibly before they changed that would be our own Objective Viewpoint talking!).

The Objective viewpoint exists as the norm until something happens to pressure it into changing.  So let us have something happen to you.  Let us have your partner, the one you have been married to for ten years without any sign of trouble, ask for a divorce.

The Subjective Viewpoint

In a fictional story it does not make much difference to you that various characters have different Objective Viewpoints – that is what drives the tension in a story.  But when the Objective viewpoints held by others drive them to radically affect your future you will generally react with your Subjective viewpoint.

In a fictional story you see the main character tootling along in normal happy- life mode until their lives are severely disrupted by some incident.  As a result they become emotionally responsive and have to deal with one crisis after another until achieving the final solution and return to their own, less emotional, Objective-viewpoint-lives.  As observer of this you empathise but are not subjected to it.  You get the luxury of sitting in judgement on character reactions through the entire story.

When it happens In real life you are the Subjective Character.  You sense others are sitting in judgement on you.  When the partner you have been with ten years tells you they want a divorce your reaction is from the Subjective Viewpoint.  You are being rejected by their Objective Viewpoint.

Next they tell you they have been having an affair for those ten years and since your name is not on the property paperwork you lose your home.  By the way, their lover is turning up in two hours to move in.  Their lover arrives and it is your best friend.  You only have one best friend.

You think about everything you have invested in these relationships and everything you stand to lose and the various ways in which you have been betrayed.

You open up to and acknowledge all the little undermining behaviours your partner engaged in but which you ignored or forgave because you loved them.  All the signals about the affair were there but you ignored them.  You declare yourself an idiot.  You cannot believe how the two of them have fooled you like this!  You want to wreck the house, you feel so angry.

Now your soon-to-be-ex partner tells you they never loved you because underneath your pleasant facade you were this unreasonable angry monster.  This tunes straight into your self-critical unconscious beliefs. Was I an angry monster all the time?  Am I responsible for the end of my relationship?

You find yourself torn between two Objective Viewpoints.  Could you have been a better person or is your partner solely responsible for what is happening here?  Should you accept your rage  or should you feel guilty instead?  You become ambivalent.

If you have an obsession or a phobia the ambivalence is created by the question of whether or not you should keep trying to move away from the trigger causing the condition or if you should move towards it and defeat it.  Can you defeat it?  The argument of moving away seems to be the natural decision – but you keep wondering if you could get rid of this problem by going in the opposite direction.

And all the time you are adding self-critical judgements to the mix declaring your internal story bad when in reality it is just a story not yet completed..

Welcome to the battle between the Acceptable Objective viewpoint and the Unacceptable Objective viewpoint

In fictional stories, from the Objective Viewpoint, you get to oversee two journeys travelled by two opposing arguments represented by characters who are both subjectively and therefore emotionally attached to the outcomes of the story.

You will tend to automatically adopt the the Subjective Viewpoint of the character you identify with most.  Most of us identify with the ‘goodie’ because it is more comfortable to do so as it fits within our socially programmed moral framework.

The question that first comes up for you when you enter the world of story is ‘who is the goodie and who is the baddie?’ because you want to identify with the goodies.  You feel good when you identify with goodies because they are more like normal people whereas baddies are concerned with making things much worse and do not seem the least bit family orientated.

If the ‘baddie’ is a fully rounded character, however, you can find yourself understanding and quite liking the ‘baddie’ as well.  In Batman movies you may find yourself liking ‘The Joker’.  Everyone likes a sense of humour, right?  What if, half way through the movie, you discover the goodie character murdered their grandmother for an inheritance?  I recently watched a movie with a flashback scene in which an alleged hero shot a pregnant woman because she irritated him – I hated him for the rest of the movie and was pleased he got what was coming to him (but I also wondered where the hero in the story had got to).

What you experience, in a relatively painless way in stories, but very painfully in your own emotional world, is ambivalence and your craving for an eventual state of Congruency.

Ambivalence

Ambivalence occurs when you believe two opposing arguments at the same time and are equally emotionally charged and attached to both.  In a story it is regarded as a necessity of the plot, but when we hold these arguments internally it can be agony.   In the scenario of being dumped by your partner you are torn between

• holding yourself responsible for the failure of your marriage and feeling sorry for the experience your partner, who you still love despite their deceitful behaviour, has allegedly had to go through as a result of living with not-good-enough you (poor them) while at the same time you feel


• enraged at how these two important individuals, partner and best friend, have conspired for years to destroy your hoped for future and everything you invested.  They have ruined your life.

You see yourself wanting to kill them but also think yourself responsible for their behaviour.  Feeling both enraged and guilty you do not know how to deal with this ambivalence.

Are they the good guys or are you the good guy?  Which is which?

Here you are struggling to get back to the Objective Viewpoint – the viewpoint that knows what is really going on and which, if you could just sit there right now, would really show you what you should do next for the best.

This is why counsellors (relationship counsellors in this case) are worth their salt – they are instant, trustworthy and experienced Objective Viewpoints for hire.  Love these folks.

Prior to this point you saw all divorces as ‘their’ divorces.  Other people got divorced and you could see the reasons they got divorced.  They are so blind to their faults!  Now in the land of Subjective viewpoints it is a different world altogether.

Now you find yourself having an extreme emotional response to losing something or someone you personally have a stake in and you wish you did not have to change your Objective Viewpoint in line with what is going on in reality.

But you do - and you find it a real struggle because you are trying to sort out who the goodie is, who the baddie is, and how you can mentally figure the whole story out and then hopefully once you have done all this everyone will come out looking like a good guy.

The Difference and Similarity Between Internal Stories and External Stories (Real-life versus Fictional Life)

When you engage with an external story you engage with a carefully designed construct with a socially acceptable morality message built in.  Most stories with socially unacceptable morality messages get censored out.

Also, you engage fully with the most moral character – you attach to that argument and stick with it for the whole story.

In external stories the baddies get what is coming to them and the goodies get their rewards.

In real life stories though baddies often benefit for long periods of time and good people have bad things happen to them – and then get blamed and punished for it as well!  Not only that, whereas in fictional stories the goodie characters may have only just a pinch of self-reproach here and there in real life goodies tend to be full of self-criticism.

So what should we do in order to sort all this out when it comes to working with what we do feel and should feel if we want to complete our own intense internal stories so getting to a new painless Objective Viewpoint as quickly as possible?

Understand that Emotional Responses Have Nothing to Do with Morality – they are Simply Arguments in a Story with Energy Attached

The problem with your internal emotional stories is you contain various Subjective and ambivalent viewpoints at full emotional strength.  The argument for taking revenge on your partner and your best friend is as strongly emotionally supported as is the argument against.

The argument for moving towards the imagery and emotional responses driving emotional disorders is as strong as the argument for moving away from them.

You contain the full story – warts, flowers and all.  You are capable of any of these options.     But you are also capable of discharging the story in private, removing it fully and still arriving at a new, emotionally neutral (and happy) Objective Viewpoint.

All you need do is repeatedly visit the story enough times you discharge the emotional energy attached, travel through the four viewpoints and end up letting go of the whole business.

You will remember the internal story in terms of logical data, but you will not experience it.

I swear those flashing lights in Star Wars are just that .

Regards - Carl

Emotions Come with a Purpose, a Role and a Need – You Can Use this Knowledge to Heal Phobias and Obsessions

Emotions have a purpose, play a role you ultimately decide the nature of and have their own universal driving need.  Understanding all three aspects of your emotional responses will help you in their management and removal.

Emotional Purpose

Your emotions are concerned with three things:

• defending your territory


• maintaining your current territory


• managing the risks involved in expanding your territory.

In the animal world control of a specific territory as a source of food and safety for the period it takes to raise new offspring is a survival-strength issue.  This is the same for humans but in addition we also use the same emotional responses in defending intellectual property such as our ideas, our hopes and relationships.  All products, quite often, of the imagination.

Anything you are capable of imagining you are capable of attaching a survival-strength response to if what you imagine is linked in to your deepest values.  If you value the freedom of having a mobile piece of territory, for example, you may really value your car.

The science of Proxemics studies the emotional effects on people of their environments and how those environments are arranged around them (it is closely related to the study of body language).  What Proxemics tells us is that the distance between you and a possible threat makes a difference in your level of emotional intensity when you have a reaction to the alleged threat.

A threat within your ‘intimate space’, within say a foot of your body, produces your most intense reactions.  If you have a phobia this will occur as you approach the external object to which your phobia is attached and you will notice it gets more intense as you approach.

In the case of an obsession the imagery you are afraid of is at the centre of your intimate zone – in your mind.  For this reason obsessions are among the most distracting types of emotional triggers you can have.

Even here, though, the issue is one of territory.  A phobic person has that problem because their Unconscious believes they have entered predator territory as they approach the feared external object or environment while the sufferer of an obsession has an Unconscious belief a predator (the unwanted image) has entered their mental territory and needs forcing out.

Although these reactions are fed by imagined scenarios they produce exactly the same emotional responses as real life events would.  The trick of getting rid of these conditions is to  treat them as if they were real life events but use the same tool that created them to remove them – your imagination.

Thankfully you do not have to recreate the real life events themselves in order to get rid of these conditions.  A person with a fear of elevators can use an empty elevator (sometimes even just an imagined elevator or a small cupboard) and a person with an obsession is both blessed and cursed by the fact the whole issue sits inside their own body and mind.

Having been produced in order to deal with an alleged territorial issue an emotional response needs to make itself known by being expressed.

Role

The overall purpose of an emotional response is to get the body to move physically in a direction in order to perform a specific, survival related act.  Three examples:

• anger


• disgust and


• fear.

Anger is the response to a threat of losing territory and the urge to take it back.  If the territory is being repeatedly threatened or taken away the response can turn to one of blind rage.  If you are having this response you will see at the centre of it the urge to move forward and then take back something you regard as central to your survival.

You will temper this reaction according to circumstances, but at some level the animal part of you is reacting to losing important territory.  How you mentally change the context of what you see as your territory alters the intensity of your reaction.

If you decide to become self-critical for feeling anger at the loss you may turn this anger inwards and it becomes depression.

Disgust is about an undesirable predator infringing your territory and dirtying it with their physical and behavioural habits.  It is about poisoning your territory.  The urge here is to push away and reject.

You can have a disgust reaction to bad food but also to unacceptable behaviour impacting your values.  Disgust is an ‘I have had enough’ response.  If you become self-critical at feeling disgust you can develop a fear of it and it can turn into an obsession.

Fear is the urge to avoid a predator entering your territory or to avoid the threat of a predator when you enter their territory.  Fear is about moving away quickly when the predator appears.  If you become self-critical of your fear you will hold it in place using both anger and secondary fear and you create phobias and panic attacks in this way.

With all three emotional types self-critical behaviour will keep the emotions trapped in your body.  Trouble is, the role of an emotional response is to express itself by getting out of your body.

The way to express an emotional response is to give it what it needs.

Need

Emotional responses only have one need.  To escape you.

If, however, you have identified your own emotional responses as predators encroaching on your mental territory, also needing to be got rid of, you will find yourself with more than one emotional response to deal with.  You will have to spend some time changing the way you see your emotional process so you no longer see it as being full of predators and no longer produce the secondary responses designed to hold them at bay.

You’ve got to let them cross your land and go out the other side.

Just because you know the territory being defended exists only in your imagination does not mean you can ignore the need of the emotional response wanting to leave your body.  The triggers may not be real but your responses are and you must take them seriously.

When you reject an emotional response as unworthy of release it fights you in order to meet its need – it looks for any external stimulus that barely resembles the original trigger to project itself onto.  When a trapped emotional response keeps begging for release you will find yourself having strange thoughts.  Thoughts of evil things happening; painful thoughts that are not the ‘normal’ you.

We call this projection.  Projection is where people take an emotional response created in one experience and project it onto an unrelated situation later.  This can happen with all our emotions and is a signal the emotional response is creating alternative thinking routes through which it hopes to escape your body.  Projection does not work very well – it is better to identify the original thought-path that created the response and allow the emotional energy to escape through that.

Purpose, Role, Need

Set aside a safe place in a room where there are no distractions.  You may want to use objects or imagined scenarios as tools onto which your attention can focus.

Allow your emotions to project onto those tools.  This may seem like a very strange and unrealistic thing to do – but your emotions will not agree with this view.  They will come up.

Acknowledge their right to ‘defend’ your territory – even just temporarily during the projection process.  Even though you know they are lying to you about the alleged threat, let the energy express itself at the target tool – let projection take place.

Do this repeatedly, until the energy has projected and expressed to the point the need of  your emotional response has been met, whether it is a normal emotional response or a phobia or an obsession or any other anxiety disorder, one day your emotional response will be gone.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Disorders - What Controls Your Conscious Point of Focus?

Scientists tell us the Prefrontal Cortex, a relatively small area of the brain just behind your forehead, performs your ‘executive functions’ – planning and controlling what you do with your brain and body.  It carries out these plans by directing your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ to open up to certain sources of stimulation.

Your Focus acts like a pen to the cellular map writing ability of your brain – whatever stimulation you deliberately open up to determines what gets written into your neural maps.  The more you consciously and repeatedly focus on the same things the more intense and permanent those new maps become.  You have the ability to write and re-write whatever you want to as long as you are willing to do the work involved in the writing – the work is hard.

How you use your tool of conscious focus can either lead to or heal serious emotional issues.  Your Conscious Point of Focus is generally called ‘what you think about’. Usually we assume thinking means working with strings of just words in our heads.

In our brains words appear to us as sounds we identify as ‘verbal self-talk’ – of course they are not actually sounds but neural energy creating an illusion we are hearing sounds.  When we translate these stimulations into the written word we convert those sounds into pictures and these pictures act as representatives of both sounds and shared social meaning for others (have you ever looked at words as though they were pictures and also sounds with meanings attached to them?).  Words are an example of our ability to ‘associate’ different types of stimuli in such a way we do not even realise they are actually different types of stimuli combined.

Words are quick-fire representations of other things, streams of these representations flow through our conscious and we shape these streams into logical thinking patterns – but we use those patterns to build:

• pictures


• shapes


• sounds


• smells (or at least, memories of smells).

We can also reverse this process.

When meanings are related to our value systems they are also attached to powerful emotional responses.  We see new patterns in regards to these sources of stimulation in our minds and link these to previously learned patterns.  The patterns are created because of differences in intensity, vibrational tone and duration.

We can deliberately choose to focus on any of these things using our Conscious Point of Focus, but we need to choose wisely because our focus is a limited resource.

Although there are several options here in regard to stimulation type, there is a limit to the number of stimulations we can deliberately pay attention to at any one time.

Our conscious brains can only work with 4 to 11 bytes of electrical information per second.  The greater the number of bytes of information we work with at any one time  the harder it is to make sense or even remember what we did in our thinking.  Once the incoming rate of information goes to 11 bytes per second you react with stress due to information overload.

When your conscious focus works at full throttle in this way your neo-cortex uses up a lot of glucose energy and gets tired more quickly in comparison to other parts of your brain.  There is a limit to how long you can focus on those bytes.  Biologically, thinking really is hard work.

Cut It Out

Your Prefrontal Cortex has the job of choosing what to focus your 4 to 11 bytes of conscious attention on whilst dealing with the fact your brain receives stimulation from your senses at roughly  2’000’000 (two million) bytes per second.

In order for it to be able to resist this mass of distracting stimulation, most of which comes up from your body as a result of brain signals stimulating hormonal responses previously being sent downwards, your PFC controls a stimulation-resistance-system.

By the way, this organic resistance system is the same system you use to suppress and repress your emotional responses.

The main stopping valve of this system is the root-like Reticular Formation in your brain stem.  The Reticular Formation is designed to control the level of electrical/emotional energy flooding up into your brain at any one time.

From your brain stem the Reticular Formation spreads upwards and outwards into the net-like Ascending Reticular Activation System (also known as the ARAS - this system makes us consciously aware of the world around us).  Different parts of your Reticular system have the ability to reduce and filter electrical stimulation in different parts of your brain.  For example, there is a layer of reticular material surrounding the Thalamus, the main sensory signal router sitting between your upper conscious brain and lower emotional brain, acting like the insulation you find on household wiring.

Without this built-in resistance system you would be unable to focus on anything other than a mass of sensory information.  In the case of emotional disorders, however, the resistance system has been used so effectively it has led to a state of internal overcharging and to trapping the emotional charge in the body.

An emotional charge trapped in the body keeps the body on high alert and this leads to an internal battle for control of your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ between your Prefrontal Cortex and two other internal attention management systems; your:

• Orientation Response and your


• Emotional Alert System

When these two mechanisms are activated they repeatedly snatch control of your Conscious Point of Focus away from your PFC and it, in turn, repeatedly snatches control back through the process of deliberate ‘distraction’.  This produces a constant state of physical tension in the body as your Conscious fights with your Unconscious over which should control your conscious focus..

When a person does not suffer with an emotional disorder their mental focus naturally comes to rest on whatever their senses are resting on at the time.  There is no internal battle for control and no sense of tension.

Your Orientation Response and Your Emotional Alert System – Your Emergency Situation Managers

Your PFC is concerned with long-term strategic self-management.  It works with such things as changing your self image; deciding what kinds of environment you would like to eventually live in; planning the route it will take to get there and putting in place the motivations you will need to keep yourself energised along the journey.

Your Orientation Response and your Emotional Alert System, in contrast, are emergency problem solvers designed to work with unexpected life events.  One is an automatic process designed to search for and identify potential threats while the other is designed to galvanise the body into urgent life-saving action by responding to those threats when identified by the Orientation Response.

Is that a Spider?  No, it is a Bit of Fluff

Our Orientation Response is the mechanism that drags our attention away suddenly from what we are currently doing to pay attention to something new we have just become vaguely aware of entering our environment.

Out of the corner of your eye you spot a small fuzzy blob on the floor and you look to see if it is a spider.  It is a bit of fluff.  You go to run a bath and spot something black against the white enamel.  You cannot resist looking.  It is an apple seed.  How did that get in there?  Who has been eating apples in the bath?

Your Orientation Response is partially pre-programmed by your perceptual bias.  Your perceptual bias is your unconscious list of things you want to avoid and is decided on previous experience.  So when you go into the bathroom you are now pre-programmed to check the bath for things that should not be there.

When you leave the bathroom you are now pre-programmed to find out how the apple seed got there.

The response is also designed to pay attention to the new, the fast moving, the tiny, the potentially itchy, the unknown; the large; that scraping sound you hear that sounds like it is in your house.  The only way to satisfy this response is to consciously pay attention to the source of concern until you have fully looked at it, identified it as safe and then let it go.  This completes the release cycle for this part of our conscious focus mechanism and you can then return to what you wanted to focus on earlier.

Until you pay attention to an unknown and unexplored stimulus for long enough, and in enough depth, to the point your Unconscious attention systems believe it to be safe, they will keep grabbing the attention of your conscious focus.

Admit it – you looked for that bit of fluff, I know you did.

If you have an obsession and you do not understand how obsessions work, and you lack confidence in working with such things to the point you cannot just put it to one side without it grabbing at your conscious focus against your will, it is the orientation mechanism that keeps causing this to happen.

The other reason is because your body is on High Emotional Alert.

Your Emotional Alert System

A real-life event or an imagined event (imagined so effectively your Unconscious emotional system thinks it is real) triggers an emotional response.  The emotional response travels up through the body towards the brain to meet up with the issue identified by the brain in order that your overall body and brain together take appropriate external action to deal with the alleged problem.

Trouble is when the emotional response reaches the brain your brain says ‘not yet’ and your PFC pushes the energetic response back down into your body.  The response stays in place, the body remains energised, waiting for the ‘go’ command from the brain.  And it waits, but not for long.  It travels up to the brain from the body again, repeatedly making the attempt to link up with the issue but  again the brain says ‘not yet’.

Your body remains in this state of continued emotional pre-release and the emotional response, now held in place for a prolonged period of time, starts to desperately seek release through projection - it comes up for any stimulus that even slightly resembles the original issue.  Unfortunately by now the brain may have forgotten what the original issue was and refuses to acknowledge the response needs to release at all.  ‘What, you again?’.  Your PFC refuses to allow the emotional response to leave the body declaring ‘something is wrong with my emotional system’ but the response keeps showing up.

Your Orientation Response is continually re-triggered by this because you have no idea what is causing the repeating imagery this not -sure-what-it-is message is what the Orientation Response is triggered by.  Your brain keeps being constantly re-stimulated by the emotional charge attempting to leave the body through the normal release process but because you will not allow it release it just keeps the vicious circle going.

Want to Switch the Vicious Circle Off?

In order to removal an obsession or any other emotional problem you have to switch off the emotional alert driving it.  There is nothing you can do about your Orientation Response – but once it has taken a good look at your obsession and at the emotional response attached to it, and realises what is there is just ‘fluff’, it will stop demanding your Conscious Point of Focus be directed to it.

Your PFC is fighting the reality of how your emotional system works by creating belief systems that cause your lower brain parts to join in with resisting release.

In order to stop the battle going on inside it must change its approach and agree to taking your Conscious Point of Focus directly into the emotional world it has spent so long fighting.

By systematically surrendering to the demands of its rival competitors for control of your conscious attention it will gradually release the emotional response behind the high alert emotional state and find itself returning to its rightful place as natural, relaxed controller of your conscious focus.

Regards - Carl