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

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

Emotions Come with a Purpose, a Role and a Need – You Can Use this Knowledge to Heal Phobias and Obsessions

Emotions have a purpose, play a role you ultimately decide the nature of and have their own universal driving need.  Understanding all three aspects of your emotional responses will help you in their management and removal.

Emotional Purpose

Your emotions are concerned with three things:

• defending your territory


• maintaining your current territory


• managing the risks involved in expanding your territory.

In the animal world control of a specific territory as a source of food and safety for the period it takes to raise new offspring is a survival-strength issue.  This is the same for humans but in addition we also use the same emotional responses in defending intellectual property such as our ideas, our hopes and relationships.  All products, quite often, of the imagination.

Anything you are capable of imagining you are capable of attaching a survival-strength response to if what you imagine is linked in to your deepest values.  If you value the freedom of having a mobile piece of territory, for example, you may really value your car.

The science of Proxemics studies the emotional effects on people of their environments and how those environments are arranged around them (it is closely related to the study of body language).  What Proxemics tells us is that the distance between you and a possible threat makes a difference in your level of emotional intensity when you have a reaction to the alleged threat.

A threat within your ‘intimate space’, within say a foot of your body, produces your most intense reactions.  If you have a phobia this will occur as you approach the external object to which your phobia is attached and you will notice it gets more intense as you approach.

In the case of an obsession the imagery you are afraid of is at the centre of your intimate zone – in your mind.  For this reason obsessions are among the most distracting types of emotional triggers you can have.

Even here, though, the issue is one of territory.  A phobic person has that problem because their Unconscious believes they have entered predator territory as they approach the feared external object or environment while the sufferer of an obsession has an Unconscious belief a predator (the unwanted image) has entered their mental territory and needs forcing out.

Although these reactions are fed by imagined scenarios they produce exactly the same emotional responses as real life events would.  The trick of getting rid of these conditions is to  treat them as if they were real life events but use the same tool that created them to remove them – your imagination.

Thankfully you do not have to recreate the real life events themselves in order to get rid of these conditions.  A person with a fear of elevators can use an empty elevator (sometimes even just an imagined elevator or a small cupboard) and a person with an obsession is both blessed and cursed by the fact the whole issue sits inside their own body and mind.

Having been produced in order to deal with an alleged territorial issue an emotional response needs to make itself known by being expressed.

Role

The overall purpose of an emotional response is to get the body to move physically in a direction in order to perform a specific, survival related act.  Three examples:

• anger


• disgust and


• fear.

Anger is the response to a threat of losing territory and the urge to take it back.  If the territory is being repeatedly threatened or taken away the response can turn to one of blind rage.  If you are having this response you will see at the centre of it the urge to move forward and then take back something you regard as central to your survival.

You will temper this reaction according to circumstances, but at some level the animal part of you is reacting to losing important territory.  How you mentally change the context of what you see as your territory alters the intensity of your reaction.

If you decide to become self-critical for feeling anger at the loss you may turn this anger inwards and it becomes depression.

Disgust is about an undesirable predator infringing your territory and dirtying it with their physical and behavioural habits.  It is about poisoning your territory.  The urge here is to push away and reject.

You can have a disgust reaction to bad food but also to unacceptable behaviour impacting your values.  Disgust is an ‘I have had enough’ response.  If you become self-critical at feeling disgust you can develop a fear of it and it can turn into an obsession.

Fear is the urge to avoid a predator entering your territory or to avoid the threat of a predator when you enter their territory.  Fear is about moving away quickly when the predator appears.  If you become self-critical of your fear you will hold it in place using both anger and secondary fear and you create phobias and panic attacks in this way.

With all three emotional types self-critical behaviour will keep the emotions trapped in your body.  Trouble is, the role of an emotional response is to express itself by getting out of your body.

The way to express an emotional response is to give it what it needs.

Need

Emotional responses only have one need.  To escape you.

If, however, you have identified your own emotional responses as predators encroaching on your mental territory, also needing to be got rid of, you will find yourself with more than one emotional response to deal with.  You will have to spend some time changing the way you see your emotional process so you no longer see it as being full of predators and no longer produce the secondary responses designed to hold them at bay.

You’ve got to let them cross your land and go out the other side.

Just because you know the territory being defended exists only in your imagination does not mean you can ignore the need of the emotional response wanting to leave your body.  The triggers may not be real but your responses are and you must take them seriously.

When you reject an emotional response as unworthy of release it fights you in order to meet its need – it looks for any external stimulus that barely resembles the original trigger to project itself onto.  When a trapped emotional response keeps begging for release you will find yourself having strange thoughts.  Thoughts of evil things happening; painful thoughts that are not the ‘normal’ you.

We call this projection.  Projection is where people take an emotional response created in one experience and project it onto an unrelated situation later.  This can happen with all our emotions and is a signal the emotional response is creating alternative thinking routes through which it hopes to escape your body.  Projection does not work very well – it is better to identify the original thought-path that created the response and allow the emotional energy to escape through that.

Purpose, Role, Need

Set aside a safe place in a room where there are no distractions.  You may want to use objects or imagined scenarios as tools onto which your attention can focus.

Allow your emotions to project onto those tools.  This may seem like a very strange and unrealistic thing to do – but your emotions will not agree with this view.  They will come up.

Acknowledge their right to ‘defend’ your territory – even just temporarily during the projection process.  Even though you know they are lying to you about the alleged threat, let the energy express itself at the target tool – let projection take place.

Do this repeatedly, until the energy has projected and expressed to the point the need of  your emotional response has been met, whether it is a normal emotional response or a phobia or an obsession or any other anxiety disorder, one day your emotional response will be gone.

Regards - Carl

Birth of an Obsession: Did You Lock the Door?

Well, did you lock the door?  Did you really lock the door or do you just think you did?

A pal was describing to me how her mum has to keep going back to check she locked the door and has been diagnosed with OCD.  In this post I am going to talk about what starts the obsessive process and how full blown obsessions develop (and also how to start getting rid of them).

WORRY

The 'itchy' nature of things that bug and worry us is how obsessive thinking is initially triggered.  Obsessive thinking, fuelled by unreleased negative emotional energy, lays a foundation for full blown obsessions to develop later.  The important thing to concentrate on here is 'fuelled by'.  Take away the fuel of your worry-engine and you take away the worrying.  I will explain how to do this near the end of the post.

Worrying About Worrying

There comes a point when we know for sure that door is definitely locked but the worry keeps grabbing our attention and then we start to worry about why we are worrying.  It is not the actual lock that bothers us but the emotional attachments held within the body linked to multiple dire and painful possibilities.  We do not think we could cope with our own emotional responses to those possibilities if they ever happened.

The brain likes to represent things for us (it is very efficient and effective like that) and represented behind the focal point of that little door lock, and the little key we keep with us, is a whole host of scary stuff we imagine lies in wait if we get that door-locking-process wrong.  Criticising yourself for worrying about the lock distracts you from facing up to the real concerns behind it - those things you do not believe you could cope with such as:

• finding your home ransacked by burglars and even worse finding them still in your house when you arrive


• losing things you have worked for all your life


• precious memories tainted (eg jewellery from your mother) by having items stolen


• loss of the belief your home is 'safe'


• wondering if the burglars will come back and what kind of evil people do such things


• the concern you will be irreversibly damaged by the event.

These are all representations - products of our imagination.  Knowing that is all they are causes us to criticise ourselves for being emotionally attached to them and refusing to feel the emotional responses associated with those underlying representations.  We regard our emotional responses as 'over-reacting' and consciously try to stop worrying; we try to freeze the process.  We attempt to stop both the thinking and the feelings involved.

Trying to Stop The Thinking Does Not Work


Fighting worrying thoughts with additional counteractive thinking such as 'I should not be thinking about this repeatedly because it only exists in my imagination', and then trying to distract yourself by deliberately focusing on nice things to think about instead means you must first think about what it is you are trying to avoid thinking about - and this keeps re-creating it. Doh.

Un-think a pink elephant - can you do it?  Try again.  Try again.  Later when you are around the thing you do not want to think about, such as that lock, you think 'I hope I do not think about it otherwise all those negative sensations will come back with it'.  Guess what you just did.  Yup, you thought about it.

Feelings Are The Key to Stopping Worrying


You are actually designed to cope with all of your feelings in all real-life scenarios regardless of content or intensity.  Feelings work in a specific way.  They appear, you feel them, and they eventually move through and out of you - if you let them.  When you try to stop this process in its tracks you develop an 'I would not be able to cope with my feelings in that situation' belief system (in truth it is because you do not want to feel your negative feelings, rather than because you cannot, but who can blame you for not wanting to?).  Nevertheless, to heal this worrying you must feel your feelings out.

By refusing to acknowledge these imagined scenarios as being a valid part of your built-in emotional response system you refuse to release the emotional charge attached and you keep the festering 'I could not cope' message running in your brain and body.  When you set out to deliberately destroy these worries, because you see them as 'wrong', you then risk creating secondary emotional responses.

SECONDARY EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

Secondary emotional responses cause obsessions; panic attacks; phobias and a whole host of other anxiety-related disorders.  Although they are intended to remove a primary emotional response they merely cement it further in place - they fail to work in the same way trying to un-think thoughts fails to work and they keep regenerating the problem.

In most cases a secondary emotional response is a repeat of the primary response: we can generate anger at being angry (rage attacks); fear of being afraid (panic attacks).  We can also generate  fear of feeling disgust and also anger towards feeling fear.  It is often easier to notice the second type of secondary emotional responses because they produce different physical sensations, whereas 'fear of fear' and 'anger at anger' can seem to blend into an overall painful mass and we have difficulty seeing which is a primary and which is a secondary response.

When you have a secondary emotional response your thinking and feelings have been geared up for war against your own original emotional response.  The determination not to have the primary response is so strong you are trying to physically remove the entire thinking/feeling process from your body.  This cannot be done.  Instead you must aim for the goal of flowing the energy through your body until the overspill is down to a reasonable level and your mind stops regarding the situation as a problem.

In the case of a phobia of door locks, for example, you have created a secondary response that causes you to emotionally fight every door lock you come across just in case it causes you to have a fearful emotional response.  In the case of an obsession you have the image of a door lock repeatedly flashing in your conscious mind attached to the most extreme emotionally intense responses you are capable of producing.  And because you know it's not 'real', you keep fighting it.

HYPERVIGILANCE

Hypervigilance, or being super-aware, is designed to keep you alive in long-term immediately life threatening situations.  You are unconsciously driven to look for evidence of things even slightly related to the perceived threat.  When you are hypervigilant your holistic thinking is shut down as you focus solely on looking for sensory signals related only to the trigger.

Feeling hypervigilant  is the difference between seeing a wild, hungry lion on your television and having a wild, hungry lion in your home.  Lions on the telly engage your conscious thinking brain in seeing nature at its most powerful and beautiful; lions in your home engage your unconscious emotional brain in contemplating the painful deaths of you and your loved ones and cause you to have powerful physical responses.

A heavy breath; a moving shadow; scratching claws; sharp teeth.  In hypervigilance your unconscious emotional brain runs you and automatically produces the signals that tell your senses 'danger!'.  But you do not need a real lion in your home to become hypervigilant.  All you need to achieve this state in normal every day life is to refuse to engage your conscious thinking brain in working with your negatively charged emotional issues.

Refusing to consciously work with an emotional issue does not make the issue go away - it forces the issue downwards into your unconscious emotional brain.

Because your unconscious emotional brain does not know the difference between imagined and real scenarios it assumes it has received the information because the scenario is real.  When your unconscious emotional brain takes control of dealing with issues you refused to deal with consciously your risk of hypervigilance is greatly increased.

Two other things that can increase the risk of hypervigilance are:

• the feared event, or something similar to it, actually happening or having happened in the past so your unconscious mind has evidence such a threat could be real


• having your sense of control over the prevention of such imagined events being undermined; for example a partner who always leaves the door unlocked when they go out.

Becoming hypervigilant towards triggers you know to be false in the present moment means you have emotional reactions you do not want or understand.  Your unconscious brain creates imagery, sounds and sensations that appear in your conscious brain against your conscious will and you have physical reactions, driven by extreme emotional responses, that exactly mimic the false situation as if it were real.  If there were an actual lion in the room you would welcome this reaction because it could keep you alive - but when you know these reactions are happening around imagined events you continue to fight them; continue to try and force them out of conscious awareness but send them repeatedly down into your emotional brain for unconscious processing.

To undo this unconsciously driven nightmare you have to do just one thing: consciously reclaim your feelings.  The earlier you start the better.

HOW TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT YOU LOCKED THE DOOR

When a person develops OCD or an obsession in regard to whether or not they locked the door they've taken what started out as a fear-laden area of worry, refused to spend time with it, started to fight it and then turned that fight into an unconscious long-term habit supported by secondary emotional responses that defend against the undoing of that habit.

This habit actually restructures both your brain and your emotional release system.  Specific emotional responses are blocked from leaving the body while  thought patterns are created that act like 'shields' trying to stop you from thinking about certain areas of life.  But like any other habit it can be reversed if you're willing to pay the price and give it the time required.

Here's an example of a strategy you can use to remove the initial obsessional worrying process:

Step 1:  Focus On the Door Lock

Accept it is not your thoughts but your feelings that keep driving you to pay attention to the lock. The feelings we're talking about here are feelings already present in your body waiting to be released - I'm not talking about deliberately generating new feelings.  If when you focus on an object you have feelings automatically come up they are already present in your body and they will keep asking you to pay attention to the issue they represent until they are released.

Step 2: Explore Your Feelings and the Issues to Which They Relate

Explore the threat of burglary and how you would react; explore the threat of feeling stupid after the event if you forgot to lock your door; having the police come round and point security issues out to you that you should have been thinking about and did not - explore the embarrassment all that entails.  Explore the issues and feel the feelings in depth. Do this consciously and this reduces the need for your unconscious emotional mind to keep getting involved.

Step 3:  Tell Yourself You Would Cope if These 'Terrible' Things Happened

Because you would.  You would hurt; but you would cope.  The feelings you have while imagining the scenario are roughly the same as you would have if the scenario were real, if you can cope with the imagined scenario you can cope with the real version.

Step 4:  Accept that Locking the Door is an Important Thing You Need to Concentrate on When You Are Doing It

Sometimes the reason we worry is because we are distracted by other things fighting for our attention and our memory of having performed an important act is blurred.  Our unconscious is telling us we did not pay enough attention to the door at the time of locking.  What is happening here is your unconscious is working in line with your deepest value systems and reminding you to keep in line with them.

Step 5:  Replay Issues and Release the Emotional Responses Attached to Them Until They Stop Grabbing Your Attention


Do not wait until the issue reappears and you say 'oh no, not again'.  Set aside a regular time slot each week where you deliberately go searching for issues; deliberately seek to feel the feelings attached.

Step 6:  Do Not Self-Criticise

Self-criticism about this process is like telling yourself it is wrong to feel pain when you cut yourself.  Almost all people I have met who worry or who develop anxiety disorders tell themselves 'I have gone wrong' on the basis of their experiencing negative feelings.  You get a broken leg, it hurts physically.  You imagine a harmful life event, it hurts emotionally.  It is not desirable, but it is not 'wrong'.  When you catch yourself telling yourself this, challenge it.  The self-criticism needs to be repeatedly stopped when it surfaces - eventually it will be become a habit not to do it.

Step 7:  Rinse and Repeat

If you follow this process over and over again you will find your worries eventually disappear.  That lock no longer keeps grabbing your attention.

To summarise ...

I guess what I'm saying here is the more you deliberately fester on a worry the less it worries you and eventually it completely fades.  The more you fight it the more it keeps demanding you pay attention to it.  Self-acceptance is about accepting your emotional responses and allowing them to release from your body.

HOW TO GET RID OF AN OBSESSION WHEN YOU'VE DEVELOPED SECONDARY EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

Unfortunately you won't be able to follow the above 7 step process until you've removed your secondary responses and this involves taking your conscious thinking down into your unconscious mind repeatedly to pull back up those issues you refused or were unable to deal with earlier.  You must now brave the 'shields' your unconscious has put in place to prevent you from doing this.

Repeatedly experiencing secondary emotional responses, which are very intense, until the unconscious starts to transfer the handling of the information over from the unconscious to the conscious mind is easier to do as the unconscious stops regarding the threat as real.  Discharging the intense emotional charge naturally leads to this transfer taking place but for this process to begin the conscious mind must start to see the development and removal of an obsession as a natural process.

It can take months and sometimes years to get to this point.  OCD and obsessions are powerful conditions and the speed of recovery depends on how much daily work a sufferer is willing to put in.

In the case of a door lock obsession, for example, the person concerned has to go towards the door lock in their mind (in an obsession the image that terrifies is contained in the mind) and release all emotional charge attached to any underlying worries and issues.

Does this remind you of a situation you have had or are having?  Please leave a comment below.

Regards - Carl

The Sensitisation-Desensitisation Cycle

There are certain things I never intend to de-sensitise to and it doesn't bother me that I'll probably have a fear of these things for the rest of my life.  These things include, for example:

• bungee jumping (I don't believe any piece of elastic in the world is capable of holding my weight)


• sitting in a lion cage in a zoo stroking the mane of a half-starved lion


• swimming alongside Great White Sharks in order to get a decent photo opportunity.

How about you?  Do you think having any of those fears will hold you back in life?  It depends on what you do for a living, I suppose.  I might do those things if the feelings I'd get afterwards, for whatever reason, would leave me feeling worse than the blind terror response that prevents me from doing them. But the belief that it's 'common sense' to be afraid of those things stops me from thinking I have some kind of problem I've got to deal with.

The terror I'm describing here doesn't exist in my body at the time of writing - but it would if I was about to do the things described.  So as I approached these situations, and I started to produce intense fear responses, I would not declare myself 'phobic' or tell myself I had a difficult-to-deal with anxiety disorder.  Would you?  I suspect, especially in regard to the lions and Great White Sharks, you'd say I've got my head screwed on right and I would say the same thing about you.

But there are people who do bungee jumping, working with lions and swimming alongside Great White Sharks for fun.  So what's going on here?  Are they nuts?  No - they're de-sensitised.  They've used their desire to pull them through any fear they had - the danger is, in fact, that because they lack fear they may allow their enthusiasm to get the better of them and end up dead.

I don't know where it's stored in our brains (it may be the Amygdala - a couple of almond shaped brain bits that are at the centre of our fear management mechanism) but I suspect we hold a 'register' that lists the things we are afraid of.  A big list of images and other sensory memories that cause us to react with terror whenever our senses tell us we're near something that's on that list.  The things on the list are called 'triggers' and the great thing for most of us is we hardly ever see or experience those triggers.

Problems arise when the triggers on our 'deadly list of fear' are things we come across in normal day-to-day life.  I know a lady, for example, who is terrified of plastic piping and anything related to plumbing.  Now that's a problem.  That fear is at the same level as playing-with-sharks is for most of us but because she consciously knows the pipes aren't sharks, and that in reality they are harmless, she has difficulty accepting the idea that she's got to go de-sensitise to them in the same way she would have to if she wanted to be a swimming-with-sharks expert.

All that happens when we develop a phobia is that we've listed something on our 'fear-list' - and if socially it's accepted as not being something dangerous to us we call it a phobia.  When it's something socially accepted as dangerous we call it 'common sense'.  It's a perfectly normal process.  And so is removing it.  The purpose of this post is to get across the message that sensitisation and de-sensitisation are normal processes.  To help demonstrate this I'm going to talk about two lower level examples (the only difference between these examples and a full blown anxiety disorder is in the emotional intensity involved).

The two examples are:

• catastrophisation and


• the unconscious incompetence/unconscious competence cycle.

Catastrophisation

Commonly known as 'making mountains out of molehills' catastrophisation is something most of us do at some time.  Using our imaginations we let a small amount of bad news (eg being late for work) build into a scenario in our minds that triggers negative emotional responses in our bodies.  The bad feelings drive further negative thoughts.  By the time we get to work we've decided our boss has already fired us; always hated us anyway and our being late is the final chunk of evidence they need to put their dastardly plan to get rid of us into action.  We picture losing our homes as the salary dries up and our kids destitute on the street (if you haven't got any kids just imagine that if you did have your imaginary kids would be destitute on the streets - this is the imagination working here, we can invent anything we want, OK?).

So when your boss sees you at work you're all riled and ready to tell him where to stick his job as he invites you into his office and tells you he's decided to give you a pay award for all your hard work.  Eh?  Sensitisation over - only not quite, as it takes about four hours for the emotional energy to disperse while you keep telling yourself 'all that grief I gave myself for nothing'.

The 'catastrophisation' process is one of our scenario building mechanisms designed to protect us from possible danger but in a modern world it can cause us harm if not properly managed - it is also an example of the sensitisation-desensitisation cycle at one of its lower levels; but let's not belittle it - you need to get this habit under control or you could end up telling your boss where to stick that job and regret it later.  Catastrophisation as a cycle usually only lasts a day or two until the truth of a situation is fully revealed.

The Unconscious Incompetence/Unconscious Competence Cycle

What a mouthful, eh?  I like to call it the 'don't know-don't care/do know-don't care' cycle.

This cycle, and our refusal to go through it, is the main cause of people not making progress in their jobs and personal lives.  Learning the cycle and applying it on a regular, systematic basis can help you to manage your personal growth.  There are four stages to the cycle:

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence - 'don't know-don't care'

I can't fly a plane but it doesn't bother me because I don't need to know because I never intend to fly a plane.  Even when my employer tells me he's sending me to another part of the country in a Cessna two-seater it doesn't bother me because my employer tells me the pilot is very experienced.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence - 'don't know-do care'

We're at 20'000 feet over mountains when my experienced pilot tells me he feels dizzy and promptly passes out.  As the plane starts to dip it suddenly really bothers me that I haven't got a clue how to fly a plane.  Where's the microphone thing?  Ground Control!

Stage 3: Conscious Competence - 'do know-do care'

Ground Control talk me down (amazing how they do that, eh?) and after they take the pilot off to hospital I report back to my boss who tells me I'd better take flying lessons as he wants me to make the trip on a regular basis and it's obvious I've got a knack for flying.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence - 'do know-don't care'

Five years later and I'm a pilot myself now and I regard other non-pilots as being dangerous around planes and not too bright.  I can fly with one hand tied behind my back and the danger now is I'll not give myself enough sleep one night and while giving a business person a trip somewhere in my two-seat Cessna I pass out due to exhaustion and they have to go through the same learning cycle I did.

OK - which of the four stages is the most intense 'sensitisation-desensitisation' stage?  What kind of thoughts go through a person's head and how do they feel?

This is such a common behavioural cycle that it's taught in most administrative management courses - and it merely describes the de-sensitisation process - just at a lower level of emotional intensity than you'd find in a phobia or an obsession.  It can last from a single day to many years as someone transitions through the stages of the cycle.

Please leave any comments/answers or questions below.

In the next post I'll be looking at the difference between phobias and obsessions when it comes to becoming de-sensitised.

Regards - Carl

PS if you think I'm joking about shark swimmers ... all you need is a little stick to poke 'em with and you're safe ... apparently ...