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