Work with Compulsions as Energy Problems Not as Thinking Problems

I remember the first time I felt compelled to look and pay attention to something I did not want to and, after at least three years of concentrated daily work and putting up with the condition for over 20 years, I was right back at that initial point of compulsion.  Being forced to look and not wanting to.

I had removed 27 obsessions, 14 phobias and a number of other layered, intense secondary emotional responses, all of which had been triggered by the desire to fight the affects of this singular place in my mind.  They had done a good job of masking it from me – but now I was back facing the original, apparently unsolvable problem.  What I mentally paid attention to was not under my direct control.  Control of my attention mechanism had literally been taken off me.

The idea you cannot control what you pay attention to and that when it grabs your attention there is nothing, apart from temporary distraction, to relieve the pressure, is a very frightening experience.

The feeling for me came in the centre of my brain - some irresistible force grabbing the backs of my eyeballs and physically turning their attention to look at horrific imagery and my body felt ‘pushed’ towards taking action – but there was nothing to do.

I had received this experience after, would you believe, reading a newspaper article about someone being harmed and killed by a gang.  I had imagined the same thing happening to someone I personally cared about and the emotional responses were so strong it had conveyed a sense of reality to my Unconscious mind.  This was so effective my body was reacting as though the event were happening right now – but there was no event.

I felt stupid about the self-sabotaging problem I had created using just my own imagination but I had no idea how to undo the affects and there was no help I could see to explain the solution to me.  In fact any information I could get back then pretty much confirmed the condition was permanent and I was doomed.

I had read the triggering newspaper article when I was 21 and it had taken less than the a couple of days for the compulsive response to kick in and for me to establish the secondary emotional layers to begin fighting it.

The compulsive physical urge my compulsion produced was to get up and search the building I was in to find the person being hurt and physically stop the gang from hurting them.

So here I was, after over two decades of putting up with the emotional blocks and spending several years clearing them – right back at square one facing the compulsive urge and the feeling of its fierce grip in the middle of my brain turning my attention to look at things I did not wish to look at.

If you have read books on OCD or obsessions you may have read about how this is a ‘thinking’ problem.  So I am looking at my problem wondering what part of my thinking is turning my attention to look at the imagery over and over again and I notice there is no thinking I can immediately see.

I feel the pressure to look in the middle of my brain.  Thinking does not feel like anything and the thinking brain does not feel.  Feeling is an emotional problem.  Feeling is an energy problem.  The great news about an energy problem is if you remove the energy through feeling you remove the problem.

So I entered the feelings gripping the middle of my brain, forcing my attention to look, and over a couple of days this feeling started to reduce and the imagery in the background (in what I call the Reflection) behind this grabbing sensation started to come up, as did several other feelings.

I agreed to feel everything – and I agreed with the imagery and how I felt about that imagery but to do all this all I needed to do was find the feelings and go into them.

You know what?  Over several weeks I lost that compulsive urge to look.  I can still have those horrible thoughts and images – but I do not have the compulsive urge to keep looking at them.  No urge to look, no need to search buildings,  no gang to fight off, nobody being hurt.

If you have a compulsion you feel grips in the middle of your brain and it is a feeling you can go into I suggest you regard that is an energy problem and not a thinking problem.  Relieve the energy, relieve the problem.

Go in and you just could end up, to your surprise, coming out.

Regards - Carl

Self-Criticism is at the Heart of Most Emotional Disorders

It takes three seconds.

Three seconds to look at your own, frighteningly intense emotional response and say ‘I’ve gone insane’ or ‘I’m so stupid’ or ‘I’m a monster!’ or … insert your own negative self-criticism here.

This is all you need to do become emotionally ill.  Honestly.  An intense emotional response to something followed by a nice juicy heavy duty self-critical judgement.

You see, this isn’t just a mere string of words.  This is a viewpoint – this is a self-image viewpoint; it’s a snapshot picture you produce of ‘you’.  And when you say it, because you’re in the middle of an emotionally intense moment and because our minds remember our viewpoints best when we produce them in an intense emotional state, your mind will flash this belief through your brain and body.

And because this experience is so intensely emotional, your unconscious mind believes it to be real because you’re ‘feeling’ it and suddenly you see your own emotional process as ‘a problem’.  It’s not the situation you find yourself in that triggered the intense emotional response you’re having, oh no.  It’s you.  Oh my goodness, you’ve gone wrong!

And then you react emotionally to your alleged ‘internal problem’ by producing a secondary emotional reaction designed to freeze the first reaction in place – a double whammy.  You feel bad and then you feel bad about feeling bad … and bad about feeling bad about …

And, because the first emotional response still wants to come out and then the second response wants to come out too you produce further responses designed to hold those initial and secondary responses in place … and it builds and with each additional response you keep telling yourself how much more ‘insane!’ you are.  You are now at war with yourself.  Full blown unconsciously-driven-negative-self-image war.

Three seconds.  The words that created the viewpoint are hidden by all the intense emotional energy produced as a result of the viewpoint you’ve put in place and your thinking brain is now repeatedly hijacked, fogging your mind and memories to a point you can’t figure out what you did to cause this problem.

You can spend weeks to months working through the emotional response, then looking at the viewpoint but still being unsure what’s ‘wrong’ with you, and then you get what we call an ‘insight’.

Insights tend to appear ‘out of the blue’ when we’re not quite expecting them but when they do appear we may self-criticise for not finding them earlier (don’t do that by the way, the self-criticising for not finding the insight earlier thing, this is how insights work).

An ‘insight’ is a ‘view within’.  Guess what you’ll see when you see the ‘insight’?  Those three blasted words you thought all that time ago: ‘I’ve gone insane’.  That’s what you’ll see – those three judgemental words that caused you to form an instant, self-critical viewpoint you burned into your thinking and believed without question instantly and in the heat of the moment.

And within the same three seconds you will then allow yourself to undo that viewpoint.  You suddenly realise how powerful those initial three seconds were and how you need to make sure you never do that to yourself  again.  The next time you experience an emotional response that intense you’ll spot that you’re about to self-criticise and you’ll interrupt yourself (won’t you?  Please do).

Self-criticism in the middle of an intense emotional response – don’t do this.

When you discover your husband has had an affair with your sister thus destroying two of your closest relationships in one go, and you suddenly have an enraged urge to kill them both, instead of thinking ‘I’ve gone insane’ and starting to fight your own response go get practical, professional help to get the emotions safely out of your body without self-criticising or self-harming yourself or hurting them.

Also – don’t allow abusers or people who don’t respect you to provide you with self-criticisms you then start applying as self-critical judgements.  It has the same devastating affect.

The majority of emotional disorders are caused by the basic self-critical belief ‘I should not be feeling this’.  Seriously.

Acknowledge what you feel, accept it regardless of intensity and find a constructive way to get it out of your system as soon as possible - your chances of remaining emotionally well are then much higher.

In every instance where I have helped someone with an emotional problem (myself included) I hear the self-criticisms spew out:

‘My silly behaviour’

‘My accidents’

‘It’s stupid of me …’

‘I am dangerous …’

‘I need to be locked up …’

‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with me …’

and within a matter of half an hour to an hour I get smiles from these folks simply by showing them a completely different set of viewpoints to adopt (they don’t become well straight away – but simply realising they’re not what they keep telling themselves they are makes a huge difference – they’ve got their own insights to find and they’re on the way).

You know those three seconds?  Don’t do it.  Let yourself off the hook. Allow yourself to be a fully rounded sometimes emotionally-intense human being.  We’ve been feeling this way (and safely releasing the feelings over time and moving on to happiness again) for millions of years.

When you find yourself creating a negative viewpoint of yourself on the basis of an intense emotional response – stop.

Regards

Carl

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