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
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