What Shape Do You Give Your Emotional Responses?

A man in his early twenties is talking to me about how he can feel his depression coming on again and he is dreading it.  I ask him to explain to me what happens - does this experience stay permanently or does it arrive, make him feel terrible for a while, then leave?

He tells me it passes eventually but he hates the experience and dreads it returning all the time.  'So, as it approaches, would I be right to assume it looks like you are about to be dragged down into a dark bottomless pit of despair and this time you might never come out as you have the other times - do you see something like that as it approaches?'.  He says yes, he does.  'Does it feel like you are being eaten alive?'.  He nods and smiles at the same time.  I can see he is picturing this imagery in his mind.  'I am being eaten alive'.

'So as it approaches you sense it overwhelming you; eating you alive; do you get a sense of being suffocated by it?'.  He nods.  'What if you were to change the way you see it.  Let us look at it as though it were a hill of energy that needs to be eaten and what is really happening is it comes to you to be eaten and then when you have eaten enough of it the hill lowers a bit; but it keeps building up because rather than eat the smaller amounts of this energy as they come to you to be eaten during the day you keep backing away from it and the hill builds up again; then this hill seems to overwhelm you.  What if you decided to go eat the whole hill, over a period of time, until it was all gone?'.

'What if you see yourself as a Pac-Man, for example, and you decide to deliberately go eat the hill before it comes to you?  What if you got into the habit of deliberately going to find it'.  That gets a smile as he pictures the scene.  'That is weird' he says.  'No-one has ever spoken to me like this before'.

Next I explain to him the way we see our intense emotional experiences is crucial to whether or not we get rid of them.  I learned this the hard way - by starting with lots of mostly ineffective verbal self-talk for several years then accidentally discovering the power of imagery to change the way I worked with my emotions.  I played with changing how I saw various aspects of what I was going through and started to get results.  When I say 'accidentally' though, that is not quite right.

For some time, as I kept telling my Unconscious 'we are going in' again as I followed my exposure therapy plan, I had strange imagery coming up such as pictures of rooms in the countryside and hills.  These images had no emotion attached to them so I tended to ignore them - then one day I realised my Unconscious was providing these images as tools.   I had been telling it repeatedly what I wanted to do and it was saying 'try this' to me.  Once I started playing with the imagery while in the centre of my emotional responses I started to see a change in whether or not the emotional responses cleared from my body.

If you apply certain types of imagery when either approaching or in the centre of an emotional response you can introduce a 'way of seeing' that will convince the various minds in your brain to release the response.  See the response as an approaching predator and your Reptilian Brain will gear your whole body up for fighting it and your upper brains do likewise.  See it as something you want to move towards and eventually release occurs.

The Shapes and Movements You See are Important in Emotional Self Management

You see a high wave of dark emotional energy coming at you and you know it is going to leave you all washed up at the end.  To your Reptilian brain, the brain part build around your brain stem and responsible for managing your bodily reactions and rhythms, this identifies the emotion approaching as something of a gaping jaw which, at the very least, will leave you in pain and wounded.  If you feel as though the emotion is suffocating you this triggers a specific response in an organ in your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is part of your Limbic brain (your specific emotional response brain sitting over your Reptilian Brain).  Scientists tell us the amygdala is like a 'suffocation alert system' and mimics the moment when a predator has you by the throat.

The amygdala creates a specific image of the trigger (your emotion) and produces a strong fight or flight response whenever the potential suffocating experience approaches.  Your hippocampus, an arched structure at the rear of the amygdala, memorises the territory surrounding the threat - it is the trigger of 'anticipatory fear'.  In a real life threatening situation it improves our survival odds by producing emotional responses to such things as predator footprints - but when it triggers in relation to our own emotions it is a real nuisance - for example you may start having emotional responses in regards to your bedroom door which you sit behind for days when in the middle of your emotional misery.

All of this kind of thing happens because of the way we 'see' our emotional responses.  It causes us to do our best to avoid and fight them off - and this freezes them inside of us.

So How Might You Change How You See that Trapped Response So You Can Eventually Get it to Go Away?

Quite often when I start talking to people about this way of changing how we see they start talking to me about their own application of this method - it is the first time they have come across someone else who talks about this kind of thing.  A lady recently told me about her ‘Special Room' approach.  That got me quite excited as I've got 'A Room' as well!  I did not tell her about my room though, everybody has a right to their own room.  My point here is this is a universal technique that people rarely talk about (I guess NLP practitioners use this kind of thing a lot?).  Once our Unconscious knows we definitely intend to go in and heal the inner turmoil it may well start providing the imaging tools for doing so - but will you recognise when these imaging tools appear?

Anyway, my favourite technique is 'the Hill' (it is all done in the imagination, by the way, no actual hills are used in the writing of this article).

The Hill – an exercise to try if you have an obsession or phobia

To begin, move yourself consciously towards your emotional response, but do not go into it yet.  You are standing next to your hill.  Feel the tension between you and the hill - if you feel fear, feel that - but remember the truly intense stuff is at the centre of the hill.  The Hill is a perfect hill shape with sloping sides and it is a hill of pure emotional energy.

If you can see what you think the 'issue' is at the centre of the emotional response imagine the issue sits in the centre of the Hill.   Stay there a while, to one side of the hill, picturing the scene and sensing the emotion nearby.  While you are waiting here I will talk to you about 'tone'.

Tone

Imagine you are an adult trying to talk a small child into believing their new bedroom does not have ghosts and is not dangerous, but the small child is very frightened of the new room.  You decide, in your ultimate wisdom as an adult, the best way to get the child to accept going into this room is to frighten them into it.  You turn to the child and with all the love and best intentions in the world you scream 'get in that room right now! Of course there are no ghosts in your room there are no such thing as ghosts you stupid child; get in there and stop being so ridiculous!'  Question: does it work, this method?  Or does it make the child not just frightened of the room but of the whole house and you included?

I used to have a phobia of public speaking which I did not know I had until I spoke to my very first class - I would freeze up completely.  I discovered if I told a joke here and there and got a laugh it changed my emotional experience.  After a few months I no longer needed humour to get me through - I actually lost my negative experience through the process of repeatedly standing in front of the group and changing the tone of how I saw what I was doing.  Eventually the new tone became permanently fixed and now I get really excited when I get to talk to groups.

So here you are standing next to  your hill of energy, possibly full of fear.  Let us change the tone of that energy so that when you enter it you have a different experience to the one you had before.  You know that lemony sweet yellow powdery sherbet dab (I ate these as a child).  Make it a hill of that, or some other powdery substance you like.  This changes the tone from experiencing, for example, the pain of a horrible panic attack to 'releasing the energy of the sherbet dab'.  It still hurts - but your underlying Unconscious brain notices the change in tone and becomes more willing to allow the release process to happen.

Time to Enter the Hill

Having waited next to the Hill for a while now what you have demonstrated to your Unconscious is that you have a degree of control over the experience.  It is not coming at you - you are acknowledging there are feelings to be released; you have moved towards it; and you have paused on the edge.  As you enter the Hill now just think about how you can change the negative tone of this experience (sherbet dab time) and move towards the very centre of the hill.  If there is an issue at the centre of the hill just be with that as well.

Now imagine that by simply being at the centre of the hill you are absorbing the energy of the hill.  Your body strips the energy from the yellow powder and a faint yellow gas starts to radiate out of the top of your head.  This now shows your Unconscious you believe you are radiating the energy away.  Believe it or not, if you do this right, this is what actually ends up happening (did for me, anyway).  Your Unconscious will allow the trapped emotional response to flow.

It is very unlikely you will achieve full release in one go.  When you have had enough, move out the other side, feeling the lowering in emotional energy levels as you do so.  Sit on the other side of the Hill for a while and then go in again or, if you have had enough, go off and do something else.  But before you do - just recap with your Unconscious to strengthen your understanding of what just happened.

You went into the very centre of the response, at its very worst, then came out the other side.  You survived.  Now to finish off tell your Unconscious not only did you survive - the  hill has reduced in size.

Do this with enough focus for long enough and you will see real shifts both in the movement of emotional energy and in the way your Unconscious sees the emotional response.

Using this method I removed severe panic attacks and 27 obsessions.

Not Realistic?

What you learn when you do this kind of self-work is that seeing, and changing how you see, is everything.  External reality has very little to do with what goes on inside our heads and that is the true reality of emotional self-management.

Regards - Carl

Panic Attacks and the Amygdala - Biological Answers

Panic Attacks and the Amygdala - Biological Answers
By Bill Chandler

I'll tell you right up front, this article is a "longie." But if you hang in there a read it all, I'll guarantee you'll learn tons of stuff about why panic attacks occur. And, of course, with that information in your back pocket you can also learn how to make them go away.

In my opinion, the key anatomical player in the generation of panic attacks is an almond-shaped, one-inch long grouping of nuclei (cluster of nerve cells) in the brain called the amygdala. And what do you know - the word "amygdala" is actually Greek for "almond-like." The amygdala is located in the temporal lobe (lower side) of the brain just a few inches from each ear, inward and in a direction toward the forehead. And it's situated equally in the left and right hemispheres. The amygdala is a card-carrying member of the brain's limbic system, which is all about the memory and motivation components of emotion. Its star players, for our immediate purposes, are, indeed, the amygdala, the hippocampus (long-term memory), and the hypothalamus (metabolism, hunger, thirst, fatigue, 24-hour life rhythms).

The amygdala is pivotal in our processing and retention of emotion and fear reactions. According to neuroscientist, Joseph E. LeDoux, Ph.D., the amygdala is the kingpin of our "general-purpose defense response control network." It would make perfect sense, then, that the amygdala would move into vigorous motion in response to threatening sensory input, real or perceived. And if you're a panic attack sufferer, don't ever, ever, ever forget the words "real or perceived."

Now, catch this. Though the amygdala and our fear circuitry remain mega-mysterious, it's at least commonly accepted that what we perceive as fear is produced by a very sophisticated two-way input system. And here's how it works. Sensory input passes through a gateway in the brain, a messenger hub if you will, called the thalamus. Conveniently, it sits right above the amygdala. The main function of the thalamus is to transmit its received sensory data to the higher-centers of the brain for reasoned response. The primary recipient of these messages is the thought and logic centers of the cerebral cortex (the approximately.10 inch outer layer - grey matter - of the brain involved with functions such as awareness, thought, language, and consciousness). However, as you're about to learn, the thalamus has other chat buddies.

When environmental input from our senses of sight, sound, taste, and touch reaches the thalamus, and very specific cues are analyzed, there looms a fork in the road. One bit of pavement leads directly to the amygdala, while the other takes its sweet time and heads toward the cerebral cortex. And each of these destinations generates very different and very unique responses. By the way - you may have noticed I left out our sense of smell from the first sentence of the paragraph. And that's because input from our sense of smell forgoes all the thalamus formality and shoots straight into the amygdala, though the amygdala doesn't facilitate perception.

Now, when the amygdala receives a message it's engineered to react by launching an intense physical response, the charge led by the secretion of a flood of stress and action hormones, such as cortisol and norepinephrine (a.k.a. noradrenaline). So this is the actual physical manifestation of fear that panic sufferers know all to well. See - the amygdala doesn't care if it's right or wrong, justified or not; it receives input and fires. By the way - the amygdala also sends messages to the brainstem to facilitate required adjustments in heart rate and respiration in response to fear and stress.

Well, after the initial onslaught of environmental kaboom hits home the slower sensory messages from the thalamus finally hit the cerebral cortex, specifically the prefrontal cortex, the area at the very front of the brain responsible for executive functioning - the mental ability to receive and interpret information and formulate decisions. As this occurs, conscious and rational thought regarding the events at hand is generated. Yes - it's in the prefrontal cortex that the fear stimuli are logically analyzed in great detail, the final assessment being sent to the amygdala. Now, the prefrontal cortex must remain on high-alert and do its best to ensure assessment accuracy because of its communication with the areas of the brain associated with pain, pleasure, anger, aggression, and panic. Indeed, there's a lot at stake. And when it's all said and done the amygdala ultimately takes its version of appropriate action, which, by the way - if sufficiently convinced - can include restoration of calm. Ah - all of this is the panic sufferer's dilemma, isn't it?

Nonetheless, think about what a great - miraculous, in fact - system this is. I mean, the amygdala, the entire limbic system for that matter, has its fear message and is prepping the body for immediate action. It's taking no chances, as it elects to err on the side of caution. And as you consider these dynamics always keep in mind that evolution presented us with a genetic make-up that leans toward the anxious. After the amygdala sends its message the prefrontal cortex takes the time to calculate the exact nature of the threat. If sufficient evidence exists that there is no threat, the amygdala is told to chill-out. Again, what an incredible mechanism this truly is. However, as it applies to us there's a major drawback. In the face of fear, the amygdala is the dominant of the two structures. And once the amygdala starts beating the drums it's really tough for the prefrontal cortex to convince it to knock it off. And without practiced intervention it really doesn't stand much of a chance.

Oh - one more bit of vitally important information that means so much to us. The amygdala also impacts fear memory by knocking on the door of the hippocampus. This allows for a faster interpretation and action response the next time around. Wow - what a protection device we possess. However, once again, this protection device presents a major drawback in that it paves the way for gross misinterpretation of sensory input, leading to inappropriate overreaction to truly harmless stimuli.

And that's the very foundation of panic!

I've worked hard in helping others with creative and effective relief strategies for depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. And it's all based in my own emotional and mental health history and recovery; as well as my clinical training and experience in counseling. I'm inviting you to visit my blog at http://chipur.com. It's a haven of sharing, learning, and relief for those enduring depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. Come on, stop on by and participate, won't you?

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