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

Removing Obsessions – What Is It that Really Lies Beneath?

Obsessions are concerned with the prevention of bad things happening (this also applies to some types of phobias).

Prior to the obsession coming into being there may have been a long period of worry related to the area of concern, of which the obsession is just one specific image or aspect.

Because it likes efficiency the brains strips out all unnecessary additional information and eventually just keeps flashing a representative image at the sufferer.  This may just be something as simple as a partial shape; for example the image of a nose (believe it or not, that is how specific an obsession can be – the person has an intense emotional reaction to something they know in their logical mind to be completely banal).

Memories of the context of the long period of worry leading up to the obsession can be blocked due to the memory-wiping affects of anxiety.  The sufferer of an obsession has trouble building an understanding about the source of the imagery now plaguing them from the centre of their obsession and they fear ‘what lies beneath’.

Once they decide to start facing it through the process of exposure therapy, however, the context is gradually revealed.

Context is rebuilt through mixing both the memories already contained within the trapped emotional response and from new interpretations of the gaps between available information.

As the emotional history becomes more available the sufferer starts to see where they went wrong in their understanding and how they should adjust their way of seeing in order to remove the obsession.

Confusion in Regards to Responsibilities and the Difference between Real and Imagined Events

When first starting to develop an obsession the sufferer may believe they are solely responsible for preventing the act at the centre of the obsession because they are the only one concerned about, or seemingly even aware of, the imagined threat.

This sense of isolation may be the result of an environment in which sharing worries and information about feelings is either prevented or seen as undesirable.  This sets up a self-fuelling internal worry cycle in mind and body.

Sufferers believe if the act were to happen it would be their fault because they had refused to listen to the pre-alert warning in their own heads.  They deliberately mimic the guilt response, as if the imagined horror story had really happened, and do so as a motivator to take early action in order to both prevent themselves from being in that situation and the event itself happening.

Unfortunately this mimicry can be so convincing the Unconscious, which cannot tell the difference between a real and an imagined scenario, buys into it as a current emergency situation and now starts warning the upper mind of the constantly ‘real’ threat as if it were happening right now.

Seeing this reaction in themselves as illogical the sufferer recoils and tries to eradicate the thinking and feelings attached to the process but this instead makes things worse.

As the person who contains ‘the imagined act’ they may see their obsession as a form of punishment for having the unwanted thoughts and feelings inside but also think they need to keep it as a preventative measure.

The sufferer can misunderstand subtle differences such as the difference between the act and their reaction to the act – it becomes meshed into one..

So, for example, when talking about healing an obsession through ‘emotional acceptance’ they can easily confuse accepting their emotional response to the act with accepting the unacceptable act itself (‘but then I might be agreeing the horrible act is OK?’).

They fear that removing the obsession will reduce their alertness.  This will lead to the act happening and they will then fail to cope with the knowledge they knew all along the act could happen but chose not to listen to the warning signals.

Problems Sharing with Others

Sufferers of obsessions struggle with some strange fears that delay or stop them seeking help or even sharing the content of their obsessions with others.

These fears can include:

• being locked up as someone capable of performing the acts in their obsessions because listeners will not understand the condition


• spreading their obsession to others (sufferers can have trouble believing that once the information is shared others will not develop the same condition)


• sharing information on their obsession will make it worse.

Going Into the Response

The feelings attached to an obsession are so strong they convey a sense of reality and a physically felt compulsion to do something about the alleged threat.

It is this compulsion to do something that can be most frightening because the sufferer knows there is nothing to do in reality so they keep backing away from the urge.  Unfortunately backing away strengthens the urge and its hold on the mind.

By taking the alternative approach and going into the urge and examining what drives it, the sufferer can start to undo the affect.  Do this work enough and they move into a stronger and stronger Objective Viewpoint - of seeing themselves from the outside – this is their self-image position.

What the self-image observer now sees is their most important value systems under threat and their reaction to them.

Obsessions and other anxiety disorders are usually built around imagined threats to what we value most but in the confusion caused by these conditions we see ourselves as the threat.

In one of her books on panic disorder Dr Claire Weekes talks about an exhausted midwife patient of hers who began worrying about how her tired state could impact on the quality of care she was able to give to the babies she cared for.

Passing an open upper floor window one day the midwife imagined accidentally dropping a baby through the window opening and this was enough to start an obsession/phobia about windows.

To the midwife the welfare of babies was an obvious core value – and it is around our core values, when we sense they are threatened, we are most likely to develop anxiety disorders.

What lies beneath our obsessions are things we can like about ourselves – things we agree with and positive things we can embrace again, but next time around we must do so in the right way.

If you have an obsession ‘what lies beneath’ are your core values – once you connect up with them again you can understand and clear your obsession and like yourself even more in the process.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness – the Pilot Hole Pressure of Facing Your Obsession

Perhaps for the first time in your life you have now decided to face your obsession instead of continually running from it.

You have set up a ‘drilling platform’ consisting of medical professionals, a counsellor and a private, distraction-free place where you feel safe enough to practice your ‘drilling for emotional wellness’ at regulated intervals.

Before you go in for the very first time there are some things you should keep in mind:

• obsessions are driven by trapped emotional energy – not by the repeating images or thoughts


• those repeating images and thoughts are the doorways through which the emotional energy driving your obsession hopes to escape.

Where to Place Your Pilot Hole Drill Bit

The drill bit we use when drilling for emotional wellness is our Conscious Point of Focus – what we deliberately pay attention to.

Obsessions are not driven by the imagery repeatedly appearing in the mind of the sufferer.  They are driven by an emotional response trying to escape through the imagery.  You eventually create the state known as ‘emotional acceptance’ by continually allowing the energy to discharge through the image.

You achieve emotional acceptance when you have fully discharged the emotional energy and the obsessive imagery stops appearing as a result.  What you ‘accept’ is the nature of the energy release process – commonly known as feeling your feelings.

The imagery you currently see as a never-ending curse is actually the route to emotional freedom.  The emotional energy you sense coming up through your body is telling you it wishes to escape through the route provided but you are currently stopping it from doing so.

So, when deciding where you should place your drill bit in order to start your first pilot hole the answer is straight through the imagery.

If even considering this an option fills you with dread this is because you have encountered your Secondary Belief Layer.

A Hard Outer Shell of Secondary Beliefs and Emotions

To stop the release process you have set up a series of belief systems, with their own supporting emotional responses, designed to hold the trapped emotional response powering your obsession in place.  These additional belief systems combine to tell you one simple thing: if you allow yourself to feel the emotional response and listen to any information it contains it will kill you.

To allow the energy behind your obsession to gain escape you may first have to drill through this secondary layer repeatedly.  This allows all the energy in your body to come up into conscious awareness and it begins releasing.

Originally set up to protect you from emotional pain this wall of false secondary beliefs now becomes your main immediate obstacle and it may take a long time to get through.

What Should You Expect as a Normal Part of this Early Pilot Hole Process?

Emotional gushing – feeling overwhelmed to the point you may need sometimes to lay down with emotional exhaustion.

Panic attacks; imagery of death through various causes; physical changes in such things as blood pressure; stomach acid; general anxiety and so on may be produced as a result of these beliefs.  You can find yourself turning into a bit of a hypochondriac taking multiple trips to see your doctor and even midnight journeys to hospital when unexplained symptoms arise and you are not sure what they mean.

You should consider this a normal part of the emotional release process and do not enter into a phase of self-criticism over any of this behaviour; especially when others do so – self-criticism just delays healing.

Seeing this behaviour in yourself you may wonder if you should now turn back to your old approach of avoiding the inward direction (I found this impossible to do – it was a bit like tipping over the edge on a downward rollercoaster).

What Should You Focus On?

What you should start to focus on is difference.  Things may be much worse – but they are different; they have not been different for a very long time, have they?

Continue to drill your way down wondering what different things there are still to be discovered.

My personal goal when I began my self-healing programme was to get rid of the entire thing within three months.  Although that pilot plan did not work to schedule I made so much progress in those first three months I knew I had to continue due to the level of difference I could sense.  I may have been in pain, but I felt empowered.

I did not like the journey, but finally there was a journey to be had and I was going to take it even if it might kill me.

You learn to focus on what you do, rather than how you feel, because doing is what makes the difference.  You can feel the emotional pressure releasing.

The action of repeatedly taking your conscious attention into an obsession may not look to the outside world much like action but it will certainly feel like action to you.  It is this ‘drilling down’, repeated daily, that brings results.

Like most other areas of life that first journey into the unknown is often the most painful, prolonged  and sharpest learning curve to be had but without it nothing else can happen.

Regards - Carl

See Differently Feel Differently – Shifting from Objective to Subjective Viewpoints and Back Again When Working with Mood Disorders

This post looks at unemotional Objective versus emotionally Subjective Viewpoints, explaining how they are interchangeable and how acquiring new Objective Viewpoints can become your most effective mental tool.

Sit awhile and look at something with me, will you?  I would like to share some Objective Viewpoint models with you.

When we look at something from a certain position we call this our ‘viewpoint’. We have two main types of viewpoint:

• Objective


• Subjective.

An Objective Versus Subjective Viewpoint Model

Draw an imaginary line with ‘Objective’ written at one end and ‘Subjective’ at the other.  Imagine yourself moving along this line between these two viewpoint extremes.

Can you see that the Objective end of the line is a very wide black line, several metres wide in fact, and it tapers down to a very thin black line when it reaches the other, Subjective, end?    Just walk up and down the line a minute to check this out.  At the Subjective end of the line it is only a millimetre wide.  If you cannot see this please take a closer look – thick line at one end tapering to a thin line at the other.  See it now?  The thick-to-thin tapering line you see is an indicator of how wide angle your viewpoint is according to where you are on the Objective-Subjective viewpoint line.

Now see yourself as just a pair of eyes.  All you are is a pair of eyes, sitting on the Objective-Subjective line.  The degree to which your eyes are open or closed matches with the thickness of the section of line you are currently standing on.

You move to the Objective end and your eyes open several metres wide (amazing, eh?); at the Subjective end of the line your eyes narrow to a millimetre.  Problem is, you do not have full control of where you stand on the line and you are not quite sure how this mechanism works quite yet.

You can deliberately move yourself to another position on the line for a while, but some kind of natural gravitational force eventually pulls you back to your original starting place.  The width of your view seems fixed.

In the distance a very large circle appears.  In the middle of the circle a message is written.  You cannot quite read the message and you do not know if you can, or how you can.  The message starts flashing for your attention; but because you cannot read it you get quite frustrated.

You notice that getting frustrated causes you to move towards the Subjective end of the line a little and your eyes start to narrow, matching the narrower width of the thinning line.  As a result, your focus starts to change and you can see the message in the circle slightly better but not enough to read it.

You also notice the narrower your viewpoint becomes the more the circle seems to move a little towards you.  In some ways this is a bit alarming – you suspect the circle up close must be really huge and overpowering.  You are not sure how you will cope with it up close.  You do not know whether being close to the circle and its message is a good or a bad thing.

Suddenly the circle starts changing all colours of the rainbow to get your attention and the message is flashing even more intensely than before – it looks really important, but still you cannot read it.  You feel yourself getting really frustrated about this and this upset state is creating a tingling in your battery.  You have got a battery? You did not realise you had a battery, did you?  Well you do now and now it is tingling you notice it.

For the first time the tingling sensations cause you to look at what is behind your eyes and there it is – a battery.  Well, I never did, where did that come from?

It dawns on you the frustrated sensations you are producing as a result of not being able to read the message on the circle are charging the battery fixed to the back of your eyes (in real life you call this your body).  The more frustrated you get over not being able to read the message on the circle the more charged your body-battery becomes and the further towards the Subjective end of the viewpoint line you move – and so the narrower your vision becomes and the closer the circle with its message gets.

Each time you move towards the Subjective end of the line the tingling increases in intensity and now it is so painful you start to fight it.  You no longer want to read the message; you do not care about the message; you want to get off the line!  You do not like the whole system!  How do you stop this and make it go away?!

All of a sudden you get so emotional the energy propels you straight to the end of the viewpoint line and you are totally Subjective.  At the same time the circle with the message on it comes rushing towards you – wham!

The circle is now so huge in your narrow viewpoint, and the tingling sensations so strong they are agonisingly painful, you have nothing but confusion going on both mentally and sensually.  You are a mess.  To top it all now you are too close to be able to see the message let alone read it.

All you see now is a small section of the line of curvature of the circle.  This battle of how you position yourself on your viewpoint line is so overwhelming, so painful, you just give in and decide to feel your pain.  You surrender to it.

After a while, you notice yourself starting to move back towards the Objective Viewpoint.  It is slow, but you start to move and the circle starts to move slowly back to its previous position.  One day you are able to look up at the circle and you can read the message clear as day.  It says:

‘To empty your emotional battery just look at this message and release your energy for long enough and you will naturally return to your Objective Viewpoint’.

By the time you get to read the message you have already learned how this works and the message just confirms it.  Now if you could have been told what the message said before you went to all that trouble …

You and I have just shared an Objective Viewpoint.

Objective viewpoints are wide-angled and emotionally neutral; Subjective viewpoints are narrow angled and highly emotionally charged.  To remove an extreme Subjective Viewpoint such as an obsession or a phobia, you must move towards, experience and release the emotional charge attached to the image or situation.

Once you have done this you will return to an Objective Viewpoint position..

Objective Viewpoints as Maps

Objective Viewpoints are relatively low energy mental patterns that work for us in a similar way a paper map from your local newsagent does when you are planning to go hiking in unfamiliar territory.

If you are familiar with using these types of maps, and have come to trust them, you will just open them up and start planning your route straight away.  So let us pretend you are walk leader for a group.

You open up your map and first thing you do is look at the map scale to plan distance versus time ratios and assess contour lines to select the appropriate path through those too-steep hills.  You look for features of interest to visit and those to avoid.

The map so far is based on the past experiences and impressions of other people but past experience is not all you consider – the next thing you look at and plan for are more serious, present-time, potentially subjective experiences.

You check the weather because some of those hills may be safe in good weather but in rain they become treacherous slippery slides.  You plan your start point and your end point according to the abilities of what you and your companions can do today.

You have your grandmother with you and she has a hip problem.   Three miles into the walk your grandmother tells you she can go no further.  You all come to a complete stop.  On your map you see there is a cottage nearby and you go to the cottage to ask for help and advice.

You are now having a very Subjective experience.  All you can think about is helping your grandmother.  How is your Objective viewpoint working for you right now?  The walk is forgotten – all you see is your grandmother.

Subjective Viewpoints as Experiences on the Map

Your viewpoint becomes Subjective when you see some specific element of the map relating to you personally which suggests you need to change direction.  Something in this particular map is moving towards you or you must move towards it.

You expect either conflict or see a need for co-operation between you and the thing identified and to overcome the situation you release emotional energy as a stimulant.

Subjective Viewpoints have intense emotional energy attached to a very narrow range of features in the Objective landscape:

• the triggering issue


• your emotional response to it.

The emotional response is produced in order to help you physically overcome the triggering issue.

Once the triggering issue has been dealt with (eg once your grandmother tells you either her hip is now fine or she has been taken to hospital) and as long as you have discharged the emotional energy produced, you will return to an Objective Viewpoint.

Mood and Emotional Disorders

If you have an emotional disorder of any kind you have become trapped in a Subjective Viewpoint position by the intense energy attached to it.  By studying how you transition between viewpoints in regards to relatively mild emotional experiences you can come to understand and apply the same model towards extreme emotional experiences -  achieving eventual freedom from their affects.

If you suffer with an obsession, for example, you are stuck in the Subjective Viewpoint of a Subjective Viewpoint.  You are looking at yourself from a short distance away, watching your emotional reaction, then emotionally reacting to what you see in yourself.

If you discharge the energy attached to the second Subjective view by feeling the energy out you will gradually move to a position where you can see the Objective Viewpoint and then develop the confidence to undo the primary emotional response and any other underlying emotional issues you have.

Once you have seen and embedded the new Objective healing model in your brain, and proven to yourself it works for you, you will keep applying the same model.

How did you get this way in the first place?

Unfortunately it can take just seconds to transition from Objective to  Subjective viewpoints but weeks or months of effort to transition back; this does not just apply to emotional problems:

• a pleasant looking letter turns out to be an unaffordable bill


• a man coming towards you with a leaflet in a city centre turns out to be your long lost brother


• a boring report up for discussion at a meeting turns out to be a report on your personal low productivity levels


• your sixty year old mother, who has lived with you for twenty years without having a boyfriend, tells you she has a new man staying the night and he turns out to be a friend of yours in his thirties who sleeps around and often brags about his exploits with older women to you and all your friends.

Just think about how quickly these kinds of events affect your ‘way of seeing’ and how long it might take for you to recover from their emotional and real-life practical affects.

Awareness comes in seconds; recovery happens over weeks or months; this is the standard pattern, am I right?  But when we become Subjective about our own emotional responses we crave quick removal of them and because we cannot achieve this we get frustrated and emotional with ourselves and tell ourselves something is wrong with us.

We become Subjective about our Subjectivity and this creates a self-perpetuating feedback loop that keeps us emotionally charged and charging.

The transition back to an Objective Viewpoint, when it comes to how we see our emotions in this situation, is the same long, unwanted kind of journey we face in regards to any other unpleasant experience we face in life. We do not recover overnight.

Objective Viewpoints are More Powerful than Subjective Viewpoints – But You Have to Get Subjective About Implementing Them

Behind every Subjective Viewpoint there is an Objective Viewpoint driving it.  Behind your emotional reaction to your own emotional reactions is a view telling you your condition cannot be healed; this is you and you just need to keep avoiding the problem and holding it in check..

When you choose to go into the painful experience repeatedly and long enough, however, a new cold, mental model starts to appear and this is the opposite of the model currently running the show.

As you start to implement your new model – the one you believe will lead to healing – your currently held Subjective view rises into your conscious mind and starts to fight its corner.  It searches for every piece of ammunition it can throw at you to stop you implementing your new plan.

Your new Objective Viewpoint must become narrowed and emotionally charged in order to begin to fight the old version.  You get frustrated and more determined and Subjective.

Emotional and mental ambivalence is produced as your different viewpoints engage in war with each other inside your mind and body.  Your new Objective Viewpoint must win if you are to heal.

To defeat an obsession you must become more obsessed with going towards it than you currently are with moving away from it.  To beat a phobia you must become more aggressive about going towards what you fear than you are about staying away from it.  To relieve depression you must be more determined to feel and release the anger driving it than you currently are with not doing so.

All of these new approaches require new Objective Viewpoints driving them and the only way to find and develop the new is to go take a very close look at the old first, regardless of how painful it is.

Observation is everything.

Look long enough and you will see the cause of your pain is you have remained emotionally charged but were not willing to go through the viewpoint transition process.  It hurts, just like any other Subjective viewpoint situation in life does, until you face up to and deal with it.

Confused?  Why Not Seek Advice?

If we feel overwhelmed by all this emotional tension we can start to freeze up in confused indecision.  We are aware our viewpoint is narrow and want to widen it so we can see the bigger picture before making a decision.

We seek advice with the intention of borrowing more informed Objective Viewpoints from trusted sources who do not wish to take unfair advantage of our situation.  Our intention is to find, select and apply a new Objective Viewpoint like a mental overlay on the situation in order to bring about a resolution so we can forget about the issue and move on.  We decide to trust and apply an Objective Viewpoint given to us by another person because:

• they demonstrate they understand our experience


• they convince us they have consistently applied or seen others successfully apply the new viewpoint recommended.

Can you think of a borrowed Objective map you applied to any area of your life that helped you sort out your thinking and behaviours eventually leading to a resolution despite how you felt about the situation – particularly where it took months to achieve the outcome?  I can think of several I use regularly.

Usually when we look at our mental maps with a view to resolving a Subjective Viewpoint issue our wish is to return to the pre-subjective place we came from.  In real life this option is rarely available – we are forced to take some kind of experiential journey during which we work through our fears and emotions, and arrive at a new place with new knowledge.

Things we found unacceptable previously become gradually acceptable; things we felt we could not do we find we can.  We grow; we detach from old beliefs and the emotions linked to them and move on to the new.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Disorders and Fictional Stories – Four Viewpoints Travelled

External fictional stories mimic how your internal emotional system works.   When your mind travels through a fictional story, in a book or at the movies, it shifts you through four viewpoints without your being consciously aware of it.

The four viewpoints you travel through when going through an external story or an internal emotional journey are:

• the Objective viewpoint


• the Subjective viewpoint


• the Acceptable viewpoint arguing for the ‘acceptable’ solution (which you believe will lead to mental and emotional Congruence)


• the Unacceptable viewpoint arguing for the ‘unacceptable’ solution (which you currently believe is the cause of your mental and emotional Ambivalence).

If you are consciously aware of the journey through these viewpoints when observing an external story you are probably either a student of fictional story structure, a critic, or feel the writer of the fictional story is not very good at their job.  To get full enjoyment from a fictional story you need to be carried along and willing to ‘suspend your disbelief’ long enough to travel the story journey as if it were real.

If you are struggling with an emotional disorder, however, the reverse is the case.  You need to be consciously fully aware of these four viewpoints in order to stop the negatively charged internal stories currently running you.  They may have the power of conveying a sense of reality but the truth is they are nothing more than emotionally charged internal stories.  You need to become writer of your own internal experience to heal from them.

A person with a phobia or obsession is being dominated by an incomplete story running through their body.  The only thing you need do in order to complete such an internal story is travel through the four viewpoints enough times in order to fully discharge the emotional energy attached to it.  Unfortunately this is not a simple mental exercise – it is a very difficult physical experience.

The most effective way to travel through these viewpoints is to begin discharging the energy (not by trying to think your way out of it).  Shifts in viewpoint are created this way -  through ‘feeling’.  In order to do this you take your conscious point of focus into the centre of your feelings much like you would first have to go to a cinema if you intended to watch a movie.

Just a caveat here – make sure you have a professional support network in place (eg doctor; counsellor) before you decide you are going to start going towards your inner internal negatively charged stories.  When working on internal stories not only do you watch your own ‘movie’ you also play all the characters involved at the emotional level.

We enjoy fictional stories, and other similar external journeys, because they mimic the full experiential path we follow when we produce and release an emotional response in relation to a real or imagined triggering event.  External fictional stories allow us to do this while staying in control of how emotionally involved we become with their theme.

Think of a fictional story you really enjoyed.  You enjoyed it more than others due to the degree of emotional satisfaction you gained.   The story built your emotional responses up (with your co-operation) and then provided the means for emotional release by story end.

We deliberately avoid external fictional stories where we judge they will either produce no emotional content for us whatsoever or they will produce emotions so intense we will not be able to release our response by story end.

Unfortunately when dealing with a trapped and incomplete internal stories they are usually the kinds of story we would not wish to observe in the outside world.

Let us take a closer look at the four viewpoints now, but as we do I would like you to keep in mind – I just realised this while writing and it may do your head in a bit – we will travel through the four viewpoints while looking at the four viewpoints.  It is holographic in nature, this viewpointy thingy.

The Objective Viewpoint

The Objective Viewpoint is the most peaceful viewpoint of the four – you feel emotionally neutral here – when you do not feel peaceful here it is because you have tipped over into the Subjective Viewpoint.

The Objective Viewpoint actually appears twice in the viewpoint cycle – at the beginning and after the cycle is completed – so we could say there are actually five viewpoints with the first viewpoint being the pre-story Objective Viewpoint and the fifth viewpoint being the post-story Objective Viewpoint.

In the post-story Objective Viewpoint you have completed the external or internal story journey and the overall Objective Viewpoint has been changed.

The Objective Viewpoint has you sitting on a hill looking down on the story battle ground like a proud military general.  As you watch the different characters below struggling to fight it out you have a current opinion of who should win and who should lose based on moral arguments - in fictional stories main characters act as representatives of arguments in a theme (in internal emotional turmoil you are struggling with these arguments in the state known as ambivalence).

You are distanced from events.  As the story unfolds you develop a logically stepped understanding of the whole picture and are able to work with expectancy in regard to what should happen next to the characters and arguments involved..

You may understand the motivations of each side of the argument but you know one of the arguments has to surrender its hold and the other must win.  If this is not achieved in an external fictional story you expect to see a sequel ensuring it is later - or you class the story as a bad story.

If this story completion does not happen in regard to an internal emotional story you remain stuck in crippling tension until it does.  You are emotionally blocked.

With fictional stories you sit in judgement at the end as to whether or not the outcome was appropriate given the different paths of cause and affect.  If you find the story outcome does not match your current moral framework you change your framework or again judge the story a  bad story.

When you have an internal, unresolved emotional issue you believe just will not complete, as your current Objective Viewpoint wants it to, you may do likewise and also declare it ‘bad’.  My experience of being someone who once suffered with obsessions and phobias, and of working with others who have had similarly intense emotional problems, is not only do we declare the individual internal story bad – we believe our entire emotional system is bad.  We go to war on ourselves over it without realising that in the majority of our experiences our emotional system is working just fine.

Your Objective Viewpoint of a thing, of anything, is fed both by your left logical neo-cortex and also your pattern making right neo-cortex.

Time-Out for Emotional Disorder Sufferers: The Data Stripping Process

If you suffer with an emotional problem, or are trying to help someone who is, the following six short paragraphs may be some of the most important paragraphs you ever read:

The job of your left logical neo-cortex is to organise unemotional information in chronological order and link it up to other unemotionally charged informational structures in your brain.  To make sense and meaning of it, and then to let it go and stop paying attention to it.

Your brain must make sure this process is completed in order to let go of an emotional experience.  This information is then stored in your unemotional memories for reference purposes later.  To help this process your left neo-cortex is able to ‘name’ the data and record the data chronologically.

‘Naming’ the data means your logical brain is able to put a fence round it.  It is the difference between looking at a glass of water you believe you control and looking at a choking fog you believe controls you.  We call it ‘fog’ and we instantly feel differently about it.  Does this make sense?

If you cannot name a thing your logical brain will repeatedly ask the rest of your brain to look at it because until you are able to fence it in like this your logical brain cannot deal with it and you will not be able to let go of the experience – you will keep experiencing it until you can fence it in in this way.

The job of your right patterning neo-cortex is to strip emotional energy from your emotionally charged experiential scenes and then transfer emotionless data over to your logical neo-cortex so it can organise it logically.

By moving your Conscious Point of Focus either towards a pattern (image) held in your right neo-cortex, or towards a trapped emotional response held in your body (towards intense feeling) you immediately start triggering this emotional stripping and data transfer process.  Once the emotional stripping; data transfer; naming and storing process is complete an emotional disorder is removed because the different parts of your brain will stop paying attention to it.

OK – back to the Objective Viewpoint:

At the point the full model of a story has been built in your logical mind, and experienced by your pattern creating emotional mind to the point it no longer finds experiential enjoyment in the story, you have completed the journey and achieved a different Objective Viewpoint which becomes set. You now ‘let go’ of the story.

I was a teenager when the movie Star Wars first came out.  I saw it at the cinemas six times in as many weeks – first as an individual and then because all my friends were going to see it.  After the sixth time I no longer wished to see it.  Emotionally it was ‘bone dry’ for me by then.  I saw a re-run a couple of months ago and all I could think was how the flashing lights on the walls of the Millennium Falcon spaceship looked like pointless flashing plastic lights.  And I realised that was what they were.  A very different experience from when I went to see the movie those six times!

This process exactly matches the process you go through when working to remove obsessions and phobias through exposure therapy.

You do not consciously control this process – it occurs as a side-effect of the way in which our attention system works.  In order to complete the process you just ‘go to the movies’ – especially those now showing in your nearest emotional world.

Regardless of how intense or problematic your own internal emotional issues may be they operate in this way.  You will see this in others when they have a fixed opinion changed by external forces and then resettle into a new opinion (by the way, if we were to say they should think more flexibly before they changed that would be our own Objective Viewpoint talking!).

The Objective viewpoint exists as the norm until something happens to pressure it into changing.  So let us have something happen to you.  Let us have your partner, the one you have been married to for ten years without any sign of trouble, ask for a divorce.

The Subjective Viewpoint

In a fictional story it does not make much difference to you that various characters have different Objective Viewpoints – that is what drives the tension in a story.  But when the Objective viewpoints held by others drive them to radically affect your future you will generally react with your Subjective viewpoint.

In a fictional story you see the main character tootling along in normal happy- life mode until their lives are severely disrupted by some incident.  As a result they become emotionally responsive and have to deal with one crisis after another until achieving the final solution and return to their own, less emotional, Objective-viewpoint-lives.  As observer of this you empathise but are not subjected to it.  You get the luxury of sitting in judgement on character reactions through the entire story.

When it happens In real life you are the Subjective Character.  You sense others are sitting in judgement on you.  When the partner you have been with ten years tells you they want a divorce your reaction is from the Subjective Viewpoint.  You are being rejected by their Objective Viewpoint.

Next they tell you they have been having an affair for those ten years and since your name is not on the property paperwork you lose your home.  By the way, their lover is turning up in two hours to move in.  Their lover arrives and it is your best friend.  You only have one best friend.

You think about everything you have invested in these relationships and everything you stand to lose and the various ways in which you have been betrayed.

You open up to and acknowledge all the little undermining behaviours your partner engaged in but which you ignored or forgave because you loved them.  All the signals about the affair were there but you ignored them.  You declare yourself an idiot.  You cannot believe how the two of them have fooled you like this!  You want to wreck the house, you feel so angry.

Now your soon-to-be-ex partner tells you they never loved you because underneath your pleasant facade you were this unreasonable angry monster.  This tunes straight into your self-critical unconscious beliefs. Was I an angry monster all the time?  Am I responsible for the end of my relationship?

You find yourself torn between two Objective Viewpoints.  Could you have been a better person or is your partner solely responsible for what is happening here?  Should you accept your rage  or should you feel guilty instead?  You become ambivalent.

If you have an obsession or a phobia the ambivalence is created by the question of whether or not you should keep trying to move away from the trigger causing the condition or if you should move towards it and defeat it.  Can you defeat it?  The argument of moving away seems to be the natural decision – but you keep wondering if you could get rid of this problem by going in the opposite direction.

And all the time you are adding self-critical judgements to the mix declaring your internal story bad when in reality it is just a story not yet completed..

Welcome to the battle between the Acceptable Objective viewpoint and the Unacceptable Objective viewpoint

In fictional stories, from the Objective Viewpoint, you get to oversee two journeys travelled by two opposing arguments represented by characters who are both subjectively and therefore emotionally attached to the outcomes of the story.

You will tend to automatically adopt the the Subjective Viewpoint of the character you identify with most.  Most of us identify with the ‘goodie’ because it is more comfortable to do so as it fits within our socially programmed moral framework.

The question that first comes up for you when you enter the world of story is ‘who is the goodie and who is the baddie?’ because you want to identify with the goodies.  You feel good when you identify with goodies because they are more like normal people whereas baddies are concerned with making things much worse and do not seem the least bit family orientated.

If the ‘baddie’ is a fully rounded character, however, you can find yourself understanding and quite liking the ‘baddie’ as well.  In Batman movies you may find yourself liking ‘The Joker’.  Everyone likes a sense of humour, right?  What if, half way through the movie, you discover the goodie character murdered their grandmother for an inheritance?  I recently watched a movie with a flashback scene in which an alleged hero shot a pregnant woman because she irritated him – I hated him for the rest of the movie and was pleased he got what was coming to him (but I also wondered where the hero in the story had got to).

What you experience, in a relatively painless way in stories, but very painfully in your own emotional world, is ambivalence and your craving for an eventual state of Congruency.

Ambivalence

Ambivalence occurs when you believe two opposing arguments at the same time and are equally emotionally charged and attached to both.  In a story it is regarded as a necessity of the plot, but when we hold these arguments internally it can be agony.   In the scenario of being dumped by your partner you are torn between

• holding yourself responsible for the failure of your marriage and feeling sorry for the experience your partner, who you still love despite their deceitful behaviour, has allegedly had to go through as a result of living with not-good-enough you (poor them) while at the same time you feel


• enraged at how these two important individuals, partner and best friend, have conspired for years to destroy your hoped for future and everything you invested.  They have ruined your life.

You see yourself wanting to kill them but also think yourself responsible for their behaviour.  Feeling both enraged and guilty you do not know how to deal with this ambivalence.

Are they the good guys or are you the good guy?  Which is which?

Here you are struggling to get back to the Objective Viewpoint – the viewpoint that knows what is really going on and which, if you could just sit there right now, would really show you what you should do next for the best.

This is why counsellors (relationship counsellors in this case) are worth their salt – they are instant, trustworthy and experienced Objective Viewpoints for hire.  Love these folks.

Prior to this point you saw all divorces as ‘their’ divorces.  Other people got divorced and you could see the reasons they got divorced.  They are so blind to their faults!  Now in the land of Subjective viewpoints it is a different world altogether.

Now you find yourself having an extreme emotional response to losing something or someone you personally have a stake in and you wish you did not have to change your Objective Viewpoint in line with what is going on in reality.

But you do - and you find it a real struggle because you are trying to sort out who the goodie is, who the baddie is, and how you can mentally figure the whole story out and then hopefully once you have done all this everyone will come out looking like a good guy.

The Difference and Similarity Between Internal Stories and External Stories (Real-life versus Fictional Life)

When you engage with an external story you engage with a carefully designed construct with a socially acceptable morality message built in.  Most stories with socially unacceptable morality messages get censored out.

Also, you engage fully with the most moral character – you attach to that argument and stick with it for the whole story.

In external stories the baddies get what is coming to them and the goodies get their rewards.

In real life stories though baddies often benefit for long periods of time and good people have bad things happen to them – and then get blamed and punished for it as well!  Not only that, whereas in fictional stories the goodie characters may have only just a pinch of self-reproach here and there in real life goodies tend to be full of self-criticism.

So what should we do in order to sort all this out when it comes to working with what we do feel and should feel if we want to complete our own intense internal stories so getting to a new painless Objective Viewpoint as quickly as possible?

Understand that Emotional Responses Have Nothing to Do with Morality – they are Simply Arguments in a Story with Energy Attached

The problem with your internal emotional stories is you contain various Subjective and ambivalent viewpoints at full emotional strength.  The argument for taking revenge on your partner and your best friend is as strongly emotionally supported as is the argument against.

The argument for moving towards the imagery and emotional responses driving emotional disorders is as strong as the argument for moving away from them.

You contain the full story – warts, flowers and all.  You are capable of any of these options.     But you are also capable of discharging the story in private, removing it fully and still arriving at a new, emotionally neutral (and happy) Objective Viewpoint.

All you need do is repeatedly visit the story enough times you discharge the emotional energy attached, travel through the four viewpoints and end up letting go of the whole business.

You will remember the internal story in terms of logical data, but you will not experience it.

I swear those flashing lights in Star Wars are just that .

Regards - Carl

Obsessions and Other Emotional Disorders – the Four Stages of Taking the Journey Within

If you are the sufferer of one or more obsessions the idea of journeying inwards may be terrifying and something you’ve been trying to avoid for some time.

It may help you to know that I once sat in that position myself and my experience, as a result of personal research and talking to many other people with similar difficulties, tells me there are millions of us in the world who share or have previously shared this situation. Despite the isolating affects anxiety disorders such as obsessions impose on us it is important to know you are not alone.

An obsession is a curable condition. I know this because I have healed myself of at least 27 of them and they have not returned. I will go so far as to say that all anxiety disorders are curable conditions, if you are willing to do the necessary work to heal them.

About six years ago I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist with a complex form of OCD – in addition to my obsessions I was plagued by phobias; panic attacks; depression and disgust attacks. I had held on to my condition for almost 30 years, mostly due to having responsibilities towards other people – there is an ‘opportunity cost’ to healing in that it takes a lot of time and energy. 

I had managed to live an externally ‘normal’ life all that time. There came a point I decided I finally needed to care for me. I had had enough.  I needed to be more selfish.

I went to see my doctor, who sent me to see a psychiatrist, who also sent me to sign up for counselling. I told them I had a plan based on Exposure Therapy, which I had already started to carry out, and I needed their support in seeing it through as it was causing me to feel a whole range of extreme emotional symptoms.

I had started to ‘go within’ and my own emotional responses had started to fight that decision.  Hidden beliefs were starting to pop up in my conscious with the aim of changing my direction back to what it previously had been: avoidance.  The general message being thrown at me was ‘if you do this you are going to die’.  I made a decision I was either going to live the inner life I wanted to live, or I was going to die trying.  Bring it on.

I faced my inner world day after day and every day it hurt like hell – but I started to see changes and results.  I called the process ‘going-into-the-out-of’.  Before you can come out of an anxiety disorder you must first be willing to repeatedly go into the centre of it and experience all its glory at fullest intensity. 

It took me three months of daily work to get rid of the panic attacks that acted as a barrier towards my being able to work directly on my obsessions.

I started to see that various aspects of this emotional mass had structure to it; I would explore, experiment and test on myself until I felt I had a reliable picture of how this or that particular emotional response worked.  I realised the same approach worked over and over again with different emotions.

I discovered these responses, and their attached images and memories, were chronologically layered – only one obsessive response would appear at a time.  As I cleared one another, older version of a previous obsession would appear.  ‘Oh, I remember this one’ I would think.  There were times when I wondered when I would get to the bottom of them – I was even concerned that if I did get rid of them would there be anything of who I was underneath it all and would I like what I found (people with obsessions tend to worry about this kind of thing).  But now I knew how to get rid of obsessions my sense of desperate frustration changed to simply  acceptance of ‘the next job to do’.

‘There must be a part that …’ was a common question that came up in my mind.  I would notice a particular aspect of an emotional pattern and then start researching it and find ‘the biological part’ in question.  Why does this happen?  Why does that happen?  Pretty soon I was telling my professional supporters what I was seeing – and they were agreeing with me.

Within a year I had got rid of almost all my obsessions; stopped my panic attacks and got rid of my phobias. My psychiatrist told me he was astonished at my progress.

It took another two years, using the same approach, to get rid of my more deeply embedded obsessions and then to start work on the underlying emotional pain that had causes the obsessions and phobias to form in the first place.

I now see my counsellor once a month for ‘maintenance’ and as each year passes I become more and more unconditionally happy as I make decisions that continue to lead me away from the hell I once endured.

The journey is a difficult one and has 4 main stages:

1 Learning to Understanding

Like an evil scientist you have to put yourself through increasingly painful episodes and watch, with a part of your mind I call ‘the Silent Observer’,  what happens.  What you eventually come to understand is your current mental model does not match what really happens with emotional responses.  Emotional responses do not just come and stay – if you stay with them long enough they turn from a foggy mood into something you can actually see, as if you were a mechanic fixing a car, and then when you keep willingly going into the experiencing of them they evaporate into nothingness.

There comes a point when you wonder where your obsession went – and you cannot get it back no matter what you do.  You may try to re-stimulate it but there is nothing to re-stimulate.  The reality of the process dawns.

2 Understanding to Doing

Being able to see the structure of an obsession does not mean you do not have to do the work – but it can get much faster just as any other area of life does with practice.  Once you know how it works, and you know it does work, you stop experimenting, testing and wondering and just get on with it.  The negative ‘it could kill you’ messages still come up but you just laugh at them.  They are like old friends by now.  The work still hurts but who cares?

You have now learned you get two choices:  feel a low level of pain indefinitely or feel an intense pain for a relatively short period of time and remove the problem.  Which are you going to choose?

It took me several months to figure out how to remove my first obsession.  By my 27th I could do it in 30 minutes of concentrated work.  What takes the time is the time in between healing as your thinking mind always puts up a bit of a fight before you are able to get into ‘the zone’ for concentrated work.

3 Doing to Obtaining

What you aim to obtain is happiness.  Happiness is not about getting something – happiness is about getting rid of emotional baggage and emotional baggage does not come much bigger than an obsession.

You obtain mental freedom – the more obsessions I got rid of the more I felt free.  I could see the mental freedom percentage increasing with each obsession cleared.  You become more aware of what it is you are obtaining and so you want more of it.  At the start of the process I had just a vague idea of what happiness was, the more happiness I got the better the picture became. 

This desire drives you not just to remove your obsessions but to remove the underlying emotional baggage that created the condition in the first place.  What you discover is you like yourself just being at peace – peace is something you cannot obtain when you have obsessions but these peaceful times increase in number and you get a clearer and clearer picture of what you want to obtain and greater confidence you can actually get it – as long as you are willing to keep ‘going-into-the-out-of’.

4 Obtaining to Maintaining

Maintaini
ng is really easy.  You have had so much training by now that as soon as a negative emotional experience occurs you are in there getting rid of it.  I am not talking about obsessions here – I am talking about basic primary emotions.  You are never going to allow yourself to become ill like that ever again. 

The mantra that you can never be cured of this condition is false – you know this as a fact when you get to this point.  When people tell you it cannot be cured but only managed they are talking from a very limited experience.  You now come to accept you know things about the way people work a lot of people will never do the work to know.

There is a fifth stage; this stage is the icing on the cake for me.

5 Maintaining to Sharing (?)

My original heading here was going to be ‘Maintaining to Teaching’ but I have learned this is an area of life that cannot really be taught.  It can only be shared – because the responsibility to heal lies within each individual and our individual journeys will be different even if the mechanics are the same.  There are no examinations or pass marks for this kind of stuff.

No-one really knows what you know – we ourselves have enough trouble figuring our own inner worlds out.

During my healing journey, which will be a journey that continues to the day I pop  my clogs because you have to keep moving in the same direction no matter how you currently feel, I have met a lot of other anxiety disorder sufferers.  One of the ways I justify the investment of time it takes to keep me on the right track is that once I discover something new I will share.

So here I am sharing – how am I doing?

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