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