Emotional Healing – Can You Find the Courage to Observe Within?

Have you ever seen a ‘back to the floor’ television programme where the senior manager of an organisation has decided to pose as a lower-level employee in order to see how things are really working out on the ground-floor of their day to day business?

Usually these managers would make their emotion-free decisions by looking at graphs and reports filtered and distorted by lower level staff in the organisational hierarchy.  What will be missing from those reports are all the little things – the faulty water cooler; the angry employee forever upsetting customers; the stink in the customer waiting room created by who-knows-what in the ventilator.

In almost all cases of these television programmes the senior manager willing to experience the nitty-gritty of the ground-floor comes away with a wealth of ideas and having a greater respect for those staff who operate ‘down below’ in the organisation.

They usually also see where their own previous attitudes and instructions, or a lack of them, dispensed to their lower-level staff have caused the problems they now have to resolve.

With a much clearer view of what needs to be done they commit to a complete turnaround in approach.

We celebrate their adventure as an act of bravery and maybe sit there thinking ‘that is what all management need to do’.  Yet not all senior managers do this – because they do not wish their minds to be changed.  Having our mind changed in this way is almost always a painful experience.  This applies to all of us when it comes to facing up to the realities in our lives.

When a senior manager goes back to the shop-floor they expect to be made uncomfortable yet are willing to do it because they associate discomfort with the sharp and necessary learning curve to be followed if their organisation is going to improve.

Not only does the senior manage undergo a change process – so does the ground-floor work force who feel a mixture of relief, mutual respect and a wish to help the senior manager further by changing the way they themselves function operationally. 

Often when the benefits of this way of working come to fruition the approach is cascaded to all other managers as a permanent change in organisational culture.  But the decision has to start at the top.

The same thing happens when we take our Conscious Point of Focus down to the level of our Unconscious Mind to observe what goes on down there when facing up to an emotional disorder.

Observation is everything.

Not just observation of the things you observe, but of the way in which you observe yourself, as you observe.  Let me ask you a question here: are you aware of the viewpoint from which you currently observe your emotional system and do you think it gets the job of making you happy done?

Put yourself in front of that television programme as you watch the manager mixing with staff on the ground floor.  Do you admire what the manager is doing?  Most likely you do.  Not often we see senior managers willing to face reality in this way, is it?

Now imagine that you watch yourself in the same way - observing what you are willing to do in order to position yourself so you can see your internal reality as it really is.  This is your self image – your view of yourself that decides whether or not you admire and like how you go about observing your inner world - or not.

When you do not admire the way you observe, because you see yourself as a ‘manager who runs away’, you develop a lack of self-confidence and a poor self-image.

When you watch the manager in the television programme taking these risks, feeling their embarrassment and being changed as a result, do you have greater confidence or less confidence in them?  Do you think of them as being stupid or courageous?

This is where confidence in emotional healing comes in.  Not from always getting things right but from having the knowledge that when things do not feel right inside you have the courage to take your Conscious Point of Focus, your brain-changing attention system, inwards so you can observe first hand what is going on.

Strangely enough, despite the emotional pain or maybe because of it, as you watch yourself taking the risks necessary to ensure the overall ‘organisation’ called you gets back on track towards becoming happier you actually end up really liking yourself into the bargain, emotional problems or no emotional problems

Once you discover that taking your Conscious Point of Focus into the centre of your emotional pain causes beneficial change to happen merely as a result of being willing to go there and observe no matter what, you become more determined to do so again in the future – and do it much earlier so you can avoid the hard slog that results when you do not do this for long periods of time.

What goes wrong in the relationship between your Conscious and Unconscious when they refuse to come together on a regular basis?

Basically the same types of things that happen when senior managers and ground-floor workers in an organisation fail to communicate effectively.  They:

• start interpreting information incorrectly
• develop a non-accepting attitude to each other and believe neither knows what is really going on producing a sense of overall mistrust and lack of confidence
• work to different value systems and
• become entrenched in unhelpful viewpoints, which they fight to hold onto when external change demands new flexibility.

In order to undo all this you have to take your Executive, planning brain down into your Unconscious ground floor brain.  You do this by entering the emotional responses being presented by your Unconscious Mind – by allowing the feelings to come through.

Now you start to:

• Re-interpret life events in such a way as to reduce their emotional impact on you (for example if you blame yourself for a life event over which you had no real control you can start to see this and let yourself off the guilt-hook)
• normalise and accept even the most intense emotional experiences (my favourite metaphor for emotional disorders is they are like broken legs: undesirable but normal; if they were not normal we would not be able to have them)
• re-prioritise your value systems (for example make your emotional happiness your priority rather than making the emotional happiness of everyone else your priority) and eventually:
• develop and alternate between different viewpoints so effectively you can see all the viewpoints available and then select the appropriate viewpoint at the appropriate time (for example if you have an obsession you have a viewpoint that says thinking about this thing is unacceptable – but you can eventually move to a different viewpoint by discharging the emotional energy attached; there comes a point it stops bothering you).

The rule of observation is whatever we pay close enough attention to automatically starts to change for the better, even when ‘better’ means something we never thought of as being ‘better’ before.

But that rule comes at a price and not all of us are willing to pay.

How about you?

Regards - Carl

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Emotional Healing – Desperation is the Requirement

No-one outside of ourselves creates a sense of desperation.  We create it.

The sense of desperation for a solution to a problem to be brought about comes from within.  To escape, to obtain, to keep.  Desperation is the point at which the emotionally driven urge not to do something is overwhelmed by the emotionally driven urge to do the thing that gets the thing.  It is the urge to win.

Desperation is the urge to do something you have never done before.

During desperation we pace floors; become angry at ourselves; others and life in general.  But we are energised.  We are passionate to the point it feels painful.  Aaaargh!  That is desperation.  Who is to blame for it?  No-one is – it is a part of the process of being alive.

During the time I was researching for a cure for my OCD, my obsessions, my phobias, my depression and panic attacks I kept reading scientific papers that said ‘incurable’ or ‘can be managed but cannot be removed’ or ‘the amygdala shrinks irreversibly’ or ‘this is due to a permanent misconnection in the brain’.

I repeatedly read how exposure therapy did not work in removing most cases of OCD and obsessions and how others like me had basically ‘had it’.

Sufferers like me were supposed to just accept our lot.

The difference between the people who write these things and myself was they were trying to please an intellectual audience while I was the desperate schmuck in the middle of the problem they were writing about.

I refused to accept what I was reading.  I would not give in.  I deserved freedom from my multiple conditions.  I had worked hard in the external world for others all my life and I would work hard for this now for myself; I had turned and gone into my experience rather than continually avoiding it.

The emotional responses inside had got much more intense because of this but my determination to succeed was powered by the urge to get rid of them.  I was desperate.

I was frustrated by the lack of good, solid information available on how to get well.  But my desperation got me through.  Desperation and the emotional fuel it generated became my launch pad.  I would try anything, risk anything, go anywhere and yes, I would even pay some money towards it (heaven forbid, eh?).

Oh, how I festered on my desperation.  But I needed it.  You see, desperation and all those painful emotions (particularly the anger and frustration) is the requirement.

Without desperation I would never have got better.  Never developed the urge to heal no matter what the ‘experts’ say.

If you are desperate to heal and find yourself whining about your suspicions of ‘those out there wishing to exploit your sense of desperation’ just take a step back and rethink – no-one else created that sense, you did.

It is the requirement for healing emotional disorders and for doing pretty much any other thing in life truly worth doing when it finally, ultimately, unavoidably needs doing.  Look at any difficult area of life and you will find that sense of desperation, when you felt cornered, was the moment that occurred just before you got yourself out of a fix.  It comes with the territory of life.

Desperation changes lives for the better.

It moves proverbial mountains; it rewires brain patterns; it makes you strong; it knocks down all those intellectual opinions telling you what you need to do cannot be done.  It makes what looks impossible possible.

Desperation: it could be the best friend you ever had.

Regards - Carl

The Good News and Bad News about Good News and Bad news

Internet Marketer Frank Kern calls it ‘the Chicken Rubber Neck Effect’.  You are driving past a car parked in the middle of nowhere and you may notice the car but you will not turn to look at it carefully as you go by – your attention will be focused on the road ahead for signs of danger.

But put a pair of legs sticking out from behind that car and you will turn your head and twist your neck to see what is going off behind it as you drive by.  So will your entire family if they are sitting in the car.  You will maybe even stop and go take a look.

Mr Kern uses this technique in some of his email campaigns and can show that by putting a ‘bad news’ heading in his email subject headers he can get a much higher email opening rate.

The reason for this is our attention mechanism is automatically set to look for ‘bad news’.  It is the reason we do not see ‘good news’ on most of our news channels – not so many people would watch.  We tend to take good news for granted.  While our attention mechanisms automatically seek out bad news, looking for good news is something,unfortunately, we have to do deliberately.

We call it ‘practising gratitude’.  If we were automatically programmed to look for good news we would be automatically grateful most of the time.  What different lives we would lead, eh?  Just think of how others would treat us.

The attention-grabbing default setting of ‘looking for bad’ is a preventative mechanism designed to pre-warn us of approaching danger but it can go against us to the point it sometimes makes us emotionally ill.  It is the central operating cause of phobias, obsessions and other anxiety disorders built around imagined emotionally charged terrible scenarios in our brains.

The good news about ‘bad’ is it has an opposite.  Everything we experience comes under the heading of ‘duality’.  There is bad in every experience, there is good in every experience, and then there is the centre of the experience which is neither good nor bad, it just ‘is’.

At the position of ‘is’ you are emotionally neutral and have a choice how you see a particular experience.  The bad news is to get to ‘is’ you have to go through bad first and discharge the negative emotions attached to get to acceptance and good and then to ‘is’.

You have the tough, painful experience of bad; then you see the good in a situation; then you take it for granted and become objective – that is, emotionally discharged about the whole thing.  You sit in the middle and watch other people reacting to the bad news in the same negative way you once did.

But do not expect them to be overjoyed when you suggest they follow the same route you did - not everyone likes to hear the good news about bad news and good news.

At this point you are able to choose your own experience and what are you naturally going to choose once you have the choice?  You will naturally choose what makes you feel good but then will return to the neutral ‘is’ position in the middle by default.

If you have an emotional problem or disorder of any kind you may currently feel quite angry or resistant to the way this works, but this is the way it works.

The bad news about all news is we contain within our experience both the painful bad and the ecstatic good.  The good news is by being willing to experience both the bad, the good and the neutral we can eventually get to choose where we sit on the scale between the two extremes.

Mentally we then stop worrying about the whole thing.

Regards - Carl

Truth versus Twaddle in Emotional Healing

Twaddle is a word used to describe idle gossip or talking foolishly.

There is quite a bit of twaddle written in the world of emotional healing.  Some of it is because the author missed something in the process they are offering – the process may well work but they have misinterpreted what happened and those following their method miss out on some key information that would help them later down the line.

Some of it, however, is because the seller of the system wants to attract a bigger market and if they were to tell it like it really is their market would shrink.

Marketers sell buyers what they want, rather than what they need, and although this makes buyers feel pleasant for a while it does not clear up the really nasty long-term stuff.

I am sure I am not completely innocent myself of writing the odd bit of twaddle but I would like to clear up on some of the more common myths I see around.

Twaddle-Myth One: You do not have to revisit the past to heal serious emotional problems – it can be done easily in the present and without any real effort

Twaddle.  You have no choice – serious emotional disorders are layered as intensely written memories in your Limbic Brain (in your amygdalae and your hippocampi) and the emotional charge attached to these memories is trapped in your body with your Unconscious fighting to keep it there.

Healing an emotional disorder is the hardest work you will ever do.

Whether or not you must visit past memories to remove the emotional charge attached to them is not a conscious choice.  If the memory and the energy attached co-exist you have to visit both.  No option.

The people who do not need to re-visit these past, traumatic events are those people who do not have this kind of an emotional problem.  Not all emotional problems need this regressive type of therapy but if you do, you do.  You will not find out if you do until you start the self-work.

In some cases a hypnotherapist may help and there are other kinds of therapists with different approaches but they all work on pretty much the same client condition regardless.

The fear of finding you do have to do this may put you off trying, but the truth is if you do need to you do.  End of.

Twaddle-Myth Two: Positive thinking produces positive feelings and negative thinking produces negative feelings

Imagery, not thinking, and the emotional responses to which they are attached – this is what alters how you feel.  But even then – the emotional energy is the thing.

Thinking with words cannot undo an emotional response – it can stop it through emotional blocking or it can think its way to releasing it – but it does not cause or prevent it.  The only constructive thing your thinking can learn to do is provide a safe, appropriate environment for emotional release – and then get out of the way.

Rage drives angry imagery followed by angry words as our thinking brains try to make sense of the feelings.  The thinking is at the end of our emotional process.

Once you have produced an emotional energy response thinking will not undo it – only feeling will.  Thinking that it is our thinking driving the problem is an ego-driven denial tactic designed to stop us from feeling.

Here is a little exercise: when you are emotionally happy and at peace think about lots and lots of negative things with no emotion attached – think about war in the Middle-East; think about global warming; think about that stabbing you heard about on the news: how long do you feel strongly about these things for?  Unless you already have a real burning emotional attachment to these things it will be for mere seconds.  Seconds.  Negative thinking alone cannot make you negatively emotional – you have to already be emotionally charged for it to have a serious affect.

I am one of the most positive-minded people you could hope to meet – but when I started to heal I was told by my psychiatrist I was suffering with severe depression and I had to accept he was right.  I was full of rage I had kept in place for years with the ‘positive thinking’ approach.

I recently went through the material of an expert on healing agoraphobia who perfectly described the emotional healing process but then went and ruined it for me (and in my view misled his clients) by describing how ‘thinking relaxing thoughts’ was the part of the process responsible for the healing process and if they dominated their thinking with thoughts of relaxation this would help them stay well.

No it will not.  Discharging trapped emotional energy, and only that, is what heals emotional illness.

Thinking otherwise is twaddle.  By the way: you are capable of thinking both positive and negative thoughts at the same time without any ill affects whatsoever.  The thing that really affects you is when those thoughts are used to build images and those images are attached to intense emotional responses.

Go buy positive thinking material, I find it beneficial all the time, but do not make the mistake of thinking it can overcome an emotional illness.

Twaddle-Myth Three: Your external circumstances do not dictate whether or not you are happy – you can be happy no matter what your environment is like

Super-twaddle.  In almost every single case where I have supported someone living in a threatening environment their environment (by this I usually mean how other people were treating them) was the very first thing the person had to escape before healing could begin.

To say otherwise is a ridiculous lie.

Whether you do not suit the environment or the environment does not suit you does not matter – if it does not support you emotionally you need to get out before the healing process can begin.

Environments are real.  They are not delusions in your mind.  If you are being bullied and undermined and threatened with your job or the end of an important relationship or with financial disaster or the loss of your kids or the loss of your own life – how the twaddle are you supposed to be happy in that kind of environment?  Oh yes, that is right, almost forgot: positive thinking.

Emotions tell us what is really going on in our lives.  We need to listen to them.

I twaddle you not.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Wellness – Are You Worth It?

Some people tell me they are emotionally ill – but resent having to pay out any money towards getting better.

Some will not give themselves the time it takes and always have something else that needs doing first.  They always have that something or someone else who needs their support more than they want their own self-care.

Others will not take the risk of trying methods that may not work to find the method that will - and some will find ways to mistrust my advice because if they do trust my advice that would mean they would have to act on that advice.

It means they have to feel the trapped pain they are running from inside.  Dangerous stuff, eh?

I know where these folks are coming from.  I used to think just like them.  It is partly due to fear of wasting valuable time; partly due to fear of being taken for a fool or looking like one when they fail but mostly … mostly it is because they do not think they are worth it.  Emotionally ill people often get that way by repeatedly refusing to validate themselves.

The time involved?  They do not deserve it.

Money to pay?  It should go towards something real and tangible.

The peaceful state waiting for them at the end of the process?  It is not there waiting for them.  It waits for others, but not for them.

I was emotionally ill for a couple of decades but then one day …

I remember one day being out and about with a group of people I cared about who made the day a living hell for me.  I had many similar days like it.  Not one of those folks cared if I had a good day or a bad day.

In the decade prior to that day I could count the number of times they had said something nice to me on the fingers of one hand with three fingers to spare.  On that day I made a decision.  Time to stop adapting.  Time to stop absorbing and putting up with.

I had been Mr Sacrificial to other people for too long and it dawned on me on that day the folks I continually put myself out for and worried about did not care much if I was alive or dead.

On that day I thought to myself ‘I need to get more selfish because no-one is going to do this for me.  I am going to be emotionally ill for the rest of my life if I do not do it’.  And I began to sort myself out.  I started to make some tough decisions.  I decided I was worth it and I kept deciding I was and every day I am willing to make the same decision whenever it is needed.

Are you?  No-one else will do it for you.

Setting Aside Enough Time for the Process

Day to day emotional management for a normally emotionally  well person can take  a couple of minutes to a couple of hours a day depending on current life events – but to get through an obsession or a phobia can take continual hard work for weeks or months – are you willing to give yourself that time?

Finding Money for the Process

Counsellors cost money – they cost me about three and a half hours of my hourly salary time for one hour of their time.  I regard this as a personal coaching session; to me it is worth the money and I am worth the investment.

Are you?  I have spent hundreds of pounds buying books; downloadable materials and trying out different techniques that did not work but which taught me some new things I did not know before.  I regard all of this ‘waste’ as worth it.  Would you waste money on yourself in this way?

I spent several hundred pounds on a hypnotherapist who made no difference to my illness but helped me to learn how to relax better – I regard that as money well spent.  Would you?

Putting Yourself First

I have ended about seven valued relationships because although I valued the relationships the others allegedly relating to me did not.  They regarded me as useful but not as a person.  They resented my explaining to them how I felt about how they treated me – I discovered I had lots of responsibilities but no rights in these relationships.

Each relationship took several years between my thinking I might need to end it and its actually ending.

I did my best to save them but when it was obvious the other people concerned (all adults) would not see I was more than just a functionary in their lives and told me they had no intention of changing I decided in my own favour.

I am now very careful about who I allow into my persoal life – and I still lead a social, people-centred life.

You too may have to decide to value personal happiness above a ‘relationships at any cost’ mentality.  Are you worth that?

I think we are all worth it.

Regards - Carl

The Practical Direction of Your Emotional Process Trumps Hope, Despair, Faith and Fear

In emotional healing there is only one direction to take: inwards.

Taking your Conscious Point of Focus inwards is a deliberate directional choice. This singular choice of direction decides whether or not an unhappy, emotionally blocked person will ever be long-term happy again.

Once you take the journey inwards, regardless of how painful it is, your emotional process starts to sort itself out.  You could have no access to any helpful support or information from any source – but if you simply took your Conscious attention inwards repeatedly and for long enough you would eventually find the resolution to your emotional problems.

Direction.  Not hope; not faith; not knowledge; not ability; not anything else.  Not the support of others; not medication; not goals; not even the desire for happiness; not another single thing I can possibly think of trumps this one truth.  If you will not take the direction inwards nothing else will work.

Repeatedly journey inwards and all the things I’ve just mentioned become passing phases.  They are useful at times, but completely pointless in and of themselves.  None of them are permanent, you see.

We may hang on to them as if they are – but they are not and we know it.  The journey into you is all there really is and you will see and use all of these ‘add-on features’ along the way but you must not make any one of them your goal.

Going into your emotional energies, positive or negative, is a lifelong process to be repeatedly engaged with if you want to remain emotionally happy and make decisions right for you in the long-term.  The moment you decide not to go into an emotional response you have a problem you are one day going to have to acknowledge and deal with or ‘suffer’ from.

Going in allows energy to be released and the insights contained within those energies tells you who you really are and what external environments and relationships are right for you.

But even these insights are temporary steps on the journey.  Just directional signs indicating the next path to take.

If you do not keep taking the right direction your inner world will become conflicted.  Those feelings inside want to be heard and they will keep trying to get your conscious attention.  To go in the wrong direction – we call this denial - you have to set up complex mental networks to repeatedly block an emotional response.  Blocked emotional responses never stop trying to get release from your body – the only option is to acknowledge and release them.

To keep blocking an emotional response the urge to block has to become unconsciously habitual.  Why?  Well, if you were conscious of yourself doing this blocking you would not do it, would you?

Er, yes, actually you would.  Here are four symptoms of blocking.

Hope, Despair, Faith and Fear

These are all temporarily useful tools or liars depending on how you look at them and how long you keep them in place.  It is OK to use these states as temporary tools but if you grasp any one of them and establish it as a permanent way of seeing you are living in a lie.

Hope

Hope is the expectation something desirable will happen no matter what we do.  Hope is a form of helplessness attached to positive emotional imagery.

It may feel nice but it is not real and it depends on external life events for those desirable things to happen.

Hope is hopeless when it comes to real life change.  If you have to keep relying on hope to get you through a situation this can become a form of psychological denial.

We grasp at hope, for example, when we are in an abusive relationship but pretend we are not.  One day, we hope, the person abusing us will stop.  We enhance the affects of failing hope when we choose to idolise or please the abuser in the hope they see how highly we think of them, hoping they will change as a result.

Sometimes we hold ourselves responsible for their behaviour and they love this.  When we do occasionally stand up for ourselves they deliberately trigger our guilt response with the intention of making us take the rap for their behaviour and getting us back into the false hoping state.

People stuck in hope become very useful to others until they hit despair.

Despair

Despair is the expectation that something undesirable will happen no matter what we do and is sometimes the result of ‘hope gone bad’.  Despair is also a form of helplessness but is attached to negative emotional imagery.

Strangely enough, I see people deliberately use mock despair to get out of doing something that would actually solve a problem – they just do not want to do the work and hope mock despair will allow them the get-out without feeling too self-critical about it.

You will see despair in others as ‘mock’ when you know for sure what the solution to the problem is and have used it repeatedly and successfully – but no, no matter how often you point out your demonstrable success with the same issue, for them it will not work.

I have felt the occasional period of despair myself – but I do not buy into it for long.   Despair is the opposite of hope but it is similar in that it is just as false and makes us feel just as helpless..

Faith

Faith is believing something unseen but wanted will happen if you behave in a certain way (so you go in that direction).

Faith has more of a behavioural edge to it than hope because unlike hope faith says you have to do something to get the ‘promised reward’.  I quite like faith – I’ve seen it in action within me many times – faith feels actionable.  Faith feels like I am empowered and moving forward.

But faith is actually a side affect of taking a chosen direction – it is not in itself enough.  If after a period of time faith does not deliver the evidence and knowledge that justifies the work I give up on faith – and so we should.

Blind faith, spending day after day involved in actions that bring no identifiable benefit, are a waste of time to me.

Faith is false when adopted as a permanent outcome in its own right.

Fear

Fear is believing something unseen and not wanted will happen if you behave in a certain way (so you go in the opposite direction).

Fear of our own emotions is always false – False Evidence Appearing Real – but a lot of us fall prey to this mistake and avoid growth opportunities due to the fear that comes with taking the emotional risks associated with growth.

Fear, without direct evidence of the feared thing happening right now, is false.

A One Sentence Summary of an Example

In a difficult situation you got trapped into using hope to give yourself good feelings but your hopes did not materialise and turned to feelings of despair which got so bad they overcame your fear of leaving and forced you to have faith things would turn out right in the end.

An even shorter sentence:  you changed direction because one direction hurt more than the other.

The Point of All This is …

If you are relying on hope; if you are full of despair; if you need to find faith; if you fear your inner world – these are emotional issues telling you your current direction is wrong.

These four related thinking and emotional states are meant to be temporary stopping places along the journey towards natural inner happiness.

If you have got stuck in one or more of them you need to get moving in the right direction again.

Regards - Carl

Three Reasons You May Feel Like Falling Down When Intensely Emotional

Quite a few people who talk to me about their extreme emotional states will talk about their fear of collapsing or fainting – especially about doing this publicly and being labelled an ‘attention-seeking drama queen/king’.

There are a number of reasons we may feel like falling down when highly emotional; here are three:

• The Mammalian Freeze Response


• Enraged Helplessness (depression)


• Physical reasons.

The Mammalian Freeze Response

Human beings have mammalian bodies – these are the bodies of prey animals.  We do not come equipped with fangs and claws.  Our brains, however, are the brains of super-predators because they can design predatory tools that far outweigh the power of those missing fangs and claws.

This omnivorous mixture sometimes creates a confused and conflicted human animal.

When we become intensely emotional our prey-animal mammalian bodies react like those of other prey mammals while our super-predatory brains fight this unwanted intrusion.  This in-fighting delays the body in going through this natural process (it can actually delay it for a lifetime).

Most people have heard of the fight-or-flight response, but there is a third response mammals have – the Mammalian Freeze Response.  Also called the Disassociation Response.  When a mammal is being captured by its natural predator it has the ability to ‘play dead’.  This is not a consciously controlled decision – it is an automatic function of mammalian biology.

It simply lays down and becomes still.

It is also called the Disassociation Response because the brain of the mammal temporarily disconnects from the body in order to reduce pain when being eaten.

If the mammal is not eaten there and then, and the predator wanders off, a short period of time passes before the mammal gets up; shakes itself off and leaves the scene.

When people experience intense emotional responses, particularly if they are anxious, their mammalian bodies sometimes react as if being ‘eaten alive’ and go through the play dead process.

At best they may want to lie down to allow the emotional response to pass through them.  At ‘worst’ they may feel as if six pairs of hands are dragging them to the floor against their will – their body feels heavier and heavier and the muscles become harder and harder to move.

Another common symptom is when they look at their hands they appear to be disconnected from their body (hence the ‘disassociation’ part).

This is not a dangerous state to be in unless it happens regularly – but it is alarming when it happens for the first time.  I suggest you speak to a doctor just to make sure that is what it is.  Their reassurance alone is sometimes enough to help this state pass.

Enraged Helplessness

Sometimes people experience environments they have no immediate control over and feel suppressed and ‘crushed’ in them but for some personal reason are compelled to remain in those environments.  Or they lose an environment (eg a loving relationship) they felt they needed in order to be happy and the environment is taken away from them.

They become sensitised to the situation and extremely emotional and enraged at life.  There may be a specific target or cause, but basically it is ‘at life’.  They feel a desperate urge to get back something lost (rage) alongside a state of not being able to get the lost thing back (helplessness).

When children do this we call it a tantrum; when adults do this we call it dangerous, unacceptable and attention seeking ‘drama queen/king’ behaviour.  This response is very strong – so strong people sometimes attempt suicide to demonstrate how strong it is for them.

The person feels they are repeatedly hitting a brick wall in an important area of their life and may demonstrate this publicly by throwing themselves at the floor – they may do this publicly because they feel others hold the solution to their problem.

If you feel ‘enraged helplessness’ you may act in this desperate way.  You could eventually have to accept that in the particular situation concerned you are in fact both helpless and enraged.

You may now need to take steps to get the emotional reaction out in a safe, non-public way while at the same time negotiating a different route towards getting the things you value so much (but it may have to be a different goal if the initial goal is unobtainable).

Again, this is perfectly normal behaviour – but if you do not want to listen to the opinions of others you need to take the inner turmoil to a professional counsellor trained in helping with this kind of thing.

It is a painful condition to deal with and heal but it can be done and the process can be accepted and cleared.

Physical Reasons

Physical illness can be masked by emotional issues.

Feeling faint can be caused by things like low blood pressure or having the flu or a lack of sleep.  Quite often with anxiety problems we get palpitations in our chest and panic as a result can lead to a feeling of light-headedness.

You may feel like doubling up and laying down with stomach cramps (prolonged anxiety can cause a change in stomach acid balance and lead to digestive problems).

Intense emotional states can make us feel like we are a bit of a hypochondriac and this fear of being labelled as such can cause us not to seek medical advice.  Do not do this – there may be a genuine physical problem developing.

Get it checked out and you will stop worrying about it.

Overall Solutions

When we feel intensely emotional we need to acknowledge the urge to fall down as a normal human condition – undesirable to our ego, but normal.

We should not ignore these signals – something is going on with us.  We need to get help to find out what the cause is.  A physical illness, such as a thyroid problem, can be masked when we just label it ‘emotional’.

Do not be too concerned about the opinions of others when going through this kind of thing unless their opinion is supportive.  I have found those who are negatively critical of others going through this experience tend to follow a similar path when they go through similar situations.  It is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

Humans are built in a certain way and there is no way of getting round this.  The urge to fall down every now and again comes with the package.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness: Emotional Representations and Reflections

I want you to imagine your inner life consists of two main elements:

• Representations


• Reflections

Representations

Representations represent Reflections – they can be a simple shape, a word or our mental image of a person.  They are quick to appear in our minds and in most cases we are quick to let them go.  We might call them thoughts – but they are the kind of thoughts that lead on to other things.

We let a Representation come and go easily when it briefly catches our attention mechanism because we do not see it as important.  When the Reflection represented has either already been fully explored or is so emotionally uninteresting to us we have no urge whatsoever to explore it it will flow through our mind without our trying to stop it.

Reflections

A Reflection is an experience in which several Representations interact with each other.  Each interacting Representation offers us another journey into another Reflection.  They form a ‘scene’ in which different directions are offered to us each with an alternative possible outcome.

The result of entering an unfamiliar reflection is to find yourself in a state of uncertainty.  This does not cause too much stress if the reflection is built around an area of thinking to which you do not have a lot of emotional energy attached.

For example, two scientists discussing alternative theories of particles produced by a particle accelerator may hold your attention for a short period of time.  If they argue over the possibility of the next accelerator test creating a black hole that could swallow you and your family they may get more of your attention.  If they tell you they are building the accelerator where your house currently sits well, it is unlikely you will pay attention to much else for a long while.  You may be particularly emotional about it.

In the above scenario you might select the image of the scientists or the image of the accelerator or the black hole as your Representation – but what it represents is the Reflection containing information about what you expect to lose and how you feel about it.

Emotionally intense Reflections produce ‘flashing’ attention-grabbing Representations.

Emotionally charged Representations grab the attention of your unconscious attention mechanism and may enforce a compulsive response we would rather not have  Compulsion is a physical urge to do something about the content within the Reflection.

We usually feel compelled to pay attention to representations when they represent a survival-related threat to us or trigger a response designed to protect something of value.

What one person regards as a survival-related issue may be different to what others do.  This is why different Representations mean different things to each of us at different times.

A couple of quick examples of Representations/Reflections:

• college certificates represent money; success; respect; a life of purpose and enjoyment – you see this represented by ‘certificate’ – you feel compelled to physically go somewhere and do things to obtain your certificate but not to get the certificate – to get the things in the Reflection behind it


• a bullying boss represents losing a big battle and getting sacked; blocked career paths; bad references; you being labelled a trouble causer; emotional illness – all this is represented by the image of the boss – on the surface it appears you feel physically compelled to go places or stand up to or run away from your bad boss but in the reflection you discover the true things feared are your own possible failures.

How Does This Information Help in Drilling for Emotional Wellness?

In obsessions and phobias we are quite often presented with the Representation and shy away from it because it looks silly or unnecessary or we just do not understand what is going on when this apparent simple image appears with a very strong set of emotional responses attached.

The emotional response, however, is not really attached to the Representation – it is attached to the Reflection behind it.

A phobic afraid of lifts (elevators), for example, may have a reaction to the lift door (the Representation) but the Reflection contains information on how it felt to be helpless; how it felt to feel suffocated; the imagined embarrassment of having to go to the toilet in a lift if you were trapped there and then have your rescuers discover the result– imagery like this may lurk in the reflection and be the real thing behind the obvious image of the lift doors.

In compulsion what happens is the emotional energy in the Reflection ‘flashes’ at us through the Representation; telling us there is something behind the Representation we need to go into and explore.

By going through our Representations into the Reflections behind them and exploring their hidden meaning we discharge the energy within.  We turn those Representative flashing attention-grabbers into just neutrally charged thoughts that appear for shorter and shorter periods until one day they hardly bother us again.

A lack of understanding of this process can leave us standing at the flashing doorway to an emotionally charged Reflection wondering what it is we are supposed to do next.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness – What Are You Drilling For?

You were born to be happy; then unhappy; then happy again.

If you are emotionally unwell, by this I mean long-term emotionally unwell as opposed to dealing with a one-off external issue, it is not because you have not got something you need from the outside world.  It is because you have got something you have to get rid of from your inside world.

We sometimes call this emotional baggage.  Emotional baggage comes in the form of trapped emotional energies produced in relation to what may be now finished external situations or imagined events.  We have not completed the internal emotional release cycle attached to them and it causes them to remain alive inside of us; we feel as though these things are still happening now.

When our emotional baggage shows itself in our behaviours we hear, and automatically re-tell ourselves, criticisms such as ‘get over it’ and ‘pull yourself together’.   What we really need to understand is we must ‘get through it’ and let ourselves ‘fall apart in private’ for a while before we can do this; and then get back to happy, baggage-less you.

Happy You lives inside and emotional illness occurs when multiple negative emotions layer in your body, blocking your conscious from accessing your true self.

Whenever you mentally approach the memories in your brain the trapped energy erupts against your will in a bid to escape.

It is as though there were a cave system in your brain with the emotional energy in your body acting as lava bubbling up.  Every now and again you either travel down a cave and open up a route to the lava (and wish you had not) or the lava pressure builds up so much it causes an eruption that seems to overwhelm and ruin everything.

When you work at healing using systematic de-sensitisation or exposure therapy you deliberately drill down into these trapped energies to enforce release.  Thinking about drilling?  Put your hard hat on..

What Are We Drilling For?

Trapped down there below all that energy sits a happier you waiting to be released.  You may not believe this though if you have been ‘out here’, looking for distractions for a long time.  You may be wondering if the happy you down there could have survived all this time.

The risk you face is you could spend a long time drilling down to find ‘nothing’.  All that work – for nothing.  The irony is, nothing is exactly what you will find, because nothing is what happiness is.  Nothing is what you should drill for.

Can you draw happiness?  Can you picture it?  The answer is no - but that does not matter because this is what you are drilling for.  I know this may sound strange – but if you have been looking for things in the outside world to make you happy for long enough you may well now be looking for the thing inside – a definite target to aim at when there is no thing to be found.  I remember, as I spent several years drilling down to release my obsessions, phobias and panic attacks, occasionally trying to ‘see’ happiness.  What was I working towards?  There came a time when I just knew I was much happier, but still could not picture it.

I can draw a smile; a can re-live an emotional buzz – but happiness I cannot do in the same way and neither can you.

This is because happiness is about the freedom to move within our own being – not being hemmed in by our thoughts; not feeling pressurised by our feelings.  Feeling free.  Happiness is about having choices and space. To achieve this all you need is an absence of intense emotional energies.

To create this you must release emotions.

Confidence comes from knowing you are able to create the space whenever you need to.  It does not come from never having an intense, difficult to deal with emotional problem ever again.

Rather than just achieving emotional release what we really want to establish is emotional flow.  Once we open up the cave network in our brains, and keep it open, the trapped emotional lava gets released but also any future lava releases safely without building up again inside.

Regards - Carl

What Shape Do You Give Your Emotional Responses?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tone

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

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

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

Time to Enter the Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Realistic?

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

Regards - Carl

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

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

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