Emotional Healing – Are Your Memories Killing You Softly?

If I were to take every fifth or so word out of this article as I write it you would be able to replace those words using your memories of grammatical context to figure out what ‘should’ be there.

Your left, logical neo-cortex is the predictor of these missing logical steps based on your currently held grammatic contextual memories.

Now imagine you are watching television news and the presenter tells you they are about to show footage of troops massacring a village full of women and children, and some of the scenes may be distressing.

Before the scenes even appear on screen your right, pattern creating neo-cortex produces patterns with attached emotional responses based on how you feel about the context of this kind of news – you create your own private internal preview.  You may decide to turn over before the scenes appear because you already know what to anticipate you will feel as a result.

Emotional memories are drawn on to feed and re-construct this preview.

Your Conscious Mind is a Prediction Machine Fed By Your Memory

Your Conscious Mind is a ‘prediction machine’.

Your left neo-cortex predicts the future on the basis of logical stepped information patterns assembled from past unemotional memories (logic).

Your right neo-cortex predicts a non-linear all–joined-up clustered view of the future based on emotionally charged experiences related to how we feel in certain environments.  These are represented by images with attached emotional responses (feelings).

As you approach any situation, external or internal, both minds predict what you will find there and how you will think and feel about it.

While this whole mechanism is designed to keep you alive and well as long as possible it can sometimes turn against you by predicting completely false expectations.  Your past is your future for just as long as you allow it to be.

Overwhelming Memories

The Conscious Mind, the part of you now reading this, can only pay attention to between 4 and 11 pieces of information per second.

Once stimulated past that mark conscious attention is overwhelmed and the information travels down into both your Unconscious as imagery and your body as emotional response energy attached to that imagery.

Consciously these things become ‘foggy’ but the affects are powerful.  If you do not pay direct attention to what is happening you can start losing immediate awareness of the relationship between mental cause and emotional affect.

As you become more emotional your thinking seems vague; undecided, powerless, uncertain.  You may become dependent on the decisions of others to provide clarity (possibly those who have created the environment you now find yourself in).

This is a normal experience.  At this point you may not yet be ‘emotionally ill’.  You feel bad but know you have suppressed your various reactions to an event or series of events – to reality – and are still aware of doing this and your reasons why.

Those reasons may include a fear that if you allow your internal reactions to come up they will either distract you from fixing the problems in your environment while you ‘waste time in self-absorption’ or they will damage your relationships with others if you release them publicly.  So you put your internal world on ‘hold’ for the time being.

But if the external environment causing your reactions keeps stimulating you in the same way you can slip into repression.  In repression you lose awareness of the relationships between cause and affect; disconnecting the logical memories from your emotional responses

You may even do this deliberately if you are in a situation in which the only logical decision to be made as a result of facing up to the reality of your situation is a decision your current value system does not agree with.

You decide the consequences of the decision presenting itself would be emotionally worse and more complex than remaining where you are now so you argue this option out of conscious memory with a range of self-threats such as ‘I would kill myself if this option happened’ or ‘I could not cope’ or ‘they or others would suffer more than they realise if they get their way’.

This is called denial.

Having blocked logical awareness of the reasons for your emotional responses you now find strong emotions seem to be resurfacing of their own accord and you even get to a point you are unable to identify what type of emotion your reaction actually is.

Over time you end up with a painful backlog of apparently pointless emotionally charged imagery stored like a computer zip file in your Unconscious.

Repressed, and having lost understanding of why you are having these responses, your logical mind declares them ‘silly’ and actively fights them whenever they threaten to surface.

They resurface all the time.

Your Emotional Memories Dominate New Environments

Your long-term logical memories act as an unemotional information resource for predicting what should happen in the future and fill logical gaps in life as they occur and only when you want them to.

Emotional memories, in contrast, are repeating ‘now’ memories – they keep recurring in the present moment and do so until you discharge the emotional energy driving them by feeling your feelings out.

Because they are so powerful trapped emotional memories bias all your future predictions and decision making.  All environments look tainted with past experiences; all people seem suspicious.  Life just seems bad.

The only solution is to discharge.

Why do we operate like this?

We are biologically designed, like every other living creature on the planet, as an energy production and release system.

The Unconscious and your body are designed to regurgitate this stored information at a later date and use it to inform future decision making.  Until we do this we carry our recordings of past experiences round with us as if stuck in ‘experiential bubbles’.

A few horrible experiences trapped inside are enough to provide you with long-term ‘dark-coloured glasses’ when looking outwards.

If you have any emotional disorder you have two stark choices: keep moving your Conscious Awareness away from the trapped emotional response inside for the rest of your life or find a way to remove it, either to the point it no longer grabs your attention against your will or permanently so it never recurs again.

Take the former route and you sense yourself being pursued by the response continually.  Take the latter and you have a much more painful, but shorter lived, experience.  Most people spend years applying the lower level pain option as opposed to the shorter but more intense recovery process until the opportunity to heal coincides with their desperation to escape the whole thing.

Deciding to put up with the automatic bias created by trapped emotional memories means you will repeatedly make decisions based on avoiding real life.  Your emotional memories will close your real, emotionally free future, down.

The answer is to re-enter your emotional memories and surrender to the natural process of regurgitating and discharging stored experiences.

What is it we intend to do when we re-enter these memories?

When both sides of your Conscious brain turn their attention inwards and travel together towards a past experience held in memory they understandably predict a horrible experience ahead.

This experience will consist of three stages:

• Anticipatory experience (dominated by the right neo-cortex through its prediction-previewing mechanism) leading into …


• Actual Re-Experiencing (this includes both the full-blow emotional experience of the memory itself and then of the arguments against seeing the unwanted understanding and the emotional responses supporting those arguments) and then this leads into …


• Re-Appraisal (in which previously unwanted and unacceptable decisions are now accepted and made retrospectively – the decision to accept our powerlessness; to like ourselves despite how we feel; to stop criticising our emotions and release them instead).

Re-Appraisal

By following our feelings for long enough we eventually tap into the mentally translatable logic hidden at the centre of our emotional responses as ‘insights’ – like the seeds at the centre of an apple.  Once these insights are revealed it unravels the whole process.

We find ourselves understanding and accepting the reason for the existence of the emotional response, its context, what it was meant to do and which of our values it was trying to enforce, and finally we agree to letting the whole thing go.

We can still keep our values but we re-organise them.  For example, if the value of ‘protecting people we love’ has become ‘protecting people we love even against their own will’ we have set ourselves up for internal emotional friction in the future.

At some point we could turn into bullies and find ourselves at war with ourselves as we observe our own behaviour.  The resolution is to re-address how we apply our values - but first that may involve a journey through our emotional responses.

Transferring the information contained within insights from our emotional right neo-cortex memories over to our logical left-neo-cortex means that in similar circumstances in the future we will apply lessons learned to our future predictions by using logical thinking responses as opposed to emotional ones.

This transfer process as a result of re-appraisal is not easy – it can take several months to achieve and will involve going through the anticipation/re-experiencing/re-appraising cycle several times.

Eventually, however, the anticipatory stage fades away and the re-experiencing stage is no longer available to experience because the energy driving it has left your body.  The newly re-appraised and emotionless  viewpoint is all that is left.

If we do not go through this learning process we enter new relationships and other types of environments carrying the old bias-driving emotional memories and continue with the same inappropriate behaviour towards new people and opportunities.

In order to stop emotional memories from closing your future life down and open up to receiving the genuinely new experiences to be found in new environments you do not need to ‘re-write your value book’.

Just discharging the negative emotional energy from old memories is enough to get your prediction machine working for you rather than against you in the future.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Healing – Can You Find the Courage to Observe Within?

Have you ever seen a ‘back to the floor’ television programme where the senior manager of an organisation has decided to pose as a lower-level employee in order to see how things are really working out on the ground-floor of their day to day business?

Usually these managers would make their emotion-free decisions by looking at graphs and reports filtered and distorted by lower level staff in the organisational hierarchy.  What will be missing from those reports are all the little things – the faulty water cooler; the angry employee forever upsetting customers; the stink in the customer waiting room created by who-knows-what in the ventilator.

In almost all cases of these television programmes the senior manager willing to experience the nitty-gritty of the ground-floor comes away with a wealth of ideas and having a greater respect for those staff who operate ‘down below’ in the organisation.

They usually also see where their own previous attitudes and instructions, or a lack of them, dispensed to their lower-level staff have caused the problems they now have to resolve.

With a much clearer view of what needs to be done they commit to a complete turnaround in approach.

We celebrate their adventure as an act of bravery and maybe sit there thinking ‘that is what all management need to do’.  Yet not all senior managers do this – because they do not wish their minds to be changed.  Having our mind changed in this way is almost always a painful experience.  This applies to all of us when it comes to facing up to the realities in our lives.

When a senior manager goes back to the shop-floor they expect to be made uncomfortable yet are willing to do it because they associate discomfort with the sharp and necessary learning curve to be followed if their organisation is going to improve.

Not only does the senior manage undergo a change process – so does the ground-floor work force who feel a mixture of relief, mutual respect and a wish to help the senior manager further by changing the way they themselves function operationally. 

Often when the benefits of this way of working come to fruition the approach is cascaded to all other managers as a permanent change in organisational culture.  But the decision has to start at the top.

The same thing happens when we take our Conscious Point of Focus down to the level of our Unconscious Mind to observe what goes on down there when facing up to an emotional disorder.

Observation is everything.

Not just observation of the things you observe, but of the way in which you observe yourself, as you observe.  Let me ask you a question here: are you aware of the viewpoint from which you currently observe your emotional system and do you think it gets the job of making you happy done?

Put yourself in front of that television programme as you watch the manager mixing with staff on the ground floor.  Do you admire what the manager is doing?  Most likely you do.  Not often we see senior managers willing to face reality in this way, is it?

Now imagine that you watch yourself in the same way - observing what you are willing to do in order to position yourself so you can see your internal reality as it really is.  This is your self image – your view of yourself that decides whether or not you admire and like how you go about observing your inner world - or not.

When you do not admire the way you observe, because you see yourself as a ‘manager who runs away’, you develop a lack of self-confidence and a poor self-image.

When you watch the manager in the television programme taking these risks, feeling their embarrassment and being changed as a result, do you have greater confidence or less confidence in them?  Do you think of them as being stupid or courageous?

This is where confidence in emotional healing comes in.  Not from always getting things right but from having the knowledge that when things do not feel right inside you have the courage to take your Conscious Point of Focus, your brain-changing attention system, inwards so you can observe first hand what is going on.

Strangely enough, despite the emotional pain or maybe because of it, as you watch yourself taking the risks necessary to ensure the overall ‘organisation’ called you gets back on track towards becoming happier you actually end up really liking yourself into the bargain, emotional problems or no emotional problems

Once you discover that taking your Conscious Point of Focus into the centre of your emotional pain causes beneficial change to happen merely as a result of being willing to go there and observe no matter what, you become more determined to do so again in the future – and do it much earlier so you can avoid the hard slog that results when you do not do this for long periods of time.

What goes wrong in the relationship between your Conscious and Unconscious when they refuse to come together on a regular basis?

Basically the same types of things that happen when senior managers and ground-floor workers in an organisation fail to communicate effectively.  They:

• start interpreting information incorrectly
• develop a non-accepting attitude to each other and believe neither knows what is really going on producing a sense of overall mistrust and lack of confidence
• work to different value systems and
• become entrenched in unhelpful viewpoints, which they fight to hold onto when external change demands new flexibility.

In order to undo all this you have to take your Executive, planning brain down into your Unconscious ground floor brain.  You do this by entering the emotional responses being presented by your Unconscious Mind – by allowing the feelings to come through.

Now you start to:

• Re-interpret life events in such a way as to reduce their emotional impact on you (for example if you blame yourself for a life event over which you had no real control you can start to see this and let yourself off the guilt-hook)
• normalise and accept even the most intense emotional experiences (my favourite metaphor for emotional disorders is they are like broken legs: undesirable but normal; if they were not normal we would not be able to have them)
• re-prioritise your value systems (for example make your emotional happiness your priority rather than making the emotional happiness of everyone else your priority) and eventually:
• develop and alternate between different viewpoints so effectively you can see all the viewpoints available and then select the appropriate viewpoint at the appropriate time (for example if you have an obsession you have a viewpoint that says thinking about this thing is unacceptable – but you can eventually move to a different viewpoint by discharging the emotional energy attached; there comes a point it stops bothering you).

The rule of observation is whatever we pay close enough attention to automatically starts to change for the better, even when ‘better’ means something we never thought of as being ‘better’ before.

But that rule comes at a price and not all of us are willing to pay.

How about you?

Regards - Carl

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Emotional Healing – Desperation is the Requirement

No-one outside of ourselves creates a sense of desperation.  We create it.

The sense of desperation for a solution to a problem to be brought about comes from within.  To escape, to obtain, to keep.  Desperation is the point at which the emotionally driven urge not to do something is overwhelmed by the emotionally driven urge to do the thing that gets the thing.  It is the urge to win.

Desperation is the urge to do something you have never done before.

During desperation we pace floors; become angry at ourselves; others and life in general.  But we are energised.  We are passionate to the point it feels painful.  Aaaargh!  That is desperation.  Who is to blame for it?  No-one is – it is a part of the process of being alive.

During the time I was researching for a cure for my OCD, my obsessions, my phobias, my depression and panic attacks I kept reading scientific papers that said ‘incurable’ or ‘can be managed but cannot be removed’ or ‘the amygdala shrinks irreversibly’ or ‘this is due to a permanent misconnection in the brain’.

I repeatedly read how exposure therapy did not work in removing most cases of OCD and obsessions and how others like me had basically ‘had it’.

Sufferers like me were supposed to just accept our lot.

The difference between the people who write these things and myself was they were trying to please an intellectual audience while I was the desperate schmuck in the middle of the problem they were writing about.

I refused to accept what I was reading.  I would not give in.  I deserved freedom from my multiple conditions.  I had worked hard in the external world for others all my life and I would work hard for this now for myself; I had turned and gone into my experience rather than continually avoiding it.

The emotional responses inside had got much more intense because of this but my determination to succeed was powered by the urge to get rid of them.  I was desperate.

I was frustrated by the lack of good, solid information available on how to get well.  But my desperation got me through.  Desperation and the emotional fuel it generated became my launch pad.  I would try anything, risk anything, go anywhere and yes, I would even pay some money towards it (heaven forbid, eh?).

Oh, how I festered on my desperation.  But I needed it.  You see, desperation and all those painful emotions (particularly the anger and frustration) is the requirement.

Without desperation I would never have got better.  Never developed the urge to heal no matter what the ‘experts’ say.

If you are desperate to heal and find yourself whining about your suspicions of ‘those out there wishing to exploit your sense of desperation’ just take a step back and rethink – no-one else created that sense, you did.

It is the requirement for healing emotional disorders and for doing pretty much any other thing in life truly worth doing when it finally, ultimately, unavoidably needs doing.  Look at any difficult area of life and you will find that sense of desperation, when you felt cornered, was the moment that occurred just before you got yourself out of a fix.  It comes with the territory of life.

Desperation changes lives for the better.

It moves proverbial mountains; it rewires brain patterns; it makes you strong; it knocks down all those intellectual opinions telling you what you need to do cannot be done.  It makes what looks impossible possible.

Desperation: it could be the best friend you ever had.

Regards - Carl

The Good News and Bad News about Good News and Bad news

Internet Marketer Frank Kern calls it ‘the Chicken Rubber Neck Effect’.  You are driving past a car parked in the middle of nowhere and you may notice the car but you will not turn to look at it carefully as you go by – your attention will be focused on the road ahead for signs of danger.

But put a pair of legs sticking out from behind that car and you will turn your head and twist your neck to see what is going off behind it as you drive by.  So will your entire family if they are sitting in the car.  You will maybe even stop and go take a look.

Mr Kern uses this technique in some of his email campaigns and can show that by putting a ‘bad news’ heading in his email subject headers he can get a much higher email opening rate.

The reason for this is our attention mechanism is automatically set to look for ‘bad news’.  It is the reason we do not see ‘good news’ on most of our news channels – not so many people would watch.  We tend to take good news for granted.  While our attention mechanisms automatically seek out bad news, looking for good news is something,unfortunately, we have to do deliberately.

We call it ‘practising gratitude’.  If we were automatically programmed to look for good news we would be automatically grateful most of the time.  What different lives we would lead, eh?  Just think of how others would treat us.

The attention-grabbing default setting of ‘looking for bad’ is a preventative mechanism designed to pre-warn us of approaching danger but it can go against us to the point it sometimes makes us emotionally ill.  It is the central operating cause of phobias, obsessions and other anxiety disorders built around imagined emotionally charged terrible scenarios in our brains.

The good news about ‘bad’ is it has an opposite.  Everything we experience comes under the heading of ‘duality’.  There is bad in every experience, there is good in every experience, and then there is the centre of the experience which is neither good nor bad, it just ‘is’.

At the position of ‘is’ you are emotionally neutral and have a choice how you see a particular experience.  The bad news is to get to ‘is’ you have to go through bad first and discharge the negative emotions attached to get to acceptance and good and then to ‘is’.

You have the tough, painful experience of bad; then you see the good in a situation; then you take it for granted and become objective – that is, emotionally discharged about the whole thing.  You sit in the middle and watch other people reacting to the bad news in the same negative way you once did.

But do not expect them to be overjoyed when you suggest they follow the same route you did - not everyone likes to hear the good news about bad news and good news.

At this point you are able to choose your own experience and what are you naturally going to choose once you have the choice?  You will naturally choose what makes you feel good but then will return to the neutral ‘is’ position in the middle by default.

If you have an emotional problem or disorder of any kind you may currently feel quite angry or resistant to the way this works, but this is the way it works.

The bad news about all news is we contain within our experience both the painful bad and the ecstatic good.  The good news is by being willing to experience both the bad, the good and the neutral we can eventually get to choose where we sit on the scale between the two extremes.

Mentally we then stop worrying about the whole thing.

Regards - Carl

Escape Emotional Hell - Stop Killing Your Own Golden Egg Laying Goose

A friend of mine asks me to check out his CV for him as he is applying for a job.  Half way through his educational history I read he decided to leave a Science degree course and go into a career in Catering.

This looks like a genuine decision to me but he has written down ‘failed to achieve’ under the Science degree course and I notice he has also written ‘failed’ in various other places on his CV for other things that were also genuine, understandable choices.  Writing ‘failed’ everywhere has made his CV look horrible.

I challenge him on this and he argues he obviously did ‘fail’ and was not ‘good enough’.  Every time we talk I notice he keeps talking himself out of doing things – out of going for jobs he could get; out of asking people for help when he needs it – a whole range of things.  The truth is my friend is a bit of a gifted genius - others tell him so regularly but he cannot see it in himself.

I am not talking here about someone with a few normal self-doubts now and again – this is a semi-permanent, very difficult to shift mindset.  He worries so much about these alleged negatives he does not sleep nights.

He sits awake all night worrying about issues; the solutions to which are right in front of him and well within his abilities.  He has been doing this worrying-all-night for so long he thinks it is normal.  When I sit talking to this friend I think to myself ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.  Some of my other friends who know him think the same way about his predicament.

We can call this ‘Golden Goose thinking’.  Done a little bit it can be a useful motivational tool – but when it comes to a point it is your only way of thinking it has the opposite affect.  It shuts your mind down completely.

The Story of The Goose that Laid Golden Eggs in One Sentence:

A couple find their goose lays gold eggs and kill it to get all the gold out in one go but find no gold inside so no more gold and no more goose.

In the case of my friend he has either started using negative imagined motivators designed to get him to produce more of something or to be better at some particular skill - but it has killed the golden goose of creativity, learning and progress within him.

Negative self-motivators used habitually do not work because they lead to ‘catastrophisation’.

Catastrophisation, also known as ‘building mountains out of molehills’, is the process of building full-blown negatively imagined scenarios which we then emotionally react to as if they were real-life events.

The net result of doing this causes us to shy away from areas of life we need to enter, and mostly enjoy, in order to cultivate personal growth.

To stop this we have to learn to tell the difference between a real-life event and the negatively-charged imagined scenario holding us back.  When you explore your reasoning behind the existence of the false negatively charged scenario you will see that although it is designed to pre-warn you of what might happen it has no direct affect on what actually happens when you arrive.

Negatively charged motivators achieve nothing but self-destructive mind-wiping.

I am pleased to report my friend changed his CV and got the job he thought he could not get.  He still has quite a way to go though.  He has to learn to stop hurting himself in the belief it will make him successful one day.

Some sleep would not hurt either.

Regards - Carl

Escape Emotional Hell: End Your Difficult Close Relationships

The idea our closest relationships are meant to be difficult is a myth.

Life is meant to be difficult; our close relationships are meant to support us in getting through life.  In difficult times we bond closer – the relationships themselves should not be creating the difficult times.

They are meant to make us feel good despite what is going on in the outside world.  In close relationships worth having you do your best to support the others you relate to, right?

Not everyone thinks like this though.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are thinking ‘well I know relationships are meant to be difficult but I did not think they were supposed to be this difficult’, and you have been thinking this for some time, it may mean you are missing out on a fact staring you in the face but too painful to face up to yet:

• you are not in a relationship worth having.

You may not, in fact, be in a relationship at all.  Relationships are two way.  At least two people see themselves as being in ‘a relationship’; contributing to and benefitting from that relationship and each cares about the experience the other is having.  The most important factor is a sense of trust.  By thinking highly of them you have opened your Unconscious Mind to this other person and they can now dip right in and affect your feelings directly – so trust is vital.

The main criteria for developing trust in a relationship is that all participants relate.  If relating is blocked because of mistrust there is no relationship.  Do they mistrust you?

If the other person or people refuse to relate to you as you wish to be related to, if they treat you with mistrust or you find them untrustworthy, you need to acknowledge this and decide accordingly.

Your commitment, your investment of time and love and energy, the hopes and dreams you have for the future of this relationship could be yours and just yours alone.

Those negative emotional responses you might be having, the occasional outbursts of rage or crying or grief in response to how you are treated or not treated and then which you feel guilty or really bad about?  Those are signs your Unconscious Mind knows what is going on but your Conscious is refusing to listen to it.

We are surrounded by relationships working just fine without all that angst.  The people in them are having no difficulty making them work.  They just work.  You can have those kinds of relationships too – but you have to accept not everyone is suited to you; not even, unfortunately, blood relatives.

No, you cannot change your blood relatives genetically – but you can change whether or not you relate to them physically and emotionally.

If you are dealing with blood relatives who hold the threat of ‘excommunication from the family’ over your head while they act abusively towards you, relying on the myth of your having no choice but to put up with it (a myth you yourself maybe perpetuate and need to change) I would suggest you challenge those relationships.

But there is a risk you could lose them.  I have.  Two blood relatives of mine borrowed money from me continuously week after week for seven years.

One repaid me by stealing from me while the other ended the relationship when I explained I did not mind loaning the money so much as I minded the lack of warmth and communication in our family – when I loaned money I was ‘liked’ but if I did not loan money or the money was not wanted I was belittled – I wanted us to be a proper family.  I was met with a cold, heartless stare and an ‘I never want to see you again’ in response.

I respected that decision.

There are other blood relatives I have disconnected from for similar reasons  - but really I have not disconnected from them so much as made it clear what kind of relationship I was willing to have or not have and stuck to my ‘guns’.  I used to be emotionally very ill because I could and would not make this kind of tough decision – relationships that do not serve you and the others involved emotionally are a form of self-imposed torture system.

I have not come away from these things completely blameless – I often got very negatively emotional along the way.  But I have learned that when I feel helpless in getting a relationship  to work it is because usually the relationship is unworkable.

We have no power, right or ability to force others to like, respect or value our contribution to their lives.  When we feel helplessness in a situation like this it is because we are genuinely helpless!

The benefit of going through this experience is we get better at spotting, taking part in and enjoying empowering relationships as a result and avoid those potential relationships that would leave us high and dry and possibly emotionally sick again.

Testing Your Relationships

One way to test whether or not you are in a relationship worth having is to ask the other person straight whether or not they think the two of you are in a relationship worth having – when they ask why you are asking just tell them you are going through a phase of testing all your relationships.

How do each of you feel about the relationship?  Each of you should be able to explore the highs and lows and the worries and history of the relationship without either of you becoming too defensive.  This is not intended to be a slanging match – this is exploring the wonder of having a relationship at all.  How do each of you see the relationship developing?

Talk about the future of the relationship.  This may seem like a strange, frightening thing to do but we need to bust through that other myth: relationships are like magic and if you talk about the magic the magic will not work any more.

In every single relationship I have had that worked (and still works) this kind of discussion was seen as a perfectly natural and valid thing to have.  In those that did not work, and which were extremely painful to work on, these kinds of discussions were a taboo and were met with aggressive responses.

My personal experience is that making tough decisions in this area of life is of primary importance in emotional self-care (not just for yourself but for the others involved, too).

Regards - Carl

Increase Your Desire to Live – Manage Your Social Environments

How many social environments do you have?  How are you treated in those environments?  Which environments should you stay in; leave or join?

These are important questions to ask and take action on if you want to become and remain emotionally well.

Choosing better social environments will increase your desire to live; as will giving yourself permission to leave those painful to you.  Sounds simple, right?  But do you do this?  Do you manage your social environments or do you just put up with them?

In his book Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell writes about an Italian community that moved to Pennsylvania US and set up a town called Roseto.  The town underwent a study in the 1950s because its main cause of death was old age.

Towns next door had death rates from heart disease three times higher than that of Roseto – in fact it was rare to find anyone under 65 who had any sign of heart disease.

The people from Roseto had no suicide, alcoholism, no drugs, almost no crime, no welfare, no ulcers.  They cooked with lard, had a diet full of cholesterol and ‘unhealthy’ food; they were heavy smokers and had a lot of obesity.

But their life expectancy was much higher than anywhere else in the US.

The secret to Roseto was in its social structure.  Rosetans stopped to chat with each other, they cooked for each other.  They cared about, calmed and respected each other.

Can you take steps to help create a better social environment for yourself?  Are you willing to end difficult relationships and cultivate deeper ones?  Are you willing to put the effort in to offer genuine friendship to those who can reciprocate?  If you do it will increase your desire to live and the evidence from Roseto suggests this trumps all the medication in the world.

It could be the most important decisional area of your life.

Regards - Carl

Escape from Emotional Hell – Stop Trying to Be a People Pleaser

I get a real emotional boost when someone feeling stressed or struggling with an emotional problem tells me something I said or did helped them in some way.  Do you?  Most people do.

But I do not make the mistake of becoming addicted to that boost – I notice it but I make sure I do not crave it.

We have no direct control over when we receive such feedback and, if taken too far, this kind of supportive behaviour turns into an unwanted intrusion into the lives of others and they will turn on us for it.

As soon as I detect my help is no longer wanted (not when it is no longer needed, but no longer wanted – there is a difference) I am out of there.

During the times we receive social affirmation for having helped someone in this way (or social acceptance in any area of life) our brains release a neurotransmitter called oxytocin.  We feel safe and peaceful under its affects.

But we can easily make the mistake of becoming addicted to the affects of oxytocin and I have seen this in others and myself.

Folks who crave social acceptance can end up becoming either::

• easily manipulated or


• manipulating.

Easily Manipulated?

The easily-manipulated tend to advertise for and attract cruel-natured manipulators.

In the television series ‘The Martian Chronicles’, based on the stories by Ray Bradbury, there is the story of an alien who takes on the physical appearance of dead people the new human colonists are mourning for.

In this way the alien brings comfort to its human hosts while at the same time guaranteeing for itself a form of camouflaged safety and acceptance in their home.

The human family it lives with know their ‘house-ghost’ is not real but refuse to argue with it because the alien, who is telepathic, is able to physically mimic the appearance and behaviour of their lost loved ones so well it makes them happy to believe the illusion – even, for example, when they know the lost person was lost back on Earth.

This works well when the family live in isolation in the Martian landscape – but for some reason the family and the alien go into town.

The alien finds itself being followed and then surrounded by a group of people because they start seeing their long-lost loved ones in it – forced to keep changing physical form the alien turns from one person to another until dropping dead from exhaustion.

I saw that particular scene more than twenty years ago but the message is still fresh in my mind: being all things to all people kills you.

This is not to say you should not deal with individuals in the way they individually wish to be treated – it just means you need to do everything from the starting point of a strong central self-image.  You need to know who you are.

Situations in which you are ‘pleasing’ people are OK temporarily so long as you know it is what you are doing.  Assertiveness training, for example, tells us it is fine to be passive now and again – but it all goes wrong when you lose the awareness your passive behaviour has become permanent.

A couple of signs you have fallen into this pleasing-everybody trap without realising it are:

• you have difficulty in saying no – you always feel guilty when you do and you are not sure if you should


• you struggle to make your relationships work – people who are supposed to care about you do not and spend all their time sitting in judgement as to whether or not you are ‘good enough’ (they do this to get more out of you while giving the minimum in return)


• you are super-empathic – you want everyone else to be ecstatically happy and are willing to sacrifice your own happiness to bring that about


• you hold back on your real feelings – someone deeply offends you but you search for a psychological clothes hanger so you can stick in your mouth upside down in order to produce a permanent smile in response .

Manipulating?

The flipside to being easily manipulated for a while is we can ‘join the war’ and begin deviously returning the manipulating treatment.  I see this done mostly by people who are intellectually but not emotionally intelligent (yet – this can be developed).

Manipulators who lack self-awareness become increasingly narrow-minded and socially self-destructive without knowing this is what they are doing to themselves.

If we are leading already highly stressed lives a craving for these ‘oxytocin moments’ can lead to our feeling deeply hurt when not receiving them.  Getting ‘nothing’ back seems like an affront in the mind of a manipulator.

I have seen people of an age where they should know better cause social mayhem in groups when others have not met this craving.

They are trapped in a ‘reverse people pleaser’ state and blame others for the needy position they are now in.

They may fool, trap and manipulate others into feeding them the emotional boost they crave.  We call these folks ‘attention seekers’.  Consciously they are unaware they are doing this and it comes as quite a shock, accompanied by a lot of denial, when this behaviour is presented back to them as a package.

A couple of signs you have fallen into this manipulating trap are:

• you see small harmless acts as major insults – no-one else sees things this way


• you are power-mad; you undermine the work of others and put them down because you want all eyes on you; you dominate the social atmosphere and have to be ‘right’ about things – the important thing is being seen as ‘right’ rather than actually being socially right and appropriate


• you hate it when others receive positive social feedback


• you maintain a secret ‘them or me’ philosophy but do not show it because if you did the enemy would know there was a war on


• you must never reveal your true agenda – because you would have to notice it too and even the threat of this feels painful.

How to Get Out of This Trap

Decide:

Who do YOU want you to be?

Pick a version of you that you and you alone would like and stick to it.  This is what we call a strong self-image.  Generate your own oxytocin-fixes by getting all warm and cosy inside your own skin.

Develop a strong self-image of the kind of person you want to be and how that kind of person behaves, then make sure you behave that way so you can trust that person.  This way if someone criticises you you will be able to tell which parts of their criticisms are valid and which are not.

Ensure you like yourself regardless of how others treat or have treated you.  Do this and you only have the job of pleasing one person; just one.

The paradox is that this apparently super-selfish-self-obsessed-single-minded person then becomes, by default, someone naturally helpful to others because that is naturally the kind of self-image such a person will wish to develop.

Occasionally you will go off track – but that is the whole point of having a strong, central self-image.  You return to it.

Work at being, and loving, just you.  Be a ‘you’ that helps people but is not dependent on receiving positive feedback for it as a measure of self worth.  If you are anything like me you will know just how difficult a job pleasing that person inside is.  Getting feedback from others then just becomes icing on the cake but not a necessity.

By the way, if you know the name of the alien in the Martian Chronicles I am talking about above please let me know.

Regards - Carl

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Drilling for Emotional Wellness – Turn Your Anxiety Disorder Relapses into Victories

So you have established a drilling platform consisting of your professional supporters (doctor; maybe a psychiatrist and definitely a counsellor) and for several weeks, months or maybe even years now you have been drilling down into your emotional responses with the intention of releasing them using your Conscious Point of Focus as a drill bit.

You have stopped denying; you have stopped suppressing and repressing as much as you used to and now you have been feeling and releasing trapped emotional responses for a while.

Maybe if you had an obsession you stopped having that obsession and if you had a phobia you stopped having that phobia.  But suddenly they are back.  The whole thing appears to be back.  You call this a relapse.

You feel stunned and helpless.

What you have known for a while though is there was still a sense of tension inside but you could not pinpoint exactly what it was.  It was related to some kind of painful memory; to something that laid the foundation for the anxiety disorder to take root.  Suddenly those feelings are coming through but not only are you getting just the old memories and the old feelings attached to them you are also having to deal with the apparent re-ignition of your obsession or your phobia or whatever else it is you have been suffering with and thought you had finally got rid of.

What to do now you are having a relapse?  For starters stop thinking of it as a relapse.  You just hit a gusher.

What Happens When You Reverse Emotional Blocking

During emotional blocking, which is what causes emotional illness, we build complex thinking networks in our neuroplastic brain designed to hold our trapped emotions and unwanted thoughts in place.

You can think of these networks as though they were cave entrances and tunnels.  The trapped emotional responses they are designed to block keep trying to breach the defences of these blocking networks – the energy of the emotional response meets with more emotional energy determined to keep it in place.

When we reverse emotional blocking the emotional energy we force ourselves to release brings these networks fully to life temporarily raising horrific thoughts fully into conscious awareness.  This can be so effective we may feel as if we have entered an alternate reality.

Normal, happier thinking is closed down during the release process.

Once the trapped emotional responses relating to a particular set of memories is released, however, these thinking ‘caves and tunnels’ in our brains go dark and dormant.  They are no longer transporting or blocking energies.  But they are still there.  You can think using them but you do not get very emotional when you do.

Although you can discharge the energy that kept bringing them to your conscious attention It takes a very long time for these brain networks to collapse completely and sometimes they never do (but they will stop bothering you because they are no longer being energised).  Until, that is, you hit another ‘mother lode’.

Your Unconscious Acts LIke an Automatic Drilling Machine

When you deliberately and repeatedly reverse the emotional blocking process you are reorienting the direction in which your Unconscious mind travels when it detects emotional pressure.

In blocking mode you trained it to automatically avoid your emotional responses – now unblocking it automatically digs down when you are not paying conscious attention.  When it hits another layer of trapped emotional energy the energy comes up and for a while lights up all those old, unwanted thinking networks.

How to React to This

See it as a much needed gusher – see it as a release of trapped energy travelling along these old networks that will eventually evaporate just like it did before and realise that the newly discovered and de-energised brain networks will soon be joining the ranks of the other dark and dormant caves in your brain.

If you see it as a thinking problem you may start to try and block the thinking again – this only restarts the blocking process.  See it as a welcome release of trapped energy and it becomes a victory.

Regards - Carl

Escape from Emotional Hell – Stop Grieving for the Living

We are never emotionally closer to the people we love than when we lose or are about to lose them to death.

I have been to a few funerals – the two that hit me most were those of a one-year-old who died of cot death and that of a colleague in her thirties bright-as-a-button-alive one day and gone the next due to a DIY accident.

Recently I heard of the passing of a lovely ex-boss and I spent a bit of time in the doldrums as a result – but I do not mind this kind of pain.  In fact, I would be upset if I was not upset, if that makes sense?

There is no such thing as a right way to grieve.  I have found at every single loss like this my emotional responses were different every time.

My most intense emotional experience of grief is having a full-body burning pain.  I feel intensely hot, accompanied by an urge to curl up around a ball of pain in my stomach.  Alongside this appears a sense of holding onto the person lost and not wanting to let go; followed by crying.

Strangely enough, however, I have not had this most intense grieving reaction to losing others to death – but to the living who have, for whatever reason, been taken out of my life.  And then come back again.  And then left again.  And then come back again … I resent the kind of situation whereby I am forced to go through the same grieving process repeatedly due to the callous behaviour of others.  How about you?

In this situation when such folks reappear every few years and then disappear again we can end up in a state of continuous low-level mourning that threatens our long-term emotional stability.  I am talking here about such people as ‘first-loves’ and close relatives.

You can become bad tempered towards the people you care most about when they keep re-triggering this response through their carelessness or when others who do not have your best emotional interests at heart use the threat of this response to manipulate you.

In my experience there are three main levels of relationships that lead to this ‘grieving for the living’ process:

• indifference


• functionalising


• alienation strategies.

Indifference

"Never make someone your priority, when they only make you an option."

You could drive a truck through the gap between how you behave towards each other but, for whatever reason, you choose to ignore it.  Problem is, your feelings can not.

This indifferent relationship is one way.  You are useful to this person but they have no emotional link to you nor have they any intention of being equally as useful to you.

When you ask them a question regarding the quality of the relationship they become avoidant or annoyed.  They only want to talk about what they want to talk about.  They ‘butter you up’ occasionally to get you meeting their wants but turn nasty as soon as they are satisfied.  Occasionally they may do something so completely outrageous (such as steal from you or break some other form of trust) you are shocked by how obviously relationship-destroying this could potentially be – but do not worry because you will make it right again with forgiveness, eh?

You grieve for the relationship you are not having.  When you talk to them about whether or not they sense this gap they reply no.  Nothing you say or do gets through to them.

They do not see you for the sake of seeing you – they always want something and often their first words of the conversation are a put-down or a blatant insult or a request for the thing they want from you.

When they do not want something from you they ignore you – they ‘send you to Coventry’.

Would you treat them like that?  I doubt it.

You see, people like that do not read material like this.  It would mean they would have to change and they are not open to change.  They would rather the world around them changes; they would rather you keep changing to adapt to their whims.

One day, regardless of who they are, you find yourself ending the relationship because you cannot stand the discomfort of the gap any longer.

When you tell them you have decided to end the relationship you expect them not to be too bothered because after all, they repeatedly made it clear for years they do not care one way or the other.  You were always a bind to them.

You leave the relationship full of questions about what really just happened but will never receive full and honest answers from the other person.

Functionalising

In functionalising a person relates to us only because we perform a function useful to them.  Take the function away by losing the ability to deliver it or fully satisfying the need of the user and the relationship is over.

When the user wants the service again there will be a brief period of interest with the promise of the wonderful relationship you want to come but then it dies down again after the service is no longer required.

We tend to set ourselves up for this kind of relationship by validating ourselves only when we provide the given service.  This process dehumanises both parties involved.

Again, we grieve for the missing relationship.  We are so much more than just:

• parents providing money


• car drivers providing taxis


• husbands and wives providing protection and comfort


• faceless employees serving anonymous companies.

But if you see yourself or others in this way you set yourself up for failing relationships.  I call this being ‘doom-boxed’ – you or the other people involved have a set of mental templates and together you work at building a restrictive box into which you then willingly shove each other.

What you greave for is your lost humanity.  You feel crushed and invalidated every time you fail to perform the particular functions of choice and everyone else joins in on your humiliation and belittlement.

Climbing out of your doom-box is an extremely difficult thing to do because you feel ‘useless’ and you have programmed yourself to be of use.  You will find the word ‘use’ used quite a lot in such relationships (if they can be called relationships).

Once you know such potential situations exist you will spot them coming and avoid them (for example, in the dating world if the first question you get asked is ‘what car do you drive?’ or ‘do you like sex?’ I would pay attention to the doom-box alert this triggers.

Social Alienation

Alienation is a painful experience in which a member of a group to which they would naturally expect to belong is gradually disconnected from that group.  It can happen to anyone in any group.

Known as shunning when a whole group decides en masse to do it jointly from a specific point in time it can also be done subtly without the person on the receiving end being able to logically identify or accept the power of this process.  They feel terrible about themselves and everyone else in the group agrees they should but cannot quite pinpoint why.

Some alienators are so skilled at doing this the person on the receiving end believes they are doing it themselves and starts fighting their own emotional responses and behaviours when, in fact, they are doing just as they should be doing if they were in a normal caring relationship.

It can take years before they are able to see the situation they were in was not normal and when later they find themselves in a different relationship discover they are able to behave in exactly the same way but with no relationship problems arising.

Alienation can be used as a punishment or as a precursor to forcing the person out of the group completely.  One of the most painful forms of alienation is Parental Alienation Syndrome.

Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS)

The paradox of becoming a parent is the moment you create new life you become much more aware of the threat of death.  Not your own, but that of your child.

Children are clueless when it comes to life-threatening danger.  During toddlerhood you find yourself jumping out of your skin every time you find them poking something into a power socket or falling down the stairs.  The fear of losing them because you just plain failed to notice and deal with a risk can turn you into a nervous wreck.

Imagine added to this pressure is a co-parent who makes it obvious they regard you as superfluous to requirements.  Who has affairs; who every now and again ups and disappears with your child; then resurfaces again.

I have a friend who runs his own carpentry business who this happened to.  His daughter will be about ten years old now – he has not seen her since she was two.  As part of a divorce settlement he paid his ex a large chunk of money – but apparently it was not enough.

She moved to another part of the country and sends him letters regularly telling him if he ever wants to see his daughter again he has to hand over the home he  now lives in.  He is emotionally stuck and cannot move on – he is frozen into grieving for a living daughter he would not now recognise if he saw her on the street.

I came across a blog the other day where another father in a similar position had been writing for several years about his battle with an ex who had done a similar thing.  All his energy; all his life; was going into this battle.  Comments on the blog supported him in this ‘self-sacrificing quest’.  My thought after reading was if the daughter ever does come back what kind of father will she find?

It is as if these people are at a funeral that never stops.

I know of a couple, grandparents, who have ten grandchildren but have only ever met one of them because of a silly dispute with their own adult children.

What we grieve for here is the lost relationship that now may never be – even though the living child is right here; either close by or right in front of us.

How To Deal With Grieving for the Living

The first step is all yours – you must decide if it is time for you to accept and end the grieving process if you are stuck in it.

The pain of grief is completely overwhelming when you are positioned just in front of the most intense phase of the process but we are designed to experience it and there is no way around this fact.

The fear may be that by going through this process you will ‘toughen you up’ and disconnect from the relationship, losing it altogether, and unfortunately there is an element of truth in this.  Going through the grieving process ‘kills’ the previous relationship – but it also frees you up for any new relationship possible later if the other person changes their behaviour.

The starting point: Acceptance

You accept:

• you are powerless to make the relationship or relationships work – you may have tried various ways to resolve the painful state and you just get the same non-cooperation in return


• you have the same right to mutually rewarding relationships as do the people you have been attempting to relate to – give yourself the same rights you give to them – this includes the right to walk away when our relationships are imbalanced; would you want them to go through what you are experiencing?  I thought as much


• you care deeply about these relationships and you are the kind of person who values the time and lives of others but there is a time to cut the attachments – even if it means at a later date starting fresh with the same people.

The Process: Shifting Viewpoints during Emotional Release

During this process you alternate between feeling grief from a Subjective Viewpoint to observing and re-developing your self-image from an Objective Viewpoint.

We do this so that as you come through the process you fully release the pain and feel mentally good about yourself.

1. Set aside a safe place where you will not be disturbed but can have some pleasant distraction every now and again when you get a bit too tired


2. Go into the feelings and the thoughts attached to them and feel them as intensely as you can – explore everything in there including your past attempts at reconciliation and how the other people concerned responded or did not respond


3. Re-experience your helplessness in the situation; now step outside of it into the Objective Viewpoint


4. To enhance this affect imagine you are looking at someone else going through the same experience – see how much they care; see how much they value these relationships?  Then see how little the other person or people involved contribute


5. From the Objective Viewpoint tell this more distant ‘you’ how it is OK to feel these feelings and how you admire them for the intensity of their feelings – see how powerful they are?  This is the glue that binds us all – but in this situation you are releasing the glue; releasing the energy


6. Re-enter the Subjective Viewpoint and feel the full force of the feelings again – feel all the pain and symptoms of the loss; think about the wonderful relationship you might have had if things had been different – it was not your fault it did not work out


7. If you did play some part in the situation, however, feel any guilt you may be feeling but return to the person who wanted that pleasant, peaceful relationship


8. if you feel rage come up based on the resentment you have to go through this process due to the behaviour of others just feel the rage and do not self-judge; just feel it out safely and work towards achieving a state of non-blaming by the end of the process


9. Go back into the Objective Viewpoint and watch yourself from the outside – look at how much this person values their relationships again


10. rest – alternate the feeling and releasing process with periods of rest or distraction as this can be exhausting.

Eventually you will come out – and when you do come out you may want to re-evaluate how you deal with the relationships you currently have and those you have in the future.

You will lose your fear and resentment of the grief process (grieving for the living) but will create strategies to make sure you do not have to endure this more than necessary in the future.

Regards - Carl

Escape from Emotional Hell - Scapegoating

Scapegoating is great if you are not the scapegoat.

Psychologically what you do is you project your painful reaction to a life event onto some other poor soul and then make sure they get punished good and proper for it.  Leaves a nice satisfying feeling in the tummy – until the problem returns and the cycle begins all over again at which point you find someone new to do it to.

When done in a small group we call it ‘bullying’.  In large organisations we call it ‘blame culture’.  Between countries it is often the reason for war.  As an individual you can only keep a personal eye out for it – but will you know when it is happening to you and will you acknowledge and accept what has to be done to get away from it?

Scapegoating is the act of creating an ‘escape goat’ which we tie to the ground for a predator to eat giving the rest of us time to escape - what was once a tribal survival tactic is now deeply embedded in human social behaviour.

A wonderful method as long as you are not the scapegoat, eh?  But there is also another twist to this tale.  In their defence the older generations developed a way of getting younger, fitter members of our tribes to also step up for the privilege: we call this heroism.

I am not knocking heroism; just saying you need to be careful you are not acting the hero in a situation where you do not fully understand what is going on.

Heroes sacrifice themselves for the greater good.  This is OK as long as when you survive the sacrificial opportunity (that is, you kill the beast or the beast is pacified in some other way) you get some of that greater good yourself.

What if, having sacrificed quite a large part of your life or put your neck on the line for a while you find the ‘greater good’ is not what you yourself receive from those you took this risk for?  You need to pay attention to this and make sure you stop offering yourself up as sacrificial lamb if it is to a person or a group of people who do not want the same good things for you they want for themselves after the ‘beast’ is vanquished.

In a lot of dysfunctional families, for example, the beast is the behavioural norm of the family itself.

To avoid each individual member of the family having to face up to the pain of their own inner worlds aggressive families sometimes appoint a ‘black sheep’.  Seen as the worst family member they then blame all their woes onto that person so avoiding facing the predator within (their painful feelings). The scapegoat gets a reward from this process by being made to feel very important; if not notorious.  They get lots and lots of attention from this process which is better than the lack of attention they had before.

I remember a couple of years back working with a young man where the rest of the family came along (two full generations plus uncles and aunts) and all of them were talking about their worries about him.  As they spoke the family members criticised each other in how they dealt with him and past arguments were brought out and re-hashed in front of him.  Glaring eyes, snappy remarks, the full works.  You would have thought he was on the verge of a violent criminal future.

The young man himself sat passively, answered questions intelligently (yet according to the family he was a bit moody and unpredictable) and when I spoke to him alone he was really easy to get along with.  He had been turned into the eye of the family storm – he was the family scapegoat.

These kinds of things can go on for years and eventually, if you are the scapegoat, you can start to believe the hype at an unconscious level.  Here is what to do if this is happening to you:

Get out.

You will not find this easy.

The first reason is because it may mean months of unpleasant planning in several different areas – financially; logistically; legally.  It could take years to simply move yourself out (the young man I speak about above left his family a few months later).

The second reason it can be difficult is because when they realise the scapegoat has escaped other members of the group want the scapegoat to return and will pursue.

Scapegoats can be useful for a number of reasons – they tend to be giving people and as such are quite useful financially and in other ways; they make great absorbent punch-bags that love to take full responsibility for being punched (heroes).

I have seen many people, of all different age groups and types, play the role of scapegoat and become seriously emotionally ill because of it.

In their heads they justify this treatment with such self-talk as: ‘they know not what they do’ or ‘they will understand one day’ or ‘they did not really mean that’.

They know exactly what they are doing.  It is you that does not understand.  They mean everything they say – you are just not listening.  You still here?

What a great person you are, eh?  Hello scapegoat.

Regards - Carl

Truth versus Twaddle in Emotional Healing

Twaddle is a word used to describe idle gossip or talking foolishly.

There is quite a bit of twaddle written in the world of emotional healing.  Some of it is because the author missed something in the process they are offering – the process may well work but they have misinterpreted what happened and those following their method miss out on some key information that would help them later down the line.

Some of it, however, is because the seller of the system wants to attract a bigger market and if they were to tell it like it really is their market would shrink.

Marketers sell buyers what they want, rather than what they need, and although this makes buyers feel pleasant for a while it does not clear up the really nasty long-term stuff.

I am sure I am not completely innocent myself of writing the odd bit of twaddle but I would like to clear up on some of the more common myths I see around.

Twaddle-Myth One: You do not have to revisit the past to heal serious emotional problems – it can be done easily in the present and without any real effort

Twaddle.  You have no choice – serious emotional disorders are layered as intensely written memories in your Limbic Brain (in your amygdalae and your hippocampi) and the emotional charge attached to these memories is trapped in your body with your Unconscious fighting to keep it there.

Healing an emotional disorder is the hardest work you will ever do.

Whether or not you must visit past memories to remove the emotional charge attached to them is not a conscious choice.  If the memory and the energy attached co-exist you have to visit both.  No option.

The people who do not need to re-visit these past, traumatic events are those people who do not have this kind of an emotional problem.  Not all emotional problems need this regressive type of therapy but if you do, you do.  You will not find out if you do until you start the self-work.

In some cases a hypnotherapist may help and there are other kinds of therapists with different approaches but they all work on pretty much the same client condition regardless.

The fear of finding you do have to do this may put you off trying, but the truth is if you do need to you do.  End of.

Twaddle-Myth Two: Positive thinking produces positive feelings and negative thinking produces negative feelings

Imagery, not thinking, and the emotional responses to which they are attached – this is what alters how you feel.  But even then – the emotional energy is the thing.

Thinking with words cannot undo an emotional response – it can stop it through emotional blocking or it can think its way to releasing it – but it does not cause or prevent it.  The only constructive thing your thinking can learn to do is provide a safe, appropriate environment for emotional release – and then get out of the way.

Rage drives angry imagery followed by angry words as our thinking brains try to make sense of the feelings.  The thinking is at the end of our emotional process.

Once you have produced an emotional energy response thinking will not undo it – only feeling will.  Thinking that it is our thinking driving the problem is an ego-driven denial tactic designed to stop us from feeling.

Here is a little exercise: when you are emotionally happy and at peace think about lots and lots of negative things with no emotion attached – think about war in the Middle-East; think about global warming; think about that stabbing you heard about on the news: how long do you feel strongly about these things for?  Unless you already have a real burning emotional attachment to these things it will be for mere seconds.  Seconds.  Negative thinking alone cannot make you negatively emotional – you have to already be emotionally charged for it to have a serious affect.

I am one of the most positive-minded people you could hope to meet – but when I started to heal I was told by my psychiatrist I was suffering with severe depression and I had to accept he was right.  I was full of rage I had kept in place for years with the ‘positive thinking’ approach.

I recently went through the material of an expert on healing agoraphobia who perfectly described the emotional healing process but then went and ruined it for me (and in my view misled his clients) by describing how ‘thinking relaxing thoughts’ was the part of the process responsible for the healing process and if they dominated their thinking with thoughts of relaxation this would help them stay well.

No it will not.  Discharging trapped emotional energy, and only that, is what heals emotional illness.

Thinking otherwise is twaddle.  By the way: you are capable of thinking both positive and negative thoughts at the same time without any ill affects whatsoever.  The thing that really affects you is when those thoughts are used to build images and those images are attached to intense emotional responses.

Go buy positive thinking material, I find it beneficial all the time, but do not make the mistake of thinking it can overcome an emotional illness.

Twaddle-Myth Three: Your external circumstances do not dictate whether or not you are happy – you can be happy no matter what your environment is like

Super-twaddle.  In almost every single case where I have supported someone living in a threatening environment their environment (by this I usually mean how other people were treating them) was the very first thing the person had to escape before healing could begin.

To say otherwise is a ridiculous lie.

Whether you do not suit the environment or the environment does not suit you does not matter – if it does not support you emotionally you need to get out before the healing process can begin.

Environments are real.  They are not delusions in your mind.  If you are being bullied and undermined and threatened with your job or the end of an important relationship or with financial disaster or the loss of your kids or the loss of your own life – how the twaddle are you supposed to be happy in that kind of environment?  Oh yes, that is right, almost forgot: positive thinking.

Emotions tell us what is really going on in our lives.  We need to listen to them.

I twaddle you not.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Wellness – Are You Worth It?

Some people tell me they are emotionally ill – but resent having to pay out any money towards getting better.

Some will not give themselves the time it takes and always have something else that needs doing first.  They always have that something or someone else who needs their support more than they want their own self-care.

Others will not take the risk of trying methods that may not work to find the method that will - and some will find ways to mistrust my advice because if they do trust my advice that would mean they would have to act on that advice.

It means they have to feel the trapped pain they are running from inside.  Dangerous stuff, eh?

I know where these folks are coming from.  I used to think just like them.  It is partly due to fear of wasting valuable time; partly due to fear of being taken for a fool or looking like one when they fail but mostly … mostly it is because they do not think they are worth it.  Emotionally ill people often get that way by repeatedly refusing to validate themselves.

The time involved?  They do not deserve it.

Money to pay?  It should go towards something real and tangible.

The peaceful state waiting for them at the end of the process?  It is not there waiting for them.  It waits for others, but not for them.

I was emotionally ill for a couple of decades but then one day …

I remember one day being out and about with a group of people I cared about who made the day a living hell for me.  I had many similar days like it.  Not one of those folks cared if I had a good day or a bad day.

In the decade prior to that day I could count the number of times they had said something nice to me on the fingers of one hand with three fingers to spare.  On that day I made a decision.  Time to stop adapting.  Time to stop absorbing and putting up with.

I had been Mr Sacrificial to other people for too long and it dawned on me on that day the folks I continually put myself out for and worried about did not care much if I was alive or dead.

On that day I thought to myself ‘I need to get more selfish because no-one is going to do this for me.  I am going to be emotionally ill for the rest of my life if I do not do it’.  And I began to sort myself out.  I started to make some tough decisions.  I decided I was worth it and I kept deciding I was and every day I am willing to make the same decision whenever it is needed.

Are you?  No-one else will do it for you.

Setting Aside Enough Time for the Process

Day to day emotional management for a normally emotionally  well person can take  a couple of minutes to a couple of hours a day depending on current life events – but to get through an obsession or a phobia can take continual hard work for weeks or months – are you willing to give yourself that time?

Finding Money for the Process

Counsellors cost money – they cost me about three and a half hours of my hourly salary time for one hour of their time.  I regard this as a personal coaching session; to me it is worth the money and I am worth the investment.

Are you?  I have spent hundreds of pounds buying books; downloadable materials and trying out different techniques that did not work but which taught me some new things I did not know before.  I regard all of this ‘waste’ as worth it.  Would you waste money on yourself in this way?

I spent several hundred pounds on a hypnotherapist who made no difference to my illness but helped me to learn how to relax better – I regard that as money well spent.  Would you?

Putting Yourself First

I have ended about seven valued relationships because although I valued the relationships the others allegedly relating to me did not.  They regarded me as useful but not as a person.  They resented my explaining to them how I felt about how they treated me – I discovered I had lots of responsibilities but no rights in these relationships.

Each relationship took several years between my thinking I might need to end it and its actually ending.

I did my best to save them but when it was obvious the other people concerned (all adults) would not see I was more than just a functionary in their lives and told me they had no intention of changing I decided in my own favour.

I am now very careful about who I allow into my persoal life – and I still lead a social, people-centred life.

You too may have to decide to value personal happiness above a ‘relationships at any cost’ mentality.  Are you worth that?

I think we are all worth it.

Regards - Carl

The Practical Direction of Your Emotional Process Trumps Hope, Despair, Faith and Fear

In emotional healing there is only one direction to take: inwards.

Taking your Conscious Point of Focus inwards is a deliberate directional choice. This singular choice of direction decides whether or not an unhappy, emotionally blocked person will ever be long-term happy again.

Once you take the journey inwards, regardless of how painful it is, your emotional process starts to sort itself out.  You could have no access to any helpful support or information from any source – but if you simply took your Conscious attention inwards repeatedly and for long enough you would eventually find the resolution to your emotional problems.

Direction.  Not hope; not faith; not knowledge; not ability; not anything else.  Not the support of others; not medication; not goals; not even the desire for happiness; not another single thing I can possibly think of trumps this one truth.  If you will not take the direction inwards nothing else will work.

Repeatedly journey inwards and all the things I’ve just mentioned become passing phases.  They are useful at times, but completely pointless in and of themselves.  None of them are permanent, you see.

We may hang on to them as if they are – but they are not and we know it.  The journey into you is all there really is and you will see and use all of these ‘add-on features’ along the way but you must not make any one of them your goal.

Going into your emotional energies, positive or negative, is a lifelong process to be repeatedly engaged with if you want to remain emotionally happy and make decisions right for you in the long-term.  The moment you decide not to go into an emotional response you have a problem you are one day going to have to acknowledge and deal with or ‘suffer’ from.

Going in allows energy to be released and the insights contained within those energies tells you who you really are and what external environments and relationships are right for you.

But even these insights are temporary steps on the journey.  Just directional signs indicating the next path to take.

If you do not keep taking the right direction your inner world will become conflicted.  Those feelings inside want to be heard and they will keep trying to get your conscious attention.  To go in the wrong direction – we call this denial - you have to set up complex mental networks to repeatedly block an emotional response.  Blocked emotional responses never stop trying to get release from your body – the only option is to acknowledge and release them.

To keep blocking an emotional response the urge to block has to become unconsciously habitual.  Why?  Well, if you were conscious of yourself doing this blocking you would not do it, would you?

Er, yes, actually you would.  Here are four symptoms of blocking.

Hope, Despair, Faith and Fear

These are all temporarily useful tools or liars depending on how you look at them and how long you keep them in place.  It is OK to use these states as temporary tools but if you grasp any one of them and establish it as a permanent way of seeing you are living in a lie.

Hope

Hope is the expectation something desirable will happen no matter what we do.  Hope is a form of helplessness attached to positive emotional imagery.

It may feel nice but it is not real and it depends on external life events for those desirable things to happen.

Hope is hopeless when it comes to real life change.  If you have to keep relying on hope to get you through a situation this can become a form of psychological denial.

We grasp at hope, for example, when we are in an abusive relationship but pretend we are not.  One day, we hope, the person abusing us will stop.  We enhance the affects of failing hope when we choose to idolise or please the abuser in the hope they see how highly we think of them, hoping they will change as a result.

Sometimes we hold ourselves responsible for their behaviour and they love this.  When we do occasionally stand up for ourselves they deliberately trigger our guilt response with the intention of making us take the rap for their behaviour and getting us back into the false hoping state.

People stuck in hope become very useful to others until they hit despair.

Despair

Despair is the expectation that something undesirable will happen no matter what we do and is sometimes the result of ‘hope gone bad’.  Despair is also a form of helplessness but is attached to negative emotional imagery.

Strangely enough, I see people deliberately use mock despair to get out of doing something that would actually solve a problem – they just do not want to do the work and hope mock despair will allow them the get-out without feeling too self-critical about it.

You will see despair in others as ‘mock’ when you know for sure what the solution to the problem is and have used it repeatedly and successfully – but no, no matter how often you point out your demonstrable success with the same issue, for them it will not work.

I have felt the occasional period of despair myself – but I do not buy into it for long.   Despair is the opposite of hope but it is similar in that it is just as false and makes us feel just as helpless..

Faith

Faith is believing something unseen but wanted will happen if you behave in a certain way (so you go in that direction).

Faith has more of a behavioural edge to it than hope because unlike hope faith says you have to do something to get the ‘promised reward’.  I quite like faith – I’ve seen it in action within me many times – faith feels actionable.  Faith feels like I am empowered and moving forward.

But faith is actually a side affect of taking a chosen direction – it is not in itself enough.  If after a period of time faith does not deliver the evidence and knowledge that justifies the work I give up on faith – and so we should.

Blind faith, spending day after day involved in actions that bring no identifiable benefit, are a waste of time to me.

Faith is false when adopted as a permanent outcome in its own right.

Fear

Fear is believing something unseen and not wanted will happen if you behave in a certain way (so you go in the opposite direction).

Fear of our own emotions is always false – False Evidence Appearing Real – but a lot of us fall prey to this mistake and avoid growth opportunities due to the fear that comes with taking the emotional risks associated with growth.

Fear, without direct evidence of the feared thing happening right now, is false.

A One Sentence Summary of an Example

In a difficult situation you got trapped into using hope to give yourself good feelings but your hopes did not materialise and turned to feelings of despair which got so bad they overcame your fear of leaving and forced you to have faith things would turn out right in the end.

An even shorter sentence:  you changed direction because one direction hurt more than the other.

The Point of All This is …

If you are relying on hope; if you are full of despair; if you need to find faith; if you fear your inner world – these are emotional issues telling you your current direction is wrong.

These four related thinking and emotional states are meant to be temporary stopping places along the journey towards natural inner happiness.

If you have got stuck in one or more of them you need to get moving in the right direction again.

Regards - Carl

Work with Compulsions as Energy Problems Not as Thinking Problems

I remember the first time I felt compelled to look and pay attention to something I did not want to and, after at least three years of concentrated daily work and putting up with the condition for over 20 years, I was right back at that initial point of compulsion.  Being forced to look and not wanting to.

I had removed 27 obsessions, 14 phobias and a number of other layered, intense secondary emotional responses, all of which had been triggered by the desire to fight the affects of this singular place in my mind.  They had done a good job of masking it from me – but now I was back facing the original, apparently unsolvable problem.  What I mentally paid attention to was not under my direct control.  Control of my attention mechanism had literally been taken off me.

The idea you cannot control what you pay attention to and that when it grabs your attention there is nothing, apart from temporary distraction, to relieve the pressure, is a very frightening experience.

The feeling for me came in the centre of my brain - some irresistible force grabbing the backs of my eyeballs and physically turning their attention to look at horrific imagery and my body felt ‘pushed’ towards taking action – but there was nothing to do.

I had received this experience after, would you believe, reading a newspaper article about someone being harmed and killed by a gang.  I had imagined the same thing happening to someone I personally cared about and the emotional responses were so strong it had conveyed a sense of reality to my Unconscious mind.  This was so effective my body was reacting as though the event were happening right now – but there was no event.

I felt stupid about the self-sabotaging problem I had created using just my own imagination but I had no idea how to undo the affects and there was no help I could see to explain the solution to me.  In fact any information I could get back then pretty much confirmed the condition was permanent and I was doomed.

I had read the triggering newspaper article when I was 21 and it had taken less than the a couple of days for the compulsive response to kick in and for me to establish the secondary emotional layers to begin fighting it.

The compulsive physical urge my compulsion produced was to get up and search the building I was in to find the person being hurt and physically stop the gang from hurting them.

So here I was, after over two decades of putting up with the emotional blocks and spending several years clearing them – right back at square one facing the compulsive urge and the feeling of its fierce grip in the middle of my brain turning my attention to look at things I did not wish to look at.

If you have read books on OCD or obsessions you may have read about how this is a ‘thinking’ problem.  So I am looking at my problem wondering what part of my thinking is turning my attention to look at the imagery over and over again and I notice there is no thinking I can immediately see.

I feel the pressure to look in the middle of my brain.  Thinking does not feel like anything and the thinking brain does not feel.  Feeling is an emotional problem.  Feeling is an energy problem.  The great news about an energy problem is if you remove the energy through feeling you remove the problem.

So I entered the feelings gripping the middle of my brain, forcing my attention to look, and over a couple of days this feeling started to reduce and the imagery in the background (in what I call the Reflection) behind this grabbing sensation started to come up, as did several other feelings.

I agreed to feel everything – and I agreed with the imagery and how I felt about that imagery but to do all this all I needed to do was find the feelings and go into them.

You know what?  Over several weeks I lost that compulsive urge to look.  I can still have those horrible thoughts and images – but I do not have the compulsive urge to keep looking at them.  No urge to look, no need to search buildings,  no gang to fight off, nobody being hurt.

If you have a compulsion you feel grips in the middle of your brain and it is a feeling you can go into I suggest you regard that is an energy problem and not a thinking problem.  Relieve the energy, relieve the problem.

Go in and you just could end up, to your surprise, coming out.

Regards - Carl