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

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 7) - Narrow Versus Open Mindedness

I’m narrow-minded about open-mindedness.  How about you? 

I find a continually narrow-minded social environment intolerable and stifling and refuse to change my narrow view about that unless there’s a really good reason to.  I am also narrow-minded in favour of opening my mind up to my internal emotional processes.  I believe it has to be done by everybody at some point, in the right environment, if they want to be happy.

Narrow-mindedness operates in your Left Neo-Cortex.  Open-mindedness operates in your Right.

No-one is totally narrow or open minded in the way they think or see something - both brains operate at the same time.  It’s a question of balance.  Which side of your brain dominates at any one time depends on the situation or context you are focusing on and how uncomfortable you are willing to be during focussing.

A few years ago I attended an interactive team development seminar for managers on how to develop teams using different managerial styles.  There were about 20 participants, all team managers, all of whom knew me well.

In one exercise four flipchart boards were put up with different types of management styles written on them.  The characteristics of the personalities of each type of management style were listed and after going through a questionnaire we were all scored and asked to go stand near the board our score showed our management style to be most like.

Out of the 20 I turned out to be the only one standing near the board headed ‘Task/Goal Orientated’.  Almost everyone else was standing over near the ‘Social/People Orientated’ board.  ‘What are you doing over there', Carl?’ a couple of them asked me.  ‘You’re one of the most people- orientated managers we know’.

Listed on my board were such characteristics as ‘Drives change’; ‘Domineering’; ‘Dictatorial’; ‘Single Minded’.  I explained that during my period as a team manager I had developed a strong view of what an open-minded, co-operative and high performance team looked like.  Before becoming a manager I would have stood over at the ‘People Orientated’ board with everyone else.

But since becoming a manager I had found myself having to enforce my view of what this ideal team atmosphere should look like due to having to deal with folks who thought they had a right to disrupt and dominate teams I managed.  Occasionally the odd ego-driven person would see the open natured approach I used as a weak management style and would launch some kind of attempt to dominate relationships within the team - and usually expected to get their own way.  Only they didn’t and couldn’t understand why not - given I was so apparently ‘easy-going’.

On the surface it looked as though I hadn’t really thought about my management style much because most of my team managed themselves.  In reality I had a very narrow viewpoint of how my team should operate; how individuals in it would treat each other and how we would deal with the external world.

I can think of a number of areas in my life now where on the surface I may appear not to have thought about things much and am easy going - but it’s not the case really.  I am very narrow-minded about certain things; but I’ve developed the narrow-minded approach to that area after a phase of being open minded, exploring issues through my Right Neo-Cortex, first.

As a result I have no fear of transferring narrow-minded thinking held in my Left Neo-Cortex over to my Right for further exploration; I know that once a new opinion has been formed and proved its value in moving me towards a better self-image or an important goal often enough it will shift back to the more comfortable Left as a retrained narrow-minded ‘fact’.

Narrow Mindedness focuses on the External and the Past

Your Left Neo-Cortex, the part you think in words with, is concerned with your external world and facts you have learned in the past about it.  In brain-mapping terms you have thousands of maps stored saying ‘go here and that happens and you do this and then that happens …’ and so on.

Some of these facts were given to you by trusted sources as emotionless bits of data that went straight into memory storage.  Others were acquired through ‘experience’ - a process by which your Right Neo-Cortex informs you of full-body energy release occurring during which an emotional cycle is completed and then the information left after the cycle completes is passed over to your Left and stored as an emotionless memory.

Whenever being ‘narrow-minded’ we are working in our Left Neo-Cortex and looking for mentally held, quickly retrieved emotionless reference data on solutions that worked for us (or for others) in the past.

As we use this data from the past (we call it ‘thinking’) to resolve any external situation occurring we compare how our factual data matches with what’s going on in the external world in real-time.   Where the two meet we call that  ‘reality’. 

Opening Mindedness focuses on the Internal and the Future

Your Right Neo-Cortex sees in pictures, feelings and other senses such as sound tone and is concerned with your internal world and the experiences you are currently processing or may experience in the future.  The brain maps here don’t operate in the same way the Left Neo-Cortex does.

Here multiple moving image and pattern maps, some attached to intense energy waves held in your body, interrelate and exchange information. These images and patterns are produced by a mixture of what comes from your Prefrontal Cortex, your Left Neo-Cortex and the full energetic informational content of your entire body.  

Options and Choices

Paradoxically we increase our options and choices in the outside world by working on our inner world - not the outer.  Think of any external life area or environment you ever wanted to move into and your first step was to agree to change your inner self first.  Whenever thinking about what kind of an external experience you would like to have or move towards it pays to first to explore your previous emotional history and move towards doing more of those things you have enjoyed emotionally in previous environments. 

Chasing the next salary raise - a Left Neo-Cortex logical thing to do, will eventually lead to you leading a passionless, inhuman lifestyle where you find you have sacrificed your true self.

With the Left Neo-Cortex we may look outwards thinking the new opportunities, the answers to problems and achieving happiness are ‘out there’.  But they’re not.  Adaptation is achieved internally. 

People struggling with depression after a loss of some kind, for example, get stuck in their thinking partly due to believing they have limited options and choices because the outside world took their options away; they start moving away from depression once they start to build new life options; release the emotional energy attached to their losses and any frozen beliefs and deliberately choose to try new things. 

All the information you need to access in order to complete any internal information cycle is already contained within you.  You just need to be willing to look for it.

The work is slow and painful when your default setting is to avoid your internal world - when you are ‘Left Neo-Cortex Narrow Minded’ about how you should work internally.

Playing with Your ‘Narrow Thinking’ and ‘Open Seeing’

Narrow mindedness gets a bad press - ‘they’ll never change’.

Open mindedness also gets a bad press - ‘they’ll believe anything anyone tells them’.

Whenever we label narrow mindedness as ‘bad’ we just got the Left Neo-Cortex to criticise the way it, itself, processes information.  The same thing happens when the Right Neo-Cortex sees emotional responses as ‘weak’.

Any negative self-criticism of the emotional process is false information.  You have to get narrow minded about that.  ANY SELF-CRITICISM OF THE WAY YOU PROCESS EMOTIONAL INFORMATION IS FALSE.

Self-criticism of this nature stops the self from figuring out and accepting how you really work.  So whenever a negative self-criticism arises in your brain grab it; accept you are capable of producing negative self-criticisms (don’t criticise yourself for self-criticising or you’re just repeating the pattern!) and challenge it.

Here are a few narrow-minded beliefs I have acquired by first going through a number of ‘open-minded’ journeys.  I used to believe the exact opposite of these beliefs - then I began to open up to the possibility those opposite beliefs might be wrong (this involved exploring emotionally painful experiences stored inside and learning from what the emotions told me about life).

These are now re-fixed in my narrow thinking brain and whenever I find myself emotionally charged I refer back to these, and many other new ways of looking at things I deliberately embraced, in order to achieve and remain emotionally free:

• If I do not schedule time for working with my negative feelings they will work on me 24/7 until I do - so I will always schedule time
• I achieve happiness by going through my feelings not around them
• Negative feelings drive thoughts; negative thoughts never drive negative feelings (no-one would watch the news if they did) - get rid of the feelings and you get rid of the thoughts
• You cannot feel a feeling that is not already waiting to be felt inside of you (your body is a battery)
• Feeling is an action in its own right - I do not need to take external action in order to complete an internal information cycle
• I am neither my thoughts nor my feelings - I am the observer who watches the flow of these things and alters the nature of the flow
• There is no such thing as an abnormal feeling regardless of intensity or type
• I will work to remove any negative self-criticisms of my protective negative feeling protective system
• Whenever I feel rage I am trying to protect something of great value - once I figure out what it is I am protecting and accept it’s OK to feel that way I will be able to release my rage safely
• I am often powerless over what happens in the external world and that’s fine
• I will tackle, avoid or leave emotionally painful environments sooner rather than later.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 6) - Your Right Neo-Cortex

The type of relationship your Prefrontal Cortex (‘you’) has with your Unconscious is managed according to how willing you are to open up to and work with the signals coming to you through your Right Neo-Cortex.

Through your Right Neo-Cortex your Prefrontal Cortex gives permission for the processing of all of your negative images and feelings.  Through your Left Neo-Cortex it processes and stores information concerned with ‘positive’ thoughts leading to future positive or neutral feelings. 

You can be a devout positive thinker in your Left Neo-Cortex yet at the same time be severely emotionally depressed in your Right.  This imbalance is caused by so called ‘positive thinking’ held in your Left denying you the right and need to feel the energies being expressed in the Right.

When I began my own journey towards self-healing nothing changed for me emotionally until I learned to think less and ‘see and feel’ more without judging how logical or otherwise the process was.  This meant I was teaching myself to more automatically open up to the signals coming through my Right Neo-Cortex.

Whenever we think in terms of what is ‘logical’ we need to realise this is an activity of the Left Neo-Cortex trying to make sense of new experiences on the basis of old learning.  Developing new logic for ourselves in regards to new or as yet unprocessed experiences is initially a Right Neo-Cortex activity.

Another thing to focus on is how rote-learned external logic fed to us by the Left Neo-Cortices of others needs to be challenged with our own best interests in mind before being automatically accepted as internally developed logic.  What works logically for others may not work at all for you.

Once you have learned how to work internally to transfer emotional experiences and complete your own emotional information cycles you discover the internal process is completely logical in its own right for you as an individual.

Daydreams and nightmares (when asleep or awake) are processed through your Right Neo-Cortex.  Emotional flow is encouraged or blocked according to how you ‘see’ your most painful internal responses in this part of your brain. 

Once you learn to process your most negative internal responses in this part of your brain, and accept the need for processing on a regular basis, then everything else needed for healing starts falling into place naturally.

In your Right Neo-Cortex you create and maintain:

• direct subjective imagery attached to emotional sensations relating to current real-life experiences


• imagined subjective imagery and sensations relating to what you imagine it would be like in reality if you were inside the horrors (and sometimes the unwanted pleasures) currently haunting your imagination


• secondary emotionally charged subjective imagery - based on how you feel about how you feel and how you see and judge yourself as you produce and accept or reject these internal reactions - usually if you have an emotional disorder you are self-critical of having it; this self-critical attitude is actually what creates and maintains the emotional disorder itself (eg I am bad; this is weird; something’s wrong with me; I’ve gone crazy and so on).

All three of the above are active in the Right Neo-Cortex as what I call ‘Reflections’.  All are driven by emotional energies coming up from the body designed to help protect you and others you care about from bad things happening.

By feeling these energies out you transform Reflections into ‘Representations’.

Representations are basic pictures with almost no emotional energy attached that can also be broken down into parts and described using words and can therefore be transferred and stored in the Left Neo-Cortex. 

Representations are ‘objective images’ - less emotional images providing information on the nature of your overall emotional process itself. 

Once the emotional energy attached to a Reflection is stripped from an image or other sensation through the process of feeling it transfers over to the Left Neo-Cortex as a word-based emotionless Representation which can then be forgotten - unless the Representation is needed later. 

Think about any emotional event in your past which you are no longer emotional about and you’ll see that this kind of transfer took place.  You shift from ‘what’s happening’ to ‘what happened’ once the energy from a situation has been generated, accepted and released through feeling. 

If a similar triggering incident happens later you search the thinking in your Left Neo-Cortex mind for information on ‘what did I learn to do last time and should I use the same logical approach again?’.

Your Left Neo-Cortex will Not Allow a Negative Self-Image to Be Transferred to it from Your Right Neo-Cortex

As mentioned earlier above, your Left is concerned with producing and storing ‘positive’ thoughts that lead to positive feelings - including positive thoughts and feelings about yourself.

If you have a negative self-image lurking in your Right Neo-Cortex there are only two things you can do in order to bring about an informational transfer from Right to Left so the information cycle can be completed and forgotten; you must demonstrate to yourself you have either:

• changed yourself through various internal or external actions and so have made yourself ‘right’  or


• changed your self-image in order to see you were ‘right’ all along and your previous negative self-image was wrong.

A negative self-image causes internal physical discomfort because it festers in the Right Neo-Cortex triggering emotional responses in the body designed to physically motivate you to make yourself ‘right’.

By ‘right’ what we mean is our thoughts, feelings, how we express those feelings and how we then behave in the external world as a result of these internal processes are all lined up (congruent or logical). 

The direction these parts of ourselves are lined up in must be congruent with the direction our Prefrontal Cortex is planning for us to move towards (which is always based on an attachment to a pleasure-inducing goal; one aspect of which is the achievement of a pleasant self-image). 

One of the main functions of our Left Neo-Cortex is to name or label ‘steps’ and then logically order those steps in terms of cause and effect pathways - we think of these pathways as acceptable ‘facts’ about how our world operates.

The Left will not accept negative facts about the self. 

In addition, we also want to see feedback from the outside world confirming our ‘rightness’ and that our congruent external behaviours are well received.  If they’re not being well received by the external world, especially by other people close to us, things start to get complicated.  We may start lying to ourselves and to others. 

When challenged information held previously in the Left Neo-Cortex as ‘factual beliefs’ may be transferred over to the Right Neo-Cortex, becoming uncomfortable, in order to produce emotional reactions that will fight the challenge.

Do You Have a Default Approach to Dealing with Others?

Self-sacrificing ‘seekers of truth’ have a tendency to accept emotional discomfort as the price to pay for achieving long-term social goals.  When things are not going right with others they tend to lie to themselves regarding the true nature of an external situation and criticise themselves for reacting to it.  They deny themselves the right to look objectively at the behaviour of others towards them because if they do it means these relationships may have to come to an end.

They label current painful external situations as ‘temporary’ - even 20 years into the situation - or paint a rose-tinted view of the hurtful behaviour of others in false hope of achieving some ‘wonderful common goal’ they think all involved will eventually appreciate.

These folks never feel quite good enough about themselves in their hostile social environments due to trying to take responsibility for things which in reality are beyond their control.  They see themselves as failures, produce various forms of negative self-imagery, and have trouble transferring information to their Left Neo-Cortex as a result.  Until they learn to be less tolerant of hostile environments, as well as refusing to self-criticise as much as they do, they remain emotionally vulnerable to developing blocks.

The solution, which some will never actually agree to, is to realise it’s their environment that stinks, not them, and that they are sometimes genuinely powerless to change things and will need to leave or repeatedly deal with the reactions their environment produces. 

Self-serving gratification seekers, on the other hand, have no such trouble.  They become skilled at labelling others negatively in various ways and so are proficient at transferring information from the Right Neo-Cortex to the Left because they have no issue with lying to others or themselves.  They will tell themselves anything to make sure any painful negative self-imagery gets removed as quickly as possible so their positive self-image can remain intact.

They tend to label others as ‘useful’ or ‘useless’; justifying critical behaviours towards others through their own internally developed logic systems.  They have the ability to change social history without conscience - for example they will hurt someone for their own ends but quickly create false justifications as to why it was OK to do that.  They reverse their perception of logical cause and effect pathways in order to be more comfortable internally.

A self-sacrificing type finding themselves in a relationship with a self-serving type has a difficult road ahead - and is vulnerable to developing emotional illness because they will find it very difficult to transfer emotionally charged information from their Right Neo-Cortex to their Left.  It’s only by maintaining a negative self-image that they can preserve this kind of relationship.

Despite all of the complexity that can arise in such so-called relationships the whole thing is really nothing more than a  battle between two lying Left Neo-Cortices fighting for the right to transfer their internal information ,  the whole thing is really about people using different approaches to bringing painful emotional information to an end by releasing emotional energy and transferring the information over to the Left Neo-Cortex to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Which approach is right or wrong?  The answer is found somewhere in the middle - and unfortunately for the self-sacrificers of the world the burden to change usually falls on their shoulders due to the fact it’s extremely difficult to get a self-server to open up to the pain involved in changing themselves.  They are usually too narrow minded and self-protecting (that is, egotistical) in the way they think.

Regards - Carl