Removing Obsessions – What Is It that Really Lies Beneath?

Obsessions are concerned with the prevention of bad things happening (this also applies to some types of phobias).

Prior to the obsession coming into being there may have been a long period of worry related to the area of concern, of which the obsession is just one specific image or aspect.

Because it likes efficiency the brains strips out all unnecessary additional information and eventually just keeps flashing a representative image at the sufferer.  This may just be something as simple as a partial shape; for example the image of a nose (believe it or not, that is how specific an obsession can be – the person has an intense emotional reaction to something they know in their logical mind to be completely banal).

Memories of the context of the long period of worry leading up to the obsession can be blocked due to the memory-wiping affects of anxiety.  The sufferer of an obsession has trouble building an understanding about the source of the imagery now plaguing them from the centre of their obsession and they fear ‘what lies beneath’.

Once they decide to start facing it through the process of exposure therapy, however, the context is gradually revealed.

Context is rebuilt through mixing both the memories already contained within the trapped emotional response and from new interpretations of the gaps between available information.

As the emotional history becomes more available the sufferer starts to see where they went wrong in their understanding and how they should adjust their way of seeing in order to remove the obsession.

Confusion in Regards to Responsibilities and the Difference between Real and Imagined Events

When first starting to develop an obsession the sufferer may believe they are solely responsible for preventing the act at the centre of the obsession because they are the only one concerned about, or seemingly even aware of, the imagined threat.

This sense of isolation may be the result of an environment in which sharing worries and information about feelings is either prevented or seen as undesirable.  This sets up a self-fuelling internal worry cycle in mind and body.

Sufferers believe if the act were to happen it would be their fault because they had refused to listen to the pre-alert warning in their own heads.  They deliberately mimic the guilt response, as if the imagined horror story had really happened, and do so as a motivator to take early action in order to both prevent themselves from being in that situation and the event itself happening.

Unfortunately this mimicry can be so convincing the Unconscious, which cannot tell the difference between a real and an imagined scenario, buys into it as a current emergency situation and now starts warning the upper mind of the constantly ‘real’ threat as if it were happening right now.

Seeing this reaction in themselves as illogical the sufferer recoils and tries to eradicate the thinking and feelings attached to the process but this instead makes things worse.

As the person who contains ‘the imagined act’ they may see their obsession as a form of punishment for having the unwanted thoughts and feelings inside but also think they need to keep it as a preventative measure.

The sufferer can misunderstand subtle differences such as the difference between the act and their reaction to the act – it becomes meshed into one..

So, for example, when talking about healing an obsession through ‘emotional acceptance’ they can easily confuse accepting their emotional response to the act with accepting the unacceptable act itself (‘but then I might be agreeing the horrible act is OK?’).

They fear that removing the obsession will reduce their alertness.  This will lead to the act happening and they will then fail to cope with the knowledge they knew all along the act could happen but chose not to listen to the warning signals.

Problems Sharing with Others

Sufferers of obsessions struggle with some strange fears that delay or stop them seeking help or even sharing the content of their obsessions with others.

These fears can include:

• being locked up as someone capable of performing the acts in their obsessions because listeners will not understand the condition


• spreading their obsession to others (sufferers can have trouble believing that once the information is shared others will not develop the same condition)


• sharing information on their obsession will make it worse.

Going Into the Response

The feelings attached to an obsession are so strong they convey a sense of reality and a physically felt compulsion to do something about the alleged threat.

It is this compulsion to do something that can be most frightening because the sufferer knows there is nothing to do in reality so they keep backing away from the urge.  Unfortunately backing away strengthens the urge and its hold on the mind.

By taking the alternative approach and going into the urge and examining what drives it, the sufferer can start to undo the affect.  Do this work enough and they move into a stronger and stronger Objective Viewpoint - of seeing themselves from the outside – this is their self-image position.

What the self-image observer now sees is their most important value systems under threat and their reaction to them.

Obsessions and other anxiety disorders are usually built around imagined threats to what we value most but in the confusion caused by these conditions we see ourselves as the threat.

In one of her books on panic disorder Dr Claire Weekes talks about an exhausted midwife patient of hers who began worrying about how her tired state could impact on the quality of care she was able to give to the babies she cared for.

Passing an open upper floor window one day the midwife imagined accidentally dropping a baby through the window opening and this was enough to start an obsession/phobia about windows.

To the midwife the welfare of babies was an obvious core value – and it is around our core values, when we sense they are threatened, we are most likely to develop anxiety disorders.

What lies beneath our obsessions are things we can like about ourselves – things we agree with and positive things we can embrace again, but next time around we must do so in the right way.

If you have an obsession ‘what lies beneath’ are your core values – once you connect up with them again you can understand and clear your obsession and like yourself even more in the process.

Regards - Carl

Where are You on the Repressor versus Sensitiser Scale?

Quite a lot of research took place in the sixties on anxiety disorders and one theory was that anxiety sufferers reacted with two main defensive styles: Repressive versus Sensitiser (this was known as the R-S Scale).

Repressives

Repressives avoid acknowledging a thing is happening in order to protect against the emotional effects of a threatening situation.  They practice selective inattention (denial).  In some cases a person may use a lot of positive self-talk and ‘hope’ in difficult circumstances in order to deny what is actually going on in their lives.

At an Unconscious level they are reacting and building up emotional tension but on a Conscious level they are not aware of this going on. They are not wiling to listen to the emotional messages coming up from their Unconscious and may have a very good reason for behaving this way – for example if they do pay attention it may mean the end of an important relationship.

Sensitisers

Sensitisers do the opposite to Repressives – they adopt a more paranoid approach and react to everything as quickly as possible with the intention of minimising the affects of the issue concerned before it can take a hold and push them to the point they are producing negative emotional responses.

In both cases the people concerned are trying to avoid the development of their own negative feelings in regards to a looming situation.

Most of us can identify with having adopted versions of these two behaviours at different times to ‘keep the peace’ or prevent a situation ‘getting out of hand’ but the researchers tell us that some folks adopt one of these two approaches as their default way of dealing with life.

As a short-term strategy either method is fine (in my view) but what if the external issue keeps recurring?  In that case all that happens is the person builds and stores emotional response issues for the future.

Both approaches are based on the belief that the ‘ultimate threat’ would be something we could not cope with.

Sample Scenario: John Loves Emily and the Children But Emily Does Not Love John

Eighteen months into their marriage and Emily gives birth to their first child.  Up until the point she became pregnant Emily was an apparently loving, caring partner who thought the world of John.  Once she became pregnant, however, Emily became cold and uncommunicative.

During her pregnancy John told himself this was simply a side-effect of being pregnant – he had tried to offer his support through this tough time but Emily dismissed his concerns about her demeanour as his ‘being silly’.

Baby is now nine months old – the relationship with Emily still feels cold and John is wondering if ‘this is it’ and asks Emily what has gone wrong.  He is getting very emotional.

Emily tells John she wants another baby.  This will make her feel differently towards him.  John replies he did not realise there was a problem and Emily states it just goes to show how unobservant and self-centred he is.

John tells Emily he would like to concentrate on the quality of life for their current child rather than simply being a child-production system and Emily tells him she wants six children and if he cannot bring himself to make her happy by doing this he will be of no use to her and can leave so she can find a man who will; she storms off.

John reasons that Emily must care about him despite her current behaviour because women do not have babies with men they do not love, do they?  He also thinks about how he will fail to cope with leaving his current child, with the shame of having another man raising his child and how easily Emily could meet another man and disappear from his life, taking his child with her, forever.   He immediately has an image of his committing suicide because of all this loss.  He decides to agree to have another baby with Emily.

Again, up until the pregnancy, Emily is the perfect partner.  Once pregnancy has been achieved however, Emily goes cold on him again.

When their first child, a daughter, reaches three John starts to worry about her behaviour – she has a habit of running headlong into things and injuring herself.  Emily dismisses all of his concerns telling him he does not know the first thing about children and he should keep his nose out.

John feels completely disrespected by her responses.  When he makes it clear he does not like the way he is treated Emily explodes in rage at him and tells him he can leave if he does not like the way things are.

This happens several times and on one occasion John also gets angry back at her and feels himself losing control.  As Emily comes at him in spitting fury mode she says something hurtful and he slaps her.

Immediately John falls into shocked remorse.  His reaction shocks him so much he vows never to do that again.  He begs Emily to forgive him and promises he will never do it again.

Now he starts trying to eliminate the possibility of another confrontation like that happening by constantly monitoring and eliminating potential areas in which his daughter could hurt herself.

John has noticed that every time his daughter runs anywhere in the house he jumps out of his skin at the thought of her being injured and he chases her around everywhere to confirm she is safe.

Emily criticises him for this, telling him to let the daughter be, and John accepts her criticisms – he is too jumpy.

Meanwhile, Emily wants a third baby.  John starts to notice the cycle – she likes him up until pregnancy and then goes cold again.  He agrees to another baby – in for a penny, right?

One day John reads a newspaper story about a child being injured in a certain way and he imagines his own child being hurt that way and then finds he cannot stop thinking about it.  He would never forgive himself if that happened to his daughter.  He criticises himself for being over-reactive but keeps it to himself so Emily does not, likewise, criticise him.  His own self-criticism he can live with but her doing it has more power.

The images of his daughter being hurt keep flashing in his mind.  John has just developed an obsession.  He cannot get the pictures of hurtful things happening to her out of his head.

Fourth child arrives and now John sees the like-John-dislike-John cycle in Emily so clearly he can no longer hide from it.  He wonders if Emily will dump him when baby number six has arrived.

A year later, when Emily does her baby routine again, John decides to test the theory and refuses to have baby number five.  Emily does not dump him immediately but she does go cold on him.  The coldness goes on and on and John notices Emily getting happier and happier – with other people who she goes out with more and more.

First child is now fifteen years old and John asks Emily straight what the ‘big plan’ is.  John tells Emily he believes she sees him as nothing more than a sperm donor and if he walked out tomorrow she would not bat an eyelid.

Emily comes clean and without any sense of guilt tells him he is absolutely right.  When John asks how she sees the next steps in regards to the family she tells him now the cat is out of the bag she wants him to see other women and wants him to stay in the house just for the sake of the children – she has no further use for him personally.

Emily asks John why he does not look surprised at what she has just said.

John looks at her and says “I always knew”.

What John Always Knew

At some level John knew he was pretending real-life events, and the way he was being treated, were not real.  He lied to himself and believed it was morally right to do so in order to protect his relationship with his child.

This is repression at work.

In a bid to remove the possible threat of a future confrontation with Emily which could also lead to the ending of the relationship both with Emily and his children he next tries to take preventative measures by following his daughter around – here he is also acting like a sensitiser.

This gets so bad it triggers an obsession.

What John Now Knows

John has an obsession to get rid of and the possible loss of a family to come to terms with.  What he now realises was that he was always powerless to change the path of the relationship.  It was always going to end up this way.

But he also knows he CAN survive the worst case scenario – in fact the worst case scenario is not as bad as the long, drawn out experience he has had.

Quite often in emotional illness we make the mistake of preferring a permanent, lower level painful experience to a short-term, intensely painful version which would eventually pass.

We remain stuck in situations, repressing and becoming increasingly sensitised to them, until we face up to the genuine fact we can cope with pretty much anything when we need to and we knew it all along.

Have you had experience of repressing and sensitising in this way?

Regards - Carl

Emotional Healing Challenges Ideas, Beliefs, Attitudes and Reveals Your Values

When a person has decided they are finally ready to start the healing journey they may find various aspects of the journey unclear for a while until they realise they have to challenge and change their ideas, beliefs, attitudes and values – and how all of these interact with each other.

Ideas

An idea is a snapshot map - usually an image.  Ideas tend to be easily shared and universally acknowledged as to what they are with other people.

An idea can be an image of something we are moving towards, something we wish to create or the map of a journey we are thinking about travelling.

We are able to share and test our ideas easily with other people and there can be common agreement on what the idea looks like.  Individual differences arise, however, when individuals assess the impact of each idea differently and you find an idea you are exploring is something someone else will not even consider.

For example I can share with you a simple three stage idea of an exposure therapy plan and you will understand it clearly – but while I automatically accept the idea as workable you may assess it as the most stupid and dangerous thing a person can do.

We are capable of storing thousands if not millions of ideas over a lifetime without being too concerned about their accuracy.

Several ideas you may like to think about when it comes to removing an emotional disorder include:

• emotional issues are driven by trapped emotional energy rather than the original trigger that produced them


• an emotional response you are currently having in regards to an event happening several years ago may be a liar because it is based on a problem that no longer exists


• even if it is lying the energy has to be released through the past event as if it were temporarily true right now in order for the body to stop wanting to resolve the issue being lied about..

The nature of ideas starts to change when we select an idea from the many available and either decide to apply the map it offers to the way we manage our emotional lives or we see the idea as something to fight..

Beliefs

Beliefs are ideas with roots.

Those roots are fed by emotional responses based on a mixture of real-life experiences and imagined scenarios (mostly imagined scenarios, if we are being honest).

They are also supported by other ideas held in our brains – ideas that show, for example, what happens if the idea is applied for a short time (a day); a medium period of time (few weeks ) and strategically (five years to a lifetime).

We believe certain things will happen if we apply an idea for long enough – the decision as to whether or not we apply a new idea depends on how convinced we are the idea will produce a desired result and how desirable that result is compared to the discomfort of the journey to get to it.

Beliefs are concerned with the truth or otherwise of a map.  If we follow the journey represented to us by the idea will we find the destination promised or the threats we were warned about?

Beliefs about a thing are really only concerned with two questions – should we move towards or away from the idea?

If I were to say to you that, as you approach your emotional disorder, uncovering it layer by layer, you will eventually see that you have been deliberately keeping the disorder to prevent some terrible thing from happening, rather than because you are hiding from your own ‘demonic self’ – would you believe me?

The decision which direction to go in, towards or away from an idea, decides your attitude to the problem.

Attitude

In past times ‘attitude’ was the name given to the method used by a predator to stalk its prey.  Whether you want to move towards an idea or away from it decides your general direction; but attitude is about the route you expect to follow to get there.

What we know about attitude is once the journey has started the attitude sometimes needs to change as reality dawns.

For example, you may be looking for a straight path to emotional wellness but the path turns out to be a crazy-paving path instead and you sometimes find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere (at least you think that way at the time).  Other times you find yourself where you want to be without knowing quite how you arrived.

If I suggest to you the first part of your journey towards emotional healing, particularly if you have a serious anxiety disorder such as obsessions; OCD or phobias to clear, is to go speak to your doctor and establish a supportive team because this is going to be a long journey and you need their help – would you do that?

Or would that be too much of a delay?  You could do what I did and spend the first three months doing an exposure therapy plan alone then rushing to the doctor for confirmation that your ‘mammalian freeze response’ is a normal part of the anxiety process and not instead evidence you are going into a diabetic coma.

Values

Values are the things  we regard as most important in life and without which life would not not be worth much (they are still just ideas, really).

Values are both about the destination and the journey.  They are how we wish to travel, and why.  Our Self-Image is a value system based on who we see ourselves as now, who we wish to be and how we get to be that person (in most cases we already are that person and we just do not know it yet).

In order to be properly lined up mentally and emotionally you need to understand your values and how you work with them right now – if you are not lined up inside the gaps will show.

You can see this in social organisations where what the organisation is set up to achieve on behalf of others is not how the organisation travels itself – for example I remember watching a television programme where a doctor treating insomniacs was trying to get his 110 hour working week reduced.  The doctor was crumbling as he worked to help others.

It is easier to see this in others than it is in ourselves but, for an individual, this lack of congruence may show for example in how a person really concerned about the safety of their family acts like a vicious bully to keep everyone ‘safe’.

Because your values become unconscious over time you may forget what they are until they are threatened by a life event or the behaviour of someone else.

When your deepest value systems are being challenged you are at most risk of developing emotional disorders because if the challenge repeats over time you will react more and more strongly; to the point you become sensitised (over-reactive).

Once you become sensitised you lose sight of what your underlying values are and become more concerned with your sensitised state.  You know you are over-reacting and become suspicious as to why.  You now see YOU as the threat.

Truth is you felt your deepest values were threatened and became compelled to do something about it – but in reality there is nothing you can do and now you are stuck in a Catch-22 situation.  All emotionally pumped up with nowhere to go.

How would you value my advice if I told you that valuing the well-being of other people above your own well-being – even if they are, for example, your children - puts you at serious risk of becoming emotionally ill?

Although we cannot remove our value systems, nor should we wish to, we can re-prioritise them.  In order to become emotionally well you may, for a long time, have to keep re-visiting and challenging what  you value.

You must always value your long-term emotional well-being above that of others - you are of no use to others if you do not do so.

Have I challenged any ideas, beliefs, attitudes and values here?

Regards - Carl

I Have an Anxiety Disorder. How Should I Think So My Emotions Work Logically Instead?

Think Big; Think Small; then Try Your Best to Think Nothing at All

Think Big – the Whole Emotional Process

It is your logical thinking brain that asks the question ‘How can I make my emotions work logically’.  Let us take a look at a few facts about your logical thinking brain.

A Few Things to Know About Your Logical Left Thinking Neo-Cortex

Thinking – the process whereby electrical signals strung together in our brains create the illusion there is coordinated speech going on in our heads – exists in two small areas of your left cortex; here we will focus on the main one – your left frontal neo-cortex.

The purpose of your left frontal neo-cortex is to act as a well organised naming and indexing system which files away quick reference representations linked to imagery in our right neo-cortex.

For example we can think the word ‘church’ in our left neo-cortex and this can link up to a picture of a church in our right neo-cortex (our picture/pattern brain) and then we can take that further by remembering our own personal experience of a church and the people we knew there and then the conversations we had and the emotional experiences and it goes on … all starting from the word ‘church’ in the left neo-cortex.

Our thinking left neo-cortex is full of these kinds of well organised representations.

The Ego – our thinking protection and control system

The ego is a mechanism designed to protect our current representational structure - we regard this structure as ‘the truth’ for us as individuals.

Without our version of ‘the truth’ and the establishing of belief systems related to these representations we would have no ability to control our behaviours.

Our left neo-cortex creates stepped memories and instructional patterns which it then expects us to follow behaviourally.  Because of this controlling function it is only natural that when an emotional disorder presents itself the thinking mind assumes it is a problem caused by incorrect thinking to be found and changed in the thinking neo-cortex..

Your left neo-cortex, however, has certain characteristics that make it unsuitable for processing your emotions:

Characteristics of Your Left Neo-Cortex

Primarily, It is the emotional blocking brain part. In order for you to be able to think consciously at all your ARAS – your Ascending Reticular Activation System – blocks the the flow of emotional and visual signals coming up from your lower Reptilian Brain.  If this blocking did not occur you would never be able to wake up.  By doing this it ‘activates’ your conscious neo-cortex (both left and right) to pay conscious attention to the outside world.

If we took away your ability to block your emotions you would be unable to develop anxiety disorders because anxiety disorders are caused by habitual emotional blocking using the ARAS.  Without this blocking ability you would repeatedly have to surrender to the emotional responses as they left your body whenever you produced them.  Your thinking would be forever being closed down whenever this happened.

So, asking your thinking brain to resolve an anxiety disorder problem is a bit like asking the owner of a restaurant full of vermin to organise their own health and safety inspection and give themselves a clean bill of health.

Your thinking brain has a vested interest in not doing what needs to be done and is trying to convince you not to do so because it gets shut down for long periods when you do and it hates this – and it hurts.

During sleep both your Reptilian Brain and your right neo-cortex (your conscious pattern making brain) are active in releasing emotional energy through ‘dreaming’,  but when you are consciously awake and thinking most of this activity is suppressed.  Day-dreaming is the act of partially opening up the relationship between your right neo-cortex and your Reptilian and Limbic brains so they share imagery while you remain conscious.

Just pay attention to any self-critical comments that come up when you start thinking about your emotional states and what you are hearing is your ego fighting against  the truth it knows it is going to have to face eventually.  It tends to regard anything that does not follow its own rigid organising process as silly.  You can retrain it to think differently by showing it the logic inherent in your emotional process as a whole rather than the emotional content of the process.

A few more things about your left neo-cortex:

Your left neo-cortex is:

• judgemental and expects incoming information to link to information already stored.  It resists what it believes not ‘right’ as it attempts to match new information with old


• unable to work with a piece of information it has not named – any unnamed thing we are unsure of will keep grabbing at our attention until it is fully named, understood and then indexed as a representation


• impatient – it is time conscious and processes information at the speed of speech  (it hates emotional work because it is time consuming)


• concerned with Convergent Goal Setting – that is, with condensing and closing things down (you cannot get more condensed and closed down than a name)


• concerned with communicating with the outside world, rather than the inside world.  It adopts quite a lot of belief systems from the outside world and attempts to impose them on your inner world in the form of shoulds


• biologically designed to store the information it records in straight linear patterns with memories based on past experiences.

So when we ask the question ‘how do I make my emotions work more logically’ what we are really asking is how do I make the rest of me work the same way as my left neo-cortex?

You cannot achieve this directly, ever.  But there is a way to do it indirectly.

Just to repeat - although the content of your emotional system is not logical; your emotional system itself is.  Once your left neo-cortex has worked with your right neo-cortex (your pattern mind) long enough to see what really needs to be done it will be more willing to get out of the way of the process and allow itself to be temporarily shut down so the right neo-cortex can be allowed to do its job of processing emotional energy.

Following on from satisfactory emotional release the thinking left neo-cortex finds itself working much more effectively and sees the logic in the new way of doing things.

A Few Things to Know About Your Right Pattern-Making Neo-Cortex

Your right neo-cortex has an advantage over your left in that it never really sleeps.  During sleep your left gets switched off but your right neo-cortex communicates with the other visual parts of your brain, mainly your lower Reptilian Brain, all the time.

These two brains together discharge most of your emotional baggage collected during the day.  However, this process does not discharge the intense emotional charge attached to anxiety disorders such as obsessions and phobias.  This is probably because the imagery involved is stored in the Limbic Brain, and not in the Reptilian Brain, but also these areas of the brain are classed as ‘genuine things to be afraid of’.

Primarily, your right neo-cortex is the emotional releasing brain. It does not think with words – it thinks in patterns; in imagery – both internally generated imagery created by the imagination and in memories of external imagery from external life.

The right neo-cortex works in ‘reflections’ – reflections are similar to the scenes of a movie – they contain meaningful dialogue; action and emotional energy.  If the right neo-cortex is allowed to work with a reflection for long enough it will strip and release the emotional energy attached to the reflection and transfer the unemotional data contained over to the left neo-cortex for naming and indexing.

This is why in most cases looking in our current thinking for the solution to an emotional disorder issue is the wrong place to look – our current thinking is a record of the data stripped from past experiences.  The answers to our emotional issues are found in our right neo-cortex most of the time.

Your right neo-cortex:

• works with experiential information (imagery with feelings attached) to explore patterns and the connections between them


• is able to link up seemingly separate pieces of information and create meaning out of them – identifying connections and rhythms


• processes this information very slowly – when it comes to processing blocked emotional energy the right neo-cortex can take a long time because first the energy must be unblocked; then sometimes it completely floods the brain and then the information contained in the blocked feelings – such as the issue which caused them – takes some time to emerge as an insight


• shows us things we do not want to see because the messages do not fit in with our ‘logical’ plans – for example that the partner we love does not love us


• is divergent in thinking – it likes to open and connect one pattern with other patterns – it is concerned with the future, not the past


• communicates mostly with our internal world


• is biologically designed to store the information it records in clusters – I think of these clusters as ‘lands of the mind’.

One other thing to say here is your right neo-cortex sees, but it does not think.  It experiences and sees the experience and communicates to your lower brains what it sees in pictures.

Your left thinking neo-cortex cannot communicate with your lower brain parts directly – they do not understand the language.  But what it can do is use words linked to pictures in the right neo-cortex and then the right communicates those images downwards.

That is the Think Big part of the equation – the overall model of why the right neo-cortex, your picture mind, is the mind you need to start working with.

Think Small – to heal an emotional issue focus on as few things as possible as intensely as possible

When you decide to heal using systematic exposure therapy (or just plain unsystematic exposure therapy by just facing the triggering issue and the emotions attached come what may) there are only a few things you need to focus on – and concentrated focus is the most crucial but difficult thing to do.  You need to turn your focus inwards and go towards:

• the feelings (you will sense there is a place inside, or even maybe to one side of your body – I know that sounds weird but that is how it sometimes feels) coupled with


• the  image or issue.

If you have an obsession you have no other option but to take this approach when applying exposure therapy but with a phobia you can go into the feeling as you approach either the external trigger or an imagined inner version - most phobia sufferers I have spoken to can practice self-therapy using just their imaginations.

As always, I would recommend if you have a serious anxiety disorder you seek professional support from your doctor first.

What if I just have feelings I want to get rid of and there is no attached imagery or trigger?

Think small again and go just into the feelings repeatedly – this will be very difficult.  What you find eventually is that imagery starts being generated and you should then focus on that.

Sometimes the imagery generated is not related to the issue that triggered the emotional response but is an image designed to help you in the release process..

The closer to the central core of the feeling you move the faster you dissipate the energy driving it.

Trying to Think Nothing at All

The simple truth is that an anxiety disorder is nothing more than an intense emotional charge stored in the body displaying the fact by flashing imagery at you through one of your right neo-cortex pattern-brain clusters.

It is quite natural to suspect there are all kinds of hidden issues, thoughts and feelings going on inside yourself when suffering with this kind of condition but if you take that kind of self-mistrust as a given side-affect of the condition itself there will come a day when you master your emotional system and logically remove any emotional problems you have.

Regards - Carl

Five Subtle Benefits Gained from Seeing a Person Centred Counsellor

During my healing process from complex OCD, phobias and panic attacks I saw three Person-Centred Counsellors spread out over a six year period.

The third counsellor I still see on a monthly basis for emotional maintenance - I find the experience so beneficial (even lottery winners can benefit from seeing a counsellor every now and again!) and as a part of their professional practice counsellors themselves are required to have professional counselling sessions in order to remain emotionally clear for their clients.

The first two counsellors I saw were provided for short periods by my doctor but the third I met through work and this coincided with my being ready to start the healing plan I had designed for myself.  In my day-job I act as a referrer, occasionally passing people on to a counselling team and I have an Intermediate Certificate in Person-Centred Counselling - this qualification is enough to understand the role of a Counsellor but not to practice professionally as one.

Trained, experienced counsellors of this type are guided by a number of ethical principles, one of the most important being the principle of client autonomy. This principle establishes that you decide the direction of your counselling sessions. Person-centred counsellors may suggest options for you to consider when you get stuck or when you ask them for advice, but they are unlikely to make final decisions for you or design and recommend a healing plan for you - that is your job.

The role of a counsellor of this type is to help you learn to become expert in understanding and working with yourself, rather than in your coming to regard them as the 'wise and wonderful guru of the inner me' who can give you the secrets you need for self-governance (they may well be this amazing character but it is not what they are employed to do).

There are a number of ethical and professional conduct principles which Person-Centred Counsellors are trained to stick to and at your first meeting they will explain these to you.  In this article I want to highlight five powerful, almost unconscious, services they provide which you will probably not see advertised or even spoken about during your sessions, but which I became increasingly aware of during my healing process:

• Acceptance Coach


• Living Mirror


• De-clutterer


• Personal Cheerleader


• Reliable Milestone Marker.

Acceptance Coach

These Counsellors are trained in the principle of unconditional positive regard (UPR) - this means they spend time entering into your viewpoint of your life and respect your right to be you. Their role is to achieve empathy with your experience - 'wear your shoes to the point they feel where they pinch'. After a couple of sessions with a counsellor who achieves this with you something magical happens. You unconsciously notice this professional person, who you respect, finds your internal horror stories easier to accept than you do. Things you find unacceptable about yourself they find perfectly normal.

In this way a counsellor can lead you towards accepting experiences you previously could not accept in your Unconscious Mind. This affect stays with you long after your counselling sessions have ended and quite often the act of discussing the 'unacceptable' will create an insight for you that prepares you more fully for the next session. The affect is so deep that when you are not with your counsellor and you are facing up to difficult emotional issues alone it is as if that level of acceptance remains with you and you are able to become your own counsellor.

Living Mirror

Summary and reflection skills are used by the Counsellor to demonstrate you are being actively listened to - this professional person has no personal agenda other than to support you in yours.  They will not support you in committing criminal acts or other really harmful behaviour, there are formal boundaries and requirements in place, but equally they will not try to impose their personal beliefs about 'what you should do next' .

Your feelings, and the content of what you say, are taken seriously. Subtle things hardly noticed by you as you say them may be presented back to you as open-ended questions for you to explore further. When this is done in a non-judgemental way it validates your experience of life and helps clarify the realities you live with. You may be lightly challenged where the information reflected back to you appears to conflict. For example if you laugh whilst relating a particularly painful experience the counsellor may ask you to explain what is behind the laughter - this enables you to identify your underlying thinking processes and beliefs more clearly for yourself.

I remember once a relative taped me while I was talking to myself at home and played it back to me - I had no recall at all of this self-talk and was really surprised about how unaware I was of the verbal chat coming out of my mouth.  Sometimes the only person not listening to what you are saying is you.  In counselling what you say and feel is summarised and reflected back to you for clarification.

A good counsellor (and I have never met a bad one) will seem to disappear from your conscious awareness at times because you become so wrapped up in the process and they are so good at being there for you it is as if your minds were fully working together.  The sense of this other mind working with yours can remain in between sessions as you start to pay more and more attention to yourself - you become much more self-aware.

De-clutterer

Sometimes the first ten minutes or so of a session may be used to clear out your emotional baggage of the day before moving on to the longer term issues. The Counsellor will not tell you what to believe or clear out of the way - you will decide this. They are trained to support you, not tell you what to focus on.  On occasion my counsellors were 'emergency support' if something really painful had happened recently and had distracted me from the long term work I was doing on healing my anxiety disorders.

These new emotional emergencies sorted out much quicker with my having counselling support already in place (pity we do not have these folks to hand when our anxiety disorders start to develop, eh, but the truth is we are blind to what is going on inside of us at the pre-disorder stage).

Personal Cheerleader

Counsellors are not just there for the unhappy experiences - they can help you acknowledge yours wins too. There may be things you have recovered from and you wish to celebrate the recovery but it would be inappropriate to do so with the people in your personal life - that relative you have finally forgiven for stealing your christmas present money ten years ago - how appropriate would it be to tell them you had nightmares of cooking them over a slow heat on a gas cooker all that time but they can rest easy now?

Or why not tell your mates how you have overcome obsessive imagery related to the throwing of children out of windows?  Not a good idea, is it?  I have actually lost friends following on from telling them I had recovered from a phobia of lampposts.

It really is important to celebrate your wins and sometimes your counsellor will stop you to make sure you do this.  It is so easy to move straight on to the next emotional issue you have to deal with without acknowledging your progress.  This leads me on to the next benefit of the counselling experience - Milestone Marker.

Reliable Milestone Marker

You may have come a very long way - but have not mentally registered much of it.  This may be partly due to short-term memory loss and also to emotional non-relativity.

When undergoing periods of intense emotional self-work it can be almost impossible to think clearly.  I found myself going through phases where just to put one word down on paper was difficult.  I recorded a lot of my experiences using simple mind maps and these would later remind me of things I noticed during the healing process - which meant going through extended periods of intense emotional exposure therapy.  Intense emotional states blank memory due to your brain being in 'emergency mode' - it works the same for emotional disorders as it does with any other life event triggering an intense emotional response.

Similarly, your Unconscious Mind tends to focus on how you feel right now.  It does not automatically tell itself how great you feel compared to last year.  If you feel a bit rubbish today you may not see any benefit in telling yourself to think back to a time you felt ten times worse - but you will if you do it.

Sometimes my day-job can be quite intellectually stressful.  I just remind myself of a time when I earned a living in a place where people smashed broken bottles over my head when they got drunk - makes my current job look like the best job on Earth.

Your Counsellor has a fully functioning memory and will occasionally remind you of how far you have come - both in terms of your intellectual understanding of yourself and also in terms of how what you feel now and how it relates to how you felt when you first started seeing them.

And there is more ...

Person--Centred Counselling is not just about going and talking to someone - the affects of this process are subtle but over time you will notice fundamental changes in your Unconscious.  Self-criticism fades and is replaced by an acceptance of what it is to be human.  You will find yourself more supportive of others because at some point you decided to better support yourself.

The time and money you put into getting counselling support is an investment in yourself that can benefit you and others for the rest of your life.

Regards - Carl

Obsessions and Other Emotional Disorders – the Four Stages of Taking the Journey Within

If you are the sufferer of one or more obsessions the idea of journeying inwards may be terrifying and something you’ve been trying to avoid for some time.

It may help you to know that I once sat in that position myself and my experience, as a result of personal research and talking to many other people with similar difficulties, tells me there are millions of us in the world who share or have previously shared this situation. Despite the isolating affects anxiety disorders such as obsessions impose on us it is important to know you are not alone.

An obsession is a curable condition. I know this because I have healed myself of at least 27 of them and they have not returned. I will go so far as to say that all anxiety disorders are curable conditions, if you are willing to do the necessary work to heal them.

About six years ago I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist with a complex form of OCD – in addition to my obsessions I was plagued by phobias; panic attacks; depression and disgust attacks. I had held on to my condition for almost 30 years, mostly due to having responsibilities towards other people – there is an ‘opportunity cost’ to healing in that it takes a lot of time and energy. 

I had managed to live an externally ‘normal’ life all that time. There came a point I decided I finally needed to care for me. I had had enough.  I needed to be more selfish.

I went to see my doctor, who sent me to see a psychiatrist, who also sent me to sign up for counselling. I told them I had a plan based on Exposure Therapy, which I had already started to carry out, and I needed their support in seeing it through as it was causing me to feel a whole range of extreme emotional symptoms.

I had started to ‘go within’ and my own emotional responses had started to fight that decision.  Hidden beliefs were starting to pop up in my conscious with the aim of changing my direction back to what it previously had been: avoidance.  The general message being thrown at me was ‘if you do this you are going to die’.  I made a decision I was either going to live the inner life I wanted to live, or I was going to die trying.  Bring it on.

I faced my inner world day after day and every day it hurt like hell – but I started to see changes and results.  I called the process ‘going-into-the-out-of’.  Before you can come out of an anxiety disorder you must first be willing to repeatedly go into the centre of it and experience all its glory at fullest intensity. 

It took me three months of daily work to get rid of the panic attacks that acted as a barrier towards my being able to work directly on my obsessions.

I started to see that various aspects of this emotional mass had structure to it; I would explore, experiment and test on myself until I felt I had a reliable picture of how this or that particular emotional response worked.  I realised the same approach worked over and over again with different emotions.

I discovered these responses, and their attached images and memories, were chronologically layered – only one obsessive response would appear at a time.  As I cleared one another, older version of a previous obsession would appear.  ‘Oh, I remember this one’ I would think.  There were times when I wondered when I would get to the bottom of them – I was even concerned that if I did get rid of them would there be anything of who I was underneath it all and would I like what I found (people with obsessions tend to worry about this kind of thing).  But now I knew how to get rid of obsessions my sense of desperate frustration changed to simply  acceptance of ‘the next job to do’.

‘There must be a part that …’ was a common question that came up in my mind.  I would notice a particular aspect of an emotional pattern and then start researching it and find ‘the biological part’ in question.  Why does this happen?  Why does that happen?  Pretty soon I was telling my professional supporters what I was seeing – and they were agreeing with me.

Within a year I had got rid of almost all my obsessions; stopped my panic attacks and got rid of my phobias. My psychiatrist told me he was astonished at my progress.

It took another two years, using the same approach, to get rid of my more deeply embedded obsessions and then to start work on the underlying emotional pain that had causes the obsessions and phobias to form in the first place.

I now see my counsellor once a month for ‘maintenance’ and as each year passes I become more and more unconditionally happy as I make decisions that continue to lead me away from the hell I once endured.

The journey is a difficult one and has 4 main stages:

1 Learning to Understanding

Like an evil scientist you have to put yourself through increasingly painful episodes and watch, with a part of your mind I call ‘the Silent Observer’,  what happens.  What you eventually come to understand is your current mental model does not match what really happens with emotional responses.  Emotional responses do not just come and stay – if you stay with them long enough they turn from a foggy mood into something you can actually see, as if you were a mechanic fixing a car, and then when you keep willingly going into the experiencing of them they evaporate into nothingness.

There comes a point when you wonder where your obsession went – and you cannot get it back no matter what you do.  You may try to re-stimulate it but there is nothing to re-stimulate.  The reality of the process dawns.

2 Understanding to Doing

Being able to see the structure of an obsession does not mean you do not have to do the work – but it can get much faster just as any other area of life does with practice.  Once you know how it works, and you know it does work, you stop experimenting, testing and wondering and just get on with it.  The negative ‘it could kill you’ messages still come up but you just laugh at them.  They are like old friends by now.  The work still hurts but who cares?

You have now learned you get two choices:  feel a low level of pain indefinitely or feel an intense pain for a relatively short period of time and remove the problem.  Which are you going to choose?

It took me several months to figure out how to remove my first obsession.  By my 27th I could do it in 30 minutes of concentrated work.  What takes the time is the time in between healing as your thinking mind always puts up a bit of a fight before you are able to get into ‘the zone’ for concentrated work.

3 Doing to Obtaining

What you aim to obtain is happiness.  Happiness is not about getting something – happiness is about getting rid of emotional baggage and emotional baggage does not come much bigger than an obsession.

You obtain mental freedom – the more obsessions I got rid of the more I felt free.  I could see the mental freedom percentage increasing with each obsession cleared.  You become more aware of what it is you are obtaining and so you want more of it.  At the start of the process I had just a vague idea of what happiness was, the more happiness I got the better the picture became. 

This desire drives you not just to remove your obsessions but to remove the underlying emotional baggage that created the condition in the first place.  What you discover is you like yourself just being at peace – peace is something you cannot obtain when you have obsessions but these peaceful times increase in number and you get a clearer and clearer picture of what you want to obtain and greater confidence you can actually get it – as long as you are willing to keep ‘going-into-the-out-of’.

4 Obtaining to Maintaining

Maintaini
ng is really easy.  You have had so much training by now that as soon as a negative emotional experience occurs you are in there getting rid of it.  I am not talking about obsessions here – I am talking about basic primary emotions.  You are never going to allow yourself to become ill like that ever again. 

The mantra that you can never be cured of this condition is false – you know this as a fact when you get to this point.  When people tell you it cannot be cured but only managed they are talking from a very limited experience.  You now come to accept you know things about the way people work a lot of people will never do the work to know.

There is a fifth stage; this stage is the icing on the cake for me.

5 Maintaining to Sharing (?)

My original heading here was going to be ‘Maintaining to Teaching’ but I have learned this is an area of life that cannot really be taught.  It can only be shared – because the responsibility to heal lies within each individual and our individual journeys will be different even if the mechanics are the same.  There are no examinations or pass marks for this kind of stuff.

No-one really knows what you know – we ourselves have enough trouble figuring our own inner worlds out.

During my healing journey, which will be a journey that continues to the day I pop  my clogs because you have to keep moving in the same direction no matter how you currently feel, I have met a lot of other anxiety disorder sufferers.  One of the ways I justify the investment of time it takes to keep me on the right track is that once I discover something new I will share.

So here I am sharing – how am I doing?

Strategy for Healing Supermarket Phobia

Having been someone who used to suffer from many obsessions and phobias I think I tended to take the 'bull at the gate' approach to most of them and it worked for me - I think for folks with obsessions the obsessions pursue them whereas people with phobias go out to pursue the phobia.

In this video an expert who has overcome a social anxiety problem discusses the 'baby-step' strategy he used.  If you'd like to subscribe to his other videos just double click the video and it'll take you to his YouTube channel.



The need for control is very strong in people with anxiety disorders and this is generated by the 'way things should be' thinking in the left neo-cortex logical mind. Getting the desire to be in control of the emotional process out of the way so you can 'lower' yourself into the process, thereby learning to control it indirectly, is key to overcoming anxiety attacks. The idea is that you let the experience flow through you and eventually it evaporates of its own accord.

Was this video helpful in any way? Please leave a comment below.

Regards - Carl

Seth tells Us How to Support Someone with an Anxiety Disorder

In these two videos Seth talks about the support an anxiety disorder sufferer benefits from but there are some caveats I'd add:

• while it's OK to ask for this kind of support from parents or siblings it's not OK to ask for it from children or those who have their own emotional difficulties - the last thing you want is everyone tippy-toeing around you - it just makes things more tense


• in some cases the reason for the anxiety disorder developing in the first place is because the family is seriously dysfunctional and may actually have been criticising the sufferer for years beforehand - this can lead to an unconscious self-critical inner voice - it's like an echo of that person's outer experience - in such cases the person needs to get external (professional) support


• there's a limit to what family and friend supporters can do - they've still got to be themselves. As Seth says though - people are only human.

Two other points I'd like to make here:

• I don't fully agree with the 'relaxation and peace and quiet at all times' approach - I believe exposure therapy needs to be achieved through cycling through both of these stages; in my experience it's experiencing intense emotions for long enough that clears them but you do need to have peaceful rest periods in between - I don't think Seth's suggesting 'no stress ever' but I wouldn't want people to think isolation and total peace are the answer either


• strangely enough depression is not an emotional response - it's a withdrawal response in which the cognitive function (our thoughts) pull back into the lower brain in an effort to avoid painful stimulation - the problem with this is that our thinking pulls back into our emotional brain and so ends up moving closer to the disturbing and ruminating thoughts.

I'll write about depression in more depth in future posts.

Regards - Carl

Seth is Overcoming His Anxiety Disorder

This fellow is a fellow to follow - meet Seth; he's provided a brilliant set of videos on YouTube relating his journey to overcome his anxiety disorders. I'm going to post them on here and write my take on his journey but if you want to subscribe to his videos directly just click twice on the video and it takes you to his series.

His work is helpful (I think, anyway) to both anxiety disorder sufferers and those supporting them.



In this next video Seth talks about losing a friend due to his anxiety disorder. If you do lose friends when you start to reveal your condition (or even a partner) you need to try and not figure out why if they won't tell you straight - just get back to the work of healing your problem and let them deal with their issues..

Sometimes you can lose a friend simply because they've got a similar emotional disorder they've never revealed to anyone and you talking about yours can have a triggering affect.

I used to have a married couple as friends. I revealed my obsessions to them after knowing them for a few years and they stopped all communications with me. Seeing them in a local park a few months later I said 'Hi' and they completely ignored me and walked by staring straight ahead. It didn't bother me - the true test of friendship is that folks be honest and fair with you and they weren't.

Hope you like the next video (and please read the rest of the post afterwards).

Dealing with and overcoming anxiety 49 - Your true friends

There's one more thing to be a bit wary of and that's making friends with people who are attracted to you because you have an anxiety disorder. I once had a friend who was my friend because he felt superior to me - when I become more successful he didn't want to know me - then when he heard I was down in the dumps again I got a call from him to get together and I declined.

There are some folks who regard people with emotional problems as easily manipulated and 'useful'. You sometimes have to be brutal with yourself and not allow people such as these into your life.

Regards - Carl

Your Systematic De-Sensitisation Plan Part Two

In yesterday's post I discussed how a 'systematic desensitisation/exposure therapy' plan is really a 'surrender plan' and went on to say when you first start it can come as such a shock to the system the idea of it being a 'plan' can seem ridiculous because of how overwhelming it is.

I also discussed the need to establish a support network (and you should see these people on a regular cyclical basis for their input and help to be effective).

In this post (and it's another biggie) I'm going to cover the following points:

1. Focus on How You Want to Feel


2. Practice Every Day


3. Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop a Subjective Viewpoint


4. Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers


5. Establish a Weekly Cycle


6. Focus on One Reaction at a Time


7. Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points


8. Judge Progress by What You Can Do


9. Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts


10. Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are.

1  Focus on How You Want to Feel

The first step of any successful system is the identification of a desirable outcome.  Imagine yourself free both of the emotional problem and of the restrictions it places on you - what would you do?  How would that freedom affect your relationships with others - and with yourself? Visualise a place where you want to be emotionally peaceful.  A state where you can be completely content; not be festering on 'how do I deal with my emotional problem?'  This kind of thing is achievable.

What if your desired outcome is not realistic? What if when you get 'there' it's not exactly how you envisioned it?  It does not matter.  When starting towards any goal in life, unless it's a very short-lived one such as 'putting the butter in the fridge' (and sometimes even that doesn't happen if you trip on the kitchen carpet)  we have to accept that final-destination type goals are variable - we never really achieve exactly what we envisioned.  What we do achieve, however, is the journey towards 'different' and 'better'.  As long as we stay on the journey we will keep re-visiting our desirable outcomes and things will gradually improve.

If you have multiple emotional problems you will eventually find yourself having a greater amount of 'emotional free time' to play with and it is realistic to set a goal of having a greater percentage of time free from emotional issues.  If you have a single emotional problem you could start your desensitisation plan on a Friday and be completely problem-free by Monday; but this is unusual - in most cases it will take several weeks and sometimes months.

Although you may not achieve an idealistic new 'you' all the time it will be a much happier you than who you are at the start of the process (instead of being happy 100% of the time you may have to settle for being happy 90% of the time; sigh).

2  Practice Every Day

You have to be careful when you practice, however.  'Opening up' an emotional response fully can leave you feeling exhausted and your focus of attention, especially if you're exposing yourself to an obsession, can be skewed for the rest of the day.  When is your best time of the week for spending 'intense' time?  Try to save the most intense work for those times.  Most days you need to be just 'skimming the edges' of the response.  This will teach your unconscious mind slowly that the response itself is not so dangerous - and it will prepare you to bring the intense work to easier fruition.

Additionally it is around the 'staying with the feeling but not fully going in' that you may get insights into what the response relates to.  If you have had a response for a long time it's easy for the information about the 'issue' to which the response relates to be lost.  For example, if you had a frightening experience in an enclosed space but forgotten the detail you may be confused when having a strong response to a new place that reminds you of it.  By skirting around and exploring the feeling at a lesser intensity you can raise the memory and this gives you a bigger picture to work with.  This helps.

By the time 'intense work time' arrives you will be itching to get in there and accept that the intense emotional response is linked to a viewpoint you accept. Let us say your reason for panicking in enclosed spaces is because you imagined suffocating in such a place but you've told yourself to stop being silly and refused to feel and release the panic.  Would it be silly to panic if you were suffocating and had a strong fear response - no, in fact it might save your life.  So we gradually figure out what the issue is (if we're not sure) and bring that and the response together.

Try not to work on your emotions when walking on busy streets or driving or operating machinery (if you can help it - sometimes the work just follows us around whether we want to switch it off or not).  Keep aware of any situation in which you could be injured or killed due to  not paying attention to the outside world.   I came close to being hit by cars twice because my attention just wasn't on what was going on around me.

Desensitisation work is very distracting.  It dominates your focus of attention and wipes your short-term memory.  You can end up doing such things as not paying for goods when leaving a shop because you can't remember if you paid at checkout or not (I didn't do this but I did upset a newsagent once when he wanted my money and I'd put it back in my pocket because I thought I'd paid him already).  These things happen.

So try and pick a safe place to practice and don't intend to 'open up' completely if you've got some other complex responsibility to meet.  If you've got the day to yourself though, go for it.

3  Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop an Objective Viewpoint

A subjective viewpoint is that of the person affected by the emotional response - this is the viewpoint of a person believing they are being 'done to' and, I hate to say it, it is the viewpoint of a 'victim'.

An objective viewpoint is that of the person sitting on the outside of the emotional response who is able to study it; test it; re-draw it and play with it and figure out how to bring the response under control and then stop it.  This is the viewpoint of a laboratory scientist who treats the subjective viewpoint as a test subject.

Transitioning from the subjective view to the objective view is very, very difficult and takes time.  A Counsellor can assist in making the transition as they sit on the outside of the experience and unconsciously coach you in how to sit in their place while they also sit in your's.  A Counsellor is very unlikely to tell you this is what's happening - it just happens.  You get used to the idea of 'sitting outside the experience and looking in'.

Why do you need to develop the objective viewpoint?  Because it's the decision-maker when it comes to the argument between two other viewpoints that are involved.  When you have an anxiety disorder of any kind and you decide to remove it you've got a war going on inside of you between these two additional viewpoints.

The third viewpoint we're dealing with is that of the trapped emotional response fighting for release - this is the emotional energy contained in the anxiety disorder. In a fictional story this viewpoint would be called the 'Protagonistic Viewpoint'

The fourth viewpoint is the resistance to the release - driven by the parts of you that don't want to go through the releasing experience.  When you want to keep the disorder trapped the disorder is the bad guy and the commitment to keeping the response trapped is the good guy - but when you start to desensitise the argument for and against release is reversed.  The anti-release viewpoint, in a fictional story, would be called the 'Antagonistic Viewpoint'.

The Objective Viewpoint, the part of you that sits outside the experience looking in, decides which of the two viewpoints wins the fight.

4  Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers

During my healing I would constantly surprise myself as I came to realise the issues behind my responses.  At first all I could see were the emotions themselves and I was 'sailing blind'.  But as I repeatedly went into the emotional responses I started to see the 'issues' appear and I'd think 'well, I agree with me thinking that - I can understand it'.  Once I got to this point I was ready to 'unitise'.  It can be difficult to release an emotional response when you don't know what triggered it.

However, I've also released a trapped response without knowing the trigger, particularly when the response, such as panic attacks, was based around the fear of another response!  It's not so easy to remove these responses because you can't clearly see the cause - it's a bit like being afraid of murky fog - you can't clearly identify things.  Nevertheless, the trapped response will evaporate if you keep going.

5  Establish a Weekly Cycle

It's a good idea to build the healing cycle around your appointments with your counsellor - this way you work towards providing the counsellor/doctor/psychiatrist with a progress report.  You can see your counsellor once a week and then as your healing progresses move the appointments further apart.  Each week you should aim to move a little bit further forward - but remember that just being on the journey is enough most weeks.

6  Focus on One Response at a Time

Your intention should be to move towards the 'maximum intensity point' within the emotional response and regard yourself as working in small emotional release cycles.  What happens, whether you plan for it or not, is that by just moving repeatedly into the most intense part of the response you force the emotional release cycle to complete.

Trapped emotional responses form 'layers' in our bodies and when you complete an emotional cycle you remove the top layer and move onto the one below - until one day they're all gone!

I have been reading recently that you should create a scale where level 1 is the mildest fear response and level 10 is the most intense and you should try and keep yourself at 'level 3' or there's a risk of re-inforcing the emotional response .  This may work well with phobias - but it's not quite so simple with obsessions.  I have also recently seen a report by a respected doctor that states desensitisation does not work on obsessions. Sorry but this is utter rubbish.  Desensitisation and exposure therapy work on all emotional responses as long as you're willing to do the work necessary, it's that simple.

Personally when I wanted to heal from my obsessions I wanted to heal as quickly as possible - I just could not be bothered with all that scales malarkey.  I was a Level 8 no matter what and it was Level 12 that finally sorted it out for me.  But yes - focus on one emotional layer at a time.

7  Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points

I'm a bit of a workaholic - I like a list of 'things I did today' at the end of every day and one of my arguments against doing the emotional work was that it was not 'productive'.  By combining the emotional work with some tedious and mentally undemanding task such as wallpaper stripping or ironing (mind that hot iron - ooch) I could do both the 'self-indulgent' emotional work and also find myself with a stripped wall or the ironing done at the end of it.

I could not do complex intellectual work and the emotional work at the same time - I could not even write my experiences down during the emotional work because if you're doing the emotional work right the logical mind, the intellectual, judgemental and interfering left neo-cortex, is hijacked and shut down.

Another distraction I combined with the intense emotional work was pleasant relaxing music; it took the edge off the pain -  my favourite was the Theta Meditation System music from Dr Jeffrey Thompson (there's a link below) - but I bought a whole stack of other relaxing music to use too.

You should reward yourself at regular intervals (especially after completing a period of desensitisation).  This all creates a more pleasant after- affect.  'Yeah, it was unpleasant, but look, I got the wall stripped'.

8  Judge Progress by What You Can Do

One of the problems with judging how well you're doing on the basis of how you feel when it comes to emotional desensitisation is it's all relative to how you feel right now.  You could have got rid of thirty unwanted emotional responses but if you're stuck in the middle of response thirty one and you look to how you feel as an indicator of how you're progressing you'll come up with 'I feel terrible!  It's not working!'.

This is yet another great role a counsellor can serve - acting as an external 'milestone marker' - someone who reminds you of your progress; of what you were struggling with when you first met and what you can do now as opposed to way back then when you first started.

Base progress on what you can do - on the places no longer off limits to you emotionally - rather than how you feel.

9  Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts

Trapped feelings look for, and produce, strange thought patterns in order to try and gain escape from the body.  Once those feelings have left the body through the correct thought pattern that created them in the first place (the 'triggering issue') all those strange thought patterns that kept catching your attention disappear.  This is how it works.  Accept the strange thoughts as a part of the healing process and don't give them too much time and weight.

10  Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are

At some point your anxiety disorder will start to disappear.  Your panic attacks will stop; your phobias will be gone; your obsessions will be distant memories.  The question you have to ask now is: what caused them?  Anxiety disorders can be caused by sudden shocking events - but I suspect it's more usual for them to appear after an anxious foundation has first been laid down for quite some time.

To maintain emotional happiness you have to be watchful for any future negative emotional responses - and hunt them down; feel and release them; at the earliest opportunity.  If you don't do this you risk a relapse into your anxiety disorder.  I've written a previous post called, I think, 'Get the Vacuum Cleaner Out' - when you get a hint of a negative emotional response find it and go into it as soon as possible.  Having this approach will keep you free of further anxiety problems.

If you don't remove negative feelings in this way, as a habit, the dirty dogs will start nipping at your heels again and they don't go away.  But then you already knew that.

That's the end of this post.  Please note that because it's a generalised view of the desensitisation process there may be some parts of it that need to be adapted slightly for different conditions.

All comments; criticisms and discussion points are gratefully received and if you would like to put a post on the blog in response to this post please email me at carl@managemesystems.com and I'll gladly post it (as long as it's relevant and above board etc) with a link back to your site.

I'm thinking about taking the whole week's posts on desensitisation and producing a free pdf download and an mp3 too - would that be of any use?

Regards - Carl

Your Systematic De-Sensitisation Plan Part One

When I first started to write this post I did a '10 steps to desensitisation' type thing with carefully planned steps from easiest to hardest response and then I thought 'that's not really how it happens, is it? - not at first'.  You can't make a plan around something before you know what it is you're planning with, can you?  It's like planning to cook a meal in a stranger's kitchen when you've never seen the kitchen you'll be working in - it's not going to happen exactly the way you think.

I'm sure there are folks out there who have started such a plan themselves and then found all the planning they'd done with their logical minds is knocked for six by the reality of how hard desensitisation/exposure therapy hits when you first start.  It's a bit like putting the brakes on a juggernaut with a payload heavier than the juggernaut itself.  All those heavy duty emotional responses just carry right on through you regardless of you having a plan or not.

So I'm going to start off here with the blunt basic foundation of a plan today and I'm going to do the '10 steps' type thing tomorrow; which is perfectly possible once you've got through the shock period at the start of beginning 'the plan' (for me the shock period lasted three months before I was ready for a fully working 'plan' - I had one big payload to reverse into).  Here we go.

Firstly - It's YOUR plan

The first thing to know about your de-sensitisation plan is it's YOUR's.  It's not my plan or anyone else's. Although the overall pattern of recovery is the same for everyone who applies the approach of 'going towards' for long enough there is no 'right or wrong way'.  When you get into the day to day work involved your desensitisation plan has to fit in with your day to day needs, your personality type and your current and future belief systems.

Every single person is unique and so the path and the plan you develop and follow will be unique.  Having said that - it's a bit like travelling on a train - the train's the same train for everyone on it, but the experience of being on the train is an individual thing.

I've read the work of quite a few experts who have produced a lot of very good de-sensitisation plans, but the truth is that the path to de-sensitisation is a crazy paving path through thorny bushes, rather than a straight path that's easy to follow.  At first it can be really messy, depending on what your external life is like and the emotional complexity of your condition - people can have a single phobia or a whole collection of disorders going on (like I used to have).

Secondly - It's a 'Surrender Plan' rather than a 'Take Control Plan'


You're doing this plan because you've come to a realisation you don't directly control the process you're going through.  One of the most difficult periods is the time before you start the plan - and then it gets even worse when you begin!  Let's be honest here - we don't want to do an exposure therapy plan or a de-sensitisation plan (both the same thing) - if we did we wouldn't need a plan at all, would we?  We're doing it because we have to, we're desperate because nothing else has worked.

We wanted the 'quick fix' plan (such as seeing a hypnotherapist) - and even that was an inconvenience -  that didn't work.  So having done the 'Avoidance and Damage Limitation Plan' and having tried the ''Try Every Expensive Expert Other than the Exposure Therapy/De-sensitisation Plan' (and then maybe followed up with the 'I Mistrust Everybody and React Bitterly When Someone Reminds Me about the Exposure Therapy Plan') we finally find ourselves at the 'I Give Up' plan.

When you put it all together it's just a 'Surrender Plan', really, isn't it?

When I first developed the map for my personal exposure therapy journey there was only one sentence going on before it began: 'oh sh*t; that's it; I've had enough; I'm going in - even if it kills me'.  I always knew what I had to do, I just didn't want to do it. After downloading yet another 'international expert tells you in an e-book how to heal at a cost of £70' I read one sentence that stood out for me:  'if you have tried all the techniques I've offered here and they've been of no use to you then you could always try the exposure therapy approach - exposure therapy is 100% effective, but it hurts'.  I was hurting already - what did I have to lose?

So it's really only when you've started the plan that you start to understand just how unrealistic the first plan is and you start to draw up a real plan that's suited more to you.  Here are my recommendations once you're at this stage:

• Get Your Mindset Right


• Get Your Support Network in Place


• Get On With It


• Get Systematic.

Get Your Mindset Right

Here's the mindset I recommend as the 'plan' begins:

• Become More Selfish


• Prepare to Learn


• Release the Ego


• Go in; stay in; stay in some more; come out

Become More Selfish

Selfish people don't generally like the word 'selfish' because it implies ignoring the rights of others - but when I explain to them it means giving yourself time, taking your emotions seriously and doing what now suits you rather than everybody else they'll say 'oh yes, but doesn't everybody do that anyway?  That's not selfishness - that's just common sense'.

If you don't take proper care of yourself you can't take care of anyone else, period.  Give yourself time; make yourself 'worth it'; stop trying to please everybody else.  Make your healing a definite priority.  I remember the time when, in order to put my healing plan into effect, I deliberately started to think 'I need to be more selfish and say no more often otherwise I'll never heal'.  I'd always been about other people - and it had made me ill.

Before you put your healing plan into action you'll need to make sure you are at the centre of it if you want it to work.

Prepare to Learn

Your de-sensitisation plan is probably the most intensely stressful learning curve you will ever go through; so you may as well adopt the attitude of a learner.

Nature will become your teacher as you start opening up to the natural process of 'feeling'.  There's this horrible period when you start to learn you have no direct control over the process - it comes built into all living creatures.

Your only choice is whether or not you go through it, and allow the process to work through you.  Train yourself to observe what nature shows you.  You will learn, for example, how to switch off your judgemental logical mind in order to allow your emotional body and your pattern creating mind to meet each other with less interference so they can achieve the goal of emotional release.

Release the Ego

There's nothing wrong with the ego - it's the mechanism that protects our hard-earned thinking and intuitive processes - but in the case of an anxiety disorder it is currently defending beliefs that are hurting you in the long term while allegedly protecting you in the short term

The unconscious mind of a person suffering from an anxiety disorder, to be blunt, is full of crap.  Mine was - and to an extent still is, but I actively seek it out and destroy it.  We all have a little tub of belief-crap lurking inside of us but some have more than others and a lack of self-awareness is the cause of it - many people get so full of it they spew it out over other people without even realising they're doing it.  I try not to do this myself.

All the hidden belief-crap in our unconscious is emotionally supported - when you challenge these beliefs by 'going-into-to-come-out-of' they come up into conscious awareness and fight their corner.  These pain-laden beliefs will affect your body by mimicking a dangerous situation; for example they can alter your stomach acid balance; change your heart rate; cause nightmares; give you muscular aches and spasms and prevent sleep; threaten you with images of 'cancer' and raise your blood pressure - and your ego will for a time have trouble accepting this powerful fighting viewpoint is a pack of unconscious lies you somehow created and must now face and endure through the healing process.

You see, it's not just a matter of forming a new plan and being allowed to just get on with it - what you're doing initially is fighting several old plans that were working really hard for you until you turned up with your silly new plan and they want to show you just how wrong it is.

You will learn what blind faith really means at this point and it dawns that the grey blobby thing in your head isn't the most important part of the healing journey- your body is.

Go in; stay in; stay in some more; come out


No matter how complex or logical or carefully planned the plan is - if you're not approaching your trapped emotional responses the plan's lost before it begins.  By repeatedly approaching your unwanted responses and going into them for as long as you can you learn the full extent of the experience you are working with.

You experience your emotions at their most intense and you start to learn the limits of those responses - and you find you can endure that limit repeatedly for long periods of time - and still remain alive.  After a time the beliefs that said 'cancer' stop.  The beliefs that said 'it will kill me' are replaced by 'this is different from what I've done before and something's starting to happen'.

You learn about how your emotions affect your thinking (generally they close logical thinking down) and how your thinking affects your emotions - and how  different parts of your brain influence other parts.  But unless you approach and go into your emotions, unless you move towards the triggers that cause you to react, you will never learn these things and you won't change and remove your anxiety disorder.

No matter how higgledy-piggledy and detailed the logical plan is, the main plan of simply repeatedly going into your emotional responses is THE plan that underlies the more logical plan that you get to write down.  I often suspect quite a few of these 10-point-plans are written after the plan has already been carried out and our logical brains want to stamp a 'just look how clever I am with my plan' picture over it.  I'm being a bit harsh here maybe - but at first the plan is a brute force thing.

Get Your Support Network in Place

Oh dear, it's time to take a risk - the risk of telling people you see as 'professionals' - people you fear are going to lock you up and throw away the key or declare you mentally ill (all anxiety disorders are at times put under the heading of 'mental illness' but emotionally driven illness is very different to mental illness).  But don't worry, the professionals have seen an awful lot more of this kind of thing than you have.  The kind of people we're talking about here are:

• Doctors


• Counsellors/Therapists


• Psychiatrists


• Others

Doctors

In my experience there are some doctors who understand this stuff better than others - but there's no way of finding out which doctors are best for you until you start talking to them.  Go to your doctors and start talking.  Talk about your condition and your plan.  My doctors told me to take it easy and wanted me to start on Prozac and see a psychiatrist.    They helped me deal with the physical side affects of my exposure therapy plan; they reassured me when I started to worry about different things.  You need a doctor as part of your support network.

Counsellors/Therapists

Your doctor may refer you to a counsellor and a psychiatrist in addition to wanting to see you themselves.  Person-Centred Counsellors will not give you directive advice - they are trained to support clients in finding their own solutions through a process of exploration and reflection - but they will support you with your plan and may help put you in touch with a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, if your doctor has not already done so (you will lose the Person-Centred Counsellor from your network at this point).  A Person Centred Counsellor will support you indirectly through your de-sensitisation process; a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist will set you homework to do and help you develop a joint plan.

Just as with the doctors you may need to spend time finding the right counsellor, of whatever type, for you.  I went through three counsellors - with several months in between each - before I found a counsellor I felt completely at home with.  It might not have been that the counsellors were not 'right' for me but rather I was not ready for counselling - now even though my anxiety disorders are healed I still see my counsellor, albeit months apart, to work through any new material and stay emotionally happy.  If you think seeing a counsellor is a bit strange just keep in mind that all counsellors are compelled to have systematic counselling themselves if they wish to work as counsellors.  There's a lot of it around.

Psychiatrists

The job of a psychiatrist is to prescribe medication for emotional and mental disorders.  When I first went to see my new psychiatrist for the first time I was expecting to receive a 'counselling' experience - it quickly became clear to me this isn't what psychiatrists do.  After spending time writing all the details of our conversation down and reading my doctor's notes my psychiatrist told me I had a 'complex form of OCD'.  He also told me I had severe depression - which came as a big surprise as I'm one of the most positive-minded thinkers I know (I realised later my being positive minded all the time was a form of denial).

He went on to describe a plan to gradually put me onto heavy doses of Prozac and then spoke about the time I would be weaned off the drug (or not) several years later.  I told him about my de-sensitisation plan and I wanted to keep the Prozac at a low level so I could heal myself rather than rely on drugs.

He agreed to support me with this and within a year I had stopped taking the Prozac altogether and I had removed my obsessions and panic attacks.

I know it's difficult at first but every time you discuss and share information with these trusted professionals you see that they accept your condition easier than you do - the recognition that you have a problem and these folks take it seriously reinforces your confidence and the sense that 'you're worth it'.

The truth is they've seen so much of this thing you previously thought unique to you they regard it as common as the common cold and that's pretty common.

Others

Others are a different story - if you have kept your condition to yourself and now find yourself talking it out with friends it is possible you will lose some of those friends (were they really friends?).  Additionally you may have lots of opinions thrown at you; most of them unhelpful - well meaning, but not in line with your plan.  Things such as 'you need to exercise more' or 'you need a holiday'.

As you start sharing your experience you will be surprised to find other people you regarded as being super-calm people with no problems start opening up about their anxiety disorders - don't be fooled into automatically thinking this means a bond of camaraderie  - you may find yourself being avoided by these people because your bravery may make them feel compelled to behave likewise and the discomfort this causes can lead to their avoiding you.

I'm not saying don't do this - I'm just saying be prepared to learn a whole lot about the human condition during this journey you're making.

It's not all doom and gloom though - you may find people who have been through the exposure therapy themselves and can identify and support you in person or on-line.  There are quite a few such people about now (a lot more than when I was healing five years' ago).

Get On With It

Now you've got a support network (and you will need them, believe me) you can begin.  You're going to get it wrong; you're going to get frustrated; you're going to feel incompetent but nevertheless you have to get on with it.

Give up on the idea of doing it alone; stop thinking you're unique and no-one else understands your predicament.  Get out there and get help; share; lose friends if you have to by making the mistake of telling them about your condition.  But get healed.

Get Systematic

Now you're talking my language.  Systems are cyclical journeys and you must become cyclical.  There's a lot of talk these days about 'straight lines being the shortest distance between two points' well, that works if you're lining up a lot of exposure therapy cycles - because you need sleep; you need food.  There will be days of the week when you make more progress than others and you can plan to do more work on these days.

You also need to plan for rest and having some fun during the healing process.  By getting systematic you:

• plan your environments


• manage your inputs


• go through the de-sensitisation process


• get feedback on the difference between before and after (counsellors are great for this)


• start all over again - working cyclically.

I'm going to post more about this tomorrow (along with the 10 point plan type thing).

Regards - Carl