The Meaning of Meaning in Emotional Self-Management

As a creature more animal than plant you are a biological meaning machine and you are reading this to see if it gives you any additional beneficial meanings to add to the meanings you already contain.

What is ‘Meaning’?

Meaning is about sense of direction.  When we look for the meaning of a thing we are asking what direction, if any, we should take in regard to how we deal with it

While all plants need to remain in a fixed position in order to stay alive adult animals die if they do not move.

To aid them in deciding what directions they should go in when they do plan to move nature provides animals with two major tools:

• brains


• emotional response systems.

Brains are cellular mapping devices that record landscapes travelled using the process of memory (our brains can also record imagined landscapes travelled).

Emotional response systems are designed to initiate emergency reactions; to move animals away from unexpected threats and towards reward opportunities whenever they arise in the external world.  They also provide map-connected alert systems by attaching emotional reflections to specific memories in our mental maps.  They inform future decision making by rising up into our conscious whenever we move towards these external landscapes to remind us of our previous experiences.

Most of our decision making is made on the basis of these emotionally mapped alerts.

How do I think versus how should I think; how do I feel versus how should I feel; how do I behave versus how should I behave – these are all questions based around need for changes in direction.

When we ask ‘what does this mean?’ what we are asking is ‘what direction do I now go in, having received this new information, and what can I expect to receive as a result?’.

When We Come Across a New Thing or a Known Thing Changes We Ask Meaningful Questions

• will it eat me or should I eat it?


• Is it controlling me or am I controlling it?


• Is it something I should not react to at all – should I stop seeing it?


• Do I move away from or towards it or do I just stay where I am?

Once we have taken a close enough look at the new or changed thing and decided our direction of thinking, feeling and physical behaviours we tend to just keep on travelling in the same direction decided until the pressure to change direction again dictates otherwise.

Meaningful Cycles

Meaningful cycles have a standard model for animals:

• we leave from a safe starting point


• we journey outwards into a usually well-mapped territory collecting resources and experiences


• we return to the safe starting point and discharge our ‘excess to requirements’ resources and experiences.

This is meaning in action – where am I going; what will I do; how do I get back home and what will I return with and offload when I get home?

We may not really notice the presence of one of these ‘meaning cycle maps’ until it is taken away from us or we are blocked from completing the full cycle in some way.

When we cannot complete our meaning cycles we feel frustrated and uneasy.  Take the external territory away and we react as if we are on the brink of starvation.  Take the ‘safe home’ away and we lose our reason for being in the territory – we feel lost (this is the cause of an identity crisis, by he way – we temporarily believe we have lost us).

Fail to complete your meaning cycles for long enough and you start to feel disconnected from who you truly are.

Your emotional meaning cycle is biologically programmed into you.  When you do not meet the needs of this cycle you can expect to get an outcome as reliable as if you did not eat food.  If you do not pay attention to your emotional world you will become emotionally ill.

Society is lying to you when it tells you it is possible to remove strong emotional responses using thinking.  Thinking can alter the rate you produce and build up energy levels but if you have already produced emotional energy in relation to an experience you must discharge it.

No amount of thinking can alter this unless the thinking is designed to get itself out of the way so emotional release can take place.

You do not control your emotional cycle – it controls you.  At least, it does until you discharge the energy contained.

I remember telling a counsellor several years ago I had just that week realised nature had designed my emotional system and I had to surrender to this fact.  It really hurts to know this!  All you control here is when you will accept and allow yourself to be taken through the cycle.  You have no say in whether or not the cycle affects you.

Just as if you do not eat you die of starvation, if you do not discharge the emotional reactions you produce and collect when dealing with ‘out there’ you become emotionally ill and this changes both your thinking and behaviours as a result.

Emotional Disorders Block Our Inner Return Home

Your Conscious Point of Focus goes out into the world.  Its home is your brain.  Your body is home to your brain – your brain never gets to go out.

For your Conscious mind to be at peace when it returns home your body must also be emotionally peaceful.  A brain in an emotionally overcharged body is an unhappy home for your Conscious.

If your body is flooded with negative hormonal chemicals your brain is is in turn also flooded with a different set of negative chemicals and these dominate your thinking ‘mood’.  A negative mood produces a negatively thinking mind.

Your brain consists of ‘you and your brain family’ with ‘you’ being an information processing point known as your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ and your family consisting of the other minds living in your brain.  Your You observes and processes information (thinks) at a rate of 4 to 11 bytes per second.

Whatever you consciously think about is ‘you’ at that time.  This bit of ‘you’ likes to go outside of your body, collect little bits of electrical information, then return home with it intending to distribute the content so the rest of your brain and your body will benefit.  We call this ‘learning’ and it contributes to our ‘personal growth’.

We like personal growth.  It feels good sometimes because we get external social acceptance when we do it and the occasional physical reward.  In most western cultures we are trained to see personal growth as something to be found out there.

But while your Conscious Point of Focus is out there your ‘family at home’, your other brain parts, are processing information your Conscious Point of Focus has made itself deliberately unaware of.

‘Moods’ are emotional responses to our environment for which we cannot immediately identify the trigger.  We know we feel bad but we cannot pinpoint why.  Moods are the result of not paying conscious attention to the information entering the rest of our brain and body.  When our body and our unconscious minds have been picking up information we could do with paying conscious attention to, but have not, they communicate it to us with moods.

While your Conscious Point of Focus processes information at 4 to 11 bytes a second, the rest of your brain receives it at 2’000’000 bytes (two million) per second – that information is going somewhere.

While your Conscious Point of Focus can be controlled in such a way as to deliberately ignore, for example, abusive environments, your other organic mechanisms do not have this ability.  They absorb the information and then later try to tell your Conscious about it and the need for you to deal with it.

They need your Conscious Point of Focus to go into the mood itself in order to discharge the feelings involved and complete the meaning cycle.  This will also result in deciding on any new directions needed to resolve the cause.   Quite often the only thing needed is to observe the mood at close quarters for the whole thing to discharge and disappear.

You need to be returning to your inner world on a regular basis or, at some point, you are going to have a huge experiential backlog to catch up on.

Scenario – imagine you are an international salesperson

You leave your family at home while you travel abroad and what you expect to be paid in, and take home for your hard work at the end of your working period, are little boxes of electrical energy you think will make all the difference back home.

You have been away a while when you get a text from your partner at home, it says: ‘honey, a really large box of energy has arrived, think you should come home to process it.  We do not need those little boxes at the moment’.

You text back: ‘Sorry honey, am too busy getting this little bit of energy out here for you, you know we talked about this.’

‘Honey, another big box of energy has arrived.  I really need you to come home; stop trying to get the little boxes of energy out there when we have got these big boxes to deal with!’.

‘Honey, you are being silly.  You know we need these little boxes of energy.  Do you know how hard I have to work to get these little boxes of energy out here?’

‘We now have ten very large boxes of energy needing your attention here.  COME BACK HOME IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE SUCH A HELL YOU WILL NEVER WANT TO COME BACK HOME EVER!!  DO YOU HEAR ME!!’’

Well, that one gets your attention.  You go home – but as you get home what you find is a home so hostile with kids so mean you no longer want to go home again.  It has become a really painful place to go – you are not ready for this.  You turn and decide you are going to stay out there.

But if you are ever going to be happy again you have to turn and go home at some point because, like all the other meaning maps in our lives – the only way to complete this cycle is to return home.

Between you and your happy home though lie several layers of emotional pain to work your way through.

We Should Base Our Meaning Cycles on Our Own Inner World First in Order to Prevent This Problem Arising

Valuing your own internal emotional meaning cycle above everything else is the most important thing you can do in maintaining emotional well-being.

If you do not know you need to stick to a regular habit of returning  to yourself you lose the ability to quickly return when a problem ‘at home’ arises.

Returning to yourself is essential for emotional well-being.  You know that sense of being distanced from who you really are?  It is not an illusion.  In depression, for example, brain scientists tell us there is an actual withdrawing of thinking from the upper brain.  We have the ability to physically cordon off our thinking and feeling centres.

How Do Emotional Disorders Develop?

Emotional disorders arise when we get so desperate not to return to our inner home we attempt to set up a secondary home outside.  To keep us held in this new place we produce emotional responses designed to resist the continual call from our Unconscious reminding us we need to return to our true inner self in order to complete emotional release.

All we see now when we look back is emotional predators lurking in the shadows of our inner world, blocking the way.  We do not really believe ‘home’ is there any more.

But, if we are lucky, one day the pull to return to our true selves gets so overwhelming we finally give in to our organic emotional process and start to tackle the internal predators, one by one, to get back there.

‘OK, honey, you win.  I’m coming home’.  Now that means something.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Disorders - What Controls Your Conscious Point of Focus?

Scientists tell us the Prefrontal Cortex, a relatively small area of the brain just behind your forehead, performs your ‘executive functions’ – planning and controlling what you do with your brain and body.  It carries out these plans by directing your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ to open up to certain sources of stimulation.

Your Focus acts like a pen to the cellular map writing ability of your brain – whatever stimulation you deliberately open up to determines what gets written into your neural maps.  The more you consciously and repeatedly focus on the same things the more intense and permanent those new maps become.  You have the ability to write and re-write whatever you want to as long as you are willing to do the work involved in the writing – the work is hard.

How you use your tool of conscious focus can either lead to or heal serious emotional issues.  Your Conscious Point of Focus is generally called ‘what you think about’. Usually we assume thinking means working with strings of just words in our heads.

In our brains words appear to us as sounds we identify as ‘verbal self-talk’ – of course they are not actually sounds but neural energy creating an illusion we are hearing sounds.  When we translate these stimulations into the written word we convert those sounds into pictures and these pictures act as representatives of both sounds and shared social meaning for others (have you ever looked at words as though they were pictures and also sounds with meanings attached to them?).  Words are an example of our ability to ‘associate’ different types of stimuli in such a way we do not even realise they are actually different types of stimuli combined.

Words are quick-fire representations of other things, streams of these representations flow through our conscious and we shape these streams into logical thinking patterns – but we use those patterns to build:

• pictures


• shapes


• sounds


• smells (or at least, memories of smells).

We can also reverse this process.

When meanings are related to our value systems they are also attached to powerful emotional responses.  We see new patterns in regards to these sources of stimulation in our minds and link these to previously learned patterns.  The patterns are created because of differences in intensity, vibrational tone and duration.

We can deliberately choose to focus on any of these things using our Conscious Point of Focus, but we need to choose wisely because our focus is a limited resource.

Although there are several options here in regard to stimulation type, there is a limit to the number of stimulations we can deliberately pay attention to at any one time.

Our conscious brains can only work with 4 to 11 bytes of electrical information per second.  The greater the number of bytes of information we work with at any one time  the harder it is to make sense or even remember what we did in our thinking.  Once the incoming rate of information goes to 11 bytes per second you react with stress due to information overload.

When your conscious focus works at full throttle in this way your neo-cortex uses up a lot of glucose energy and gets tired more quickly in comparison to other parts of your brain.  There is a limit to how long you can focus on those bytes.  Biologically, thinking really is hard work.

Cut It Out

Your Prefrontal Cortex has the job of choosing what to focus your 4 to 11 bytes of conscious attention on whilst dealing with the fact your brain receives stimulation from your senses at roughly  2’000’000 (two million) bytes per second.

In order for it to be able to resist this mass of distracting stimulation, most of which comes up from your body as a result of brain signals stimulating hormonal responses previously being sent downwards, your PFC controls a stimulation-resistance-system.

By the way, this organic resistance system is the same system you use to suppress and repress your emotional responses.

The main stopping valve of this system is the root-like Reticular Formation in your brain stem.  The Reticular Formation is designed to control the level of electrical/emotional energy flooding up into your brain at any one time.

From your brain stem the Reticular Formation spreads upwards and outwards into the net-like Ascending Reticular Activation System (also known as the ARAS - this system makes us consciously aware of the world around us).  Different parts of your Reticular system have the ability to reduce and filter electrical stimulation in different parts of your brain.  For example, there is a layer of reticular material surrounding the Thalamus, the main sensory signal router sitting between your upper conscious brain and lower emotional brain, acting like the insulation you find on household wiring.

Without this built-in resistance system you would be unable to focus on anything other than a mass of sensory information.  In the case of emotional disorders, however, the resistance system has been used so effectively it has led to a state of internal overcharging and to trapping the emotional charge in the body.

An emotional charge trapped in the body keeps the body on high alert and this leads to an internal battle for control of your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ between your Prefrontal Cortex and two other internal attention management systems; your:

• Orientation Response and your


• Emotional Alert System

When these two mechanisms are activated they repeatedly snatch control of your Conscious Point of Focus away from your PFC and it, in turn, repeatedly snatches control back through the process of deliberate ‘distraction’.  This produces a constant state of physical tension in the body as your Conscious fights with your Unconscious over which should control your conscious focus..

When a person does not suffer with an emotional disorder their mental focus naturally comes to rest on whatever their senses are resting on at the time.  There is no internal battle for control and no sense of tension.

Your Orientation Response and Your Emotional Alert System – Your Emergency Situation Managers

Your PFC is concerned with long-term strategic self-management.  It works with such things as changing your self image; deciding what kinds of environment you would like to eventually live in; planning the route it will take to get there and putting in place the motivations you will need to keep yourself energised along the journey.

Your Orientation Response and your Emotional Alert System, in contrast, are emergency problem solvers designed to work with unexpected life events.  One is an automatic process designed to search for and identify potential threats while the other is designed to galvanise the body into urgent life-saving action by responding to those threats when identified by the Orientation Response.

Is that a Spider?  No, it is a Bit of Fluff

Our Orientation Response is the mechanism that drags our attention away suddenly from what we are currently doing to pay attention to something new we have just become vaguely aware of entering our environment.

Out of the corner of your eye you spot a small fuzzy blob on the floor and you look to see if it is a spider.  It is a bit of fluff.  You go to run a bath and spot something black against the white enamel.  You cannot resist looking.  It is an apple seed.  How did that get in there?  Who has been eating apples in the bath?

Your Orientation Response is partially pre-programmed by your perceptual bias.  Your perceptual bias is your unconscious list of things you want to avoid and is decided on previous experience.  So when you go into the bathroom you are now pre-programmed to check the bath for things that should not be there.

When you leave the bathroom you are now pre-programmed to find out how the apple seed got there.

The response is also designed to pay attention to the new, the fast moving, the tiny, the potentially itchy, the unknown; the large; that scraping sound you hear that sounds like it is in your house.  The only way to satisfy this response is to consciously pay attention to the source of concern until you have fully looked at it, identified it as safe and then let it go.  This completes the release cycle for this part of our conscious focus mechanism and you can then return to what you wanted to focus on earlier.

Until you pay attention to an unknown and unexplored stimulus for long enough, and in enough depth, to the point your Unconscious attention systems believe it to be safe, they will keep grabbing the attention of your conscious focus.

Admit it – you looked for that bit of fluff, I know you did.

If you have an obsession and you do not understand how obsessions work, and you lack confidence in working with such things to the point you cannot just put it to one side without it grabbing at your conscious focus against your will, it is the orientation mechanism that keeps causing this to happen.

The other reason is because your body is on High Emotional Alert.

Your Emotional Alert System

A real-life event or an imagined event (imagined so effectively your Unconscious emotional system thinks it is real) triggers an emotional response.  The emotional response travels up through the body towards the brain to meet up with the issue identified by the brain in order that your overall body and brain together take appropriate external action to deal with the alleged problem.

Trouble is when the emotional response reaches the brain your brain says ‘not yet’ and your PFC pushes the energetic response back down into your body.  The response stays in place, the body remains energised, waiting for the ‘go’ command from the brain.  And it waits, but not for long.  It travels up to the brain from the body again, repeatedly making the attempt to link up with the issue but  again the brain says ‘not yet’.

Your body remains in this state of continued emotional pre-release and the emotional response, now held in place for a prolonged period of time, starts to desperately seek release through projection - it comes up for any stimulus that even slightly resembles the original issue.  Unfortunately by now the brain may have forgotten what the original issue was and refuses to acknowledge the response needs to release at all.  ‘What, you again?’.  Your PFC refuses to allow the emotional response to leave the body declaring ‘something is wrong with my emotional system’ but the response keeps showing up.

Your Orientation Response is continually re-triggered by this because you have no idea what is causing the repeating imagery this not -sure-what-it-is message is what the Orientation Response is triggered by.  Your brain keeps being constantly re-stimulated by the emotional charge attempting to leave the body through the normal release process but because you will not allow it release it just keeps the vicious circle going.

Want to Switch the Vicious Circle Off?

In order to removal an obsession or any other emotional problem you have to switch off the emotional alert driving it.  There is nothing you can do about your Orientation Response – but once it has taken a good look at your obsession and at the emotional response attached to it, and realises what is there is just ‘fluff’, it will stop demanding your Conscious Point of Focus be directed to it.

Your PFC is fighting the reality of how your emotional system works by creating belief systems that cause your lower brain parts to join in with resisting release.

In order to stop the battle going on inside it must change its approach and agree to taking your Conscious Point of Focus directly into the emotional world it has spent so long fighting.

By systematically surrendering to the demands of its rival competitors for control of your conscious attention it will gradually release the emotional response behind the high alert emotional state and find itself returning to its rightful place as natural, relaxed controller of your conscious focus.

Regards - Carl

Obsessions – Five Questions Answered

• What is an Obsession?


• What Drives an Obsession?


• Why is an Obsession so Difficult to Remove?


• How Can I Remove an Obsession?


• How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

What is an Obsession?

An obsession is a secondary emotional response designed to try and remove or hold back the sensations produced by an intense primary emotional response. The primary emotional response is attached to an image of the issue it was originally produced to deal with; these primary responses are usually concerned with preventing something terrible happening.

The secondary response is created when your logical mind does not accept the need for the primary response or the image to which it is attached and begins to fight it. It fights both the emotional response by 'squeezing it down' and also the image by trying to get it out of the brain.  Both of these approaches fail to work.

Attempting to remove a thought-based image from your brain just repeatedly re-creates the thought you are trying to remove because you have to think about what you want to remove before you can remove it.  This loop goes round and round in our thinking.  Fortunately, you do not have to succeed in this goal in order to remove an obsession because obsessions are not driven by thoughts.

What Drives an Obsession?

Obsessions are driven by the trapped emotional responses held in place by the refusal of your logical mind to grant them release.  This is the only thing that drives an obsession.  Just so we are clear:

Obsessions are maintained and driven by emotional responses only.

They are not driven by your thinking – your thoughts are a by-product of the emotional response looking for a way out of your body.  Release the emotional energy attached to the image and the image disappears from your conscious mind as a side-affect.

Why is it so difficult to heal obsessions?

The answer to this question is complex; here are three main reasons obsessions are difficult to get rid of:

• Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs


• The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Your Six Minds


• Painful Physical Symptoms

Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs

The majority of your brain works with visual signals.  How you ‘see’ your overall emotional system decides whether or not you allow or block certain types of emotional responses to pass through it.

One of the first things I ask people suffering with emotional problems is ‘how do you see your response – what shape does it have for you?’.  If you regard your obsession as a predator, approaching with  an arched back preparing to once again suffocate you into submission, your unconscious will naturally try to hold it back from approaching.

As you start to heal from an obsession your visually based belief systems are unable to deny the new patterns emerging and these patterns create new thinking pathways in your brain – new physical links through which fresh thinking patterns send their signals – old neural links are decommissioned and eventually fade altogether.  The price of this re-writing of the brain, if we use Exposure Therapy, is intense emotional pain for various periods of time.

To your Unconscious seeing is believing and, if you decide to heal your obsession using Exposure Therapy, you will see quite a lot of things in ways difficult to explain to others and which may seem silly.

Your visual belief systems are difficult to access because they are spread out, and reinforced, by the conversations going on between, at least, six minds.

The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Six Minds

Your overall ‘mind’ is actually a combination of the workings of several sub-minds. A mind is a mechanism that either blocks or allows electrical stimulation to flow through it to the next mind in line.  When it comes to a particular obsession at least five sub-minds are involved in the blocking process and all 5 need to be persuaded to change how they see your obsession.

Out of your six minds only your Body-mind feels compelled to deal with the issue and the other five are at war with it.  The six minds are:

1. your Body-mind (when your Body is emotionally charged it is the most powerful mind of the six – it is the mind that generates the most emotional energy you will ever feel; once produced this energy either floods or, if held back threatens to flood and dominate, the work of the other five minds until the energy is fully discharged – when it fails to achieve discharge your body feels tense)


2. your Reptilian-mind (this mind observes both what is going on in your upper minds as well as ensuring your body is geared up to meet the challenges coming downwards – your Reptilian-mind has no contact with the external world other than what it sees second hand through your upper minds - it observes these signals in limited terms of predator versus prey and cannot tell the different between real or imagined threats)


3. your Emotional-mind (Limbic System – this mind is designed to store both specific images of threats and also general images of the environments surrounding those specific threats – the emotional-mind is the home of the mechanism that maintains both normal fears and anxiety disorders such as obsessions – this mind can be moulded and managed through indirect behaviours and is the core of your Unconscious)


4. your Logical-mind (left Neo-Cortex  - this mind thinks in words and what I like to think of as ‘low-level imagery’ built from words - this mind is the source of both the original problem in emotional blocking but can also become leader in applying the solution when dealing with obsessions once it understands and accepts a new way of seeing the emotional process as logical in its own right)


5. your conscious Pattern-mind (right Neo-Cortex – your pattern mind releases emotional energy faster and more effectively than any of your other minds when consciously applied – working with your unconscious it is able to recognise and consciously use new imagery forced into being by the healing process)


6. your Ascending Reticular Activation System (this is a net-like structure connecting your brain minds; it acts both as a resistance system and an activation system – using this system you are able to allow or block emotional responses from entering the brain; some scientists believe the ARAS is the home of your sense of self).

All six minds need retraining, both as individual minds and in how they work with each other, in order to bring about and maintain healing from an obsession.

Thankfully, if you decide to use Exposure Therapy in order to heal your obsession, only one general approach is needed to ensure this retraining happens.

Painful Physical Symptoms

Obsessions ‘pressure-cook’ your emotional responses in such a way as to make them some of the most intensely painful emotional experiences you can endure.  Should you decide to take the Exposure Therapy route to healing you can expect physical and mental symptoms like these:

• your current intense feelings get much worse (things feeling much worse is actually an indicator you’re doing it the right way)


• sleeplessness and extremely lurid, frightening nightmares


• additional emotional responses previously hidden from your conscious such as frequent panic and rage attacks – issues that did not affect you previously may suddenly start looming large


• overwhelm of your thinking processes to the point all you can do is sit or lay down and ‘feel’ – probably accompanied by intense imagery and the regurgitation of long-lost painful memories or feared imaginings


• palpitations; high blood pressure (mine doubled for several months); a change in stomach acid balance

I do not sell it well, I know.  Here is one more:

• Mammalian Disassociation Response; the symptoms of this include sensations of being pulled to the ground and, when looking at your hands getting the distinct impression they are not attached to your body.  The cause of this is a mechanism all mammals have designed to reduce the sensations of pain when being eaten by a predator.

How Can I Remove an Obsession?

Exposure Therapy can heal most anxiety disorders and simply involves changing your mental direction.  Your brain is a mapping system and the pen that draws the maps is your conscious focus.  Obsessions are maintained by our minds repeatedly trying to run away from the natural affects of our own emotional energies.  Change the direction of your focus by 'going in' and the pen starts drawing a different type of map.

By consciously taking your point of focus into the emotional response and then observing, without prejudicial judgement, what happens when you remain in the response for long enough, you will force your different minds to adjust.  You will see trapped energy begin to move; you will see that the responses hurt, but they do not kill you.

To succeed you must eventually surrender to your emotional process totally and trust your body to know what it is doing; this is difficult because we are socially programmed not to trust our bodies.

Because it is so difficult I recommend you try other options first before trying Exposure Therapy – try hypnotherapy or counselling and see if anything like that helps.  I have been told by an EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) practitioner, an ex-NHS nurse whom I completely trust, that EFT can be used to clear obsessions gently.

So try other options first if you can and then, if you find yourself at a point of despondency and extreme frustration - so extreme you are willing to try anything - then try Exposure Therapy.

A word of caution: establish a foundational support system before you begin to experiment with this approach.

Once you start the Exposure Therapy approach to healing an obsession you may find it very difficult to stop yourself.  I found myself working on this process in my sleep and because I had 27 obsessions to remove it went on for several years.

If you do exposure therapy in regards to a phobia, for example, your perception tells you the object you fear is external to you – you have to imagine yourself approaching, or actually approach, the related external object.   With an obsession you are both blessed and cursed by the fact your perception sees the problem as being ‘inside’ and, if you are desperate enough, you will work night and day to get rid of it whether you want to or not.  You literally turn your trapped emotional energy in on itself.

Once you get to this stage you will find yourself so enraged by the condition, so determined, so aggressive and attacking towards it you will want to destroy it.  You will think about nothing else but destroying it.

In order to remove an obsession you must become more obsessed about thinking about it than you previously were about not thinking about it.  Does that make sense?

How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

Three main steps:

• Get professional support in place


• Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place


• Share your plan with those who can be trusted

Get professional support in place

I recommend the following as a minimum:

• your doctor


• a counsellor


• a psychiatrist (maybe – usually recommended by your doctor)

I found the advice of my doctors invaluable – one of them was the most supportive person I had in my life until I met my counsellor.  She recommended a psychiatrist who tried to put me on heavy doses of Prozac but agreed I could stick to low doses during my self-healing programme – the psychiatrist was amazed at my progress. My doctor was able to reassure me at various times when the physical symptoms I experienced were particularly worrying (the symptoms of anxiety disorders can mask other conditions so it is important to get reassurance from your doctor).

The counsellor I found I still see today on a monthly basis – this lady supported me every step of the way during healing and has been invaluable as my ‘self-acceptance coach; milestone marker and cheerleader’.

You need the support of these people if you can get them.

Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place

For a number of reasons you may not be able to do direct work on yourself unless it is in private.  This work will be time-consuming and you do not want to be disturbed.  That is not to say you will not need a break or a distraction now and again - this work is exhausting – but the more focused and concentrated your self-work is the faster you will make progress.

A couple of other good reasons for working this way is to remove the danger of taking your moods out on others (and you will get moody – that is really the whole point!) and, even more importantly, doing this work while out and about can be life-threatening, especially when crossing roads or using machinery, as it can completely dominate your attention.

Share your plan with those who can be trusted

I have no problem sharing my experience with anyone – but there are people who are made uncomfortable by friends who tell them they have strong emotional responses to everyday inanimate objects and I have lost so-called friends due to this.

There are also malicious gossips around, so you may want to keep an eye out for those too.  However, if your primary concern is getting well you are going to have to get really courageous and be willing to pay any social price that presents itself.

Pay attention to how others react to you – but remain true to yourself.

Any questions or comments?

Regards - Carl

Obsessions and Phobias - How We Can Lose Direct Control of Our Emotional Process

You have total control of your emotional process up to the point you start trying to take total control of your emotional process.

You may want to read that again.

This paradox is difficult to see by the tired mind of someone who’s been at war with their own emotional system for a prolonged period of time.

Have you ever lived or worked with someone who had a desperate need to prove they were what they already were?  Exhausting, isn’t it?

The moment you see your own emotional energies as a problem is the moment your unconscious mind starts the internal battle of freezing those energies inside your body to prevent the ‘bad stuff’ from leaking out.

We do this ‘freezing’ by using our brain’s built in organic electrical resistance system to hold back the electrical signals coming up from the body (starting with the Reticular Formation in your brain stem) .

In order to directly control your emotions you must first understand you cannot directly control them.  You can delay them – but you should do this in the knowledge the only thing you can control directly is the process by which you manage their appropriate release later.  Once an emotional response is produced in the body you have no choice but to find a way to release it or it will make you sick.  So let me say that again:  the only aspect of the emotional process you have any control over is that of appropriate release.

It’s one of those areas in life where doing the opposite of what you may ‘think’ you should do is what gets you where you want to be.

The ‘Loss of Control’ Tipping Point

There is a tipping point at which the management of an emotional response shifts from being consciously and deliberately managed, by the thinking brain, to being an automated reaction driven by the emotional brain.  In the case of someone suffering with an obsession or a phobia this kind of reaction occurs whether you want it to or not and before you can consciously interrupt it.

This tipping point is reached when the management of the emotional signals coming into the brain shifts from what’s known as the ‘long processing route’ to the ‘short processing route’.

The ‘long route’ involves incoming sensory signals being sent upwards into the upper thinking brains for processing.  Here we have ‘association areas’ where incoming sensory signals are matched and mixed with information already known and trusted.  After full association has taken place (through good old ‘thinking’) we have integrated the new information and can make ‘sense and meaning’ of it.  Any emotional energy attached to the issue is discharged through the activity of your right pattern-making brain and any valid ‘data’ information is processed by your left ‘rational’ brain.  The issue is then either forgotten or stored in our long-term memory and we no longer pay attention to it.

It can take some time for this association process to complete.  However, if we are not willing to complete this process, if we are not willing to think about the sensory information coming in,  there is a risk we will ‘deny’ it and denial can lead to us forcing the new information to go through the brain’s sensory ‘short route’.

The ‘short route’ means the raw signals get sent downwards into the emotional brain for emotional processing.  There’s no ‘association and integration’ processing going on down there unless it involves an emotional response being released somewhere along the line.

Repeatedly refusing to consciously accept and release an emotional response when it comes up from your body into your brain causes the shift from long route to short route processing. This shift in processing is very difficult to reverse.  Difficult, but not impossible.

At the Centre of Both the Long and Short Routes Sits the Thalamus

Two Thalami , resembling the appearance a half-walnut, sit between the upper thinking brain and the lower emotional (limbic) brain. They  act as the centre-point of your  Perception – how you ‘see’ things.

Your Perception is a culmination of all the discussions and relationships going on between several of your brain parts, all of which have a slightly different way of ‘seeing’.  Your most powerful brain part in this decisional process is your left neo-cortex – your conscious logical thinking brain.  This brain part has the power to refuse permission for an emotional response to be processed by your upper thinking brain.

Problem is, once permission for release ‘upstairs’ has been refused the logical brain loses the right to influence how the emotional signals are processed by the lower brain.  It’s a question of losing the rights because at some point we refused the responsibilities.

The Thalamus is the brain’s main sensory signal ‘router’ – it receives all of your visual, sound and touch signals before either your thinking or emotional brain parts get to see them.  The Thalamus filters incoming signals on the basis of what the brain parts around it are telling it they see.  They also tell it what kind of signals they’re looking out for – and it goes hunting for them in the incoming signals.

If your conscious thinking dislikes one of your own emotional responses so much you refuse to accept it as a part of ‘you’ you may then refuse it permission to enter your thinking brain, this forces those signals downwards.

Your emotional brain now tries to manage your emotional process using other emotional responses – as a result your internal emotional system generates a self-perpetuating internal war making you constantly tense and, because your conscious brain is no longer involved in the process, your thinking becomes totally perplexed about what on Earth is happening.  The emotional responses are taking place without your conscious involvement other than you being informed ‘you’re having an intense emotional response!’.

This confusion further reinforces the idea that something is ‘wrong’ and the Thalamus will continue to identify your own emotional responses as an urgent, threatening issue requiring a repeated urgent emotional response – and it will send any and all related signals coming in straight down into your emotional brain for processing.

In order to resolve the problem you must reverse what you did.

You must allow for your emotional energy to come up through your body and enter your brain so you can start the association process.  Doing this will allow you to regain a sense of control because it forces the sensory signals back up the ‘long process route’ and the thinking brain regains the ability to say no to producing the emotional responses in the first place.

Unfortunately by now you will have established a very effective unconscious set of arguments as to why this is a bad idea – and these ideas are absolutely committed to the belief that what you are about to do will kill you.

I’m not joking – your unconscious believes that taking your thinking into the emotional response will kill you and it believes you just don’t ‘get it’.  Your unconscious believes you’re about to do something that’s the equivalent of going into a cage with an unfed lion.

But if you’re willing to go ‘into the cage with the starving lion’ step by step, through the process of exposure therapy, it can be done but the transition involved is a much more intense and painful journey than if you had processed the issue using thinking in the first place.

The question is: how much do you want control of your emotional process back?

Regards.

Carl

The Thalamus - a Brain Part that Can Make Liars of Us All

Do you get angry when you'd rather not?  Have you tried 'shouting an obsession or phobia out?' - you know, that old trick about going 'STOP!' and that's supposed to interrupt the response before it happens (but it still happens).

Are you frustrated you have emotional responses before you can consciously control them?  Do you feel angry towards others who challenge you to face up to the pain within, particularly when they seem to have no such pain?  This inner-world-versus-outer-world conflict is caused partly by the work of the Thalamus.

It's the job of the Thalamus to make the decision whether or not you get to react mostly emotionally or mostly with thinking to a situation.

Unfortunately how you think about how you feel makes very little difference to how you currently feel - it's whether or not you're willing to feel that decides if one day you will be able to just think about an issue.

The reason we can't change our emotional responses using our thinking is because all of our senses are routed to enter 'behind' our conscious thinking brains.  Your visual centre, for example, is at the rear of your brain and visual signals entering your brain do so below your thinking neocortex.  The decision as to whether it is your upper thinking brain or your lower emotional brain that gets to respond to a stimulus is decided before your thinking brain receives the signals.  The fact our eyes are at the front of our heads maybe creates the illusion that our visual and sound signals go straight into our thinking brains, but it isn't so.  For people suffering with emotional disorders this is an extremely confusing and frustrating fact of our biology.

You cannot directly affect this routing process through thinking - but you can indirectly change it through feeling.

I firmly believe the decision to send sensory signals upwards or downwards is made purely on the basis of the levels of currently held emotional charge in the body produced in regard to particular sensations/images/sounds.

The job of which direction incoming signals are sent in is made by your Thalamus.

The Thalamus (or Thalami)


All sensory information entering the brain is routed through the Thalami - two walnut sized structures that sit side by side and lay between the conscious thinking brains and the unconscious, emotionally responding Limbic Brain.

Your Thalamus receives all the information coming in from your senses.  It filters these signals for information relating to those images, sounds and sensations already attached to strong emotional responses.

If your emotional responses are already firing in response to related information it sends the signals downwards into the emotional brain before your thinking brains have any say in the decision.  Your thinking brains are informed of the decision by the fact your body produces physical symptoms.

The Thalamus believes the more emotionally charged your body is in regard to an issue the more life threatening a situation actually is.  If this is not the case in reality your entire emotional system begins living a lie.  Your conscious thinking brain picks up on the fact these reactions are liars and in most cases it does the opposite of what it needs to do to release the lie (ie feel and release the painful feelings) - it refuses to allow the feelings release from the body and this just perpetuates the signals-being-sent-downwards cycle.

The feelings are real but the triggers to which they relate don't exist.

Have you noticed how people who habitually lie put up a terrific fight before allowing themselves to go through the 'truth recognition process'?  Quite often we think of such people as 'devout and deliberate liars' but most liars are just people craving pleasant feelings while trying to escape the build-up of emotional pain that accompanies the 'reality shifts' involved in feeling negative emotions such as guilt and loss of social power that the Thalamus has been producing for them.  They started one lie that produced pain for them, which they didn't face, and they've been running ever since.  Even people who don't habitually lie can have this problem. In obsessions, for example, the life threatening image or sound they believe will kill them is completely harmless.  Consciously they know this; unconsciously they don't.

Lies may appear manipulative, 'evil', or things produced by  people living on a planet completely opposite in nature to our own - but it's really their Thalamus and their inability to manage it's decisional process causing this false reality to be maintained.

The emotional release required to adjust the Thalami settings is always intensely painful and involves a shift in our perception of 'reality' that can be quite a blow to the ego.

The pay-off of tuning into true reality and reversing the polarity of the Thalamus so it sends the signals upwards for thinking instead of downwards for emoting is the release of current negative emotional energy, prevention of the further build-up of unnecessary negative responses.  This is a huge step closer to being unconditionally happy.

Hurts like hell, but it does the job.

Regards - Carl

How the Body Works : The Thalamus

The Thalamus The thalamus, shown in red, is part of the forebrain. It plays an integral part in relaying sensory information from the sense organs to the cortex. Acting as a major relay center, the thalamus passes incoming messages on to higher centers in the cortex. A thalamus with its nuclei color coded is represented here. Some nuclei deal with several different types of messages, while other nuclei deal with only one type. The lateral geniculate body relays information to the visual ...