Response to Kurt who is on the path to healing from Anxiety and OCD

Hi Kurt, thank you for getting in touch and giving me permission to reply through the blog.

The main body of your initial email and the second smaller follow-up email you sent are at the bottom of this post in italics if other readers wish to look at the whole thing.  To answer your email as thoroughly as I can I am going to split the content up into paragraphs and then respond to each paragraph separately if that’s OK?

Here we go:

Learning to Think More in Pictures

When healing from my my own obsessions I would go into the nearest available emotional response available (this may sound a bit strange but when you have practiced doing this for a while you get used to the idea that entering the emotions trapped within is the key to remove emotional disorders of every kind). 

When I did this very strong imagery would come up.  By ‘strong’ I mean it completely dominated my mind while I was in the emotional response.

I would move my Conscious towards the obsessional image and then other images, not the image at the centre of the obsession (although that was there too) would start to appear after several hours.

They were either images regarding the nature of the process I was trying to enforce or about the situation and environment I was in at the time the obsession developed. 

At first I did not realise these images had any meaning or use at all.  I would just get a ‘sense’.  After a while though (a few weeks) I started to realise this was how my Unconscious was talking to me.  Sometimes it was warning me not to go towards the obsessional image (with pictures of certain death) and other times it presented imagery I had not seen before (such as the picture of a hill or of a horrible building in the middle of a beautiful scene).

It took me a few months of doing this on a daily basis for me to realise these images were advice on how to see things in order to heal. 

When we enter our emotions we also enter our Unconsciously stored memories of the pictures we sent down, sometimes years ago (in your case, 10 years ago).  If we enter them repeatedly and communicate to our Unconscious we want a new approach to resolving our blocked emotional problem eventually the Unconscious starts coming back with suggestions of its own - it communicates these suggestions in pictures.

If you think of your basic internal design as being similar in structure to any human business organisation you can form a picture of your Conscious, thinking brain, being like the Board of Directors while your Unconscious acts in a similar way to how a large workforce would.

If an organisation makes cars, for example, and suddenly it decides to drop cars and make bicycles instead management should expect a bit of a rebellion from the workforce in regards to what looks like to the workforce a crazy management idea going to put everyone out of a job. 

Fear, anger, frustration, rejection should be expected.  But if management are as gentle as possible while they keep pushing for the new approach eventually the workforce starts to co-operate and comes up with ideas of its own on how the new goals can be brought about.  This mostly happens for us when we start to accept our own intense emotions have not actually killed us yet despite our belief they just might.

The first impression I got when I received your email was of a ‘wall of painful information that cannot be resolved or coped with’.  I got that impression just by looking at your email as a whole without reading the content.  There are few paragraphs separating the text in your email (if any) and if you look at it visually the words look like bricks in a wall.  I assume this is what your Unconscious is currently seeing?  An impenetrable wall? 

The second visual impression I get is of a concave mirror.  The reason I get this visual impression is because the content of your email reflects my own experience several years ago during my healing process.

I remember saying to a counsellor how, when I looked at my condition, I felt I was in a mirrored ball with only my own emotional responses bouncing back at me.  I could not seem to get through that wall.

Does that relate to your experience at all? 

As we heal from emotional disorders such as obsessions and OCD I found we become much more image and pattern focused - this is because pictures with emotional energy attached are the common language between the Unconscious and Conscious minds.

Word-based thoughts produced in our thinking mind create pictures (like sticks used to build a hut) and then these pictures, produced in the right neo-cortex (our picture and pattern mind), are projected down into the Unconscious.

Some of these pictures look threatening – we see ourselves as though we are not coping or could not cope with them – and we attach a negative emotional response to these pictures. 

Where the threat is genuine in the real, outside world we feel ourselves ‘forced into a corner’ to react and protect ourselves and at some point we fight, flee or surrender.  This usually discharges the emotional energy produced and we are able to accept and move on with external life. 

But when we believe the threat is a product of our own internal imagination we may tend towards pretending the response itself should not be acknowledged as real and then not worked with because the feared external threat is not real.

Our Conscious may now reject the idea of processing strong negative emotions in regards to what it sees as ‘only imagined events’ and the emotional energy attached to the image is not discharged.  It remains in the body still attached to the pictures.  Those pictures are continually sent upwards by the Unconscious which is really just asking for permission to release the energy attached to the image now dominating our mind.

A problem for our Unconscious is it has no filtering mechanism for deciding real events versus imagined events - that is the job of the Conscious.  When we send imagery downwards with strong emotion attached it is always treated as a real event.

Thought-based self-talk has almost no effect on changing how we currently emotionally react to things unless it is concerned with gently taking us into moving towards the trapped emotional responses and pictures presenting in the Conscious mind. 

In summary: pictures and feelings are what you need to focus on most.

So that’s the first thing I wanted to say!  Let us start looking at your email content.

i was wondering if you could help me with a 10 year problem, i had a panic attack 10 years ago , and after that i was looking for what happend thinking some one put drugs in my beer, as the week went buy i seacrhed for whta happned

You had a panic attack and you thought something had gone wrong with you.  What if you had a panic attack and thought ‘I am having a panic attack and that is perfectly normal and I will just keep feeling my way through it and I will eventually get back to normal’ instead?

What if you knew that all intense emotional responses such as these take several hours to several days and sometimes even several months (such as when suffering grief) to go through? 

We think something has gone wrong with us because it is the first time we have experienced the situation (you remember it, the moment sticks in your mind a bit like a car crash would).  But what if instead you just felt it, accepted people have these experiences, and did not start searching for what went wrong?  ‘Oh, I have had an intense fearful reaction.  I will feel it without criticising it until it has gone’.  And then it goes and does not return.

Naturally with it being an unusual experience you wanted to find out if there was a physical threat in your environment and you suspected someone had put drugs in your beer.  This is a genuine thing to be concerned about but from what I gather here you believe it was an imagined threat you should not have imagined.

I would have a short burst of fear if I thought someone may have put drugs in my beer, by the way, and so would most others.  It is perfectly normal for you to suspect things.  What we have to do when we have these kinds of suspicions is accept we have them, think about the thing and discharge the emotions as we go through them.  You could not act out your suspicions by blaming people in the real world because it was just a suspicion - but did you make the mistake of blaming yourself for being ‘suspicious’?  It is normal to have suspicions.  Just watch them and let them go by, and eventually they will.

If you had found out someone really had put drugs in your beer you would have had a right to do something about it - our suspicions simply prepare us for dealing with things should they occur in the real world. 

You could say ‘nothing happened in the outside world but internally I had a strong emotional response and I now have to feel it out of my system’ or you could say ‘nothing happened in the outside world so internally I refuse to feel it out of my system because it should not keep bothering me’.

By refusing to accept the whole thing as a normal part of being human you have frozen the experience into your body, into your Unconscious, and it is still acting like it needs to be listened to and is telling you the emotional energy needs release.

In that short section there you’ve provided some very strong images and I’d suggest you return to those; return to the situation and just re-interpret all your emotions and suspicions as perfectly normal. 

That is going to be a lot harder than it sounds though as your Unconscious ‘workforce’ is blocking you from doing that. 

OK let’s look at the next section of your email (by the way, I used to have this problem too):

i was thinking alot analizing alot, so i started picking on my thinking, then made rules up , no more going into detail, no more thinking as much , not more analizing, FROM NOW i would say , but i noticed when i started saying FROM NOW, it has been going on for 10 years and never worked, if i get a doubt thought i cant amalize it , cause i have this rule dont go there, because if i allow my self to think any thing, i will get a doubt thought and think of ways how to mange it, i will think of 2 or 3 ways to perfect it , if i get a bad feeling i will try and think of ways so i dont get this feeling any more, if i get doubt , i panic thinking its ocd, if i get tired , panic its to do with ocd, if i need a bill , panic its to do with ocd, these feelings are normal feelings , but i confuse it for cd cause the ocd causes me the same emotions, my obsesion is to think about my thinking , ways to master it, ,,if i say dont go there, this will work for a week, but i go back as soon as i get tired, if i allow my self to think it , its oges on for ever, i doubt every thing i think , if i think thoughts in detail , ITS WRONG, if i try and clarify what someone has said to me and i think it 2 times to let it sink in , WRONG , since i have said dont go there,its like form what i have read from ur blog is, i am sqaushing these thoughts and emotions dont go there, and when i get a thought close to my thinking obseesion, i panic,im scared of every thought , checking into seeing if its ok to think , cause i dont want to think my obsession, but its not working

You know how when you go into a feeling it shuts your thinking down and eventually all you can see is the image or the painful feelings or the ‘bad thing’?  That’s normal during intense emotional discharge. 

In your brain hormones are released that override all thinking processes and these hormones, for a period, force the entire brain to focus only on the issue concerned.  You are not designed to work in any other way.  During feeling you look at the images and thoughts and you figure out what actions you need to take to stop those feelings being repeatedly generated.  A problem for us though is sometimes we can’t bare to look.  We need to look.

What you should do here is feel it.  Accept it.  Rest if you are tired.

Your current thinking is denying the emotional response process what it needs.  Your thinking is trying to beat your emotional (physical) system into submission instead of working with it.  We have to get our thinking out of the way and FEEL ourselves out of obsession and anxiety conditions.

If you FEEL like resting, rest.  If you FEEL frightened, feel it.  Eventually it feels all the way out of you. 

Anxiety disorders such as this are not driven by thoughts - they are driven by trapped emotional energy needing release.  When you feel you release that energy.  If the thoughts and images the energy is attached to are still coming into your Conscious mind, Kurt, you have not released the energy attached to them yet.  Think ENERGY and only about the ENERGY. 

Emotional problems are energy release problems, not thinking problems.  Thinking they are thinking problems is the problem.

I kept slipping back into my thoughts too but eventually I learned - you have to allow your thinking to close down and go into your feelings and let your body do its job.  It takes several hours to several days to several months of daily work to clear the blocked energy out (when I first started my self work it took me 3 months to clear my first obsession; but I had 27 of them - once I learned the technique though I could clear an intense response in a much shorter time.  One obsession I got rid of in 30 minutes).

Go into the imagery and the feelings.  Stop criticising the process with your thoughts.  FEEL and SEE.

Eventually you will have new thoughts coming up as ‘insights’ and these will change your thinking so you do not have this problem in the future as long as you keep working with instead of against your emotional release process.

Again, this is a very difficult thing to do.  Removing an emotional block is a bit like emptying a reservoir through a one inch hole in a dam wall - all that thinking trains your Unconscious to stop emotional release and now you’ve got to re-train your thinking mind to simply slow down and give in to the natural emotional release process.

This will be very painful and you will need the support of your therapist (well done for having the courage to seek help through one and for being willing to share your current condition with others).

Control

Removal of an anxiety disorder, and eventual total control, is achieved indirectly by giving ourselves permission to work with our emotional responses in private, knowing we have no need to do something in the outside world in order to achieve full release, whenever they occur. 

So, for example, if someone gets me angry this week or a situation makes me afraid this week, real or imagined, I do not tell myself I should not feel these things - I absolutely positively fester on them; I have imaginary arguments with the people I am angry at (and I write my points down and agree with them too) and I explore all the reasons for my fears and angers.

I do not self-criticise or find a way to think myself out of the experience.

You know what happens after I’ve done this?  They disappear.  Once you work with instead of against your internal world this stops your apparent lack of control being a worry. 

We do not directly control our emotions - we cannot stop them once they have started.  It is possible to interrupt negative self-talk now and again to stop negative emotions being produced but if we try to use positive self-talk to block a negative response coming up it actually makes us ill.

Mastering the emotional release process, rather than preventing ourselves from having emotional responses at all, is what brings a sense of control.

Time Involved

You’ve mentioned having made several attempts to ‘go in’.  Well done on that - a lot of people get quite upset about just thinking about doing that but you’ve actually started doing it.  You’ve learned it makes you feel worse and it’s very tiring.

That’s normal.

You need to do this every day for the rest of your life if you want to both cure your emotional block and then remain emotionally well.  If you do this you will get rid of all your anxiety disorders and remain emotionally well in the long term.  It is an on-going process through which you get happier and happier.  I noticed as I processed each emotional layer I started having longer and longer periods of plain and simple happiness.

10%; 20%; 80% …. play the percentages.  It is not possible to be 100% happy all of the time because life throws things up now and again.  But 90% happy sounds great, doesn’t it?  I found if you take up things like yoga it bumps it up another few % too.

Can you see?  You need a permanent approach of dealing with your emotions (everyone does).  At first it is going to get much, much more difficult.  This is a skill that is very difficult to learn but one which will benefit both you and everyone else you come into contact with.

Once you have adopted the new approach for long enough the emotional healing takes care of itself as you see it working and your approach to new emotion-generating situations becomes automated.  It stops being a matter of ‘what do I do?’ and just a matter of ‘when do I do it?’.

Kurt, I don’t think I’ve answered everything in your email by a longshot, but please read other posts on the blog (most of them will be relevant to you) and keep leaving comments and sending emails.

Thank you so much for getting in touch.

Regards

Carl

Here’s Kurt’s full email:

how are you , i was wondering if you could help me with a 10 year problem, i had a panic attack 10 years ago , and after that i was looking for what happend thinking some one put drugs in my beer, as the week went buy i seacrhed for whta happned, then i noticed i was thinking alot analizing alot, so i started picking on my thinking, then made rules up , no more going into detail, no more thinking as much , not more analizing, FROM NOW  i would say , but i noticed when i started saying FROM NOW, it has been going on for 10 years and never worked, if i get a doubt thought i cant amalize it , cause i have this rule dont go there, because if i allow my self to think any thing, i will get a doubt thought and think of ways how to mange it, i will think of 2 or 3 ways to perfect it , if i get a bad feeling i will try and think of ways so i dont get this feeling any more, if i get doubt , i panic thinking its ocd, if i get tired , panic its to do with ocd, if i need a bill , panic its to do with ocd, these feelings are normal feelings , but i confuse it for cd cause the ocd causes me the same emotions, my obsesion is to think about my thinking , ways to master it, ,,if i say dont go there, this will work for a week, but i go back as soon as i get tired, if i allow my self to think it , its oges on for ever, i doubt every thing i think , if i think thoughts in detail , ITS WRONG, if i try and clarify what someone has said to me and i think it 2 times to let it sink in , WRONG , since i have said dont go there,its like form what i have read from ur blog is, i am sqaushing these thoughts and emotions dont go there, and when i get a thought close to my thinking obseesion, i panic,im scared of every thought , checking into seeing if its ok to think , cause i dont want to think my obsession, but its not working, i have seen alot of numerous therapist, i am thinking and changing my mind every day , of which RULE  i should have DONT GO THERE OR GIVE IN , BUT WHEN I GIVE IN , I ONLY LAST 2 DAYS AND GET DOUBT AND GO BACK TO DONT GO THERE, its really annoying i guess im just looking for help from  some one in this 10 years to say , GIVE IN, and say with this , cause if u r not scared it will bore out, but if u keep going back to dont go there, it will keep going on, ,, i have obsession with fixing my self and thinking, and emotions , i just wish i could accept emotions and dont run, accept thoughts and dont run, and to know some times i will think my obseesion, and sometimes i will let them go ,   but dont go there will never work 100 percent cause u need to go throught this to not be scared not run,  sorry about it being so long, but this ocd has cost me a house and my job , and i cant keep ging on , and reading stuff on the internet anymore , i jsut want to give in , what ever what ever please help ,,,,,,,,,  thanks in advance kurt

hi carl thanks for getting back to me, you have my permission to put my name up there or email , i dont mind, one more thing is , the therapist said to me today, just ASK YOUR SELF IF THIS IS CONTROLLING YOUR THINKING,  AND IF SO LET IT GO , BUT NOW I SEE IM OBSESSING IF THIS THOUGHT IS CONTROLLING OR IF ITS CHALLENGING , OR ACCEPTING IT , JUST A NEW OBSESSIION AGAIN,, YES PLEASE MATE, LET ME KNOW HEN U HAVE POSTED IT WITH THE WEB PAGE, CAUSE IM DESPERATE TO READ IT THANKS KURT

Obsessions and OCD Symptoms – Do You Have Them?

This is a brief guide – if you suspect you have an issue of this kind you should seek local professional diagnosis and support.

Here we look at:

• Typical Symptoms of Obsessions and OCD


• Development of Obsessions and OCD


• What Drives Obsessions and OCD


• Removing Obsessions and OCD Using Exposure Therapy.

Typical Symptoms of Obsessions and OCD

The sufferers of obsessions and OCD  are stuck in a self-perpetuating sensory feedback loop.

The Conscious Mind of a sufferer is repeatedly bombarded with imagery of an imagined horrific event happening accompanied by an emotional reaction so intense it stimulates the Unconscious Mind into believing the event actually is happening – right now; repeatedly.

Knowing the event is not real the Conscious Mind refuses to allow the loop to complete and develops thoughts, imagery and beliefs to fight the initial reaction to the imagined event.  ‘Why should I allow this experience to affect me when I know it is not real?  Something is wrong with my emotional system!’.

These secondary thoughts, images and beliefs also feed into the Unconscious Mind making the condition more intense while the Conscious Mind loses direct control of both Primary and Secondary responses.  The inner fight becomes an automated experience maintained by the area of our brain designed to control repeating behavioural habits – the Basal Ganglia.

This is how obsessions and OCD are born and maintained.

OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) occurs when a sufferer finds performing a certain type of physical action reduces the tension associated with their obsession, or any other unwanted emotional response, as it partially completes the emotional loop and offers temporary cathartic release of emotional energy while also showing the Unconscious Mind some kind of reassuring preventative measure has been taken.

However, this action also reinforces the Unconsciously held belief there is a genuine threat – otherwise why would we need to do anything to reduce the risk of it?

When the relieving, preventative action is not taken the sufferer becomes increasingly tense, eventually feeling compelled to perform the preventative action again.

Typical symptoms of Obsessions:

Repeating imagery appears in the Conscious accompanied by unusually intense negative emotional responses that remain for long periods of time.  There is no pretending this is not happening.  The only way to stop the mind being overwhelmed is to find more pleasant distractions to focus on.  The sufferer is unable to ‘relax’ as this clears the way for the unwanted imagery and attached emotional responses to move in.

Obsessions are based around imagery such as:

• your harming, or others harming, those you care about and this happening due to your lack of awareness or alleged self-control


• of lashing out for no good reason at complete strangers or people you love


• of inappropriate sexual behaviour and of being shunned or shamed because you did something or because your lack of alertness failed to prevent others treating those you care about this way


• of your accidentally poisoning others or failing to prevent others from being poisoned


• of you or others being harmed with inanimate objects and these now allegedly dangerous inanimate objects (even just their basic shape) repeatedly appearing in your conscious mind accompanied by intense negative emotions (you may go on to develop phobias in regards to these objects)


• of death caused by contamination, germs and disease in situations that you could have prevented


• fear of burglary; death; earthquakes; not coping with the death of loved ones; incurring the wrath of God because we are thinking something evil


• of impulsively or accidentally dropping children out of windows; accidentally suffocating someone; causing someone we care about to choke because we were not alert enough; causing someone to be killed in a car accident because we did not advise them to be careful on the roads often enough.

The same images appear over and over again in the Conscious Mind alongside intense emotional responses such as feelings of intense disgust; fear; anger and grief.  The person may also suffer with depression and panic attacks.  In the Unconscious intense emotions drive imagined scenarios as if they were real events needing to be dealt with.

Typical Symptoms of OCD

With OCD the sufferer feels compelled to perform stress-reducing reassurance acts such as:

• continual washing; cleaning; grooming; checking light switches; water taps; cookers; door locks; brakes; clocks; bathroom pipes and showers for leaks; organising household objects for no reason (eg cups and cutlery in the houses of other people when they visit) and also


• hoarding things for protective purposes (which they never use); checking waste bins repeatedly; feeling you walked through something ‘the wrong way’ and doing it again just in case; needing to constantly avoid or touch something; re-reading something you have written over and over again; re-opening things you have sealed just to make sure what you put in there is in there and also sometimes


• avoiding certain colours because they produce negative emotional responses; associating names; numbers or certain situations with repeating negative emotions; needing constant reassurance from others that you did something the right way;  repeatedly checking your body for signs of disease; thinking about life-threatening conditions over and over again; a constant feeling of not being as good, as sensible, or as attractive as others (this being done to such an extent it is much more intense than having normal occasional self-doubts).

You do not need to be struggling with all of these conditions – just a few of them could mean you may have or be developing the symptoms of obsessions or OCD.  To the sufferer it may seem these images are warnings of personal faults but the truth is obsessions and OCD are based on a determination to prevent these things from happening – all anxiety disorders are concerned with prevention and protection.

Behind these immediate symptoms is a powerful, attention grabbing emotional drive to keep ‘looking’ at the symptoms themselves with a view to undoing them and then undoing them some more and then undoing them again.

Development of Obsessions and OCD

Occasionally I come across someone explaining how they cannot stop thinking about or doing something they enjoy, such as  planning for their wedding despite not yet having a partner or collecting garden gnomes.

They worry they have an obsession because they do not want to stop this habit and feel a bit down when they do.  They ask ‘anyone got any advice?’.

My advice is: this is probably ‘a hobby’, not OCD or an anxiety-related obsession you need to be concerned about.

The only time a hobby should be a concern is if it is being used as a distraction device to keep mental attention away from the affects of an intense, emotionally overwhelming response.

Distraction devices are a typical method sufferers of OCD and obsessions use to reduce and avoid the stressful nature of their condition.  Once they stop the more pleasant distracting action the internal tension caused by their condition returns to conscious awareness.

Anxiety Disorders

OCD and obsessions are members of the anxiety disorder family.  Anxiety disorders are caused by our having a secondary emotional response to a primary emotional response.

Our primary response is our perfectly normal response to our natural interpretation of an external real-life event or a given way of thinking in regards to an imagined event.

The defining question is whether or not our logical mind accepts the primary response as valid and is willing to find an appropriate method of releasing the emotional energy produced by the response.

If, for whatever reason, we decide a primary response is unacceptable and do not wish to feel it we may then produce a secondary response intending to hold it back from affecting us any further (that is the intention, anyway, but in reality it causes an anxiety disorder and we end up feeling both the unwanted primary and secondary feelings repeatedly).

When we produce a Secondary response it may be the same emotional response as the Primary response and so it ‘blends’ in our conscious when we look at the situation.  For example:

• panic attacks and phobias are caused by fear of situations we associate with fear responses


• depression is caused by anger at the fact there are situations in which we feel anger.

In regards to obsessions and OCD it may be we have two different emotions fighting each other such as:

• fear of disgust.

This can then become fear of the fear of a disgust response and so we have panic attacks when consciously approaching mental imagery at the centre of our disgust-creating obsessions.

It is possible to develop some anxiety disorders, such as phobias, following  a single fearful response in a single given situation, regardless of what our baseline emotional state is.  This is how our fear-response mechanism is designed – see a lion in your back garden and you will automatically nervously look for signs of the lion two weeks later when venturing outside (can I suggest it would be stupid not to?).

Repeatedly going out into the garden and finding no lion present will eventually re-train and remove the fear response in your Unconscious – but only after your Unconscious is convinced there definitely is no lion.

This is not an irrational process – this is your unconscious survival mechanism at work.  This is not an anxiety disorder developing but you can turn it into one if you refuse to accept the fear adjustment process itself and tell yourself your reaction was abnormal.

Judging the process abnormal you then refuse to go outside and experience it at all because you do not agree with the fear adjustment mechanism, sometimes referred to as ‘extinction’ or ‘habituation.  In this particular situation your non-acceptance of the fear adjustment process triggers the phobia called ‘agoraphobia’ – fear of experiencing fear in the outside world.

Conditions such as OCD and obsessions tend to develop following a series of negative life events in an area of deep concern and our continued efforts to suppress our emotional reactions when those areas of life are threatened.  It is sometimes difficult to identify what the root external causes of OCD and obsessions are.

As you can see from the ‘fear of fear of disgust’ model above the layers can be quite difficult to unravel.

Medical professionals sometimes refer to obsessions and OCD as ‘complex’ because the journey back to wellness involves the unravelling and acceptance and adjustment of and to multiple belief systems and anxiety-creating memories.

Negative feelings, at the earlier initial worrying stage leading up to the development of obsessions, may be so mild in comparison to the later intense emotional responses they do not readily stand out in our awareness – we have to go searching for these worries in order to make sense of their overall long-term affect on us and then undo the worrying habit in order to prevent a return of the more intense obsessions/OCD once removed.

On a positive note: if you have the courage and determination to remove an obsession or OCD you will more than likely have the courage to remove the lower level emotional issues that led to them.

Example: Your Family in Danger?

Let us say you have a young family and you worry about their safety.  Your six and seven year old children seem to have no road awareness and you live near a busy city road.

When you do try to raise their awareness you are labelled as a worrier or you are humiliated in front of the children by your partner.  Not just on one occasion, but every occasion for months.

In a bid to ‘protect everyone’, despite their apparently deliberate ignorance, you put yourself on a state of emotional ‘high alert’ creating a kind of imaginary ‘awareness umbrella’ to ensure you respond quickly enough should the threat occur.  You imagine yourself diving out in front of cars and lorries to protect your children as they dash into the road and so on.

You focus conversations on road safety at every opportunity and because no-one is listening to you become annoyed by the lack of respect coming your way – your alleged worrying has become the family joke.  When you go out with your children you insist they hold your hands when crossing the road but your partner does not do this.

To avoid being repeatedly humiliated you may start looking for evidence of the threat to prove your ‘rightness’.  You stick pictures of children killed in traffic accidents up on the walls.  Your partner takes them down and  your critics keep criticising and you now start to criticise yourself because you see your worrying as the cause of a rift in the relationship with your partner and children.  How are you going to protect them if they up and move away from you even further?  So you start to suppress and repress the feelings and try to hide your worrying.  You also hide the fact you have started having fantasies about hitting your partner over the head with something heavy.

You believe you are over-reacting – but are you?  If you let your guard down the feared bad thing might happen.

Then you read in a local newspaper the story of a gang deliberately targeting young children in your local area.  Because you are already on high alert this story ‘takes off’ in your mind; but you cannot share the information with your partner; you know what the response will be.

You now believe you must remain constantly alert to this new threat or it could happen.  Your mind fills with imagery and multiple negative emotions such as disgust and anger based around the feared scenario but you are also self-critical of your higher alertness level.

You produce emotional responses but then refuse to release and experience them as they rise up into your brain because logically you know the scenarios they are attached to are not real – they are imagined.

Unwanted images attached to the imagined issues now repeatedly appear in your mind automatically, accompanied by intense emotional responses you do not wish to experience.

Driving all of this is that seed of worry: in your imagination you are creating grief scenarios in which you miss your children; guilt scenarios that say their death by whatever means was your fault because you did not find the method to convince them of the dangers.  You did not protect them.

You believe you would not cope with the grief; you would not cope with the guilt.  You would die a living death.  Then you step back and tell yourself ‘eh, this is not real, what are you doing to yourself?  Look how emotional you are!’.  But because the management of this process has now transferred into your Limbic Brain you do not have direct control of your reactions.

Mixed in with all these fearful feelings is your rage at your partner for putting you in this position and you start to believe you are not a very nice person.

You have an obsession; or if you complete some repetitive physical task to calm yourself temporarily when the negative emotions start to come up, you have OCD.

Self-Criticism Plays a Critical Part

Having a certain level of concern for a valued life area is a good thing – but it is best to manage these concerns in the thinking, logical mind if possible. Unfortunately we value some areas of life to such an extent our reaction is automatically emotional when we see them repeatedly threatened.

The more intensely emotional we are about a valued threatened life area the greater the chance that management of the issues at the centre of our concern will move into the emotional brain; our lower Limbic Brain.

Once this happens we become automatic worriers against our conscious will – the Limbic brain does not think – it just automatically ‘emotes’ in relation to imagery and other sensory information at the centre of the worrying process.

Your Social Environment Plays a Part

If you are in or have experienced a social environment in which you have seen and experienced the safe acceptance and release of emotional responses, and feel confident with how you work at this level, you may heal problems such as this almost as quickly as they develop.

For example if you were raised a Buddhist you would have been trained to go through the release of negative emotions and the issues to which they are attached over and over again as a standard approach to living.

If, however, you were raised in a social environment in which not only was such training absent but your feelings were criticised and you were told you would only be ‘acceptable to others’ if you suppressed your unwanted emotions you now have an increased risk of developing obsessions and OCD.

In order to reverse and undo the process it helps if you first see what drives it.

What Drives Obsessions and OCD

There are two main drives behind these conditions:

• Emotional blocking


• Thought or image stopping.

Emotional Blocking

The most serious form of emotional blocking has already been discussed above: secondary emotional responses, the process by which we try to stop a primary emotional response affecting us by fighting it with a secondary one.

There are two other, less intense, forms of blocking also briefly mentioned above which we often use before we get to the secondary emotional response stage: suppression and repression.

Using Suppression we keep an emotional response under wraps while still having conscious knowledge of the related triggering situation.  We might do this to prevent social damage; for example being angry at our boss but not wanting to display our anger because of the potential consequences.

This is a valid and useful approach – as long as we find a ‘safe’, appropriate place to release our negative feelings later.  Suppress for long enough, though, and it becomes ‘repression’.

Repression is a situation in which we have the feelings still coming up but have lost the understanding of why they were created, the memories are hidden, yet still keep affecting us.  In repression we and others label these troubling and unwanted reactions as ‘our personality’ and make the mistake of identifying them as ‘us’.  We start to hate ‘us’ and how we work (actually what we hate is the emotional system life has equipped us with).

One day we have one negative response too many and we start to fight it using our own emotional responses with the intention of forcing the unwanted thoughts and feelings ‘out of existence’.  Paradoxically we now have two sets of feelings to work through, primary and secondary responses, fighting each other and producing a ‘pressure-cooker’ intensity in our emotional system.

Emotional blocking creates an electrically overcharged mind and body through the repeated release of high-alert hormones and neurotransmitters in much the same way building a dam across a river causes water to rise.

A Seemingly Out-of-Control Attention Mechanism

Although the brain does not ‘feel’ in the same physical way the body does we do produce an emotional, feeling-based reaction in the Limbic Brain, our emotional brain, which acts as if it were a spark-plug to the rest of the body.

When the Limbic Brain sparks it forces our Conscious to pay attention to the unwanted thoughts, images and feelings contained in our obsessions.  We may sense the backs of our mental eyeballs being grabbed and forced to ‘look’ at the imagery and the emotional response concerned.

There is a moment of panic at the start of an obsession where the sufferer wonders what on Earth has just happened to them and they fight its apparent hold on their mind – they cannot pull their attention away.

In reality, however, this is not an abnormal event – this is exactly how our attention mechanism works when we find ourselves in the presence of a predator or a threatening situation.

In the case of an obsession or OCD we have convinced our Unconscious the unwanted thought or image is a real-life threat, and have activated the attention mechanism in the same way we would if a hungry lion were approaching.

Your logical thinking mind knows this is a harmless image in reality and wants you to look at other things, but it is forced to keep focusing on the image or external object of concern again and again; because your emotional brain has registered the image as a serious threat.

Any time you enter a new place, if there is anything present that reminds you of your obsession or OCD, you keep looking at it or focusing on it against conscious will.

Thought or Image Stopping

Image stopping is exactly what it sounds like – we deliberately try to stop an image, thought or sound pattern from appearing in our minds because what it represents is unacceptable to us.

When we have an obsession or OCD the Unconscious Mind is making the mistake of believing the representative pattern is itself the real event.  It believes this because the strength of the emotional response attached to it is the same as if it were real.

Your brain contains hundreds, if not thousands, of thoughts and images related to horrible things that can happen to you and others in life – so why do they not all become an emotional problem for you?

Normally these horrible images float into conscious awareness and then go right on by and out of it.  Air accidents; news on the latest soldier killed in battle; stabbings – we think about these things; we feel a temporary negative emotional response about them; then we let them go.

This is because we are in ‘objective’ viewpoint.  But there are some thoughts and images that hit closer to home because they are ‘subjective’.  It may be we feel a valued personal life area has been threatened for some time and we are concerned about there being an actual risk to ourselves or those we care about.  When our brain receives or creates thoughts and images related to that more sensitive area of life we are therefore more prone to react with intense emotions.

The problem with using thought-stopping as an obsession or OCD removal process is it requires the unwanted thoughts to be recreated.

People with obsessions and OCD see the thoughts and images attached to their unwanted emotional responses as an enemy to be hunted and ejected from the mind.

They believe if they can get rid of the horrible thoughts they can remove the emotional responses that come with them – but it works the other way round.  Emotional problems are an emotional energy issue – not a thinking issue; they require an emotional release solution.

The logical thinking mind searches itself for the solution to what it believes to be a thinking problem and in doing so makes the imagery appear even more significant building additional neural networks to work on the alleged mental problem.

These networks have a ‘search and destroy mechanism’, spreading their influence to other parts of the brain.  As a result the sufferer finds additional horrible thoughts, imagery and emotional responses being produced.

Sufferers may develop phobias in regards to external objects and situations reminding them of their internal imagery.

Thought-stopping is not the answer to removing anxiety disorders.  The answer is to tune into, accept and then work with the natural emotional energy cycle life has provided us with.

What keeps driving a horrible thought to keep reappearing in our minds or driving us to perform a stress-relieving action is not the imagery but the emotional energy attached to it.  The energy keeps ‘grabbing’ the image, bringing it to conscious attention, because it is telling you this is the target it needs to be discharged at.

In order to remove any emotional disorder caused by emotional blocking we have to allow the emotional process, the same process used to protect ourselves against hungry lions, to complete.  We must gradually stop blocking it.

We have to allow ourselves to temporarily pretend the unwanted thoughts and images are valid and move towards them in order to trigger full release (or as near full as we can get) so the emotional attachment to the imagery is discharged and the Unconscious can see that the image is just that – an unpleasant, representative image we can let go.

Just like all those other horrible thoughts in our mind we do not pay much attention to.

Removing Obsessions and OCD Using Exposure Therapy

Exposure Therapy (also sometimes referred to as De-Sensitisation) is effective in treating most anxiety disorders – of any type - but it is painful and can be slow.   For this reason you may want to try other methods first and should approach your doctor for their support if you intend to use it.

Although the symptoms are no more than the affects of your own natural body discharging emotional energy those affects are powerful during the healing process.

Inducing full emotional overwhelm can result in symptoms such as the ‘mammalian freeze response’ – which is something that comes as quite a shock in itself when first experienced (this is also referred to as the ‘disassociation response’).  Having a medical professional who has seen this kind of thing before explain this to you makes quite a difference to your progress.

Success rates using Exposure Therapy are higher for the healing of phobias than they are for obsessions or OCD and I will explain why further down.

Exposure Therapy comes in two flavours:

• Systematic and


• Non-systematic.

Both achieve the same outcome when the process is complete: the Unconscious is retrained to no longer see the imagery as threatening and the intense emotional response attached to it is discharged and detached (or at least discharged to a point it no longer gets the attention of the Conscious).

Systematic Exposure

Systematic Exposure is:

• planned and the plan is


• graduated.

The sufferer creates a ‘risk list’, for example based on a scale of 1 to 10, starting with what situation creates least anxiety to that which creates most.  They then start exposing themselves at regular intervals to the least anxiety-creating situation and once the anxiety response has stopped in that situation they move on to the next, more intense anxiety creating situation.  Quite often the anxiety about the next situation has already been reduced due to the removal of the previous one.

Let us say you were terrified of public speaking and started by speaking in short bursts in small groups gradually moving up to actually teaching a class or taking part in a stage play with a large audience.  Terror would turn to nervousness to a state of enthusiasm and excitement (believe it or not).

Non-Systematic Exposure

Non-systematic exposure is a more intense approach.

With this approach you identify the most intense anxiety-creating situation and go straight into it.  Full throttle; come what may.  And you stay there to exhaustion – then start again, repeating until the emotional energy is discharged and the triggering situation becomes neutral, no longer pestering the Conscious.

The problem with Non-systematic exposure is the intensity of the experience can cause the Unconscious and Conscious minds to slam the neuronal doors shut again; rejecting the experience due to the pain involved.

Systematic Exposure Therapy, the graduated type, is much more difficult to use with obsessions or OCD than with phobias because the images and memories triggering these conditions are perceived by the brain to be inside the brain.  Phobias are ‘out there’ and so we only become afraid when we know we are approaching external territory in which the phobia trigger is found.

You open the neuronal doors to an obsession and it is full throttle exposure whether you want it to be or not – but still it takes quite a while to reach the main trigger of this type of emotional problem because we have built internal mental and emotional barriers.

In a bid to keep the obsession or OCD from completely dominating the mind and body the Conscious and Unconscious have made an attempt to close down and block  access to the imagery and emotional energy and when you finally decide to face it and ‘go in’ these arguments and blocks will rise up in to Conscious awareness to fight the decision.  They are based around the two drives I mentioned earlier:

• Emotional blocking


• Thought or image stopping.

To reverse emotional blocking you must begin to set aside private time and be willing to endure the affects of ‘emotional opening and releasing’ – that is, sensing what emotional responses are pushing up for release from within your body then Consciously taking your thinking mind in to meet those feelings.

To reverse thought and image stopping you must force the mind to deliberately focus on and move towards the unwanted, unacceptable imagery.

Both your Conscious and Unconscious will naturally fight this new ‘going in’ decision because both believe it will kill you – the intense emotional effect mimics suffocation by a predator.

You may have to lay down; you will at some point have to allow your thinking to shut down so you can be emotionally ‘flooded’.  This flooding takes the form of full hormonal release in the body and flooding of the brain with neurotransmitter chemicals causing the issue at the centre of the response to be transmitted on a mass scale across the brain (as opposed to the normal way in which it transmits signals through specific neural pathways).

Eventually the emotional energy is both fully released and the emotional production triggering mechanism is switched off.

But you will not believe this can be achieved until you experience it for the first time.

Regards

Carl

Obsessions – Five Questions Answered

• What is an Obsession?


• What Drives an Obsession?


• Why is an Obsession so Difficult to Remove?


• How Can I Remove an Obsession?


• How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

What is an Obsession?

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

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

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

What Drives an Obsession?

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

Obsessions are maintained and driven by emotional responses only.

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

Why is it so difficult to heal obsessions?

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

• Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs


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


• Painful Physical Symptoms

Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Six Minds

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

Painful Physical Symptoms

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

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


• sleeplessness and extremely lurid, frightening nightmares


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


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


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

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

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

How Can I Remove an Obsession?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

Three main steps:

• Get professional support in place


• Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place


• Share your plan with those who can be trusted

Get professional support in place

I recommend the following as a minimum:

• your doctor


• a counsellor


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

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

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

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

Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place

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

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

Share your plan with those who can be trusted

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

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

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

Any questions or comments?

Regards - Carl

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