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
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