Emotional Vibrations Part 2 - Environmental Management

In Part 1 we looked at the biological process creating the cellular vibrations we refer to as ‘feelings’ and how feelings, once produced, need to be released through some form of expression or they store both as active vibrational layers in the body and also as layered maps in the brain. 

Here in Part 2 we start focusing on the fact the sole purpose of having an emotional system (and a brain) is self preservation through effective territorial management. 

To remain emotionally happy you need to focus on the cycle of:

… going where you are wanted and wanting where you go and then going where you are wanted and wanting where you go …

- which by default also means leaving where you are not wanted and saying no to going places that won’t meet your personal needs.

This isn’t a quickfire process to be carried out just by your thinking.

How you feel is the deciding factor - this is the source of human intuition and should be the best guide for your major life decisions.

The problem for those with emotional disorders is their intuition is interrupted and overwhelmed by a mass of secondary emotional responses.  When it comes to making environmental management decisions they regard their feelings as an untrustworthy source; there’s a constant ‘is it me or is it them?’ battle inside.

A common thread running through most emotional disorders is that of sufferers failing, or refusing, at some early point, to mentally recognise, acknowledge and deal with the signals their emotional system is sending them regarding an unsuitable environment.

They either don’t understand what the signals mean, or attempt instead to try and switch off their emotional system by using self-criticism, or certain philosophies along the lines of ‘people are meant to sacrifice themselves for others’, as tools to suppress their reactions. 

This enables them to stay in harmful environments for longer, even indefinitely.  It also further intensifies their reactions and they become further sensitised; continuing to produce secondary emotional reactions fighting their initial responses.

Unfortunately there are just some environments, as individuals, we can neither change nor adapt to, while still in them, and emotional healing will only take place once we have left the environment for a long enough period (sometimes permanently) to come to an objective decision. 

Emotionally ill people criticising themselves (or being criticised by others) for being ‘too sensitive’ are in fact suffering the consequences of not being sensitive enough.

A commitment to emotional wellness automatically requires a commitment to better environmental monitoring with ‘better’ meaning more in line with the individual’s own needs and emotional signals, rather than in line with what others believe those needs and signals should be. 

Get More Selfish

What I’m saying here is that people with emotional illnesses need to become objectively selfish and stay that way.  They need to step outside of themselves; looking in and asking about themselves ‘what does this person need to get back to happiness?’ - and then be willing to carry out the work subjectively; from within the condition, as the sufferer.

This in turn leads to the sufferer needing to make decisions they would never have made previously in regards to changing their environments. 

We can find ourselves feeling ambivalent about such decisions for a while but should regard this as a sign of real change.  Ambivalence (feeling opposing feelings about a decision) is caused because new thoughts are going against current unconscious belief systems. 

The battle continues until the real-life evidence proving we and others are happier as a result of the new decision is so strong our belief systems are changed as a result. 

To the Unconscious ‘seeing is believing’ and so we need to explore, test and experiment until the unconscious accepts the results it sees.

By deciding our personal happiness needs to be achieved primarily through a process of self-acceptance, a process we ultimately control; rather than through social acceptance; which we do not control; we change how we manage our lives for the better.  You have to learn to like yourself and say yes to environments that like you.

It sounds simple, but a lot of people don’t do this consistently.

A person who learns to do this wants everyone around them to learn to do exactly the same for themselves too - even when you are the ‘environment’ they need to leave. 

It’s surprising how, when you begin changing yourself in this way, you suddenly realise how those around you have been telling you they wanted you to do it all along. 

Until we learn to make decisions in this way we get stuck because we’re forcing ourselves to remain in environments that don’t meet our individual needs.

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

In the late 1940’s and early 50’s psychologist Abraham Maslow produced a ‘‘Hierarchy of Needs’ model:

Mr Maslow’s Hierarchy explains our needs are instinctual and we all react emotionally to deficiencies in our environments when they fail to support those needs. 

I’m a big fan of the model (it’s been developed quite a bit further since then and you can read more about it here).

As each layer of need is satisfied, starting with the Physiological needs at the bottom of the Hierarchy, we are able to start paying attention to the next level above.  At the fourth level, ‘Esteem’, we begin to experience fewer and fewer periods of negative emotional stress.

If a lower level need comes under threat, however, we move back down again and start to experience those strong negative emotional responses designed to help us plug the deficiency  (on the bright side if we’ve learned how to get up to the higher levels we may not need to have the same long drawn-out learning experiences as we did previously). 

The model does have its critics - but those critics are usually people who’ve had the luxury of being high up on the hierarchy for a while - so long they’ve forgotten (or never even experienced) what it’s like to be homeless, unemployed  or wonder where their next meal’s coming from.

We can aim for those higher levels, ignoring the more basic levels of need and denying we have to pay attention to them, but you pay a high price in the long term. 

Up until about 10 years ago I had been trapped by my environmental deficiencies in layers 2 and 3 (Safety and Love/Belonging) since about age 7; I now see myself as being in the Esteem/Self-actualization layers and selfishly plan to stay there.

I achieved this by making, and continuing to make whenever the need arises, often painful decisions in regards to changing the ways in which I interact with my various environments - physical; situational; social and internal.

Categorising Our Environmental Types

An environment is anything from which you take things in and put things out into.

We can break our environments down into those four main categories I’ve mentioned above and take a look at how they each affect us in terms of emotional vibrancy:

• Physical (external non-living environment)
• Situational (a memorable life event occurring)
• Social (the combined long-term affects of our interactions with other people)
• Internal (our current vibrational state).

Then we can look at our levels of control over them; do we have:

• total control
• partial control (influence)
• no control.

Finally we have to make four main decisions in regards to our environments based on the balance between how much we need what these environments offer us and how much control we have over obtaining what they profess to offer:

• do we go look for new?
• do we stay and accept?
• do we need to adapt to or change them if we stay?
• do we leave?

In the next post in this series we’ll be looking at the extent to which we can realistically alter our Physical, non-living environments in order to improve our emotional vibrancy.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Vibrations - Part 1 - Your Dominant Vibrational Tone

You vibrate.  How are you vibrating right now (how do you feel)?

Is there a tone you mistrust or don’t understand?  Have you had emotional experiences you felt were wrong or abnormal or too powerful - or do you find yourself stuck in them?

This post concerns itself with how important our negative vibrational tones (negative emotions) are - and the fact they can dominate every decision we make from the point we create them to the point we identify and evaporate them.

I’m not joking when I say you vibrate.  It’s a biological fact.

Sticking out through the surface membranes of every cell in your body are the heads of tiny molecules called ‘receptors’.

These receptor molecules have tails travelling down through the membrane surface into the cell body below them.  Tails that never stop contorting into different shapes.  When excited they can change shape at a rate higher than 10’000 times a second.  They vibrate.

What excites your receptors?  Your ligand molecules.

Ligand molecules travel around your body and brain, carried in the liquids we call hormones and neurotransmitters.  Our ligands carry messages from one part of the body (including the immune system) to others.

Ligands are molecular keys; receptor heads their molecular locks.

When the right ligand locks on to the right receptor head it transmits a message into the receptor.  The receptor then transmits the message deep down into the cell by vibrating its tail; for each vibrational tone there is a different rate of shape-changing activity that creates it.

With millions of receptors vibrating on its surface, a whole cell produces vibrational energy and with billions of cells vibrating, your body produces an overall vibrational tone.  We buzz, hum, and sometimes we scream.

Each emotional state is the product of a different vibrational tone or frequency.

Your Dominant Vibrational Tone Controls How You Think and Act

It also dominates how you think about how you think; how you feel about how you feel; how you react to how you act.  These tones can become self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecies.

Sometimes, when we’ve been stuck with the same vibrational tone for too long, we make the mistake of calling it ‘our personality’.

When a person is emotionally ill they are being controlled by a feeling; not so much by a set of thoughts.  The negative thoughts are produced by the vibrational energy as it connects with the brain’s receptors.

Yes, you can trigger a negative vibrational tone using your thoughts - but more often than not the tone affecting you was stimulated by an external event and you accepted someone else’s opinion of it.  Sometimes this is accidentally brought about; other times it may be deliberately engineered by someone manipulating you.

No-one ever woke up in a morning and thought ‘I know, today I’ll deliberately think in a way that causes me to feel like cr*p for the rest of my life’.  The fact you may be completely unaware you have been given a negative vibrational tone; or of the original circumstances creating it, is something needing to be faced up to and explored before the affects can be removed.

Those affects can be subtle.

Some Things You Should Know About Exploring Your Vibrational Tones (Your Feelings)

Everything I share with you here I learned through direct experience through a long, drawn-out process of trial and error.  I tried for years to out-think my various emotional problems and then, when that didn’t work, I just decided I would go repeatedly into the feelings themselves instead and just stay there for as long as I could.  Even if it killed me (which was what my thoughts were telling me it would do).

Panic attacks; multiple obsessions; phobias; rage attacks; depression.  I cleared the lot using the ‘go into the feelings and ignore the thoughts’ approach.  It took three years of constant daily work to remove my disorders.

In the first three months I cleared my panic attacks; another year and I got rid of my obsessions and phobias; another couple of years reduced and removed the primary responses I had tried to avoid for over twenty years.  I still have those primary responses to deal with now and again - just like every other person does, but I no longer have the problem of having emotions I can’t get rid of.

During this journey I learned a lot about how our emotions - our vibrational tones - work; including:

• They store in layers


• you have to name, acknowledge and normalise their affects on you, before you can remove and forget them


• You have to manage your environments if you want to stay well.

They Store in Layers

By ‘dominant vibrational tone’ what I mean is the vibrational tone you see most often projecting into your thoughts and sometimes out into the world through your behaviours.

Underlying the outwardly most obvious tone there will be other vibrational layers driving those upper conscious behaviours.  Let’s say for example your current dominant tone is anger.

The anger may be produced due to someone or something stopping you from exercising your right to meet a responsibility.  Above the anger layer may be a sense of guilt and a dislike of your perpetual angry state - which means you are angry at being angry which means you believe you should not be angry and so are deliberately keeping yourself in the situation that makes you angry!

You not only feel responsibility for the thing you are given no rights to look after - you also take responsibility for your reaction to the situation too.

Below all this is a layer of fear.  You regard the thing for which you believe you have responsibility, whatever it may be, to be precious.  You’re afraid something bad will happen to it if you’re not allowed to look after it and the consequences are just unacceptable.  Nevertheless, you are still not given the rights to manage this responsibility.

You find you are also afraid because every time you lose your temper it even further weakens the level of rights you have.  You feel trapped and self-critical.  You hate how you are responsible for the whole situation and you cannot seem to bring it under control (or yourself).

Below these levels, however, is also a layer of love.  A layer of care for others or the thing or person you feel responsible for.  You  may no longer be able to see this layer when you’re struggling with the layers above - but it’s there.  We don’t have the above negative layers of vibrational reaction unless we actually care deeply first.

And, after years of struggling to look after the subject of our care and being perpetually denied the rights to meet our responsibility, our resolve to take back control gradually weakens and we finally let go of the sense of responsibility.

But we find ourselves still being influenced by these various vibrational layers we’re stuck with.

When I first started going into my feelings as a strategy for removing my emotional disorders my intention was to go straight into facing the most obvious obsessions and get rid of them - all in three months flat (I have a little chuckle at that memory).

Obsessions are constructed when we have an intense primary disgust response to an image but then regard the disgust response as abnormal and become afraid of it.  This causes the imagery to continually reappear in the conscious mind; each reappearance being accompanied by the strong feelings driving the process.

Obsessions are a ‘hyper-vigilance reaction designed to make sure a dreaded thing doesn’t happen even though it has never even come close to happening.

The only way a person can cope with the condition, if they don’t remove it, is through enforced distraction.  It’s a bit like determinedly reading a novel while a hungry lion pants in your face.

I decided to reverse the avoidance/distraction strategy I had used for over twenty years and go mentally towards the imagery instead.  All emotional hell broke loose inside.  I experienced continuous severe panic attacks.

My stomach chemistry changed; my blood pressure shot sky high (at one point I went into hospital and a nurse told another it was the highest blood pressure reading she’d every seen).  I ended up having EKG tests.  I experienced the ‘mammalian disassociation response’, my doctor repeatedly asked me to slow down my self-work and go onto drugs supervised by a psychiatrist but at that time I couldn’t and wouldn’t.

It took three months of daily work to reduce the intensity of the panic attack response to a point I could start working directly on the obsessions.  My Unconscious definitely didn’t want me to do this.  Initially I found with every single obsession I approached I would have a minor sense of panic, imagery of death would fill my mind, ‘you can’t do this; you won’t cope’ thoughts would appear.  I had no idea if I could actually do what I was trying to do.  I was full of self-doubt that never seemed to go away - but I had to try.

Then I got rid of my first, most obvious, obsession.  Hurrah!  Another one appeared.  An old obsession I remembered from a few years back.  I got rid of that one after a few weeks.  Hurrah!  Another one appeared.  Got rid of that one.  I was getting good at this now.  I cleared another in thirty minutes flat and laughed to myself about the idea of being fully cured by tea time.  Another one appeared.

The next one took a few weeks.  The next one, too.  I noticed some of my phobias were starting to disappear of their own accord (an obsession is a fear of something perceived as dangerous being inside the self; a phobia is a fear of something perceived as dangerous being outside the self).

Although I always had some self-doubt every time I approached an obsession the more obsessions I removed the less intense the fear was and the fewer the ‘don’t do it’ thoughts there were.

Every one of these responses was got rid of by my agreeing to feel the vibrational tone of whatever feeling presented itself next, regardless of what I thought about it.  I learned to hunt inside for the sense of feeling and go into the feelings repeatedly no matter what kind of imagery or thoughts came up.

Twenty-seven obsessions and fourteen phobias later I had learned an awful lot about the emotional process and not one of these responses returned.  ‘Do you know’, I thought to myself ‘I think they work in layers’.  Some research followed and I discovered they do.

The Hippocampus, a peapod shaped brain part in the Limbic Brain, creates chronologically layered maps of our emotional responses and keeps those maps until the vibrational energy attached to them is fully discharged.  Once you have discharged the vibrational energy attached to a map, the map disintegrates and you reveal the next map below it.

Once the panic attacks and the obsessions and the phobias had gone, I had to deal with the depression.  Depression, in my case, was caused by trapped rage.  Trapped rage at what?  I didn’t really know at that time.  I found myself expressing my rage in a closed-off room at people no longer around to hear it (thank goodness) for all the ways they’d done the dirty on me.  And then it hit me.

As I’m working through all this intense emotional stuff, releasing the vibrational energy, I realise I’m starting to access a layer of emotional tone I cannot identify.  It feels very strange.  It feels extremely painful.  I remember it was this tone that made me feel suicidal when I was 19 years old.

A burning sensation over my entire body closing my thinking down and making me feel my world has come to an end.  I feel a mixture of anger, sadness and grief.  This particular vibrational tone dominates how I see my thinking, how I judge myself.  It damages my self image by making me feel ‘not good enough’ in a number of ways about different things.

I am not good enough.  During my daily work in this tone I start to realise the sheer power of what this tone has done to my thoughts and feelings.  It makes me feel isolated and dark.  It is physically overwhelming.  All my emotions from this point on - from the point at which this vibrational tone began dominating my body and mind - looked abnormal.  Nothing about me looks right to me any more when I’m under the affects of this tone.

Strong memories come up that put me back in the original circumstances that led to this tone - circumstances that went on for years and involved different people.  I can see there’s a common thread of some kind running through all of this in my personal history but I can’t bring it all together yet.  Can’t put my finger on what it is I’m seeing.

I find this vibrational tone sparks off a lot of other unwanted emotional responses too - but I still can’t figure out what it is I’m experiencing.  Then I get an insight.  This is ‘shame’.

About a year before this insight I’d been talking to a friend about my previous battle with obsessions.  She had spoken to her mother, a social worker, about the underlying causes of obsessions and her mother had told her in her experience shame was often the underlying cause.  At the time of speaking to my friend I hadn’t yet accessed the ‘shame’ layer.

Here it was.  I had entered the ‘shame’ layer.  I’ll be talking about shame in a later post.  I had now moved on to the next stage of what it takes to remove the affects of a negative vibrational tone.  I had named it.

You Have to Name, Acknowledge and Normalise

… their affects on you, before you can remove and forget them (negative vibrational tones).

What am I talking about here?

Naming

“Until you’ve named a thing, it owns you” - David Allen.

The short-term step in completing a vibrational emotional response internally is to convert it from imagery into words, naming it.

Once you’ve named an experience and discharged the energy attached to it then you can forget about it; unless you want to share the information with the outside world or bring it back to help you deal with another similar problem.

You feel the energy out of your body, causing you to transfer management of the information from your emotion-processing Right Neo-Cortex to your thought-processing Left Neo-Cortex, which by default means the information has to be given a name.  You then store the name in your word-based memories.

Until you can name a thing you will not be able to stop your ‘what the hell is that?’ attention mechanism from looking at it.  Take a look at everything you see around you now and pick out the thing you don’t know the general name of - can you do it?  Before you knew its name, you wondered what it was called and what it did.

You wanted to know if it was safe.  If you think a thing may be dangerous, especially if its one of your own emotions, you’ll keep looking at it.  You’ll keep bringing it up while saying to yourself ‘what the hell is that and what do I about it?’.

You don’t need to know every aspect of everything around you in order to be able to stop paying attention to it - just enough to know it’s safe.  Or, if it can be dangerous, you want to know it’s been made safe and is under your control.  Once you know just enough to know what it is, what it does, and whether or not you need to do something about it, and if not that it’s ‘safe’ - you can forget about it.

When you realise you don’t have to do anything or you’ve done the thing needing to be done (which, in the case of a negative emotional tone is to feel it out) you can let it go.

Acknowledging and Normalising

To acknowledge means ‘to recognise the truth of’.

What do we need to acknowledge?  The fact we are organically designed to be mostly driven by our emotional states.  The nature of our thinking is decided. on the whole, by how we feel.

Happiness is achieved through proper management of our feelings, our overall bodily vibrational tone, rather than through proper management of our every thought.

One of the problems you come up against when trying to focus on the negative thoughts you do not wish to think is you must recreate those negative thoughts in order to try and un-think them.  People suffering with obsessions, for example, are stuck in this loop.  Our memories are designed to keep regurgitating any thought or image with unpleasant emotional energy attached.

A negative thought without emotional energy attached is an ‘objective’ thought which you see yourself as being on the outside of.  A negative thought with emotional energy attached is a ‘subjective’ thought which you see yourself as ‘being in’ and needing to do something about.

So, when you tell yourself ‘I definitely don’t want to think those negative thoughts that make me feel bad so I’ll cover them over with lots of other positive thinking’ what you’re actually doing is attaching negative emotional energy to the negative thoughts and raising their importance in your Unconscious attention mechanism.

You took an objective thought and made it subjective.  You shifted a piece of information being managed in your thinking mind over to your emotional mind for management - which guarantees you’ll change your vibrational tone for the worse.

People suffering with depression are making this mistake.  Brain scans show that when people try to withdraw from negative thinking because of the painful emotional energy attached their brain activity pulls back from the thinking Neo-Cortex down into the Limbic Brain area - the very brain part spark-plugging the negative emotional energy response.  Their thoughts now become much broodier and they have trouble connecting with the outside world, or in developing the new options in thinking that would cause the depression to lift.

If you have a pleasant, happy vibrational tone, negative thoughts will sail right on by without much notice.  If you have a negative vibrational tone, particularly if it’s based on a self-critical self-image, every negative thought or feeling will get caught up in the ‘what the hell is that?’ attention net - you stop and question the meaning of everything going through your mind.

Most Westerners are programmed to believe ‘thinking’ is the thing to focus on in order to improve the quality of our vibrational tone and of our thinking itself.  It isn’t.  For long-term emotional well-being you must focus on discharging your feelings - your physical vibratory sensations.

Several months into my own self-healing journey I began to understand I was training myself to surrender to my true organic nature.  I remember telling my person-centred counsellor ‘I’ve been forced to accept my emotional system is designed by nature and there’s nothing I can do about it’.

The statement seemed a bit strange to the both of us at the time but it was a turning point.  I was just giving up the mental fight to ‘out-think’ and surrendering to the emotional energy; allowing my own body to sort itself out.

Our thinking minds think they control us as if we were quick-fix mechanical mechanisms. Change a few interlocking thought patterns and ‘hey presto'!’ you’ve got a fully functioning happy human being.  In reality we are an overall energy field or, as Dr Candace Pert, author of ‘Molecules of Emotion’ puts it, ‘flickering flames’.

We have to work long-term on our flickering flames inside if we want to become and remain happy.

A mood - a vibratory state - determines how you think. No amount of positive thinking can overcome an emotional state.  You must complete the emotional cycle; releasing the vibrational energy, in order to become your happy self again.

Normalising

Each of us has a view of what ‘normal’ looks like in regards to any area of life we look at.

The ‘norm’ for a thing is its behavioural range, with upper and lower limits.  When behaviour lying outside of those limits occurs we regard this as ‘abnormal’ (which means in some way unsafe and therefore needing to be avoided or defeated).

Until we reach a point at which we have to challenge the unconsciously, socially programmed ‘norms’ we’ve been given, we operate as if they were an obvious truth.

People with emotional disorders have been given a narrow range of ‘acceptable emotional responses’ to work with.  They regard their intense vibrational states as lying outside the normal range.

The truth is, when it comes to emotional responses, human beings do not get to decide what normal looks like.  Nature does.  Although we refer to obsessions, phobias, panic attacks and depression as ‘emotional disorders’ they are nothing of the kind.

One of the illusions we suffer from when struggling with these conditions is the idea we are unique in having these experiences.  If we reveal what’s going on inside our heads to others, no-one else will understand.  They’ll lock us up and throw away the key, right?  But the truth is, ‘they’ could be struggling with similar emotional problems of their own and are disguising it just like we are.

Emotional ‘disorders’ - caused by nothing more than a body overcharged with emotional energy needing to be released - are very common.  They are undesirable, but they are common.  Which means by default they are not ‘abnormal’.

It is impossible to have an abnormal emotional response.  It is possible to channel the vibrational energy involved into an abnormal, destructive behaviour - but the response itself is absolutely normal.  It’s what you do with it; how you behave; that decides how appropriately you manage it.

We are all capable of vibrating emotionally in the same way.  We are all capable of becoming emotionally ill (vibrationally overcharged) and then producing thoughts in line with that emotional state.

People with obsessions, phobias, anxiety disorders, anger disorders, depression - and any other emotional problem you care to focus on - produce the same kinds of thoughts as every other person with that particular trapped emotional state.  They hold similar viewpoints and travel a similar internal journey causing them to create them.  That’s why we are able to diagnose what type of anxiety disorder a person has. It is a common experience.

Remove the emotional state and you remove the thoughts.  Most of us don’t like this fact because it’s a slow and painful process.

Sharing with Others

Earlier I mentioned ‘naming’ as the short-term path to healing vibrational energy problems but in the the long-term the full path to normalisation is to share this difficult inner struggle with others, having them come back to you with acceptance and confirmation of it as a shared human experience.  I’ve found repeatedly when talking with someone who’s had or is struggling with an emotional problem disclosing you’ve had a similar experience immediately stimulates their willingness to open up.

It dawns on them their experience is not so strange after all.

It took me several years to overcome this barrier.  I thought once I started to tell others about it they’d ‘lock me up and throw away the key’.

Sharing information on how you feel, think and act while under the influence of strong vibrational tones, in a safe accepting environment, and having others confirm they have the same understanding of the experience, is what finally helps you release the problem and the memory of it.

But not all environments are accepting.  Some of are directly responsible for causing the problem to develop in the first place.

In the next post I’ll be writing about vibrational environments you need to identify and avoid if you want to remain emotional happy.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 11) - Talking to the Washed Up Volleyball and …

… liking what it says?

There is a never ending conflict between the current nature of your self-talk and the nature of the feedback you receive from your different environments.  Are you normal?  Are you acceptable?  Do you need to change?

Or do you need to change your environment instead?

Ever been ‘sent to Coventry’ - given the silent treatment?  This is a standard social punishment technique. Or have you ever received negative feedback?  Did it hurt? If it did: did the level of pain you felt vary according to who the person giving the feedback was; the social situation and the type of relationship you thought you had with them? 

The reason we are vulnerable to feeling pain when exposed to this kind of thing is because the final stage of completing our internal emotional information cycles depends on feedback from sources outside of our control - ‘out there’. 

We have a built-in need to express, and then receive positive feedback on what we express, in order to feel safe in our environment.  The nature of the feedback matters to us.  It decides things for us.

You cannot complete your internal information cycles, so achieving happiness, when your external environment is so hostile you are not even allowed to express yourself out into it. 

In such an environment we have only two choices to make: do I stay and make my environment adapt to me, or leave to find a new environment?  This decision is based on self-talk.  Unless you are a young child, or an adult with some severe disability, no-one else but you can make this decision for you.

You have a problem when most of your self-talk is based on subjective memories of how others treat you, rather than your own self-produced objective understanding.  Particularly when you’ve received negative feedback from those you see as ‘special’. 

We let ‘special’ people into our inner world, attaching to and valuing all they say and do.  Unfortunately we’re at a disadvantage if they do not behave likewise.

We open up our Unconscious to them, trusting they have our best interests at heart. Sometimes what they say and do becomes what we say and do to ourselves - it’s called brainwashing. Mental and emotional marination.

Allowing yourself to be mentally and emotionally marinated by the negative opinions of trusted others means after you’ve left their company you walk away thinking you are the negative environment who imposed yourself on them.  This is often the cause of low self-esteem.

We need to be careful out there - but we also need to be even more careful in here too.  We need to keep control of our self-talk.

In an earlier post I explained the Left Neo-Cortex, the thinking part of us, will not allow the transfer of information confirming a negative self-image.  It remains stuck in the Right Neo-Cortex, keeping us emotionally charged up about it.

This is because a negative self-image means we are not in balance with our environment.  All living organisms have a continuing need to know whether or not they and their environment are in tune - their survival depends on it.

We repeatedly send signals out asking ‘how am I doing here?’ and we need positive signals coming back or we start to question the imbalance.

The true measure of how successful we are in managing our internal world of information is decided by whether or not we, as a whole being, are being accepted or rejected in our external environment (socially and physically) and whether or not we can trust the feedback signals we receive from our own unconscious.

We want to know we are normal.  A person who regards themselves as abnormal, in any way, is by default a more anxious person.

Expression

In the film ‘Castaway’, actor Tom Hanks plays a FedEx employee stranded on an island.

Discovering a washed-up volleyball he paints a face on it, calls it ‘Wilson’ and starts talking to it.  In the character’s mind Wilson acts as a feedback mechanism and he’s so emotionally dependent on Wilson’s company he experiences genuine grief when Wilson gets washed away by the sea later. 

At the start of the film we see Tom’s character concerned mainly with solving logistical and time management problems; he does not come across as a people-orientated man.  As events unfold, however, we see the part of his nature that keeps him going is his emerging need to reconnect with people - he doesn’t just have conversations with Wilson, he also talks to a picture of his wife as if she were present too. 

Have you ever spoken to someone not present?  I have - particularly when clearing emotionally charged memories.  I’ve had full-blown arguments with imaginary people; telling them exactly what I failed to tell them when I had the real-life opportunity. 

I’ve achieved quite a few insights and cleared some very painful emotional responses doing that.  Is this normal?  For me it turned out to be essential.  I know a lot of people who’ve used this kind of approach to resolve their inner demons - including a counsellor friend who cleared an emotional response by beating up her imaginary ex-husband with an imaginary baseball bat. 

And, although this method was usually painful to go through, it allowed me to finally accept it was they, not I, who were creators of the unacceptable environments I had left. 

We need to express, using whatever method best suits us at the time in a safe environment, in order to clear out our emotional baggage and accept our emotional process.  It’s how we work.  Quite often the reason people develop emotional disorders is because they’ve been brainwashed by a hostile environment, created by one or more other people, into repressing this need.

We can express in a variety of ways, but the two main types are Unconsciously and Consciously.

Unconscious Expression

Unconscious expression is all about energy release.

When you manage information in your Unconscious, through your feelings and your image-based Right Neo-Cortex, you are managing vibrational energy.

This energy projects outwards through your physical mannerisms, voice tone and behaviours. Do you have any personal habits you’re only aware of when others point them out?  I have a few.

When I’m concentrating I tend to have a ‘Mr Sad’ introspective face.  People sometimes comment ‘Carl, don’t look so sad’ and I reply ‘I like being sad, it cheers me up’. 

If I’m walking somewhere with an intention of doing something I find meaningful I tend to lean forward a little bit - I’ve had colleagues refer to it as my ‘purposeful walk’. 

As a child I would always have a red nose because if I got excited about an idea I would rub my nose furiously (looking like a rabbit cleaning itself) and I had a lot of ideas.  I still have this tendency but it’s not as bad as it used to be; some folks think it’s due to heavy drinking but it’s not.  Honest. 

So if I’m thinking excitedly about something while walking towards it you’ll see me leaning forward with a sad expression sporting a bright red nose. All driven by unconscious energy.

We express unconsciously through all the things we physically do or don’t do.  If a friend tells you three times they definitely want to do something with you but three times they don’t show up what are they really telling you?  It’s their Unconscious expressing what they really want; overriding what they’re consciously planning. 

If you were to point the difference out between what they’re saying and what they’re doing they might admit, perhaps emotionally, you’re right.  Experience has taught me to watch what people do; rather than what they say - because our Unconscious energy is what decides the future in the long term.

I’ve also learned not to blame or point out these inconsistencies unless absolutely necessary - why bother?  It just causes bad feeling on all sides. 

Let’s say, though, that instead of people pointing my unconscious habits out to me in a playful way, as they usually do, there’s a real atmosphere of social rejection in which I am being punished, maybe being shouted at or ‘sent to Coventry’.  What do I do then?  To escape the pain of social rejection I may decide to repress my unconscious energies.

Repression of Unconscious Expression

We can tune into our unconscious energy and create different routes for releasing this energy as it arises - so if I know I can do this, and want to, I can find ways to change my current automatic physical responses by directing my expression of energy into other activities.  For example, if a situation makes me angry on a regular basis I can take that anger to the gym and get a better workout instead of releasing it directly at the original trigger.

Alternatively, I can decide to use the energy produced to leave; avoiding the trigger creating the anger response in me.  Or I could use the energy aggressively to tackle the trigger head on.

Trouble is, both the retraining and the leaving options take a lot of time and effort.  I’m only going to do these things if I am willing to funnel the energy into achieving a new goal or if the pain caused by staying where I am is intense enough to drive me away.  The third option, tackling the trigger head on, could involve negative consequences outweighing any benefits gained.

The last option, and its the option all people with emotional blocking disorders have taken, is to trap the emotional energy inside my body so I stop expressing outwardly altogether.  I pretend the energy is not there.  I try to fool my environment - and myself - in the hope my environment will give me positive feedback.  This is ‘denial’.  When the positive feedbacks still fails to come and the trigger keeps triggering my unconsciously driven response I am well on the way to being emotionally ill.

In any environment where the act of expression itself is rejected, no matter what form it takes, we are susceptible to looking at our unconsciously produced energies and, after deciding they are unacceptable for whatever reason, start trapping them inside.

Those of us who adopt the blocking option can become skilled at it, masking our external expressions to the point when we finally start to talk about our inner struggle with others who may have been around us for some time they think we’re lying. 

A blocking person can seem completely calm and ‘together’ on the outside while living in hell on the inside.

The trouble with unconscious energy is it doesn’t just disappear because you don’t want to express it.  It keeps attempting to come up for release and finds various alternative routes to try and project out of the body-mind system.

If we look at people suffering with obsessions, for example, their trapped physical energies are trying to escape through various strange images.  The sufferer is consciously forced to see ever-repeating imagery wondering why on Earth they are unable to stop this from happening in their brain - they believe it’s a ‘thinking’ problem.  It’s actually an energy release problem.

Once the energy has been released, simply by feeling the feelings attached to the imagery, the images disappear as a side affect (just a note here to say that although this is a ‘simple’ process it’s still a difficult and painful thing to do). 

If you’ve opted for blocking, so repressing your emotional energies as a solution to deal with a long-term rejecting environment, your first step may need to be leaving the environment generating the need to repress.

Conscious Expression

Emotional outbursts occur when the unconscious, working through the emotional Limbic, overrides the restrictions placed on it by the master conscious controller of you - your Prefrontal Cortex - and projects itself unrestricted onto the outside world.

Outbursts are particularly likely to happen during the period of life when we are dealing with our most important life choices but at the same time lack the self-control mechanism provided by the Prefrontal Cortex because it is not yet fully formed and connected to the rest of our brain and body.  This period occurs between puberty and our mid-twenties. 

Up until then parents and other responsible adults need to act as the controlling mechanism (unfortunately it is also the time when when we are most vulnerable to the influences of irresponsible adults and the manipulative plans of others who can see our naivety).

The command to engage consciously with your unconscious signals, transferring them to your image and thought processing Neo-Cortex, comes from your Prefrontal Cortex.  This part of you looks backwards at the incoming sensory signals like a rower in a rowing boat; deciding which signals it will pay attention to and which it will block.

It is the part of you that forms a judgement about your self-image and decides what directions you should move in to achieve a positive one.  It decides which of your sensory signals will be forwarded on to your Motor Cortex for physical action to be stimulated.

Physical conscious expression involves talking; writing; drawing; and all your other deliberately planned physical actions. Nice, neat and appropriately packaged for you and others to accept and look at (unless you’re in an environment which refuses to accept your consciously controlled expressions and then don’t be surprised when unconscious expression kicks in and overrides it all again!).

What we need to receive, in response to whatever method of conscious expression we use (and we really do NEED this), is acceptance. 

Unfortunately, because you can’t rely on other people to give you this, you need primarily to learn to give it to yourself. 

When I was emotionally ill I distinctly remember the moment when I decided ‘I need to be more selfish - I need to give myself the absolute right, above everything else, to get happy’.

Once you decide to do this for yourself the next step is to stop tolerating non-accepting environments because they will wear your commitment to self-acceptance down.

Achieving Total Self Acceptance

I like dealing with people who have achieved total self acceptance because:

• they are congruent - what they consciously and unconsciously express match up; as a result of this …
• they don’t tell me what they think I want to hear; so they don’t fool or manipulate me and I can decide quickly whether or not I should invest in developing a common positive-feedback environment with them and if I don’t …
• neither of us feels bad about that - in fact we simply reaffirm our individuality and our right to be who we are.  There is nothing wrong with not being suited to someone else or deciding not to share an environment of some form with them if you are completely unsuited.

Here’s a personal life example: an attractive woman I’ve known for about 15 minutes in total approaches me and asks me to take her back to my place in order to have sex.  I’m taken aback by the direct nature of her approach and I suspect she uses this approach a lot and often gets the results she’s looking for.  I don’t do this kind of casual thing myself so I just laugh it off.

She comes back to me a few weeks later, still interested, and asks me what I look for in a woman.  I tell her ‘honesty - if a woman is honest with me that allows me to make a valid decision about whether or not I should get involved with her and I can’t complain if it turns out later she is exactly the kind of person she said she was’.

So this lady says to me ‘well, I’ll tell you honestly if you get involved with me you’ll find I’m not the kind of woman who sticks to one man and you’d have to accept I see other men for sex too’.

I thanked her for her honesty - and I respected her for it and still do (no, I didn’t get involved). 

She was self-accepting of who she really was and so was I.  When it comes to identifying what a ‘positive feedback environment’ looks like it doesn’t mean you need others to conform to your idea of who they should be.  It means you’re allowed to be who you are.

Choosing and Creating Positive Feedback Environments

I had to get more selfish in order to heal from my emotional disorders.  I had to be willing to end relationships I had long-term emotional commitments to because the others involved had got used to treating me without respect and as though there was something ‘wrong’ with me.

The only thing wrong with me was that I had put up with years of being treated as though there was something wrong with me!  I had come to believe it myself - and it had affected me at the unconscious level.

If you are coming out with expressions such as ‘I need to toughen up’; ‘I’m too soft’; ‘I shouldn’t be letting these things get to me’ - it means you’re forcing yourself to stay in environments you’re unconsciously absorbing negative signals in and you’re trying to pretend otherwise.

We need to live in environments that support our individuality as a person; forget all the gender based prejudices; the shaming tactics and the social politics of it all.  We are individuals foremost.  There is no ‘should be’ when it comes to who we are.

If you are someone who has developed an emotional disorder as a result of not being allowed to express yourself in a rejecting environment it means your body is overcharged with emotional information and the environment you were in has convinced you your feelings are abnormal and you should not complete your own information cycles.

Normalisation

We need to express and gain acceptance so that we can normalise our experiences; name them mentally and let them go.

Imagine you’re listening to a five year old child talking to their teddy bear and when it comes to their doing the voice of the teddy talking back to them you hear them speak, in a deep teddy bear voice: ‘you’re not normal - I think you should see a psychiatrist. You’re not good enough to be playing with the likes of me; I think it’s you who should be locked up a toy box somewhere, not me’.

Would you think that strange?  That’s the kind of self-talk people with anxiety disorders are inflicting on themselves.  They need to find environments in which they can consciously express their unconscious world.  They need to do this so they can bring out and ‘normalise’ their inner experiences as they finally complete their internal information cycles.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 10) - Focusing on The Limbic

The Limbic is where your most intense negative emotional responses are attached to sensory stimuli.

Those sensory stimuli can include images, sounds, smells and, strangely enough, the physical sensations of emotional responses themselves.

Positioned close to the middle of your brain the Limbic has evolved from what used to be the area used for detecting smell and avoiding suffocation. It sits below the Thalamus, the brain’s signal routing system.

Whenever your Thalamus sends a sensory signal straight to the Limbic, via what is called the ‘short route’, you experience an immediate full-body emotional response.  Thinking doesn’t get a chance to directly intervene in the reaction - it happens and your conscious is informed afterwards.

We create and maintain anger, anxiety and other similar negative responses in the Limbic.

Other emotional brain parts, such as the pleasure/reward system (based in the medial forebrain bundle) and the disgust response (managed in the insular cortex) also affect us but, if you can learn to work with the Limbic in reducing negative response levels, you can use the same approach to improve how other emotional brain areas perform for you as well.

The main parts of the Limbic we want to focus on when thinking about emotional healing are the Hippocampus and the Amygdala (there are two of each sitting symmetrically alongside each other below the Thalamus, so they’re sometimes called the Hippocampi and the Amygdalae).

The Hippocampus

The Hippocampus is our environmental and territorial mapping system.

Shaped a bit like a runner bean pod it creates cellular maps using incoming sensory signal information. These maps are so accurate scientists using a brain scanner can identify where test subjects are in a computer maze game by looking only at the live scans of their Hippocampus.

Journeys are mapped here - real and virtual - in specific detail.  The Hippocampus stores its maps in layers.  When we reflect on memories of a previous journey or repeat a real-life external journey we begin accessing these layered maps.

As soon as you enter unfamiliar territory the Hippocampus starts the map-building process and another layer is created.

If you have an intense negative emotional experience in an environment the Hippocampus will map where that occurred in the territory and will also map other environmental details present at the time of the experience.

An entire map can switch from feeling ‘safe’ to feeling ‘dangerous’ instantly due to one negative event occurring when you are in that map - for example if you have an argument with a colleague or are abused in some way on the way to work by a passer-by it can take several days for the Hippocampus to retrain itself to see those places as safe again.

Anticipatory Fear

Once a negative experience has been mapped in a particular territory or situation your Hippocampus will trigger anticipatory signals preparing you for fight or flight when that territory or situation appears to be approaching.  The closer you get to the specific triggering point in the map the more intense the emotional response becomes.

If your general approach to this process is to change your route to avoid the trigger (for example you change your job to avoid a colleague) the Hippocampus not only maintains the original map but goes on to trigger the same avoidant responses in new situations where the sensory signals only vaguely resemble the original.

Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there.  Your entire Unconscious watches the direction you take in regards to the energised map in question and if you repeatedly avoid facing it, as well as other things vaguely reminding you of it, the map spreads, and you now start developing full-blown emotional responses to those vague reminders as well.

The whole process is designed not just to protect you when you find yourself directly in the presence of the original fear-triggering situation, but prevent you entering its presence in the first place.

A single map of this nature can affect your whole body-mind and stimulates beliefs that you cannot cope - both with the original situation and now with the steps leading up to the situation.

Secondary Emotional Response Signals

Most fear-inducing things in life can be avoided.  Having these fears is not a problem because we don’t come into contact with the triggers on a regular basis.  A fear of lions; a fear of bungee jumping; a fear of sitting in a bath full of venomous snakes; a fear of looking foolish in front of others at an important social gathering we have been asked to speak at; a fear of slipping on ice this year because last year we slipped over and broke our hip.  These are all natural fears to have.

We could overcome them if we really wanted to - and some people do and then like to show off about it.

Difficulties arise for us when we have to come into contact with these triggering situations on a regular basis, but have not yet removed the natural fear response attached to them.  Coming into contact with them means we now have an ‘emotional problem’ to deal with.

Things get even more difficult if, when we keep coming into regular contact with these things, we refuse to internally complete the emotional response process needed to adjust and become comfortable again.

We are now vulnerable to producing secondary emotional responses; particularly if we are being socially rejected by others (or believe we are) because of our fear or if we negatively criticise our own emotions.

Secondary emotional responses are produced with the intention of removing or reducing the affects of primary emotional responses when we believe our own primary response is wrong or abnormal.

Produced with the intention of removing the symptoms of fear, or whatever other negative emotion is involved, the actual result is to trap the emotional response and then magnify and pressure-cook it.

And, because Secondary responses are usually applied using the same type of emotional response as the Primary, we cannot ‘see’ what we have just done.  There’s no visible join - we’re left mystified as to why the response has become so unbelievably, overwhelmingly intense.  We create an ever-repeating emotional loop with both the Primary and Secondary responses triggering and fighting each other.

Panic attacks are the result of a fear of fear; phobias are a fear of feeling fear in the presence of an object or situation; rage attacks and depression are caused by anger at having to feel anger or grief, sadness or shame; obsessions are caused by a fear of an intense disgust response.

The Hippocampus Maps Primary Emotional Responses When a Secondary Response is Produced

When we produce a Secondary emotional response the Hippocampus identifies the ‘symptoms’ of emotional responses themselves as dangerous.  The strange thoughts and not-usually-felt feelings are themselves identified as things to be avoided or fought.

The Hippocampus now starts building organic maps in regards to your own, allegedly dangerous, responses.  You create layers designed to defend against these internal emotional layers and their behavioural affects, building what I call ‘lands of the mind’; in the same way it builds maps of the external world.

Your own emotional system becomes the threat your emotional system wants to avoid.

When you decide to compel yourself to start accepting your own feelings again you have to take an actual journey inwards, in just the same way you would if the threat were mapped as an external threat.  The journey is long; fraught with multiple emotional responses designed to warn you of the hidden dangers - and every physical sensation looks like a potential killer.

The Argument Between Reality versus Imagination

One of the arguments you may come up against, if you have an emotional disorder and want to remove it, is that this inner journey is an imaginary thing and so therefore not ‘real’.

We have a tendency to think of things outside of ourselves as being ‘real’; therefore genuinely existing and worthy of attention; but things happening mentally and emotionally inside of us as somehow ‘false’, so not as valid.  We tell ourselves we should maybe ignore these inner parts of ourselves most of the time.  This is, to a great extent, a socially programmed illusion designed to make us more useful to others.

The truth is, whether you think you are managing external or internal reality, it is all the same internal process.  You are not, in reality, capable of fully experiencing or controlling external reality.  Internal reality is your only reality.

Everything is an internal adjustment process.  Whether you approach an apparently ‘external reality’, as mapped by your Hippocampus, or what you see as an ‘internal unreality’, it is the same internal mapping system you are travelling through and reacting to - not the actual environment.  You are consciously approaching a place in your own brain.  It is all real; it all operates by the same rules.

We project this internal, emotionally charged map onto the external world and react to it as if it were ‘real’, until we learn to retrain those internal maps telling us the threat does not really exist -and all of this happens only inside of us.

This is why you can remove a phobia or an obsession, or any other trapped emotional response, without having to revisit the actual original external fear-creating situation that caused you to map it in the first place.

The whole thing is real, and valid, fully mapped, inside your own Limbic brain.

Projection

Ever had others project their currently stuck internal maps on to you when they react to you as if you did or said something you did not actually do or say?  I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me about 4 or 5 times where the consequences seemed to go on for long periods before dying a natural social death.

If you’re aware of the nature of ‘projection’; and care about how it affects you and others, you can reduce how much you do it to others and avoid the affects it has on you when others project their trapped emotional maps in your direction.

It’s not just individuals that do it to each other either - whole groups, even nations, can remain stuck in frozen prejudice - treating others as if something that happened once, decades ago, is still happening today.

The responsibility for changing these internal maps lies solely with the person or group doing the projecting.  The reason we project is because we have not fully travelled the journey mapped in our own Hippocampus - we have not completed the emotional information cycle and trained our Limbic to see the original threat no longer exists - perhaps it never did.

Now let’s take a look at the almond-sized brain part that sits at the end of the Hippocampus.  The part of us where the most intense, most painful emotions we are capable of producing are generated.

The Amygdala

While the Hippocampus maps environments surrounding specific threats, the Amygdala stores imagery and other sensory stimuli of the specific threats at the centre of the overall reaction.  The most intense emotional responses you are capable of producing are attached to the sensory constructs mapped here.

It’s as if you travel along a corridor-like map in the Hippocampus in order to reach the fear inducing signals stored in the Amygdala at journey’s end.

The Amygdala operates as a ‘negative sensory signal register’.  It stores sensory lists of all the things you have an intense negative response to.

People; objects; sensations; shapes; sounds.  Anything can be registered here.  These things will normally appear perfectly harmless to you - unless they are being managed in the Amygdala.

As you move consciously towards the sensory stimuli being managed here you may get a sense of your being suffocated by the intensity of the emotional response attached.  Latest scientific research tells us this is exactly what the amygdala responds most strongly to - a sense of suffocation.  The reaction is designed to kick in when a predator has you by the throat.

When you feel overwhelmed by an emotional response, as it closes down your ability to think clearly while filling your mind with imagery attached to intense unwanted physical symptoms, it can be easy to see how this experience itself can mimic suffocation, convincing the Amygdala to list the emotions themselves as a suffocating, life-threatening experience.

Completing Emotional Information Cycles in the Limbic

Apart from the emotional cycles related to bonding and reproduction, which can keep recharging and discharging for a lifetime, the emotional process in the Limbic is designed to produce singular negative responses which can be permanently discharged and removed.

All of your negative emotional responses; primary or secondary, are designed to be discharged after serving their purpose.

If you have an emotional blocking problem, in which you are producing a Secondary emotional response to a Primary, it will take some time and effort to achieve emotional freedom, but it can be done.

When your Limbic is given the job of managing a specific set of sensory signals it acts like a spark plug to the rest of the body and brain, causing the release of hormones containing those molecules known as ‘ligands’ throughout the body-mind.  These molecules attach to your various body and brain parts causing them to become vibrationally activated - that is, producing energy intended to drive physical action - the fight, flight or freeze responses.

If you have not yet faced up to the threat (the original stimulating trigger at which the emotional charge is targeted) your body remains in a state of charged alertness - full of high energy emotional information signals.  Ready for action - tense.

Full discharge only occurs when you have made the journey through the Hippocampus maps towards the Amygdala registry where the image and other related sensory signals are stored.  You will know when you’re getting closer to full discharge because the painful negative emotional affects get stronger and stronger.  When your conscious mind arrives at the triggering sensory signal - perceived as being external or internal - that’s when you are at full emotional discharge.

This is how it works when you use the systematic desensitisation approach (exposure therapy) method, anyway.  This is the method I used and which some other therapies use.  There are other methods, such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which can be used to remove the feelings in a more gently way.

Emotional Acceptance

I’ve written elsewhere on the blog about the process of emotional acceptance and I’ve put a link to an article about it at the end of this post.  Achieving emotional acceptance is concerned with training your thinking brain to surrender to the full emotional process by bringing a stop to how you think your emotional process should work and learning how it actually does work - and accepting just how overwhelmingly powerful it can seem at times - yet still be safe.

When you mentally deny an emotional response the right to discharge the signals keep driving up from the body as though to say ‘eh, we’re still here!  You’ve got to do something!’.  If the Prefrontal Cortex - the part of you watching you, decides to block release of these energy signals they stay active. Your body remains tensed and ready and emotionally energised and it keeps telling your upper brain about it.

If your thinking decides to try and block the signals using Secondary emotional responses it intensifies the situation even further.

So the answer to how we allow the Limbic to complete its information cycle so we can get rid of our emotional problems is really simple. We reverse what we are currently doing and start to discharge the energy attached to the sensory signals through the process of feeling our feelings.

Feelings attached to individual sensory constructs, not thoughts, and whether or not you move consciously towards or away from them, is the language of your Limbic and the rest of your Unconscious below it.

You accept an emotional response by moving towards it.  This allows the Limbic to complete its responsibility in regards to the information it contains - and from there, following discharge of the emotional energy, the energy-stripped informational content of the experience is passed up as imagery into the Right Neo-Cortex then transferred into thoughts in the Left Neo-Cortex.

Regards - Carl

Article: The Three Elements of Emotional Acceptance

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 9) - Information Location and Control

What I’m going to focus on here is the idea you manage the same information using different parts of your brain and body and how the information affects you depends on which part of you is doing the managing of the information; rather than the nature of the information itself.

Let me put it this way: you usually process television news with your Left Neo-Cortex - your thinking brain - with some of the information leaking over to your emotional brain.  This means you have, on the whole, an objective viewpoint and you are watching the news from an outsider’s view.

If you had to process the same information using only your Limbic Brain - and this was sending signals to your image brain - your Right Neo-Cortex - you would be having very powerful emotional responses to what you saw and might never watch the news again.  The Right Neo-Cortex, working with your Limbic Brain, is where you manage your subjective viewpoints - when the same information is being managed here you are in the news.

Same information, but managed by a different part of you.

A person with an emotional disorder is someone stuck in subjective viewpoint even though their personal ‘news’ may have happened and in reality finished 30 years ago.  They’re still experiencing the sensations first hand from within the experience with the sensory signals being repeatedly sent to the Right Neo-Cortex for processing but being blocked.

They are sent there by the Thalamus.  Whenever sensory information is produced, either internally or externally, the Thalamus is the brain part deciding which part of you will receive those signals. 

The Thalami (because there are two of them) are a pair of oval structures sitting between your upper Neo-Cortex and the lower Limbic Brain and they send incoming sensory signals either upwards through what’s called the ‘long route’ or downwards to your emotion-processing Limbic  Brain through what’s called the ‘short route’.

The Thalamus Decides

The Thalamus is home to your automated prejudice and bias processes.

Although prejudice and bias may be frowned on socially, the truth is we are automatically designed to regard anything new and unfamiliar as potentially threatening until we have learned it is actually safe and then integrated knowledge about it into the rest of our thinking mind.  Integration can be a time consuming long-route process (this is certainly the case when working with an emotional blocking disorder).

We are, by default, designed to pay attention to negative information first, whether generated externally or internally, because it is this type of information that keeps us alive.  This is why most people glue their eyeballs to ‘negative news’ on the television more often than to nice self-improvement programmes.

Broadcasters are using what marketers call the ‘rubber chicken-neck affect’ of our negative bias process to get our attention and then we thank them for keeping us ‘informed’.  Unfortunately the good news, of which there is an abundant supply, doesn’t grab our automatic attention so easily so we have to deliberately focus on it through the practice of ‘gratitude’.

The Thalamus operates a referencing and routing system whereby it automatically feeds fresh information coming in to where that particular type of information is currently being managed.

If you currently manage sensory information of a certain type using mainly your Left Neo-Cortex the information is sent quickly through the long route and you receive the information as ‘thoughts’ which you associate with various other previously stored thought-based memories.

If you currently manage fresh incoming information of a certain type using mainly your Right Neo-Cortex this means you focus on such things as imagery and sound tones, not so much with thoughts, and in addition this also usually means there is a more emotional component to the way you handle the information. 

Picture a sunny holiday beach and having your feet massaged - thoughts or feelings and images?

You may still involve your thinking in resolving any problems associated with the information, but you also have to deal with an emotional response.  This means having to feel your feelings until they have been released while at the same time controlling your thinking in such a way it allows the emotional experience to pass safely through without you forming strong negative judgements about it (you have to stop yourself feeling bad about feeling bad or it turns into a vicious cycle).

If you currently manage fresh incoming information of a certain type using mainly your Limbic system the information is sent quickly down the short route and you have an extremely powerful emotional response affecting your entire brain and body - whether you consciously want to have the response or not. 

Short-route responses always produce intense emotional reactions.  For those of us suffering with emotional disorders this is a frustrating part of our organic design.  Your body reacts, your thinking brain is overwhelmed and then your mystified Pre-frontal Cortex, the part of you that watches yourself, cannot understand why you cannot prevent the response (unless you’ve been reading this!).

Avoiding Sensory Information Overwhelm

Many times a day Your Thalamus receives much more sensory information than your brain can cope with so it sends it into your body.

Your Conscious brain can only work with 4 to 11 bits of information per second with its optimum level  being at about 7 bits.

The senses feeding information into the Thalamus present it with a potential 2 million bits of information per second.  For this reason one of the main jobs of the brain is to reduce the amount of information getting through to the Conscious.

External sensory information entering the Thalamus is filtered allowing the Conscious and the Limbic Brain to focus on things they are currently looking for.  Internal sensory information, including emotional information, is filtered or resisted using the Reticular Formation, a structure in your brain stem.

All this excess unprocessed information does not just disappear of its own accord.  It stores in your body.

Your body acts as a dumping ground for all the as yet unsorted and repressed sensory information.  Focus on any memory and your body starts providing you with information on the environment you were in; how you felt; who else was there; what the weather was like and so on.  You can feel this information as it comes up.

If you feel inexplicably tense about something about the past and don’t know why it’s because experiential memories - energetic ‘ligand’ information - is stored in your body and needs processing.  

The Same Information is Scattered Throughout Your Brain and Body 

Every cell in your body is covered in millions of floating keyhole-like ‘receptors’.  Every single cell, regardless of what type of cell it is.  The receptors are different in type, according to the body part they occupy.  Rather than the cells of each body part having just one receptor type they have thousands of types with certain types being dominant.

What these keyhole receptors receive are key-like ‘ligands’.  Ligands are molecules containing instructions on how the cells should behave once they have attached to the receptors.  When a ligand locks to a receptor it transmits instructions into a cell body and the cell reacts.

All thoughts, feelings and physical responses are produced as a result of a ligand locking on to a receptor.  After the instructions have been carried out the ligand releases and moves away from the cell.

Ligands are transported in the chemical carriers known as ‘neurotransmitters’, ‘hormones’ and ‘peptides’.  This is our internal chemical information transfer system.

Our Electrical and Chemical Communication Systems

Some believe all genuine information - information of value in managing ourselves - is transmitted only through the body’s electrical communication system - the brain and nervous system.  This process uses a mechanism called ‘synaptic transition’. 

Electrical signals travelling along neurones in our brain come to the neurone end point and meet a tiny synaptic gap. The signal is transferred across the gap by chemicals (containing ligands) to the receiving neurone next in line and the electrical message continues on its path.

The electrical approach tells us everything we think is managed in the brain and the conclusion is if we focus on ‘positive thinking’ we can eventually bring our emotional world under control.

I can tell you without a shadow of doubt this doesn’t work for people struggling to remove an emotional block. 

Scientists tell us the true picture is different; there is much more going on than the electrical model alone.  Our main communication system is chemical.

Those gaps between our transmitting and receiving neurones are not so tiny.  In fact, many are inches apart from each other and not directly in line which means, in relative size terms of how far we used to think those thought-carrying chemicals travelled, is a massive change in distance and direction. 

We don’t just send these signals from single neurone to single neurone - we flood our brain with them.  A single signal sent out by one neurone travels to many others at the same time. 

In fact on average 98% of what our neurones receive comes from a chemically transported ‘ligand soup’ saturating our brain; only 2% comes from the nearest transmitting neurone.

The electrical system is there - but it’s operating in a ligand bath.

That’s why a single emotionally charged issue gets to dominate our minds regardless of what we’d like to think about.  We are flooded with an issue for as long as we are emotional about it.  Our brain isn’t being flooded with an electrical signal - it is being flooded with a chemical signal causing an electrical signal whenever a ligand attaches to any of our many neurone receptors.

The Information is Everywhere in Your Body

We used to think the blood-brain barrier separated these ligand-carrying chemicals into two types - ‘neurotransmitter’ ligands in our brain and ‘hormone’ ligands in our bodies. 

But this turns out to be untrue - the blood-brain barrier doesn’t keep them apart and the body carries the same neurotransmitters your brain does - even your immune system contains them.

Which means the chemicals containing ligands that carry thoughts across your brain synapses are also the same as those carrying thoughts around your body and it works the other way around too.  Feelings and thoughts are interchangeable according to where the information is being managed from.

What a very strange concept that is, eh?  Not so strange if you acknowledge that how you feel in your body dominates how you think until those feelings are released and the thoughts produced as ‘insights’ are then stored and forgotten.

Your body thinks.  It does not think in the same way your brain parts do but it acts as a memory store and when it stores experiential memory in the form of vibrational energy - created by ligands connecting to receptors in your body’s cells - it keeps reminding you those memories need processing.

Drawing the Information Together

Our body, every living bit of it, is information and our Conscious needs to learn how to draw it together and work with it if it is going to live in a happy overall ‘body-mind’. 

Scientists who work in the world of ligands and receptors tell us that by releasing a chemical signal into our blood we can draw ligands in towards different brain and body part receptors. 

What if, when we deliberately open up to our feelings, we send those attracting signals out and ligands containing the information we want to take a closer look at are physically drawn up into the brain? 

The information contained in these ligands, those we ‘think’ with, is the same information we ‘feel’ with when the ligands are stored in our body or being worked with in our other brain parts.

It’s my experience, and that of many others I have spoken to, the process has to follow a specific route - the Emotional Information Cycle.

Scientists used to say specific brain and body parts did specific things - so for example the Limbic Brain is also called the ‘Emotional Brain’ because all negative feelings were believed to be produced and contained within that small area - but now the view is more fuzzy. 

The information itself is scattered throughout your brain and body but how you experience the information depends on which part of you the Thalamus directs the information to for management of the information. 

How Do We Transfer Responsibility and Control of the Information from the Emotional Brain to the Thinking Brain?

Allow the part currently controlling the information to complete its role in the cycle. 

In the case of an emotional blocking disorder this means consciously forcing the cycle to complete.

Unconsciously you are already allowing all those pieces of information you are not blocking, including most or your emotional responses, to be processed by the cycle with little conscious awareness this is happening. 

Blocked emotional responses, however, need direct conscious action because you at some point sent conscious instructions to your Unconscious to stop the signals.  If you have repressed emotional energy trapped in your body you need first to start tuning into your feelings and set aside time to ‘go in’ to them.

For someone with an emotional disorder, such as a phobia or an obsession, this itself can be an overwhelming, mentally debilitating phase lasting hours, days and months, even when working daily to achieve transfer.

With these conditions you are not simply going into some negative feelings - you are turning the Unconscious in on itself - all anxiety disorders are caused by ‘Secondary Emotional Responses’; emotional responses designed to defend against Primary Emotional Responses.

These Secondary Responses are held in place by powerful Unconscious beliefs that need to faced, challenged and changed by your Unconscious seeing repeatedly that you can experience these intense energies and remain alive.

By ‘feeling’ the body transfers information, at the same time as releasing vibrational energy from the body’s cells, up into the Limbic Brain and the Right Neo-Cortex where it presents as images.  The Left Neo-Cortex makes sense of the images, translates them into words and the cycle completes once all the driving energy has left the body.

Shifting from Automatic Emotional Response to Automatic Thinking Response - and then Forgetting

The Thalamus switches the direction in which it sends fresh incoming information once it has seen the emotional energy cycle has completed in regards to the particular type of information concerned and the information is being processed by your thinking brain.

Discharging the emotional energy attached to negative images and thoughts turns them into bland thoughts which are managed mostly by the Left Neo-Cortex.

Now, when the signals arrive in the emotionless Left Neo-Cortex, you get asked if you want to produce an emotional response by sending the signals to your Limbic instead and you actually get to say no.  You can resist the previously automatic habit of sending the information to the emotional brain purely using thought and, finding you are now able to do this you don’t get emotional about the threat of getting emotional and so don’t produce secondary emotional symptoms.

Given the trouble you’ve gone to get the Thalamus to change the direction it sends these signals in its unlikely you’ll agree to hand the information back to the Limbic for management - but if this happens anyway and you produce another unwanted emotional response it means you simply have some more emotional energy to discharge through feeling before the transfer becomes permanent.

If the emotional energy attached to the information or issue has not been fully discharged you will still feel an ‘internal pull’ created by the Limbic which means either it has not yet completed its role in regards to this particular information or you have accessed another emotional layer that needs discharging (I write about emotional layering elsewhere).

If it’s quite a low level ‘pull’ you can pretend you didn’t notice it but personally I choose to schedule time to discharge all emotional energy.

Doing this, even with the lowest level intensity of emotional responses, allows you to complete an emotional cycle and ‘forget’ it - which means you store it away in long term memory unless required later. 

While it is very unlikely you will ever require the issue at the centre of the emotional blocking disorder later, usually because the issue itself no longer exists in reality, what you do want to remember is the process.

It is this process and using it as your automatic approach whenever you experience intense emotions that gets you back to being unconditionally happy as quickly as possible.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 8) - Learning to Love Your Right Neo-Cortex

Do you have a love-hate relationship with your Right Neo-Cortex?

I do - and so do most people who have had emotional disorders.  Hating your Right Neo-Cortex too much can lead to emotional illness.  It’s the part of your brain that processes negative emotional responses attached to negative types of imagery.

If you refuse to accept the need for working with negative thoughts and imagery you develop emotional blocking, which means you are at war with your Right Neo-Cortex - even though it is a part of you.  Blocking begins the moment you decide you are unwilling to feel your negative feelings and turn that unwillingness into a semi-permanent habit.  At this point your Prefrontal Cortex - the part of you that watches yourself - instructs the rest of your brain to restrain the signals coming through. 

Those signals don’t go away - they remain trapped in your body trying to gain release through the work needing to be done in your Right Neo-Cortex.  They keep bothering you until you start surrendering to the process again.

There was a time in my early twenties when I got so sick of my own intense emotions I began to hate and self-criticise them.  I reduced the ability of my Right Neo-Cortex to process the information coming through.  I mistrusted what it told me.  We are all capable of doing this without realising what it is we are setting ourselves up for.

It took me over 20 years later, after leaving two abusive relationships, to start opening up to my Right Neo-Cortex again. 

Opening up to your Right Neo-Cortex involves deliberately allowing the signals travelling through it to reach their goal - your Conscious Mind - and allowing what comes through to sometimes restructure your view of reality.

That’s what your Right Neo-Cortex is - it’s your ‘view of reality changer’.  You have to consciously explore it in order to figure out what reality for you is. 

In the short term I hate exploring the information provided by this part of my brain because the work is:

• painful
• slow
• tiring
• negatively informative
• illogical
• externally unrewarding.

That’s just how I see it in the short term.  In the long-term, however, I regard the work as needing to be done in the same way we need to do housework.   Despite the resentment and resistance that seems to always come up for a short period - which can sometimes mean for several days before healing begins - I know for a fact that on the other side of the work lies greater internal happiness and the revealing of information supporting more valid life choices.

I am also grateful for my Right Neo-Cortex because without having learned how it does what it does I would have remained emotionally ill for the rest of my life.  It isn’t the ideal way I’d like my emotional system to work, but at least it works.

It’s a bit like going to the gym - you don’t go to the gym to be in the gym, you go for the way it helps you deal better with the physical stresses of normal everyday life outside of the gym.

At the gym you work with weights at intensities above those you’d normally expect to handle and as a result build up greater strength and resistance to injury when carrying out normal activities or when dealing with physical emergencies. 

When working with emotional intensities strong enough to clear emotional blocks you get mentally tougher; you develop self understanding and discipline; you become more confident and eventually destroy those negative opinions about your organic self that led to blocking in the first place.

When I find myself needing to do work in my Right Neo-Cortex I’ll reluctantly set aside some time and space to enter my ‘emotional gym’.

How reluctant and resistant I am depends on the variables in that bulleted list of negatives I’ve given above.  Just because I know what I need to do, and that I’ll feel much better after I’ve done it, doesn’t mean I enjoy the doing!

Painful - Why is the Negative Emotional Process Painful?

Negative emotional signals travelling through the body use the same electrical and chemical communication system our physical pain signals do.

The same system telling you something is burning your skin or making you vomit also tells you when you’re enraged or afraid or grieving - and then triggers similar symptoms.  Both convey the same message: something important to you is under attack and you need to protect it now. 

Your negative emotions are warning signals designed to mimic physical damage with the intention of moving you away or towards something in order to avoid actual damage.

However, unlike a physical response, in which the pain is directly localised to the physical area being injured so we can automatically withdraw that part, a painful emotional response can be signalled everywhere throughout the body; affecting both our major organs and the way our brain operates; including the way we think; and for prolonged periods of time.

This is why our brain can easily make the mistake of thinking emotional pain itself has the same consequences as physical pain; leading to the development of beliefs such as ‘If I feel my painful feelings they will kill me’.  It actually works the opposite way. 

We can tolerate and release far more emotional pain than we can physical pain without it doing us actual harm.  Unfortunately if we avoid our emotional pain it leaves us ‘built up’ with trapped emotional energy and it is this trapped emotional energy that leads to psychosomatic illnesses.  It is not the painful releasing of emotional energy that causes illness but the holding onto it - in this regard emotional pain works in the opposite way to physical pain so it pays to teach yourself to focus on the difference.

Training Yourself to Accept the Pain of Emotional Release

A part of your brain called the Periaqueductal Grey (‘the PAG’ for short) operates as your pain threshold recording and management system.  The job of the PAG is to tell you what risks you can tolerate in order to bring about growth while avoiding death or permanent injury.

If you were to use exposure therapy as your emotional healing technique this would mean you intended to retrain your PAG as a part of the process.  The PAG eventually learns you can be immobilised physically and mentally by emotional pain, and for long periods of time, yet still survive and fully recover.  Not so with physical pain.

I remember going to a gym a few years ago with a guy who did an exercise we called ‘Jesus Christ’s’ using dumbbells - we called it that partly because the exercise involved a crucifixion pose and partly because you would quickly get to the point you wanted to blaspheme.  It got painful quick.

My friend always went further than I did - I would train my shoulders to muscular numbness then stop with him shouting ‘one more!’ in my ears; but he would always go beyond that point.  Then one day he stopped going.  He’d injured himself.  I’d seen a few weight training fans injure themselves the same way, including three young men who caused permanent damage to their lower spines trying to outdo each other on a lateral pull-down machine.  They told me their doctors had all told them they should never use that machine again.

Our PAG learn snot just from our own experiences but from those of others too.  It’s the job of your individual PAG to tell you what you can and can’t do physically as an individual.

But if it makes the mistake of thinking emotional pain operates by the same rules as physical pain the PAG stops you from doing the work necessary in the Right Neo-Cortex to remove that pain - and the pain remains in place (albeit at a lower level of intensity)!

Slow

You can un-think a thought in seconds but emotional signal work, in which you feel out the energy attached to an image in order to stop it bothering you, can take hours or even days. 

Where you have multiple emotional responses layered in your brain and body needing release it can take several years - in my case it took me about 5 years of daily work to get in touch with the original triggering emotional responses that caused my illness and by the time I got there I had removed 27 obsessions and 14 phobias, plus a few other emotional blocks, along the way.  Good training.

I remember the first obsession - it took me 3 months of daily work to remove because I had severe panic attacks every time I tried - I got rid of the panic attacks purely by feeling them at full intensity every day for those 3 months.  Really slow and painful stuff. 

I removed my first obsession within a couple of days once the panic attacks had reduced.  A few months later I cleared one of my last obsessions in 30 minutes flat. 

When you work in your Right Neo-Cortex you’re working slowly with lots of intense information and a lot of this information is being drawn up from your body.  That’s another good reason we resist working with it - but it’s where the path to emotional happiness is found.  How much you want to be happy decides how committed you are to getting friendly with your Right Neo-Cortex again over a long period of time.

Tiring

Your Right Neo-Cortex works even when the rest of you is asleep and if you’ve directed it to work on an intense emotional response be prepared not to get too much sleep because it may keep waking you up every time it accesses a new emotional layer. 

I’d sometimes wake in the middle of a panic attack not knowing how it had been triggered but I understood the process - my Unconscious, which is what your Right Neo-Cortex has direct access to, was working full throttle on my emotional blocks even while I was consciously unaware of it.

In addition, your Conscious Mind is only capable of working with 4 to 11 pieces of information at any one time and during emotional release your brain is flooded with millions of signals - more than it can possibly deal with ‘logically’ which causes mental overwhelm.

Prepare to be really tired when working in your Right Neo-Cortex. 

Negatively Informative

Your Right Neo-Cortex is the brain part through which sensory signals tell you when all that glitters is not gold.

It tells you when a ‘psychological contract’ has been broken; when people are lying or when the social atmosphere is, in some subtle way, abusive or shaming or operating against your best interest.  It tells you when you don’t fit in with certain types of company or behaviour.  It tells you when you’re not doing something you really enjoy (it also tells you what you should be doing but aren’t for some ‘logical’ reason, by the way).

It is the ‘gut instinct’ and ‘intuition’ interpreter (and is in fact directly linked to your gut area).  It tells you things you don’t want to know. 

Your Left Neo-Cortex, your positive-minded planning brain, may be so outraged and upset by the messages coming through your Right Neo-Cortex it refuses to accept the message as real.  It may demand word-based evidence to prove whether the signals in your Right Neo-Cortex are true - so for example it may drive you to try and get another person to ‘tell’ you the truth in words about how they intend to treat you badly rather than allow you to make your own choices based on how you feel about they are treating you in reality.

Your Left may argue the case as to why you should refuse to listen to those feelings talking to you through your Right Neo-Cortex, on the basis of logical information stored in regards to past interpretations.  You’ll think of responsibilities you must meet; dreams you’ve been working towards; financial and other disasters that could occur for you, and cared-for others, should you accept this new information.

I did this for a very long time.  I thought of many good logical reasons I should remain stuck in painful social relationships and why I should ignore the painful signals telling me to leave them.  I no longer do this - I listen to my Right Neo-Cortex.  I watch behavioural patterns; I trust my senses; I make choices based on my feelings alone.

Illogical - Oh No It’s Not!

Your Right Neo-Cortex, linked as it is to your emotional energy release process, is logical in its own right.  Your Right Neo-Cortex communicates only with your internal Unconscious.  Your internal Unconscious is a moving universe of interactions.  It is MASSIVE.  That doesn’t mean it’s stupid.

Your Left Neo-Cortex communicates directly with the external world.  It’s job is to match your thinking up to the thinking of others in ‘external logic harmony’.  The reason my Left Neo-Cortex is allowing me to type this for you to read is because it believes itself able to produce an externally logical structure, with names and descriptions, you will be able to accept and understand.

The logic of the Left Neo-Cortex and the logic of the Right Neo-Cortex are two entirely separate worlds.  The Right Neo-Cortex never criticises the Left Neo-Cortex - it just screams at it for acceptance.

As long as the Left Neo-Cortex regards the Right as stupid and illogical it will refuse to allow the Right to pass on information to the outside world or complete an emotional information cycle.  Sharing your inner experience with the outside world through ‘expression of the self’ is an important part of emotional self-acceptance.

The Left Neo-Cortex is made biased against the Right Neo-Cortex through external social programming.  Change your social programming by changing what you read, what you tell yourself and choose your social circles that support what you tell yourself and that illogical Right Neo-Cortex opens up a whole new world.

Your Right Neo-Cortex is much more logical than your Left will ever be.  Your Left Neo-Cortex decides what to think when you’re in a certain place.  Your Right, if you listen to it, decides what place you’re going to be in to do that thinking.

Think about that one, Mr Oh-So-Clever Left Neo-Cortex.

Externally Unrewarding

You’re going to go in a room on your own, shut the door and work almost silently on yourself for hours and days - maybe even years - struggling up some internal mountain of emotional pain and no-one in the outside world is ever going to know about it or appreciate how hard you’ve had to work at this thing.

Where’s the fun in that?

We’re externally programmed to be obsessed with external appearance but the true path to happiness is in how you appear to yourself.  The quality of your self-image is decided by how often you work in your Right Neo-Cortex.

External rewards are there to be found as a result of working on your inner world but because you do not control their arrival or what form they take you can’t rely on them as a goal to work towards.

You can cheat a bit though - I’ve cheated by setting up a blog, writing about my successes and speaking to others about my healing experiences.  Eventually we do need to express our inner experience to the outer world in some beneficial way or we haven’t fully completed our information cycle - we haven’t acknowledged what we’ve learned from our Right Neo-Cortex if we don’t do this.

But, when you first enter a strong emotional response, you may need to cut off from the outside world and go inwards - into your Right Neo-Cortex.  This can seem self-indulgent; timewasting and any other externally driven negative viewpoint held in your Left Neo-Cortex you care to add.

The reward is internal.  Internal freedom; internal emotional control; internal acceptance and - best of all - internal happiness in greater quantities.

The greatest internal reward is liking yourself.

If you can learn to accept the need to work towards liking your negative self - experienced through the Right Neo-Cortex as it is - you’re just about there.

Regards - Carl