Three Reasons You May Feel Like Falling Down When Intensely Emotional

Quite a few people who talk to me about their extreme emotional states will talk about their fear of collapsing or fainting – especially about doing this publicly and being labelled an ‘attention-seeking drama queen/king’.

There are a number of reasons we may feel like falling down when highly emotional; here are three:

• The Mammalian Freeze Response


• Enraged Helplessness (depression)


• Physical reasons.

The Mammalian Freeze Response

Human beings have mammalian bodies – these are the bodies of prey animals.  We do not come equipped with fangs and claws.  Our brains, however, are the brains of super-predators because they can design predatory tools that far outweigh the power of those missing fangs and claws.

This omnivorous mixture sometimes creates a confused and conflicted human animal.

When we become intensely emotional our prey-animal mammalian bodies react like those of other prey mammals while our super-predatory brains fight this unwanted intrusion.  This in-fighting delays the body in going through this natural process (it can actually delay it for a lifetime).

Most people have heard of the fight-or-flight response, but there is a third response mammals have – the Mammalian Freeze Response.  Also called the Disassociation Response.  When a mammal is being captured by its natural predator it has the ability to ‘play dead’.  This is not a consciously controlled decision – it is an automatic function of mammalian biology.

It simply lays down and becomes still.

It is also called the Disassociation Response because the brain of the mammal temporarily disconnects from the body in order to reduce pain when being eaten.

If the mammal is not eaten there and then, and the predator wanders off, a short period of time passes before the mammal gets up; shakes itself off and leaves the scene.

When people experience intense emotional responses, particularly if they are anxious, their mammalian bodies sometimes react as if being ‘eaten alive’ and go through the play dead process.

At best they may want to lie down to allow the emotional response to pass through them.  At ‘worst’ they may feel as if six pairs of hands are dragging them to the floor against their will – their body feels heavier and heavier and the muscles become harder and harder to move.

Another common symptom is when they look at their hands they appear to be disconnected from their body (hence the ‘disassociation’ part).

This is not a dangerous state to be in unless it happens regularly – but it is alarming when it happens for the first time.  I suggest you speak to a doctor just to make sure that is what it is.  Their reassurance alone is sometimes enough to help this state pass.

Enraged Helplessness

Sometimes people experience environments they have no immediate control over and feel suppressed and ‘crushed’ in them but for some personal reason are compelled to remain in those environments.  Or they lose an environment (eg a loving relationship) they felt they needed in order to be happy and the environment is taken away from them.

They become sensitised to the situation and extremely emotional and enraged at life.  There may be a specific target or cause, but basically it is ‘at life’.  They feel a desperate urge to get back something lost (rage) alongside a state of not being able to get the lost thing back (helplessness).

When children do this we call it a tantrum; when adults do this we call it dangerous, unacceptable and attention seeking ‘drama queen/king’ behaviour.  This response is very strong – so strong people sometimes attempt suicide to demonstrate how strong it is for them.

The person feels they are repeatedly hitting a brick wall in an important area of their life and may demonstrate this publicly by throwing themselves at the floor – they may do this publicly because they feel others hold the solution to their problem.

If you feel ‘enraged helplessness’ you may act in this desperate way.  You could eventually have to accept that in the particular situation concerned you are in fact both helpless and enraged.

You may now need to take steps to get the emotional reaction out in a safe, non-public way while at the same time negotiating a different route towards getting the things you value so much (but it may have to be a different goal if the initial goal is unobtainable).

Again, this is perfectly normal behaviour – but if you do not want to listen to the opinions of others you need to take the inner turmoil to a professional counsellor trained in helping with this kind of thing.

It is a painful condition to deal with and heal but it can be done and the process can be accepted and cleared.

Physical Reasons

Physical illness can be masked by emotional issues.

Feeling faint can be caused by things like low blood pressure or having the flu or a lack of sleep.  Quite often with anxiety problems we get palpitations in our chest and panic as a result can lead to a feeling of light-headedness.

You may feel like doubling up and laying down with stomach cramps (prolonged anxiety can cause a change in stomach acid balance and lead to digestive problems).

Intense emotional states can make us feel like we are a bit of a hypochondriac and this fear of being labelled as such can cause us not to seek medical advice.  Do not do this – there may be a genuine physical problem developing.

Get it checked out and you will stop worrying about it.

Overall Solutions

When we feel intensely emotional we need to acknowledge the urge to fall down as a normal human condition – undesirable to our ego, but normal.

We should not ignore these signals – something is going on with us.  We need to get help to find out what the cause is.  A physical illness, such as a thyroid problem, can be masked when we just label it ‘emotional’.

Do not be too concerned about the opinions of others when going through this kind of thing unless their opinion is supportive.  I have found those who are negatively critical of others going through this experience tend to follow a similar path when they go through similar situations.  It is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

Humans are built in a certain way and there is no way of getting round this.  The urge to fall down every now and again comes with the package.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness: Removing Compulsions

What is a Compulsion?

A compulsion has two main components:

• an unpleasant triggering thought that repeatedly activates our unconscious attention mechanism accompanied by


• an emotional response generated within the body that makes us feel we need to do something.

A compulsion is the urge to do something preventative in regards to a potential threat.  This can be felt physically as a lifting sensation just below the chest area – it seems to come from the stomach.  It is very strong; very unwanted; and as a result of being unwanted is seen as unpleasant, painful and often interpreted as ‘abnormal’.

We can have compulsions in regards to very simple representations – simple images or words - behind which sit more complex reflections - scenarios in which we have strong imagery of things we value, or wish to protect, being harmed or destroyed.

Trouble is, because the scenario exists only in our minds, there is nothing we can do physically.  Unless, that is, you come to regard just feeling as something you do.

In a bid to calm the urge ‘to do’ for a while we may carry out physical ritualistic acts that reduce the tension - but the urge returns again and again because our Unconscious knows the main task still remains undone.  We have not completed the ‘doing cycle’ it requires us to do to the point our Unconscious can see the task as done and will then let the thoughts and feelings related to the feared threat go by just like our other thoughts do.

Compulsions can seemingly appear from nowhere but they may be supported by a foundation of prolonged anxiety or anger about the area of concern that has been there for some time.  The person becomes more and more sensitised to the issue in much the same way we do to a real-life external negative event that keeps recurring.

This repeated urge to do meets with a repeated ‘there is nothing to do!’ argument from our logical thinking mind (our left neo-cortex) which refuses the impulse to move towards the compelling imagery because the idea of physically doing when there is nothing to physically do looks completely illogical.

Is OCD related to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

I believe it is.  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a condition in which a person has been through a real-life event and has produced such an intense, overwhelming emotional response they are unable to process the response at the time of the event.

The event may be a one-off thing or a long-term series of related incidents that challenges our understanding of life and who we are in relation to that life.  In PTSD the healing process involves the person re-entering their recurring memories of the real-life experience and re-negotiating their route through the experience; through their thoughts, feelings and interpretations; to a point they feel they can let  go of it.  Most of this work involves the imagination.

I would suggest the only difference between PTSD and obsessions/OCD is that one is initiated by real-life events whereas the other is based on mainly imagined events with a real-life anxiety creating background leading up to it.

Our Unconscious Does Not Know the Difference Between Real and Imagined Events

Because we logically know an imagined event is not real we tend to invalidate it – we say ‘it did not really happen and therefore the urge to go and undo the imagined event should not be acknowledged – it should not be there’.

This is what our logical mind says.  It is what the logical minds of some brain experts tell us.  However, we are not dealing with the logical mind – we are dealing with the workings of the Reptilian, Limbic and right neo-cortex pattern creating minds.  We are dealing with emotional energies trapped in the body.

What they want our logical minds to do is not the same thing as what our logical minds think we should do.

What Should We Do when there is Nothing Physically to be Done?

We need to do what our emotional minds need us to do – we need to go into the compulsion, find the Reflection behind it, and, ever so slowly, explore and come to understand what it is that drives it.

Behind the imagery connected to your compulsion; behind the Representation and within the Reflection; you will discover things you are really passionate about; what you care deeply about; what it is in life you want to hold onto.

You need to validate this overly intense experience – accept it – but at the same time feel and release the emotional energy attached to it with a view to removing the intensity.  It is the shocking intensity of it that grabs at your attention mechanism rather than the images themselves.

Releasing emotional energy in this way is ‘doing’.

At some point you will come out of the other side of the Reflection, having fully explored it, having discharged most of the emotional energy attached to it.

The compulsion becomes milder and milder in its attention grabbing affects until one day you see the whole thing as a neutrally charged memory and are able to let go of it.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness: Emotional Representations and Reflections

I want you to imagine your inner life consists of two main elements:

• Representations


• Reflections

Representations

Representations represent Reflections – they can be a simple shape, a word or our mental image of a person.  They are quick to appear in our minds and in most cases we are quick to let them go.  We might call them thoughts – but they are the kind of thoughts that lead on to other things.

We let a Representation come and go easily when it briefly catches our attention mechanism because we do not see it as important.  When the Reflection represented has either already been fully explored or is so emotionally uninteresting to us we have no urge whatsoever to explore it it will flow through our mind without our trying to stop it.

Reflections

A Reflection is an experience in which several Representations interact with each other.  Each interacting Representation offers us another journey into another Reflection.  They form a ‘scene’ in which different directions are offered to us each with an alternative possible outcome.

The result of entering an unfamiliar reflection is to find yourself in a state of uncertainty.  This does not cause too much stress if the reflection is built around an area of thinking to which you do not have a lot of emotional energy attached.

For example, two scientists discussing alternative theories of particles produced by a particle accelerator may hold your attention for a short period of time.  If they argue over the possibility of the next accelerator test creating a black hole that could swallow you and your family they may get more of your attention.  If they tell you they are building the accelerator where your house currently sits well, it is unlikely you will pay attention to much else for a long while.  You may be particularly emotional about it.

In the above scenario you might select the image of the scientists or the image of the accelerator or the black hole as your Representation – but what it represents is the Reflection containing information about what you expect to lose and how you feel about it.

Emotionally intense Reflections produce ‘flashing’ attention-grabbing Representations.

Emotionally charged Representations grab the attention of your unconscious attention mechanism and may enforce a compulsive response we would rather not have  Compulsion is a physical urge to do something about the content within the Reflection.

We usually feel compelled to pay attention to representations when they represent a survival-related threat to us or trigger a response designed to protect something of value.

What one person regards as a survival-related issue may be different to what others do.  This is why different Representations mean different things to each of us at different times.

A couple of quick examples of Representations/Reflections:

• college certificates represent money; success; respect; a life of purpose and enjoyment – you see this represented by ‘certificate’ – you feel compelled to physically go somewhere and do things to obtain your certificate but not to get the certificate – to get the things in the Reflection behind it


• a bullying boss represents losing a big battle and getting sacked; blocked career paths; bad references; you being labelled a trouble causer; emotional illness – all this is represented by the image of the boss – on the surface it appears you feel physically compelled to go places or stand up to or run away from your bad boss but in the reflection you discover the true things feared are your own possible failures.

How Does This Information Help in Drilling for Emotional Wellness?

In obsessions and phobias we are quite often presented with the Representation and shy away from it because it looks silly or unnecessary or we just do not understand what is going on when this apparent simple image appears with a very strong set of emotional responses attached.

The emotional response, however, is not really attached to the Representation – it is attached to the Reflection behind it.

A phobic afraid of lifts (elevators), for example, may have a reaction to the lift door (the Representation) but the Reflection contains information on how it felt to be helpless; how it felt to feel suffocated; the imagined embarrassment of having to go to the toilet in a lift if you were trapped there and then have your rescuers discover the result– imagery like this may lurk in the reflection and be the real thing behind the obvious image of the lift doors.

In compulsion what happens is the emotional energy in the Reflection ‘flashes’ at us through the Representation; telling us there is something behind the Representation we need to go into and explore.

By going through our Representations into the Reflections behind them and exploring their hidden meaning we discharge the energy within.  We turn those Representative flashing attention-grabbers into just neutrally charged thoughts that appear for shorter and shorter periods until one day they hardly bother us again.

A lack of understanding of this process can leave us standing at the flashing doorway to an emotionally charged Reflection wondering what it is we are supposed to do next.

Regards - Carl

Removing Obsessions – What Is It that Really Lies Beneath?

Obsessions are concerned with the prevention of bad things happening (this also applies to some types of phobias).

Prior to the obsession coming into being there may have been a long period of worry related to the area of concern, of which the obsession is just one specific image or aspect.

Because it likes efficiency the brains strips out all unnecessary additional information and eventually just keeps flashing a representative image at the sufferer.  This may just be something as simple as a partial shape; for example the image of a nose (believe it or not, that is how specific an obsession can be – the person has an intense emotional reaction to something they know in their logical mind to be completely banal).

Memories of the context of the long period of worry leading up to the obsession can be blocked due to the memory-wiping affects of anxiety.  The sufferer of an obsession has trouble building an understanding about the source of the imagery now plaguing them from the centre of their obsession and they fear ‘what lies beneath’.

Once they decide to start facing it through the process of exposure therapy, however, the context is gradually revealed.

Context is rebuilt through mixing both the memories already contained within the trapped emotional response and from new interpretations of the gaps between available information.

As the emotional history becomes more available the sufferer starts to see where they went wrong in their understanding and how they should adjust their way of seeing in order to remove the obsession.

Confusion in Regards to Responsibilities and the Difference between Real and Imagined Events

When first starting to develop an obsession the sufferer may believe they are solely responsible for preventing the act at the centre of the obsession because they are the only one concerned about, or seemingly even aware of, the imagined threat.

This sense of isolation may be the result of an environment in which sharing worries and information about feelings is either prevented or seen as undesirable.  This sets up a self-fuelling internal worry cycle in mind and body.

Sufferers believe if the act were to happen it would be their fault because they had refused to listen to the pre-alert warning in their own heads.  They deliberately mimic the guilt response, as if the imagined horror story had really happened, and do so as a motivator to take early action in order to both prevent themselves from being in that situation and the event itself happening.

Unfortunately this mimicry can be so convincing the Unconscious, which cannot tell the difference between a real and an imagined scenario, buys into it as a current emergency situation and now starts warning the upper mind of the constantly ‘real’ threat as if it were happening right now.

Seeing this reaction in themselves as illogical the sufferer recoils and tries to eradicate the thinking and feelings attached to the process but this instead makes things worse.

As the person who contains ‘the imagined act’ they may see their obsession as a form of punishment for having the unwanted thoughts and feelings inside but also think they need to keep it as a preventative measure.

The sufferer can misunderstand subtle differences such as the difference between the act and their reaction to the act – it becomes meshed into one..

So, for example, when talking about healing an obsession through ‘emotional acceptance’ they can easily confuse accepting their emotional response to the act with accepting the unacceptable act itself (‘but then I might be agreeing the horrible act is OK?’).

They fear that removing the obsession will reduce their alertness.  This will lead to the act happening and they will then fail to cope with the knowledge they knew all along the act could happen but chose not to listen to the warning signals.

Problems Sharing with Others

Sufferers of obsessions struggle with some strange fears that delay or stop them seeking help or even sharing the content of their obsessions with others.

These fears can include:

• being locked up as someone capable of performing the acts in their obsessions because listeners will not understand the condition


• spreading their obsession to others (sufferers can have trouble believing that once the information is shared others will not develop the same condition)


• sharing information on their obsession will make it worse.

Going Into the Response

The feelings attached to an obsession are so strong they convey a sense of reality and a physically felt compulsion to do something about the alleged threat.

It is this compulsion to do something that can be most frightening because the sufferer knows there is nothing to do in reality so they keep backing away from the urge.  Unfortunately backing away strengthens the urge and its hold on the mind.

By taking the alternative approach and going into the urge and examining what drives it, the sufferer can start to undo the affect.  Do this work enough and they move into a stronger and stronger Objective Viewpoint - of seeing themselves from the outside – this is their self-image position.

What the self-image observer now sees is their most important value systems under threat and their reaction to them.

Obsessions and other anxiety disorders are usually built around imagined threats to what we value most but in the confusion caused by these conditions we see ourselves as the threat.

In one of her books on panic disorder Dr Claire Weekes talks about an exhausted midwife patient of hers who began worrying about how her tired state could impact on the quality of care she was able to give to the babies she cared for.

Passing an open upper floor window one day the midwife imagined accidentally dropping a baby through the window opening and this was enough to start an obsession/phobia about windows.

To the midwife the welfare of babies was an obvious core value – and it is around our core values, when we sense they are threatened, we are most likely to develop anxiety disorders.

What lies beneath our obsessions are things we can like about ourselves – things we agree with and positive things we can embrace again, but next time around we must do so in the right way.

If you have an obsession ‘what lies beneath’ are your core values – once you connect up with them again you can understand and clear your obsession and like yourself even more in the process.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness – the Pilot Hole Pressure of Facing Your Obsession

Perhaps for the first time in your life you have now decided to face your obsession instead of continually running from it.

You have set up a ‘drilling platform’ consisting of medical professionals, a counsellor and a private, distraction-free place where you feel safe enough to practice your ‘drilling for emotional wellness’ at regulated intervals.

Before you go in for the very first time there are some things you should keep in mind:

• obsessions are driven by trapped emotional energy – not by the repeating images or thoughts


• those repeating images and thoughts are the doorways through which the emotional energy driving your obsession hopes to escape.

Where to Place Your Pilot Hole Drill Bit

The drill bit we use when drilling for emotional wellness is our Conscious Point of Focus – what we deliberately pay attention to.

Obsessions are not driven by the imagery repeatedly appearing in the mind of the sufferer.  They are driven by an emotional response trying to escape through the imagery.  You eventually create the state known as ‘emotional acceptance’ by continually allowing the energy to discharge through the image.

You achieve emotional acceptance when you have fully discharged the emotional energy and the obsessive imagery stops appearing as a result.  What you ‘accept’ is the nature of the energy release process – commonly known as feeling your feelings.

The imagery you currently see as a never-ending curse is actually the route to emotional freedom.  The emotional energy you sense coming up through your body is telling you it wishes to escape through the route provided but you are currently stopping it from doing so.

So, when deciding where you should place your drill bit in order to start your first pilot hole the answer is straight through the imagery.

If even considering this an option fills you with dread this is because you have encountered your Secondary Belief Layer.

A Hard Outer Shell of Secondary Beliefs and Emotions

To stop the release process you have set up a series of belief systems, with their own supporting emotional responses, designed to hold the trapped emotional response powering your obsession in place.  These additional belief systems combine to tell you one simple thing: if you allow yourself to feel the emotional response and listen to any information it contains it will kill you.

To allow the energy behind your obsession to gain escape you may first have to drill through this secondary layer repeatedly.  This allows all the energy in your body to come up into conscious awareness and it begins releasing.

Originally set up to protect you from emotional pain this wall of false secondary beliefs now becomes your main immediate obstacle and it may take a long time to get through.

What Should You Expect as a Normal Part of this Early Pilot Hole Process?

Emotional gushing – feeling overwhelmed to the point you may need sometimes to lay down with emotional exhaustion.

Panic attacks; imagery of death through various causes; physical changes in such things as blood pressure; stomach acid; general anxiety and so on may be produced as a result of these beliefs.  You can find yourself turning into a bit of a hypochondriac taking multiple trips to see your doctor and even midnight journeys to hospital when unexplained symptoms arise and you are not sure what they mean.

You should consider this a normal part of the emotional release process and do not enter into a phase of self-criticism over any of this behaviour; especially when others do so – self-criticism just delays healing.

Seeing this behaviour in yourself you may wonder if you should now turn back to your old approach of avoiding the inward direction (I found this impossible to do – it was a bit like tipping over the edge on a downward rollercoaster).

What Should You Focus On?

What you should start to focus on is difference.  Things may be much worse – but they are different; they have not been different for a very long time, have they?

Continue to drill your way down wondering what different things there are still to be discovered.

My personal goal when I began my self-healing programme was to get rid of the entire thing within three months.  Although that pilot plan did not work to schedule I made so much progress in those first three months I knew I had to continue due to the level of difference I could sense.  I may have been in pain, but I felt empowered.

I did not like the journey, but finally there was a journey to be had and I was going to take it even if it might kill me.

You learn to focus on what you do, rather than how you feel, because doing is what makes the difference.  You can feel the emotional pressure releasing.

The action of repeatedly taking your conscious attention into an obsession may not look to the outside world much like action but it will certainly feel like action to you.  It is this ‘drilling down’, repeated daily, that brings results.

Like most other areas of life that first journey into the unknown is often the most painful, prolonged  and sharpest learning curve to be had but without it nothing else can happen.

Regards - Carl

Drilling For Emotional Wellness – Setting Up Your Platform

What is the first step towards turning a blocking emotional system into a flowing system?  The first thing you need to put in place is a drilling platform.

A drilling platform offers a stable place in a world of chaos you can return to again and again.

Your Emotional Energy Drilling Platform

Your emotional drilling platform is an artificial structure set up temporarily only during the energy release process.  Once it has achieved its purpose your platform can be dismantled or left to operate unmanned by itself until the next time you need to use it deliberately.

Nothing in life can guarantee total emotional freedom at all times.  I may see myself as a bit of an ‘expert’ in removing such things as obsessions, phobias and panic attacks – but I am only in this position because I learned how to set my healing platforms up.  I still get new emotional issues – I just know now how to get rid of them quickly because I have developed the understanding and skills set.

Prior to this I was a complete emotional wreck inside.  People would say they could not believe how calm I was in some external situations where others were very emotional.  Truth was, compared to how I felt inside, these external situations were barely noticeable. Now I get the best of both worlds.

Before we take a look at setting up a new emotional drilling platform, consider those platforms already successfully operating in your life.

What platforms have you already got set up?

Do you go to work?  If you go to work in any organisation the way in which that organisation is set up is a ‘platform’.  Multiple staff working together to mine something of value that leads to something else of value.  You all get together and you drill.  How much would you get done working alone?

Have you ever had a conflict situation at work that made you feel bad – did you get together and sort it out and then feel better?  You drilled the situation and released the energy using the platforms designed to sort out  such disputes.  Was there a meeting, or an informal discussion or something in writing?  What did they release?  What did they drill for?

Do you go shopping? If you go shopping your own shopping platform may consist of your transport arrangements; your shopping bags; shopping trolleys at the store; the contents of your purse or wallet and a grocery list.  All those staff at the shops you go to are working together in multiple platforms to support you in operating yours.

Where do you go that makes you feel good?  Do you read books or watch television for pleasure?  Do you set aside a specific physical place, create a certain atmosphere and devise a specific time slot?  Experiential Platforms.  Eat dinner off a plate sitting on a table and cook the meal on a cooker?  Platforms.

Your life is unconsciously full of platforms involving support from different people and tools applying different types of knowledge to resolve what would otherwise create multiple stressful issues.

All these things are important, right?  All these things are of value to you?  So why do we all, nearly every one of us, have so much trouble when it comes to creating a platform to drill down for the most important thing anyone can have in their lives?

A happy you.

Buried under all that energetic gunk there is you, and the real you deserves to be let out.  Your emotional release platform needs a place, a time and proper staffing just like all the other platforms in your life do.

Place

In order to drill for emotional energy effectively you need a safe place for an extended period of time.  This safe place could have somebody else there, as long as they are acting as your Guardian and not your Judge, Jury and Executioner.  They should be there to help undo those aspects of your own negative self-talk – not to reinforce them.

Most of the time though, you will probably be alone when you do this work.  Drilling for emotional energy needs to be very focused and by its very nature tends to be focusing – especially if you get an emotional gusher.

There is a real risk if you are in untrained company you will take your mood out on others – or they will notice and ask you about it.  There is also a risk of certain places being dangerous to you – such as when crossing roads if you are not paying attention to traffic.

So I recommend either a private room with no distractions (and nothing in it with moving parts) or, for short periods, time spent with a trusted Guardian figure.

Staffing

Drilling for emotional energy needs the support of different people at different times.  There are physical, mental and long-term planning issues, including concerns about affects on the environment, when you set up such a drilling platform.

Releasing emotional energy affects your physical body.   You have to make sure what you experience is both normal and is not masking illness not related to intense emotional release.

Doctor

During emotional release things like stomach acid balance; heart palpitations; sweating; nightmares and the ‘mammalian freeze response’ – also known as ‘disassociation’, may take place.  Got a good doctor?  Make them a part of your platform team – you will need them to speak to whenever you hit a physical situation.

Include here the possibility of a Psychiatrist – just a note: psychiatrists are medicinal professionals; their job is to prescribe medicine.  Your doctor will refer you to a psychiatrist if you wish them to and your psychiatrist will offer you medicinal support as well as giving you the opportunity to talk.  There will be room for negotiation here so do not think you should just do as you are told when it comes to medication.

I discussed my healing strategy with my psychiatrist and he agreed to keep me on the lowest level of Prozac – after a year I no longer required it (I am not sure I required it at all, to be honest, but I wanted the option).

Psychiatrists are used to people turning up on their door with no plan whatsoever, but if you have a plan they will listen to it and support you.

Something that surprised me at first was when I described my plan my psychiatrist would agree what I was saying was correct – but would not give me the whole plan!  This is most likely because they are trained not to.  As I say, they are medicinal practitioners.  They will probably refer you for counselling – and your counsellor is someone you can really start to develop your plan with.  You do not need to wait, however, until your psychiatrist or doctor refers you for counselling before getting yourself a counsellor.

Counsellor

There are several types of counsellor – a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist will help change negative thoughts to positive thoughts; a Person-Centred Counsellor will assist you in assisting yourself while at the same time offering a very light form of challenge (this kind of counselling is flexible to your needs); an Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) practitioner will help you release intense emotional charge gently; a Neuro-llinguistic Programmer (NLP) works with mental modelling.

All and any of these types of counsellors are effective in their own way.  You should speak to your doctor and psychiatrist about which type they recommend but also do a bit of your own research as well.  Pick one, stick with that counsellor for a time and then speak to that counsellor as to whether or not you both feel they are the right type to assist you in your drilling for emotional wellness.

Your Board of Governors

Most platforms operate using a ‘Board of Governors’.  A governor is any source of advice called upon to help shape the nature of the development of an organisation.

We can take on and let go of our governors as we see fit and some governors may only serve the needs of our drilling platform for a short period of time – others become semi-permanent.  The only permanent member of your staffing team is you.

Your governors can be helpful real-life friends (I do not mean critical friends with agendas they want you to stick to – I mean people who value YOUR experience and agenda) or other advice sources.

They may be well-known authors – I remember going through a couple of years regarding Dr Claire Weekes, the panic attack expert, as my main ‘governor’.

Governors are useful not only for drilling down to release intense emotional energy – they are helpful in maintaining emotional happiness once it has been achieved.

You

The main member of staff you will need on your drilling platform is you.  If you do not turn up to take lead of the operation drilling for your emotional energy release cannot take place.  You could be the one member of drilling staff you have most trouble getting to show up.

You have to value yourself enough to be willing to carry out the drilling process in a safe place without distraction – this means being ‘selfish’.  It means turning up to do the work without whining about how inconvenient the process is.  When you get frustrated at the process; the way in which your organic emotional system works, what you are really saying is ‘I do not value myself much’.  You do not think you deserve the time emotional release takes.

Staffing your platform with a doctor, a psychiatrist, a counsellor and a Board of Governors really starts to reinforce the idea you are an important person in your own right.

Part of the reason we become emotionally unwell is we have spent far too much time valuing the platforms being operated by other people.  We love to help them drill for their ideas; their viewpoints; their wants – even to the point we adopt them when they work directly against our own emotional well-being.

Setting up your own platform to drill for emotional release may be the first time you have ever considered you have something in there of value to drill for.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness – What Are You Drilling For?

You were born to be happy; then unhappy; then happy again.

If you are emotionally unwell, by this I mean long-term emotionally unwell as opposed to dealing with a one-off external issue, it is not because you have not got something you need from the outside world.  It is because you have got something you have to get rid of from your inside world.

We sometimes call this emotional baggage.  Emotional baggage comes in the form of trapped emotional energies produced in relation to what may be now finished external situations or imagined events.  We have not completed the internal emotional release cycle attached to them and it causes them to remain alive inside of us; we feel as though these things are still happening now.

When our emotional baggage shows itself in our behaviours we hear, and automatically re-tell ourselves, criticisms such as ‘get over it’ and ‘pull yourself together’.   What we really need to understand is we must ‘get through it’ and let ourselves ‘fall apart in private’ for a while before we can do this; and then get back to happy, baggage-less you.

Happy You lives inside and emotional illness occurs when multiple negative emotions layer in your body, blocking your conscious from accessing your true self.

Whenever you mentally approach the memories in your brain the trapped energy erupts against your will in a bid to escape.

It is as though there were a cave system in your brain with the emotional energy in your body acting as lava bubbling up.  Every now and again you either travel down a cave and open up a route to the lava (and wish you had not) or the lava pressure builds up so much it causes an eruption that seems to overwhelm and ruin everything.

When you work at healing using systematic de-sensitisation or exposure therapy you deliberately drill down into these trapped energies to enforce release.  Thinking about drilling?  Put your hard hat on..

What Are We Drilling For?

Trapped down there below all that energy sits a happier you waiting to be released.  You may not believe this though if you have been ‘out here’, looking for distractions for a long time.  You may be wondering if the happy you down there could have survived all this time.

The risk you face is you could spend a long time drilling down to find ‘nothing’.  All that work – for nothing.  The irony is, nothing is exactly what you will find, because nothing is what happiness is.  Nothing is what you should drill for.

Can you draw happiness?  Can you picture it?  The answer is no - but that does not matter because this is what you are drilling for.  I know this may sound strange – but if you have been looking for things in the outside world to make you happy for long enough you may well now be looking for the thing inside – a definite target to aim at when there is no thing to be found.  I remember, as I spent several years drilling down to release my obsessions, phobias and panic attacks, occasionally trying to ‘see’ happiness.  What was I working towards?  There came a time when I just knew I was much happier, but still could not picture it.

I can draw a smile; a can re-live an emotional buzz – but happiness I cannot do in the same way and neither can you.

This is because happiness is about the freedom to move within our own being – not being hemmed in by our thoughts; not feeling pressurised by our feelings.  Feeling free.  Happiness is about having choices and space. To achieve this all you need is an absence of intense emotional energies.

To create this you must release emotions.

Confidence comes from knowing you are able to create the space whenever you need to.  It does not come from never having an intense, difficult to deal with emotional problem ever again.

Rather than just achieving emotional release what we really want to establish is emotional flow.  Once we open up the cave network in our brains, and keep it open, the trapped emotional lava gets released but also any future lava releases safely without building up again inside.

Regards - Carl

Where are You on the Repressor versus Sensitiser Scale?

Quite a lot of research took place in the sixties on anxiety disorders and one theory was that anxiety sufferers reacted with two main defensive styles: Repressive versus Sensitiser (this was known as the R-S Scale).

Repressives

Repressives avoid acknowledging a thing is happening in order to protect against the emotional effects of a threatening situation.  They practice selective inattention (denial).  In some cases a person may use a lot of positive self-talk and ‘hope’ in difficult circumstances in order to deny what is actually going on in their lives.

At an Unconscious level they are reacting and building up emotional tension but on a Conscious level they are not aware of this going on. They are not wiling to listen to the emotional messages coming up from their Unconscious and may have a very good reason for behaving this way – for example if they do pay attention it may mean the end of an important relationship.

Sensitisers

Sensitisers do the opposite to Repressives – they adopt a more paranoid approach and react to everything as quickly as possible with the intention of minimising the affects of the issue concerned before it can take a hold and push them to the point they are producing negative emotional responses.

In both cases the people concerned are trying to avoid the development of their own negative feelings in regards to a looming situation.

Most of us can identify with having adopted versions of these two behaviours at different times to ‘keep the peace’ or prevent a situation ‘getting out of hand’ but the researchers tell us that some folks adopt one of these two approaches as their default way of dealing with life.

As a short-term strategy either method is fine (in my view) but what if the external issue keeps recurring?  In that case all that happens is the person builds and stores emotional response issues for the future.

Both approaches are based on the belief that the ‘ultimate threat’ would be something we could not cope with.

Sample Scenario: John Loves Emily and the Children But Emily Does Not Love John

Eighteen months into their marriage and Emily gives birth to their first child.  Up until the point she became pregnant Emily was an apparently loving, caring partner who thought the world of John.  Once she became pregnant, however, Emily became cold and uncommunicative.

During her pregnancy John told himself this was simply a side-effect of being pregnant – he had tried to offer his support through this tough time but Emily dismissed his concerns about her demeanour as his ‘being silly’.

Baby is now nine months old – the relationship with Emily still feels cold and John is wondering if ‘this is it’ and asks Emily what has gone wrong.  He is getting very emotional.

Emily tells John she wants another baby.  This will make her feel differently towards him.  John replies he did not realise there was a problem and Emily states it just goes to show how unobservant and self-centred he is.

John tells Emily he would like to concentrate on the quality of life for their current child rather than simply being a child-production system and Emily tells him she wants six children and if he cannot bring himself to make her happy by doing this he will be of no use to her and can leave so she can find a man who will; she storms off.

John reasons that Emily must care about him despite her current behaviour because women do not have babies with men they do not love, do they?  He also thinks about how he will fail to cope with leaving his current child, with the shame of having another man raising his child and how easily Emily could meet another man and disappear from his life, taking his child with her, forever.   He immediately has an image of his committing suicide because of all this loss.  He decides to agree to have another baby with Emily.

Again, up until the pregnancy, Emily is the perfect partner.  Once pregnancy has been achieved however, Emily goes cold on him again.

When their first child, a daughter, reaches three John starts to worry about her behaviour – she has a habit of running headlong into things and injuring herself.  Emily dismisses all of his concerns telling him he does not know the first thing about children and he should keep his nose out.

John feels completely disrespected by her responses.  When he makes it clear he does not like the way he is treated Emily explodes in rage at him and tells him he can leave if he does not like the way things are.

This happens several times and on one occasion John also gets angry back at her and feels himself losing control.  As Emily comes at him in spitting fury mode she says something hurtful and he slaps her.

Immediately John falls into shocked remorse.  His reaction shocks him so much he vows never to do that again.  He begs Emily to forgive him and promises he will never do it again.

Now he starts trying to eliminate the possibility of another confrontation like that happening by constantly monitoring and eliminating potential areas in which his daughter could hurt herself.

John has noticed that every time his daughter runs anywhere in the house he jumps out of his skin at the thought of her being injured and he chases her around everywhere to confirm she is safe.

Emily criticises him for this, telling him to let the daughter be, and John accepts her criticisms – he is too jumpy.

Meanwhile, Emily wants a third baby.  John starts to notice the cycle – she likes him up until pregnancy and then goes cold again.  He agrees to another baby – in for a penny, right?

One day John reads a newspaper story about a child being injured in a certain way and he imagines his own child being hurt that way and then finds he cannot stop thinking about it.  He would never forgive himself if that happened to his daughter.  He criticises himself for being over-reactive but keeps it to himself so Emily does not, likewise, criticise him.  His own self-criticism he can live with but her doing it has more power.

The images of his daughter being hurt keep flashing in his mind.  John has just developed an obsession.  He cannot get the pictures of hurtful things happening to her out of his head.

Fourth child arrives and now John sees the like-John-dislike-John cycle in Emily so clearly he can no longer hide from it.  He wonders if Emily will dump him when baby number six has arrived.

A year later, when Emily does her baby routine again, John decides to test the theory and refuses to have baby number five.  Emily does not dump him immediately but she does go cold on him.  The coldness goes on and on and John notices Emily getting happier and happier – with other people who she goes out with more and more.

First child is now fifteen years old and John asks Emily straight what the ‘big plan’ is.  John tells Emily he believes she sees him as nothing more than a sperm donor and if he walked out tomorrow she would not bat an eyelid.

Emily comes clean and without any sense of guilt tells him he is absolutely right.  When John asks how she sees the next steps in regards to the family she tells him now the cat is out of the bag she wants him to see other women and wants him to stay in the house just for the sake of the children – she has no further use for him personally.

Emily asks John why he does not look surprised at what she has just said.

John looks at her and says “I always knew”.

What John Always Knew

At some level John knew he was pretending real-life events, and the way he was being treated, were not real.  He lied to himself and believed it was morally right to do so in order to protect his relationship with his child.

This is repression at work.

In a bid to remove the possible threat of a future confrontation with Emily which could also lead to the ending of the relationship both with Emily and his children he next tries to take preventative measures by following his daughter around – here he is also acting like a sensitiser.

This gets so bad it triggers an obsession.

What John Now Knows

John has an obsession to get rid of and the possible loss of a family to come to terms with.  What he now realises was that he was always powerless to change the path of the relationship.  It was always going to end up this way.

But he also knows he CAN survive the worst case scenario – in fact the worst case scenario is not as bad as the long, drawn out experience he has had.

Quite often in emotional illness we make the mistake of preferring a permanent, lower level painful experience to a short-term, intensely painful version which would eventually pass.

We remain stuck in situations, repressing and becoming increasingly sensitised to them, until we face up to the genuine fact we can cope with pretty much anything when we need to and we knew it all along.

Have you had experience of repressing and sensitising in this way?

Regards - Carl

Emotional Healing Challenges Ideas, Beliefs, Attitudes and Reveals Your Values

When a person has decided they are finally ready to start the healing journey they may find various aspects of the journey unclear for a while until they realise they have to challenge and change their ideas, beliefs, attitudes and values – and how all of these interact with each other.

Ideas

An idea is a snapshot map - usually an image.  Ideas tend to be easily shared and universally acknowledged as to what they are with other people.

An idea can be an image of something we are moving towards, something we wish to create or the map of a journey we are thinking about travelling.

We are able to share and test our ideas easily with other people and there can be common agreement on what the idea looks like.  Individual differences arise, however, when individuals assess the impact of each idea differently and you find an idea you are exploring is something someone else will not even consider.

For example I can share with you a simple three stage idea of an exposure therapy plan and you will understand it clearly – but while I automatically accept the idea as workable you may assess it as the most stupid and dangerous thing a person can do.

We are capable of storing thousands if not millions of ideas over a lifetime without being too concerned about their accuracy.

Several ideas you may like to think about when it comes to removing an emotional disorder include:

• emotional issues are driven by trapped emotional energy rather than the original trigger that produced them


• an emotional response you are currently having in regards to an event happening several years ago may be a liar because it is based on a problem that no longer exists


• even if it is lying the energy has to be released through the past event as if it were temporarily true right now in order for the body to stop wanting to resolve the issue being lied about..

The nature of ideas starts to change when we select an idea from the many available and either decide to apply the map it offers to the way we manage our emotional lives or we see the idea as something to fight..

Beliefs

Beliefs are ideas with roots.

Those roots are fed by emotional responses based on a mixture of real-life experiences and imagined scenarios (mostly imagined scenarios, if we are being honest).

They are also supported by other ideas held in our brains – ideas that show, for example, what happens if the idea is applied for a short time (a day); a medium period of time (few weeks ) and strategically (five years to a lifetime).

We believe certain things will happen if we apply an idea for long enough – the decision as to whether or not we apply a new idea depends on how convinced we are the idea will produce a desired result and how desirable that result is compared to the discomfort of the journey to get to it.

Beliefs are concerned with the truth or otherwise of a map.  If we follow the journey represented to us by the idea will we find the destination promised or the threats we were warned about?

Beliefs about a thing are really only concerned with two questions – should we move towards or away from the idea?

If I were to say to you that, as you approach your emotional disorder, uncovering it layer by layer, you will eventually see that you have been deliberately keeping the disorder to prevent some terrible thing from happening, rather than because you are hiding from your own ‘demonic self’ – would you believe me?

The decision which direction to go in, towards or away from an idea, decides your attitude to the problem.

Attitude

In past times ‘attitude’ was the name given to the method used by a predator to stalk its prey.  Whether you want to move towards an idea or away from it decides your general direction; but attitude is about the route you expect to follow to get there.

What we know about attitude is once the journey has started the attitude sometimes needs to change as reality dawns.

For example, you may be looking for a straight path to emotional wellness but the path turns out to be a crazy-paving path instead and you sometimes find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere (at least you think that way at the time).  Other times you find yourself where you want to be without knowing quite how you arrived.

If I suggest to you the first part of your journey towards emotional healing, particularly if you have a serious anxiety disorder such as obsessions; OCD or phobias to clear, is to go speak to your doctor and establish a supportive team because this is going to be a long journey and you need their help – would you do that?

Or would that be too much of a delay?  You could do what I did and spend the first three months doing an exposure therapy plan alone then rushing to the doctor for confirmation that your ‘mammalian freeze response’ is a normal part of the anxiety process and not instead evidence you are going into a diabetic coma.

Values

Values are the things  we regard as most important in life and without which life would not not be worth much (they are still just ideas, really).

Values are both about the destination and the journey.  They are how we wish to travel, and why.  Our Self-Image is a value system based on who we see ourselves as now, who we wish to be and how we get to be that person (in most cases we already are that person and we just do not know it yet).

In order to be properly lined up mentally and emotionally you need to understand your values and how you work with them right now – if you are not lined up inside the gaps will show.

You can see this in social organisations where what the organisation is set up to achieve on behalf of others is not how the organisation travels itself – for example I remember watching a television programme where a doctor treating insomniacs was trying to get his 110 hour working week reduced.  The doctor was crumbling as he worked to help others.

It is easier to see this in others than it is in ourselves but, for an individual, this lack of congruence may show for example in how a person really concerned about the safety of their family acts like a vicious bully to keep everyone ‘safe’.

Because your values become unconscious over time you may forget what they are until they are threatened by a life event or the behaviour of someone else.

When your deepest value systems are being challenged you are at most risk of developing emotional disorders because if the challenge repeats over time you will react more and more strongly; to the point you become sensitised (over-reactive).

Once you become sensitised you lose sight of what your underlying values are and become more concerned with your sensitised state.  You know you are over-reacting and become suspicious as to why.  You now see YOU as the threat.

Truth is you felt your deepest values were threatened and became compelled to do something about it – but in reality there is nothing you can do and now you are stuck in a Catch-22 situation.  All emotionally pumped up with nowhere to go.

How would you value my advice if I told you that valuing the well-being of other people above your own well-being – even if they are, for example, your children - puts you at serious risk of becoming emotionally ill?

Although we cannot remove our value systems, nor should we wish to, we can re-prioritise them.  In order to become emotionally well you may, for a long time, have to keep re-visiting and challenging what  you value.

You must always value your long-term emotional well-being above that of others - you are of no use to others if you do not do so.

Have I challenged any ideas, beliefs, attitudes and values here?

Regards - Carl

What is Emotional and Cognitive Sensitisation and why should you know about it if you have an anxiety disorder?

Sensitisation

‘Sensitisation’ describes a point at which we become more than normally reactive to a certain kind of stimulation.

We can become sensitised at three main levels:

• physically
• cognitively
• emotionally.

Physical sensitisation can be seen in conditions such as allergies (eg hay fever) where our body activates an auto-immune system reaction to a physical substance it has identified as a threat in a similar way to how an infection is identified. 

The substance concerned may have previously produced no such reaction.  Some allergy reactions may be so severe they actually threaten the life of the sufferer (eg asthma).

Where an allergy develops in childhood a sufferer may grow out of it but if it develops in adulthood recovery is rare.  Thankfully medication and avoidance strategies help.

Other examples of physical sensitisation are the reactions we get by simply touching the same spot on our skin repeatedly (lightly with a pin does a good job of this) and RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) whereby nerves are irritated and inflamed by repetitive micro-movements.

Cognitive sensitisation is the root initial cause of conditions such as obsessions and OCD.  It is a process in which new thinking networks are set up in a bid to eradicate an unwanted thought or sets of thoughts.

Paradoxically this repeatedly generates the unwanted thoughts because the new ‘hunter’ thought patterns are designed to identify the target needing removal and recreate the unwanted thinking in order to do so.  It is a self-defeating process..

We do not deliberately set up these additional thought patterns, by the way – we do it without realising what it is we just did.

Frustrated at our lack of success we may then become emotionally sensitised in a bid to win the war against these unwanted thoughts and their attached emotional responses..

Emotional sensitisation – the powerhouse that maintains all anxiety disorders. 

Primary emotions are the emotions we produce in direct response to a real-life or imagined trigger.  Sometimes, however, a primary emotional response is based around information we do not want to accept as real and if we reject the information we also tend to reject the primary emotional response attached to it (the reverse is also true – if we reject an emotional response we also reject thoughts attached). 

In a bid to push the unwanted Primary emotional response away we produce a Secondary emotional response.  Secondary emotional responses are the underlying driving force behind emotional issues.  They create the same self-replicating model as that created when trying to un-think thoughts but this time it is a battle of energies within the body. 

The Primary and Secondary responses trap each other into a continuous fight within the body.

All Three Levels of Sensitisation are the Result of Over-active ‘Feed-Forward’ Mechanisms

Our physical auto-immune system creates and distributes new anti-bodies on the basis of a single previous attack.  If it makes errors by producing antibodies in regards to substances we actually want to be around it has the argument that producing antibodies unnecessarily five times, and getting it wrong, is better than not producing them the single time they are needed.

Our anti-thought and anti-emotional systems use cognitive bias and emotional hyper-arousal as their search and reaction tools for (allegedly) dealing with unwanted thoughts and feelings prior to their having any harmful affect on us.

Cognitive Bias

Scientists have conducted tests on various types of people that show our brains filter incoming information according to the way information is already being prioritised and processed by them. 

One such test is called the Stroop Colour Word Interference Test in which subjects are asked to write down the text colour of various words presented. 

The test reveals those words related to our current cognitive bias catch our attention and this leads to an increase in the time it takes to identify the text colour.  Smokers slow down when it comes to smoking-related words; anxiety sufferers slow down when it comes to anxiety-related words.

Because the thoughts we wish not to have are linked to intense negative emotional responses they deeply affect our memories and dominate our thinking as we struggle to get rid of them.

They are prioritised in our cognitive bias and this bias then seeks information from the environment on everything regarding these thoughts. 

Other tests have shown that even ‘positive’ information about slightly related issues will be fed into the network of fearful images and thoughts once this anxious cognitive bias has been established.

We are now cognitively sensitised and it is a self-replicating process.

 Hyper-Arousal

Hyper-arousal is a state in which a creature is on emotional high alert while constantly scanning the environment for any sign of threat.

We are at greatest risk of becoming hyper-aroused when the actual threat appears at irregular intervals.  If we know when a threat is due to appear we will adjust to the rhythm of its occurrence - but if we are not sure ‘what happens next or when’ we can easily go into the hyper-aroused state.

In this state we feel ‘jumpy’ and minor things trigger off intense emotional reactions.  We can remain in exhausted preparation for an alleged ‘battle to come’ like this for years.

These systems are ‘feed-forward’ mechanisms meant to prevent damage from an unwanted intruder – but they create the problem themselves.

Thankfully there is a way to escape the condition – De-sensitisation.

Cognitive and Emotional De-sensitisation

Systematic De-sensitisation (also known as Exposure Therapy - I am sure there are other names for it as well!) concerns itself with removing Cognitive and Emotional Sensitisation by repeatedly facing the triggers to which they are related and then entering the emotions and thoughts attached to those triggers repeatedly until the response becomes ‘habituated’.

Habituation is the point at which an unwanted emotional response becomes extinct and no longer compels our thoughts to keep paying attention to it.  At this point we have become emotionally neutral to the trigger.

This may sound like some kind of ‘scientific approach discovered in the 1960s’ – which was when studies on it started becoming most popular – but the truth is it has been a part of the human condition since humans have existed and the same pattern is adopted by the rest of the animal kingdom – particularly for mammals – in order to heal from it.

In simple terms the process is:

• you are frightened of a place because you once spotted a predator there
• for whatever reason you have to go to that place but you are reluctant because it is still highly likely there is a predator there
• you go to the place a lot of times and find there is no predator but you are still very emotional about the place
• eventually because you have continually repeating evidence there is no predator your Unconscious adapts to the new information and you stop being frightened.

This reverses both cognitive bias and hyper-arousal – and the good news is if applied with disciplined determination it is often successful and prevents further recurrence.

We learn to let go of thoughts about unpleasant things as they pass through our Conscious and let go of emotional responses so they can pass through and out of our bodies.

So Why is this Simple Process
so Difficult when it Comes to Healing Anxiety Disorders?

No-one wants to use this healing method unnecessarily because it is time-consuming, mentally confusing and always painful.  It is painful on several levels: painful thoughts; painful feelings and can produce really unpleasant physical reactions (such as change in stomach acid balance and heart palpitations).

However, if a person has tried other available methods without success they may then choose this more painful route because they decide they need to get on with it and are willing to try anything.

As a sufferer changes their sense of direction from avoidance to going into their feelings and towards their unwanted thoughts they find their arguments against doing so suddenly come to life and imagery arises that causes them to feel much worse than the emotional place they were at previously – the thing to focus on here is the difference. 

Any change in approach and in feeling intensity should be seen as progress – even if it feels worse.

The reason for the increased intensity in feelings is because we have begun to release trapped emotional energy.  One day you will find the majority of your cognitive bias and emotional hyper-arousal has gone.

You are left with a much deeper understanding of life and who you are in relation to it.

Self-Awareness is Everything

If you use De-sensitisation to remove an anxiety disorder you will most likely be able to identify the circumstances (your environment and how you reacted to it) you were experiencing when your sensitisation occurred. 

This is the genuine feed-forward information you need to focus on to prevent the other types of self-harming feed-forward systems establishing themselves again.

• Were you caught between two or more sets of values and did not know what direction to take for the best so remained frozen in a painful place?
• Was there a period you felt powerless or dominated by someone or something in life?  Did they create an environment in which you did not know ‘what was coming next or when?’
• Did you worry yourself sick about something and this set you up for sensitisation?
• were there certain types of thoughts which you thought you should not think?
• have you come to accept your most intense feelings and come to realise these are linked in to your most important value systems and arise when your values are threatened?

When external reality presents the kinds of environments that lead you into this kind of situation again you will either acknowledge and move away from those environments or you will re-interpret them so you do not react in the same way.

Here’s a short YouTube video on the Stroop test:

Regards - Carl

What Shape Do You Give Your Emotional Responses?

A man in his early twenties is talking to me about how he can feel his depression coming on again and he is dreading it.  I ask him to explain to me what happens - does this experience stay permanently or does it arrive, make him feel terrible for a while, then leave?

He tells me it passes eventually but he hates the experience and dreads it returning all the time.  'So, as it approaches, would I be right to assume it looks like you are about to be dragged down into a dark bottomless pit of despair and this time you might never come out as you have the other times - do you see something like that as it approaches?'.  He says yes, he does.  'Does it feel like you are being eaten alive?'.  He nods and smiles at the same time.  I can see he is picturing this imagery in his mind.  'I am being eaten alive'.

'So as it approaches you sense it overwhelming you; eating you alive; do you get a sense of being suffocated by it?'.  He nods.  'What if you were to change the way you see it.  Let us look at it as though it were a hill of energy that needs to be eaten and what is really happening is it comes to you to be eaten and then when you have eaten enough of it the hill lowers a bit; but it keeps building up because rather than eat the smaller amounts of this energy as they come to you to be eaten during the day you keep backing away from it and the hill builds up again; then this hill seems to overwhelm you.  What if you decided to go eat the whole hill, over a period of time, until it was all gone?'.

'What if you see yourself as a Pac-Man, for example, and you decide to deliberately go eat the hill before it comes to you?  What if you got into the habit of deliberately going to find it'.  That gets a smile as he pictures the scene.  'That is weird' he says.  'No-one has ever spoken to me like this before'.

Next I explain to him the way we see our intense emotional experiences is crucial to whether or not we get rid of them.  I learned this the hard way - by starting with lots of mostly ineffective verbal self-talk for several years then accidentally discovering the power of imagery to change the way I worked with my emotions.  I played with changing how I saw various aspects of what I was going through and started to get results.  When I say 'accidentally' though, that is not quite right.

For some time, as I kept telling my Unconscious 'we are going in' again as I followed my exposure therapy plan, I had strange imagery coming up such as pictures of rooms in the countryside and hills.  These images had no emotion attached to them so I tended to ignore them - then one day I realised my Unconscious was providing these images as tools.   I had been telling it repeatedly what I wanted to do and it was saying 'try this' to me.  Once I started playing with the imagery while in the centre of my emotional responses I started to see a change in whether or not the emotional responses cleared from my body.

If you apply certain types of imagery when either approaching or in the centre of an emotional response you can introduce a 'way of seeing' that will convince the various minds in your brain to release the response.  See the response as an approaching predator and your Reptilian Brain will gear your whole body up for fighting it and your upper brains do likewise.  See it as something you want to move towards and eventually release occurs.

The Shapes and Movements You See are Important in Emotional Self Management

You see a high wave of dark emotional energy coming at you and you know it is going to leave you all washed up at the end.  To your Reptilian brain, the brain part build around your brain stem and responsible for managing your bodily reactions and rhythms, this identifies the emotion approaching as something of a gaping jaw which, at the very least, will leave you in pain and wounded.  If you feel as though the emotion is suffocating you this triggers a specific response in an organ in your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is part of your Limbic brain (your specific emotional response brain sitting over your Reptilian Brain).  Scientists tell us the amygdala is like a 'suffocation alert system' and mimics the moment when a predator has you by the throat.

The amygdala creates a specific image of the trigger (your emotion) and produces a strong fight or flight response whenever the potential suffocating experience approaches.  Your hippocampus, an arched structure at the rear of the amygdala, memorises the territory surrounding the threat - it is the trigger of 'anticipatory fear'.  In a real life threatening situation it improves our survival odds by producing emotional responses to such things as predator footprints - but when it triggers in relation to our own emotions it is a real nuisance - for example you may start having emotional responses in regards to your bedroom door which you sit behind for days when in the middle of your emotional misery.

All of this kind of thing happens because of the way we 'see' our emotional responses.  It causes us to do our best to avoid and fight them off - and this freezes them inside of us.

So How Might You Change How You See that Trapped Response So You Can Eventually Get it to Go Away?

Quite often when I start talking to people about this way of changing how we see they start talking to me about their own application of this method - it is the first time they have come across someone else who talks about this kind of thing.  A lady recently told me about her ‘Special Room' approach.  That got me quite excited as I've got 'A Room' as well!  I did not tell her about my room though, everybody has a right to their own room.  My point here is this is a universal technique that people rarely talk about (I guess NLP practitioners use this kind of thing a lot?).  Once our Unconscious knows we definitely intend to go in and heal the inner turmoil it may well start providing the imaging tools for doing so - but will you recognise when these imaging tools appear?

Anyway, my favourite technique is 'the Hill' (it is all done in the imagination, by the way, no actual hills are used in the writing of this article).

The Hill – an exercise to try if you have an obsession or phobia

To begin, move yourself consciously towards your emotional response, but do not go into it yet.  You are standing next to your hill.  Feel the tension between you and the hill - if you feel fear, feel that - but remember the truly intense stuff is at the centre of the hill.  The Hill is a perfect hill shape with sloping sides and it is a hill of pure emotional energy.

If you can see what you think the 'issue' is at the centre of the emotional response imagine the issue sits in the centre of the Hill.   Stay there a while, to one side of the hill, picturing the scene and sensing the emotion nearby.  While you are waiting here I will talk to you about 'tone'.

Tone

Imagine you are an adult trying to talk a small child into believing their new bedroom does not have ghosts and is not dangerous, but the small child is very frightened of the new room.  You decide, in your ultimate wisdom as an adult, the best way to get the child to accept going into this room is to frighten them into it.  You turn to the child and with all the love and best intentions in the world you scream 'get in that room right now! Of course there are no ghosts in your room there are no such thing as ghosts you stupid child; get in there and stop being so ridiculous!'  Question: does it work, this method?  Or does it make the child not just frightened of the room but of the whole house and you included?

I used to have a phobia of public speaking which I did not know I had until I spoke to my very first class - I would freeze up completely.  I discovered if I told a joke here and there and got a laugh it changed my emotional experience.  After a few months I no longer needed humour to get me through - I actually lost my negative experience through the process of repeatedly standing in front of the group and changing the tone of how I saw what I was doing.  Eventually the new tone became permanently fixed and now I get really excited when I get to talk to groups.

So here you are standing next to  your hill of energy, possibly full of fear.  Let us change the tone of that energy so that when you enter it you have a different experience to the one you had before.  You know that lemony sweet yellow powdery sherbet dab (I ate these as a child).  Make it a hill of that, or some other powdery substance you like.  This changes the tone from experiencing, for example, the pain of a horrible panic attack to 'releasing the energy of the sherbet dab'.  It still hurts - but your underlying Unconscious brain notices the change in tone and becomes more willing to allow the release process to happen.

Time to Enter the Hill

Having waited next to the Hill for a while now what you have demonstrated to your Unconscious is that you have a degree of control over the experience.  It is not coming at you - you are acknowledging there are feelings to be released; you have moved towards it; and you have paused on the edge.  As you enter the Hill now just think about how you can change the negative tone of this experience (sherbet dab time) and move towards the very centre of the hill.  If there is an issue at the centre of the hill just be with that as well.

Now imagine that by simply being at the centre of the hill you are absorbing the energy of the hill.  Your body strips the energy from the yellow powder and a faint yellow gas starts to radiate out of the top of your head.  This now shows your Unconscious you believe you are radiating the energy away.  Believe it or not, if you do this right, this is what actually ends up happening (did for me, anyway).  Your Unconscious will allow the trapped emotional response to flow.

It is very unlikely you will achieve full release in one go.  When you have had enough, move out the other side, feeling the lowering in emotional energy levels as you do so.  Sit on the other side of the Hill for a while and then go in again or, if you have had enough, go off and do something else.  But before you do - just recap with your Unconscious to strengthen your understanding of what just happened.

You went into the very centre of the response, at its very worst, then came out the other side.  You survived.  Now to finish off tell your Unconscious not only did you survive - the  hill has reduced in size.

Do this with enough focus for long enough and you will see real shifts both in the movement of emotional energy and in the way your Unconscious sees the emotional response.

Using this method I removed severe panic attacks and 27 obsessions.

Not Realistic?

What you learn when you do this kind of self-work is that seeing, and changing how you see, is everything.  External reality has very little to do with what goes on inside our heads and that is the true reality of emotional self-management.

Regards - Carl

I Have an Anxiety Disorder. How Should I Think So My Emotions Work Logically Instead?

Think Big; Think Small; then Try Your Best to Think Nothing at All

Think Big – the Whole Emotional Process

It is your logical thinking brain that asks the question ‘How can I make my emotions work logically’.  Let us take a look at a few facts about your logical thinking brain.

A Few Things to Know About Your Logical Left Thinking Neo-Cortex

Thinking – the process whereby electrical signals strung together in our brains create the illusion there is coordinated speech going on in our heads – exists in two small areas of your left cortex; here we will focus on the main one – your left frontal neo-cortex.

The purpose of your left frontal neo-cortex is to act as a well organised naming and indexing system which files away quick reference representations linked to imagery in our right neo-cortex.

For example we can think the word ‘church’ in our left neo-cortex and this can link up to a picture of a church in our right neo-cortex (our picture/pattern brain) and then we can take that further by remembering our own personal experience of a church and the people we knew there and then the conversations we had and the emotional experiences and it goes on … all starting from the word ‘church’ in the left neo-cortex.

Our thinking left neo-cortex is full of these kinds of well organised representations.

The Ego – our thinking protection and control system

The ego is a mechanism designed to protect our current representational structure - we regard this structure as ‘the truth’ for us as individuals.

Without our version of ‘the truth’ and the establishing of belief systems related to these representations we would have no ability to control our behaviours.

Our left neo-cortex creates stepped memories and instructional patterns which it then expects us to follow behaviourally.  Because of this controlling function it is only natural that when an emotional disorder presents itself the thinking mind assumes it is a problem caused by incorrect thinking to be found and changed in the thinking neo-cortex..

Your left neo-cortex, however, has certain characteristics that make it unsuitable for processing your emotions:

Characteristics of Your Left Neo-Cortex

Primarily, It is the emotional blocking brain part. In order for you to be able to think consciously at all your ARAS – your Ascending Reticular Activation System – blocks the the flow of emotional and visual signals coming up from your lower Reptilian Brain.  If this blocking did not occur you would never be able to wake up.  By doing this it ‘activates’ your conscious neo-cortex (both left and right) to pay conscious attention to the outside world.

If we took away your ability to block your emotions you would be unable to develop anxiety disorders because anxiety disorders are caused by habitual emotional blocking using the ARAS.  Without this blocking ability you would repeatedly have to surrender to the emotional responses as they left your body whenever you produced them.  Your thinking would be forever being closed down whenever this happened.

So, asking your thinking brain to resolve an anxiety disorder problem is a bit like asking the owner of a restaurant full of vermin to organise their own health and safety inspection and give themselves a clean bill of health.

Your thinking brain has a vested interest in not doing what needs to be done and is trying to convince you not to do so because it gets shut down for long periods when you do and it hates this – and it hurts.

During sleep both your Reptilian Brain and your right neo-cortex (your conscious pattern making brain) are active in releasing emotional energy through ‘dreaming’,  but when you are consciously awake and thinking most of this activity is suppressed.  Day-dreaming is the act of partially opening up the relationship between your right neo-cortex and your Reptilian and Limbic brains so they share imagery while you remain conscious.

Just pay attention to any self-critical comments that come up when you start thinking about your emotional states and what you are hearing is your ego fighting against  the truth it knows it is going to have to face eventually.  It tends to regard anything that does not follow its own rigid organising process as silly.  You can retrain it to think differently by showing it the logic inherent in your emotional process as a whole rather than the emotional content of the process.

A few more things about your left neo-cortex:

Your left neo-cortex is:

• judgemental and expects incoming information to link to information already stored.  It resists what it believes not ‘right’ as it attempts to match new information with old


• unable to work with a piece of information it has not named – any unnamed thing we are unsure of will keep grabbing at our attention until it is fully named, understood and then indexed as a representation


• impatient – it is time conscious and processes information at the speed of speech  (it hates emotional work because it is time consuming)


• concerned with Convergent Goal Setting – that is, with condensing and closing things down (you cannot get more condensed and closed down than a name)


• concerned with communicating with the outside world, rather than the inside world.  It adopts quite a lot of belief systems from the outside world and attempts to impose them on your inner world in the form of shoulds


• biologically designed to store the information it records in straight linear patterns with memories based on past experiences.

So when we ask the question ‘how do I make my emotions work more logically’ what we are really asking is how do I make the rest of me work the same way as my left neo-cortex?

You cannot achieve this directly, ever.  But there is a way to do it indirectly.

Just to repeat - although the content of your emotional system is not logical; your emotional system itself is.  Once your left neo-cortex has worked with your right neo-cortex (your pattern mind) long enough to see what really needs to be done it will be more willing to get out of the way of the process and allow itself to be temporarily shut down so the right neo-cortex can be allowed to do its job of processing emotional energy.

Following on from satisfactory emotional release the thinking left neo-cortex finds itself working much more effectively and sees the logic in the new way of doing things.

A Few Things to Know About Your Right Pattern-Making Neo-Cortex

Your right neo-cortex has an advantage over your left in that it never really sleeps.  During sleep your left gets switched off but your right neo-cortex communicates with the other visual parts of your brain, mainly your lower Reptilian Brain, all the time.

These two brains together discharge most of your emotional baggage collected during the day.  However, this process does not discharge the intense emotional charge attached to anxiety disorders such as obsessions and phobias.  This is probably because the imagery involved is stored in the Limbic Brain, and not in the Reptilian Brain, but also these areas of the brain are classed as ‘genuine things to be afraid of’.

Primarily, your right neo-cortex is the emotional releasing brain. It does not think with words – it thinks in patterns; in imagery – both internally generated imagery created by the imagination and in memories of external imagery from external life.

The right neo-cortex works in ‘reflections’ – reflections are similar to the scenes of a movie – they contain meaningful dialogue; action and emotional energy.  If the right neo-cortex is allowed to work with a reflection for long enough it will strip and release the emotional energy attached to the reflection and transfer the unemotional data contained over to the left neo-cortex for naming and indexing.

This is why in most cases looking in our current thinking for the solution to an emotional disorder issue is the wrong place to look – our current thinking is a record of the data stripped from past experiences.  The answers to our emotional issues are found in our right neo-cortex most of the time.

Your right neo-cortex:

• works with experiential information (imagery with feelings attached) to explore patterns and the connections between them


• is able to link up seemingly separate pieces of information and create meaning out of them – identifying connections and rhythms


• processes this information very slowly – when it comes to processing blocked emotional energy the right neo-cortex can take a long time because first the energy must be unblocked; then sometimes it completely floods the brain and then the information contained in the blocked feelings – such as the issue which caused them – takes some time to emerge as an insight


• shows us things we do not want to see because the messages do not fit in with our ‘logical’ plans – for example that the partner we love does not love us


• is divergent in thinking – it likes to open and connect one pattern with other patterns – it is concerned with the future, not the past


• communicates mostly with our internal world


• is biologically designed to store the information it records in clusters – I think of these clusters as ‘lands of the mind’.

One other thing to say here is your right neo-cortex sees, but it does not think.  It experiences and sees the experience and communicates to your lower brains what it sees in pictures.

Your left thinking neo-cortex cannot communicate with your lower brain parts directly – they do not understand the language.  But what it can do is use words linked to pictures in the right neo-cortex and then the right communicates those images downwards.

That is the Think Big part of the equation – the overall model of why the right neo-cortex, your picture mind, is the mind you need to start working with.

Think Small – to heal an emotional issue focus on as few things as possible as intensely as possible

When you decide to heal using systematic exposure therapy (or just plain unsystematic exposure therapy by just facing the triggering issue and the emotions attached come what may) there are only a few things you need to focus on – and concentrated focus is the most crucial but difficult thing to do.  You need to turn your focus inwards and go towards:

• the feelings (you will sense there is a place inside, or even maybe to one side of your body – I know that sounds weird but that is how it sometimes feels) coupled with


• the  image or issue.

If you have an obsession you have no other option but to take this approach when applying exposure therapy but with a phobia you can go into the feeling as you approach either the external trigger or an imagined inner version - most phobia sufferers I have spoken to can practice self-therapy using just their imaginations.

As always, I would recommend if you have a serious anxiety disorder you seek professional support from your doctor first.

What if I just have feelings I want to get rid of and there is no attached imagery or trigger?

Think small again and go just into the feelings repeatedly – this will be very difficult.  What you find eventually is that imagery starts being generated and you should then focus on that.

Sometimes the imagery generated is not related to the issue that triggered the emotional response but is an image designed to help you in the release process..

The closer to the central core of the feeling you move the faster you dissipate the energy driving it.

Trying to Think Nothing at All

The simple truth is that an anxiety disorder is nothing more than an intense emotional charge stored in the body displaying the fact by flashing imagery at you through one of your right neo-cortex pattern-brain clusters.

It is quite natural to suspect there are all kinds of hidden issues, thoughts and feelings going on inside yourself when suffering with this kind of condition but if you take that kind of self-mistrust as a given side-affect of the condition itself there will come a day when you master your emotional system and logically remove any emotional problems you have.

Regards - Carl