Emotional Vibrations Part 2 - Environmental Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get More Selfish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categorising Our Environmental Types

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards - Carl

Emotional Vibrations - Part 1 - Your Dominant Vibrational Tone

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

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

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

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

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

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

What excites your receptors?  Your ligand molecules.

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

Ligands are molecular keys; receptor heads their molecular locks.

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

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

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

Your Dominant Vibrational Tone Controls How You Think and Act

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

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

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

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

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

Those affects can be subtle.

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

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

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

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

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

• They store in layers


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


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

They Store in Layers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Have to Name, Acknowledge and Normalise

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

What am I talking about here?

Naming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acknowledging and Normalising

To acknowledge means ‘to recognise the truth of’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normalising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing with Others

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards - Carl