You Can Cope with Anything Until It Kills You and If It Does You’ll Cope with That Too - and so will everybody else

Worrying is an automatic process caused by the Unconscious where we’ve attached a lot of emotional energy to some potential negative life event.

The message we’ve given ourselves is ‘I couldn’t cope!  I couldn’t cope!  I couldn’t cope!’ and it keeps churning away inside.

Trouble is we have limited control of what happens in life when it comes to nasty surprises so our Unconscious tries to keep us negatively motivated and pre-prepared in the belief that being hyper-vigilant will give us an advantage and we may just manage to outwit reality.

It doesn’t.  It just ruins the journey of life.

To undo worrying and get rid of your repeating negative emotions either take some time out alone or talk to others and go into the scenarios underlying the immediate worrying thoughts.  Feel how you’d feel if the worst happened.  I’m not talking about just touch on the feelings and jump back - I’m talking about really going into the feelings and FEEEEEELLLL for as long as it takes.  Then you’ll see yourself come out of it and this teaches your Unconscious you actually would cope.

This releases the energy attached to your worrying thoughts - your mind is full of horrible thoughts you could be thinking about but the only ones coming up into Conscious attention are those you have emotional energy attached to - feel the energy out and the horrible thoughts disappear.

Once you’ve done this enough times worrying stops.  If you won’t do this for yourself then you’re not taking proper care of yourself - I know what this feels like because I used to have the same problem and it made me seriously emotionally ill. 

You would cope and you are coping but worrying makes it 100 times worse.  Sure, you’d have a horrible time while you coped if the thing really was to happen but by worrying you’re coping over and over again and it hasn’t even happened yet! 

The newspapers are full of negative life events showing us worst case scenarios - but they also show those who survived and those who coped with those events too.  YOU WOULD COPE!  and if you didn’t you wouldn’t care anyway.

But your Unconscious won’t believe it until it sees it so you have to spend time ‘going in’ to show it you would cope by spending time with the imagined event and the horrible feelings you release.

Then one day the Unconscious realises you would actually cope and stops trying to warn you about it.

You CAN cope with going through this process - if you’re willing to do the work.

You can cope with anything.

Regards - Carl

The Mammalian Disassociation Response

Imagine if you were an animal, a mammal, with the body of an antelope and the brain of a tiger.  An omnivorous eater; physically designed to be a prey animal, mentally designed by Nature and trained by it's herd to think of itself as a predator. 

This is what a human being is.  What a ridiculously designed creature, eh?  What was Nature playing at?  No wonder a human sometimes can't figure out quite what it is or why it's thinking and emotions don't always work in line with each other.

It makes a poor carnivore; possessing a body with neither claws nor teeth sharp enough to pierce another animal's hide or to easily eat the meat below it.  It is slower, weaker and less flexible in comparison to almost all the other mammals in it's territory. 

As a herbivore it cannot digest most leaves and grasses; it has great difficulty in chewing and digesting roots.  It can easily, however, find seasonal berries and fruit - but the seasons don't last long.  So why does it survive so well?

It survives and thrives because Nature has given it the ability to create external tools.  By manipulating its external world humanity has been able to gain leverage over all other animals, plants and territories.  It has hands and fingers able to manipulate raw materials directly, turning them into tools, but it has also learned to use even more advanced tools to create and maintain extended tools that no human can directly operate.

Those creative hands are controlled by an unusual brain.  A brain with comparatively more inter-connectivity (60% white matter) than any other mammal of its kind.

Our grey matter, the matter we associate with thinking, is the same in comparison by volume as that of a chimpanzee - it's the white, interconnecting brain underneath that is much larger.  It gives greater rise to association and idea generating possibilities.

And, because we are able to associate sound and symbols so effectively and have a talking mechanism we can communicate our internal connections with others of our kind; we are super-connected both internally and externally.

Remember though, before we get carried away by how awe inspiring we are - we are still mammals.  We have the same basic biological emotional response system as the Impala, the Antelope and the Rabbit (to name a few). 

I remember the slightly perplexed look on my counsellor's face one day when I told her I'd just realised it was Nature, not me, that decided what the emotional process was and I now had to surrender my ego to the fact if I was going to heal my anxiety disorders.  You see, as a human mammal I was convinced my intellect should be running the emotional show but something much more powerful was going on and I had to accept and surrender to it.  When you suffer with an anxiety disorder of any kind you learn this lesson very deeply if you experience the Mammalian Disassociation Response.  Journeying through and out of the other side of a blocked emotional response forces you to understand. 

This is the natural experience a prey mammal sometimes goes through (if it lives long enough) when being attacked by a predator.   It is not a consciously controlled experience. 

We often hear of the 'fight or flight response' where, in a split second, an animal decides to fight or flee from it's attacker and the emotional energy driving either response is the same.  But mammals come with three responses to threatening situations, not two, and we are mammals.  The third response is the 'freeze' response - 'The Mammalian Disassociation Response' - also known as 'playing dead'. 

When you can neither fight or flee but still have all the energy powering these urges running through your body this is your only other option (unless, as humans can, you suppress it).

It is called the Disassociation Response because, in a bid to easing the pain of being eaten alive, the Conscious mind is detached from the body.  My personal experience of this, after I had been working on healing my panic attacks daily for three months (deliberately, through exposure therapy), was to have my muscles begin pulling me to the ground one night on the way home from work, forcing me to feel like laying down.

My thighs and shoulders got heavier and heavier - as though I were weight training with them at every step and at some point I was going to have to stop moving and collapse.  I looked at my hands and they, and my arms, seemed to be far, far away.  I got home from work, began searching the internet, and came to the conclusion I was suffering with the symptoms of a diabetic coma. 

I phoned my doctor who asked me to go and see her straight away - when I got through the door she told me she saw these same symptoms often with patients suffering with anxiety related issues and this was simply the ‘Freeze Response’.

I had read about the response before in Peter A. Levine's book, 'Waking the Tiger' (a book on how to heal traumatic stress disorders), but this was the first time I had experienced it.  Within thirty minutes of seeing the doctor and receiving her explanation the symptoms, which had been coming on for about three days, had lifted.  Once my thinking mind was able to label the condition and accept what Disassociation felt like for me, my Unconscious was able to let it go.

Mammals freeze or play dead with the unconscious intention of either not being noticed by the predator (moving gets you noticed) or of looking as though you're a diseased meal.  In his book Mr Levine explains how prey animals will look as though they're dead, with eyes open, while the predator stands over them. 

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

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

Shortly after this time my panic attacks completely disappeared (they never returned) and I learned a very important lesson:  to stop trying to figure out and outwit the reality of my emotional system using my intellect.

To let the process of feeling do what it was designed to do: discharge.

Sometimes in external life we find ourselves in situations over which we have no control and we are so terrified we want to run away to avoid it or so enraged we want to attack it or undo it but still can have no effect on the situation.  Then, when our emotional reaction keeps being produced and it's obvious there's nothing to be done (sometimes because the emotionally intense reaction is in regard to an imagined scenario) we may turn on the emotional response itself, criticising ourselves, fighting it.  We hate the emotional response and the way it affects us when it comes.

We even end up producing a Secondary Response to try and keep it in check and that just makes it worse.  Now we are overwhelmed but at the same time suppressing the whole thing just so we can get through the day.

But if you were to give in to it ... lay down, let it 'eat you alive' for as long as it needs to ... what do you suppose the Unconscious eventually sees?

It sees the experience from beginning to end for what it really is - all the symptoms, the different intensities, their strange effects, and yet you're still alive despite enduring the worst.  And it stops producing the response.  You get up, you shake yourself off, and you get on with living.

No matter what the emotional type, the emotional healing process works in the same way.

We may hate being mammals sometimes, but that's what we are.

Regards - Carl

Your Prefrontal Cortex - Your Superconscious

Positioned just below and behind your forehead the Prefrontal Cortex looks backwards, like a rower in a rowing boat, into your brain and body (it is listed as the ‘Front Cortex’ in the diagram above). 

It performs your Executive Functions.  As your Strategic Senior Manager the PFC develops and monitors your long-term self-image and self-awareness process as you travel various journeys through different environments. 

'You’ lives there.

Central you is unconditionally happy you with the role of your PFC being to repeatedly return you to that state.  When you are internally emotionally conflicted it is the PFC that tells you 'you are not yourself'.

I became more aware of the workings of this brain-part about three months into my self-devised healing plan during which I was carrying out daily self-exposure therapy sessions in regards to my obsessions.  Until then I hadn't known it even existed and became gradually more aware through the functions it performed. 

Initially I imagined I had somehow developed a new place from which to look at things, almost like a new personality, but in truth I was learning to shift my consciousness - the point from which I saw things - into this part of my brain.  I did this by asking just one question:  'how does it (my emotional process) work?'.  I had spent years telling myself how it should work, but it wasn't working that way.

Simply by repeatedly looking inwards, watching my emotional system for prolonged periods of time without critical judgement, I began to change my inner dynamic.   Other parts of my brain's conscious activity, such as my thinking chatter, began shutting down quicker while memories and pictorial information were being accessed more often.  I was now in the habit of hunting emotional energy responses and matching them to imagery to which they were attached - then moving consciously towards both.

At first I named this newly discovered part of myself my Silent Observer.  I called it 'Silent' because it did not work in word-based thinking.  I called it 'Observer' because I noticed the moment it saw a particular part of myself in a different way permanent changes began to occur in the way my emotions operated.  They began to release in dramatic bursts and then disappear.

Initially I had started the process of going in using just my thinking word-based brain - I would mentally talk to myself a lot - but this new picture-based part was taking over the job and any thoughts for or against working on myself would quickly die down.  After I had done the self-work for a couple of months I couldn't stop going in even if I wanted to - it was now automated.  Day and night my Silent Observer forced me to go into emotional reactions I hated.

For a specific period during sleep the Prefrontal Cortex works on the imagery flowing through our brains - we call it dreaming - and during this time it talks to the Unconscious through the Right Neo-Cortex (your Conscious Pattern and Picture Mind).  It decides which images are dreams and which are reality.  It establishes a visual map of how different areas of your life are connected or disconnected.  By the way, your Right Neo-Cortex never sleeps and your Unconscious uses it to talk back to your Conscious all of the time.

I watched as my Silent Observer observed, experimented and tested my emotions like a cold hearted scientist.  The 'Observing' moments began to increase in number.  The Silent Observer began spending more of its time away from what was going on in the outside world because it was getting results internally it had always previously looked for out there.  I imagined it to be like an ecstatic engineer who had been trying to bring an old engine back to life for years and suddenly understood what needed to be done. I started to experience a great deal of frustration - something overwhelmingly determined had lit up in the front of my head and was angry at how long the change process was taking. 

Now starting to develop a belief I could actually remove my obsessions my Prefrontal Cortex pursued anything new it spotted like a rabid hunter.  It wanted to get the work done before any external-world event could distract it.  I would occasionally wake in the middle of the night to find myself having a panic attack in my sleep, shaking and sweating with a pounding heart.  A new emotional layer, with new imagery, would come up into consciousness and my Unconscious would fight back with arguments such as 'I can't go there, it'll kill me!'.  My Silent Observer - the Prefrontal Cortex - would say 'that's an acceptable risk, carry on'.

My doctor, who I had been seeing regularly, advised me to slow the self-directed exposure-therapy process down as my physical symptoms were getting more severe.  I had started making regular trips to the hospital due to having strong heart palpitations; my stomach acid had become imbalanced and my blood pressure had rocketed - one nurse told another a reading she took from me was the highest she'd seen in her career.  But I couldn't stop.  I explained to my doctor it was like I'd gone over the curve of a rollercoaster ride and to stop now would take more effort than to just go with the ride.  My Prefrontal Cortex  had won the battle - it was going to keep working on my inner world now whether my Unconscious wanted it to or not. 

The Prefrontal Cortex is our predatory brain part. 

It forces us to hunt.

It performs multiple functions such as:

• acting as self-motivator; moving you in different directions, in different physical postures and generating different emotions according to different environmental contexts


• your main source of judgement (is it you or is it them?); it decides what 'real' is as it assesses the meaning of the many signals reaching it through the rest of your brain - sometimes, when it's tired and sleep deprived, those signals get sent straight to the emotional Limbic brain in error and you can find yourself reacting automatically to something without knowing why


• managing your value systems - it decides what goals in life you are emotionally attached to and moving towards, and how you prioritise or line up your journeys towards those goals, one over another, and then redesigns your brain to adapt your behaviours to support the value hierarchy this creates for you.

And there’s more.  The Prefrontal Cortex also produces:

• hope: it projects picture-based suggestions of wonderful environments you could move towards and calls on experiential sensual memories to enhance the affect; it triggers the initial production of Dopamine causing you to become pleasantly attached to the idea of something (craving) and moving towards scenarios built only in your head and then Seratonin to make you feel satisfied when you reach the goal


• despair: it projects picture-based horror stories telling you about things to be avoided; about things pursuing you and which you (allegedly) need to keep a continual lookout for - it triggers the initial production of Adrenaline and Cortisol in order to stimulate fight, freeze or flight reactions (and it can do this in regards to your own emotions too) causing you to avoid scenarios that do not yet exist in reality


• depression: in depression it initially produces rage at being detached from something seen as a high value priority to the self-image; when rage does not ensure reattachment it then attempts non-cooperation with the process of life itself by withdrawing electrical activity in certain parts of the brain; it pulls back into the lower Limbic brain in a bid to avoid acknowledging the painful loss but paradoxically causes itself to set up home in the very worried, brooding brain


• gratitude - it can train you to start upwards from rock-bottom by learning to appreciate every little positive thing; you don't do this by default - this is a re-learning process


• intuition - the Prefrontal Cortex can learn to pay closer attention to certain signals it previously ignored so sharpening its ability to see 'in-between' signals; to shift from a subjective experience to an objective viewpoint and then make better informed directional judgements.

A lot of this activity is carried out in the imagination - the Prefrontal Cortex's image manipulation and association tool.  But we’re not finished yet - it does even more than that:

• it creates logical cause-and-affect memories by deciding which of your brain's signals should be kept and stored as named 'facts' for later retrieval


• it records visual patterns, using these as templates for future actions - it imposes these patterns on your internal and external world; it is the creator of both positive and negative expectations and also of disappointment and pleasant surprise


• it is a solution hunter - searching through your many internal signals for sense and meaning and it does this because it is also your direction-finder - to find 'meaning' is to find 'direction'.

also, of most importance in emotional healing it is the part of you that:

• consciously affects neuroplasticity - the connecting and disconnecting ability of your brain's neural pathways


• it can persuade the Unconscious to co-operate in re-establishing emotional flow by forming new connections


• it is the part of you that, when it hears the mantra 'you can't cure your emotional condition, you can only manage it' decides that message is unacceptable and tells you to proceed towards full healing anyway


• it's the part of you that finally decides to override your social programming, making the achievement of internal unconditional happiness your top priority while developing the view that if you do this your social environment will benefit anyway as a result.

Oh, one more thing - it's also the part of you that made you emotionally ill in the first place because it previously made some wrong decisions about the direction in which you should travel in order to find your unconditionally happy self.  Sorry about that.

Your Prefrontal Cortex is Your Superconscious

We use the Prefrontal Cortex all the time but we may not become consciously aware of it until we start making plans to move into a new environment.  It is this part of us that keeps reassessing just how much we want to move, and then drives us on, making us increasingly determined despite coming up against obstacles.  It reminds us of what we're moving away from and what we're moving towards.  It will even lie to us to get us there by promising things it has no way of knowing exist for sure (we call this faith).

Because we're not consciously engaging with it all the time we may regard it as a part of our Unconscious, but it's actually our Superconscious.  Our overseer and future programmer.

It instructs the Unconscious, which then goes on to automatically work on behalf of the Prefrontal Cortex's instructions once they are imprinted enough times.  Whereas the Unconscious is concerned with self-protection and maintaining the safer status quo, the Prefrontal Cortex is concerned with taking measured risks and trying new things.

The Unconscious and the Prefrontal Cortex are in constant discussion with each other, with your Conscious thinking mind - your Left Neo-Cortex, sitting between the two.  When suffering from an emotional block your thinking mind experiences the discussion as a non-stop fight it can’t quite figure out by using it’s sole resource and tool - thinking.

When deciding to heal emotionally, by using a technique such as exposure therapy, you force your Prefrontal Cortex to reconnect with the parts of the Unconscious it is currently avoiding, getting your word-based thinking mind out of the way and entering their more picture-based discussion. 

Trapped emotional energy is released and the old neural pathways the energy once travelled through start to disintegrate like disused railway lines.

New ‘happiness pathways’ are created and they become your more permanent way of thinking and feeling (this is not a theoretical change in thinking, it is physical reconstruction of the brain - it hurts and takes time to achieve). 

In the next post we look at the Left and Right Neo-Cortex and the roles they play in your Emotional Information Cycle.

Regards - Carl

Completing Your Emotional Information Cycles

All emotional disorders are caused by blocked full-body 'emotional information cycles'.

The most common model for multi-cellular life on Earth is the tube and organic tubes live by managing the cyclical flow of things travelling through them. 

Living tubes take things in from the world outside; manipulate what they take in, extract what they need from the flow then pass other things back out into the environment.  This cycle is rhythmic, the rhythmic pulse produced being dependent on the organic system concerned (compare your breathing cycle rate with your sleep cycle rate, for example). 

The rhythm of our emotional cycle depends to a large extent on how we work psychologically as an individual.  We all have the ability to block emotional energy release through psychological 'non-acceptance'.  We can also reverse this blocking through learning 'acceptance' (opening the psychological valves, so to speak).  Because of this difference in psychologies, differences in what we accept and reject, one person's 'emotional rhythm' will pulse at a different rate to another's.

As a rule babies do not block their emotions.  They feel, they express, they heal - and they do it really loudly and quickly too.  As babies turn into adults however they develop different approaches to emotional expression based on different life experiences and then begin matching these to varied forms of 'social programming feedback' from their social environments.  Each of us has different opinions about what we 'should' be feeling or doing and where we ‘should be’ feeling or doing it as a result. 

Adults generally learn to express less and suppress more, holding their responses in check to maintain and get benefit from important and complex social relationships.  Too little suppression can put you in jail or worse; too much suppression can make you emotionally sick.

When any biological  lifecycle is blocked or disturbed the organism experiences tension; discomfort; illness; sometimes even death.  Our emotional system is just one more biological system, designed to operate in a certain way.  We take in sensory signals; we let some signals float on by while others we extract from the flow; we act on those extracted signals and we put thoughts, attitudes and behaviours out into the external world on the basis of them.  We change our entire physical positioning, and occasionally our entire 'environmental set', on the basis of this particular life cycle.

Blockages of any biological cycle occur either because an environment does not provide the right things needed (what's coming in may be poisonous to us), or the environment is not accepting what the organism puts out (rejection is painful, isn't it?). The cyclical rhythm is disturbed, with the organism finding itself out of synch both externally and internally.   The return to balance, to 'homeostasis, where the rate of emotional flow is at the' Goldilocks Point ' of being just right, takes a lot of energy to bring about following such a disturbance.

If you are someone stuck in a blocked emotional state right now and want to return to homeostasis (non-emotional, unconditional happiness) your job is to learn how to complete your internal emotional information cycles. 

Please note if you are suffering with a severe emotional problem you should not attempt to do this work without the support of a medical professional. 

Here’s a quick version of what a normal emotional information (not blocked) cycle looks like:

It all starts in your Prefrontal Cortex.

• The Prefrontal Cortex sends signals to


• the Left and Right Neo-Cortex commanding them to send signals to


• the Limbic Brain which sends signals both into the brain and also to


• the Endocrine System (glands) which releases chemicals containing


• Ligands - molecules containing information which travel through the body in the carrier liquids we call hormones (and in the brain as neurotransmitters).  Ligands travel through the body looking for the appropriate receptive organs, muscles and other bodily parts which they then attach to via


• Cell Receptors which float on the surface of cell walls.  Once the ligands attach to the cell receptors the cell receptors begin contorting their lower strands, which are buried within the cell body, at about 10'000 times a second, causing the cells to vibrate internally producing an intense energy driven


• emotional response which travels through the body and then back up via the Reticular Formation into the brain reaching the


• Prefrontal Cortex at which point the responses asks for permission to release and


• if the Prefrontal Cortex accepts the need for physical release the energy flows and nerves either drive


• your muscles to physically discharge energy through movement targeted at the external world or the Prefrontal Cortex can decide the energy can be released just through the process of


• feeling alone and the energy flows and clears - with both the Unconscious and the Prefrontal Cortex working together to fully release the energy and then when fully released


• the Prefrontal Cortex confirms the threat is no longer present and produces a sense of satisfaction or relief and the whole body returns to a relaxed state.

So it all ends in the Prefrontal Cortex too. 

Did you get all that?  If not - read it again and build a picture of the full journey in your mind. 

It starts in your forehead, travels backwards through your brain then downwards into the body and then comes back up through the body, through your brain, and the energy releases; evaporating either through physical activity or through surrendering to the process of feeling alone.

Although the cycle I've described above is probably much more complex, with lots of other activities and communications going on in the brain and body, that just about sums it up.  If you were to focus on that model during healing it would be sufficient for you - for your Prefrontal Cortex, that is, to understand what needs to be done.  A blocked emotional response is a full body information cycle needing completion.

In my next post I’ll be discussing the role of the Prefrontal Cortex, the starting and finishing point of our emotional responses, in more depth..

Regards - Carl

PS I’ve not posted in quite some time but I’ve not been idle (honest!) I’m working on ‘the book’. The book will be a mechanics-style guide for people suffering from severe emotional disorders on how to get back to being unconditionally happy.

It’ll be a ‘live’ book - which means I’ll be putting a free e-book version on the blog when it’s complete (there will also be a link for you to go and buy the paperback version should you prefer). It also means you’re going to see the content developing on the blog through my posts (this is one example). The finished book may look different (including the style) but the message will be the same.