Remove Potential Panic Attacks by Moving into the Internal Territory Immediately

You feel a spark of fear; a spark of emotional discomfort inside – and you move straight into it.  You put yourself right in the centre of it as soon and fully as possible.

You do not look for distractions in the outside world.  You do not try telling yourself positive things.  You do not attempt to forcefully relax.  All of these are denial strategies that will lead, paradoxically, to the very thing you do not want to happen.

No.  What you do is move straight into the middle of the feeling and stay there for as long as the feeling persists.  If you do this it will disappear of its own accord.  It will flow through and out of you.

When your Unconscious sees you do this repeatedly it loses the fear of fear that causes panic attacks and it learns to accept the flow of the different types of energy that come with being alive.  There is no search for the cause of an alleged major internal thinking problem.  There is no need to find out why you suffer while others do not.

Our brain and body are mapping systems.  Their job is to map the external world and tell us where we are safe or not and move towards the safe and away from the dangerous in the outside world.

Frozen anxiety responses, emotional responses we trap within our bodies, are intense – so intense they cause our mapping systems to map them as if they were dangerous external territory albeit they are inside of us – as if they were real world events.

Once our own internal emotional responses are mapped in this way we make it our business to avoid these internal parts of ourselves; we act and dislike these parts of ourselves just as we would a dangerous external land.

If you have an emotional disorder of any kind you will be aware of a ‘place inside’ you do not like.  People who have never had an emotional disorder may have difficulty in understanding this concept.  When you approach emotional energy trapped inside you may notice it is ‘located’ in  a specific place.

This could be an illusion created by your accessing different parts of your brain, but I suspect it is also due to the fact certain types of energy are stored in certain places in and around the body.

Overcoming a well-embedded panic attack reaction is hard work; but the question for ex-sufferers is how do they stop it coming on again?  Here is the answer once again:

• move straight into the fear and stay there immediately.

This stops the internal maps of avoidance being built; gives your brain and body the right to do what they are naturally designed to do: feel it out.  I once suffered with panic attacks; I no longer do.  Neither will you if you teach yourself to habitually do this as soon as fear shows up.

Regards – Carl

Five Subtle Benefits Gained from Seeing a Person Centred Counsellor

During my healing process from complex OCD, phobias and panic attacks I saw three Person-Centred Counsellors spread out over a six year period.

The third counsellor I still see on a monthly basis for emotional maintenance - I find the experience so beneficial (even lottery winners can benefit from seeing a counsellor every now and again!) and as a part of their professional practice counsellors themselves are required to have professional counselling sessions in order to remain emotionally clear for their clients.

The first two counsellors I saw were provided for short periods by my doctor but the third I met through work and this coincided with my being ready to start the healing plan I had designed for myself.  In my day-job I act as a referrer, occasionally passing people on to a counselling team and I have an Intermediate Certificate in Person-Centred Counselling - this qualification is enough to understand the role of a Counsellor but not to practice professionally as one.

Trained, experienced counsellors of this type are guided by a number of ethical principles, one of the most important being the principle of client autonomy. This principle establishes that you decide the direction of your counselling sessions. Person-centred counsellors may suggest options for you to consider when you get stuck or when you ask them for advice, but they are unlikely to make final decisions for you or design and recommend a healing plan for you - that is your job.

The role of a counsellor of this type is to help you learn to become expert in understanding and working with yourself, rather than in your coming to regard them as the 'wise and wonderful guru of the inner me' who can give you the secrets you need for self-governance (they may well be this amazing character but it is not what they are employed to do).

There are a number of ethical and professional conduct principles which Person-Centred Counsellors are trained to stick to and at your first meeting they will explain these to you.  In this article I want to highlight five powerful, almost unconscious, services they provide which you will probably not see advertised or even spoken about during your sessions, but which I became increasingly aware of during my healing process:

• Acceptance Coach


• Living Mirror


• De-clutterer


• Personal Cheerleader


• Reliable Milestone Marker.

Acceptance Coach

These Counsellors are trained in the principle of unconditional positive regard (UPR) - this means they spend time entering into your viewpoint of your life and respect your right to be you. Their role is to achieve empathy with your experience - 'wear your shoes to the point they feel where they pinch'. After a couple of sessions with a counsellor who achieves this with you something magical happens. You unconsciously notice this professional person, who you respect, finds your internal horror stories easier to accept than you do. Things you find unacceptable about yourself they find perfectly normal.

In this way a counsellor can lead you towards accepting experiences you previously could not accept in your Unconscious Mind. This affect stays with you long after your counselling sessions have ended and quite often the act of discussing the 'unacceptable' will create an insight for you that prepares you more fully for the next session. The affect is so deep that when you are not with your counsellor and you are facing up to difficult emotional issues alone it is as if that level of acceptance remains with you and you are able to become your own counsellor.

Living Mirror

Summary and reflection skills are used by the Counsellor to demonstrate you are being actively listened to - this professional person has no personal agenda other than to support you in yours.  They will not support you in committing criminal acts or other really harmful behaviour, there are formal boundaries and requirements in place, but equally they will not try to impose their personal beliefs about 'what you should do next' .

Your feelings, and the content of what you say, are taken seriously. Subtle things hardly noticed by you as you say them may be presented back to you as open-ended questions for you to explore further. When this is done in a non-judgemental way it validates your experience of life and helps clarify the realities you live with. You may be lightly challenged where the information reflected back to you appears to conflict. For example if you laugh whilst relating a particularly painful experience the counsellor may ask you to explain what is behind the laughter - this enables you to identify your underlying thinking processes and beliefs more clearly for yourself.

I remember once a relative taped me while I was talking to myself at home and played it back to me - I had no recall at all of this self-talk and was really surprised about how unaware I was of the verbal chat coming out of my mouth.  Sometimes the only person not listening to what you are saying is you.  In counselling what you say and feel is summarised and reflected back to you for clarification.

A good counsellor (and I have never met a bad one) will seem to disappear from your conscious awareness at times because you become so wrapped up in the process and they are so good at being there for you it is as if your minds were fully working together.  The sense of this other mind working with yours can remain in between sessions as you start to pay more and more attention to yourself - you become much more self-aware.

De-clutterer

Sometimes the first ten minutes or so of a session may be used to clear out your emotional baggage of the day before moving on to the longer term issues. The Counsellor will not tell you what to believe or clear out of the way - you will decide this. They are trained to support you, not tell you what to focus on.  On occasion my counsellors were 'emergency support' if something really painful had happened recently and had distracted me from the long term work I was doing on healing my anxiety disorders.

These new emotional emergencies sorted out much quicker with my having counselling support already in place (pity we do not have these folks to hand when our anxiety disorders start to develop, eh, but the truth is we are blind to what is going on inside of us at the pre-disorder stage).

Personal Cheerleader

Counsellors are not just there for the unhappy experiences - they can help you acknowledge yours wins too. There may be things you have recovered from and you wish to celebrate the recovery but it would be inappropriate to do so with the people in your personal life - that relative you have finally forgiven for stealing your christmas present money ten years ago - how appropriate would it be to tell them you had nightmares of cooking them over a slow heat on a gas cooker all that time but they can rest easy now?

Or why not tell your mates how you have overcome obsessive imagery related to the throwing of children out of windows?  Not a good idea, is it?  I have actually lost friends following on from telling them I had recovered from a phobia of lampposts.

It really is important to celebrate your wins and sometimes your counsellor will stop you to make sure you do this.  It is so easy to move straight on to the next emotional issue you have to deal with without acknowledging your progress.  This leads me on to the next benefit of the counselling experience - Milestone Marker.

Reliable Milestone Marker

You may have come a very long way - but have not mentally registered much of it.  This may be partly due to short-term memory loss and also to emotional non-relativity.

When undergoing periods of intense emotional self-work it can be almost impossible to think clearly.  I found myself going through phases where just to put one word down on paper was difficult.  I recorded a lot of my experiences using simple mind maps and these would later remind me of things I noticed during the healing process - which meant going through extended periods of intense emotional exposure therapy.  Intense emotional states blank memory due to your brain being in 'emergency mode' - it works the same for emotional disorders as it does with any other life event triggering an intense emotional response.

Similarly, your Unconscious Mind tends to focus on how you feel right now.  It does not automatically tell itself how great you feel compared to last year.  If you feel a bit rubbish today you may not see any benefit in telling yourself to think back to a time you felt ten times worse - but you will if you do it.

Sometimes my day-job can be quite intellectually stressful.  I just remind myself of a time when I earned a living in a place where people smashed broken bottles over my head when they got drunk - makes my current job look like the best job on Earth.

Your Counsellor has a fully functioning memory and will occasionally remind you of how far you have come - both in terms of your intellectual understanding of yourself and also in terms of how what you feel now and how it relates to how you felt when you first started seeing them.

And there is more ...

Person--Centred Counselling is not just about going and talking to someone - the affects of this process are subtle but over time you will notice fundamental changes in your Unconscious.  Self-criticism fades and is replaced by an acceptance of what it is to be human.  You will find yourself more supportive of others because at some point you decided to better support yourself.

The time and money you put into getting counselling support is an investment in yourself that can benefit you and others for the rest of your life.

Regards - Carl

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?

Your Two Emotional Permission Points

You have two Emotional Permission Points and they ‘live’ in your left, logical thinking neo-cortex.  You will see them, if you look for them, whenever you are in a situation that suggests an emotional response may be needed.

Permission Point 1: Emotional Production

Think of a moment in your life when you were in a position to produce an intensely negative emotional response to a situation - but chose not to.

You got a taste of the emotional response rising up through your body but  chose not to release the ‘full blast’.  The people around you were unaware, after the situation passed, you had felt an emotional response coming on at all and you retained a sense of control.

Do you remember a moment like that?

Chances are you sensed the emotional response approaching and applied a mental model that changed the context of the situation for you.  The normal reason we reduce and remove our emotional responses is because by giving ourselves a different route out of the situation through the use of an alternative thinking template we manage to regain our sense of control over how we are affected by the situation and that sense of control reduces our sense of threat.

Can you think of another situation in which you granted permission for Emotional Production?  Chances are it was the right thing to do.  An important point to remember is that ‘feeling bad’ in response to a situation is not the same thing as ‘being bad’.

I’ve seen a lot of evidence that a well controlled emotional response can create an exquisitely appropriate outcome – you just need to make sure you do not overdo it.

Oh, and you also have to take responsibility for making sure you fully complete the emotional cycle.

Permission Point 2:  Emotional Release

The emotional response is produced in the body and the feelings come up – your logical thinking brain then receives a request from the body for the emotional response to be released.

If you refuse to release the emotional response you block it and It will not leave your body until you change your decision.  You may block it without realising you did.

If you block the response because you have decided it will do more harm than good to release it at that time and plan to release it in more appropriate circumstances you are practicing ‘suppression’.

Suppression means you are consciously aware of the emotional response and its trigger and can later process the response in order to return to a non-emotional state.  Suppression is a useful social tool.  Suppression is a good thing most of the time.

If you permanently refuse permission for release, however, maybe because you disagree with the emotional response itself, this leads to repression.

In repression the trigger and the response become separated as we attempt to ‘destroy’ the emotional response.  What you end up with is a trapped emotional state that just appears to be the ‘new you’.  This new you could be a constantly angry you or a constantly disgusted you or a constantly fearful you (insert the emotional response of your choice).

All because you refused emotional release at Permission Point 2.

If you give yourself the right to produce the emotional response at Permission Point 1 you must also take responsibility for granting release at Permission Point 2 (at some point).

Obsessions, phobias, panic attacks – all emotional disorders - are caused by the failure to grant release when the emotional response comes back up through the body.

If you give permission for emotional production you must also make sure you give permission for appropriate release.

Regards.

Carl

Birth of an Obsession: Did You Lock the Door?

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

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

WORRY

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

Worrying About Worrying

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

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

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


• losing things you have worked for all your life


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


• loss of the belief your home is 'safe'


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


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

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

Trying to Stop The Thinking Does Not Work


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

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

Feelings Are The Key to Stopping Worrying


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

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

SECONDARY EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

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

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

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

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

HYPERVIGILANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1:  Focus On the Door Lock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Step 6:  Do Not Self-Criticise

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

Step 7:  Rinse and Repeat

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

To summarise ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards - Carl

One Approach to Beat All Anxiety Disorders

Nice article below from Craig April on acceptance.  Acceptance is achieved by repeatedly 'going into the out of' - exposure therapy.  The experience is drawn out and extremely painful but it's a bit like opening a zip-file on a computer; things reveal and change themselves purely because you keep going into the trapped experience.

Panic Attacks, Social Phobia, Obsessions Or General Anxiety - How to Beat Them With One Approach
By Dr. Craig April

"All you have to do to beat anxiety is to accept that which you feel is presently unacceptable."

Think about this for a moment. If you could truly accept whatever you fear, then why would your anxiety continue? It wouldn't and couldn't. And just to clarify, "acceptance" doesn't mean expecting or sensing that what you fear will happen. What I mean by "acceptance" is being okay with whatever you fear happening. Truly feeling that if what you fear happens, you'll accept it and live with it. "Fine, let it happen. Whatever will be will be".

Lets apply it to some examples of anxiety:

Example 1.) Panic attacks: If you could accept whatever panic attack symptoms you fear, such as fear of going crazy, losing control, not breathing, etc. then you wouldn't be concerned about it anymore and it would go away.

Example 2.) Social anxiety: If you truly accepted the possibility of being judged or criticized, then you wouldn't care about this anymore.

Example 3.) Obsessions: If you truly accepted whatever your unwanted thought is telling you to fear and acknowledged that you can't completely protect yourself against this source of anxiety, then you wouldn't fear it anymore.

Isn't this quote freeing? To know that all you have to do is just accept what you find unacceptable and then your anxiety will go away can be quite liberating.

Look, I know this is easier said then done. It takes thinking about your anxiety in a whole new way, but more importantly, it also requires new behaviors and approaches. That's why obtaining treatment proven to be effective is so vital. In fact, keeping this quote in mind while you learn strategies and techniques that are reducing your anxiety can get you there that much quicker.

This quote can give you proper motivation to start or continue to fight your battle against anxiety. Why? Because it is absolutely true.

Apply it to your own anxiety by asking yourself: "If I accept __________, then what would I still fear?"

Copyright 2009, Craig April, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved

Dr. Craig April is an anxiety management specialist and Director of The April Center For Anxiety Attack Management in Los Angeles. He and his staff treat all aspects of anxiety symptoms with proven cognitive-behavioral methods.

To visit us on the web and get your FREE anxiety quotient where you can score your symptoms, go to http://www.KickFear.com

P.S. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our FREE monthly newsletter.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dr._Craig_April


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De-sensitising to Phobias, Panic Attacks; Obsessions and Other Disorders

In my article 'The Three Elements of Emotional Acceptance' I describe the three core elements of accepting and clearing an emotional response as being:

• the emotional response


• the issue or trigger to which the emotional response relates


• agreement before and after emotional clearance in order to achieve 'acceptance' (of the process)

and I explain we must 'unitise' the three elements - that is, bring them together and 'thread' the emotional response through the issue like cotton thread through the eye of a needle. You achieve this by repeatedly moving into the emotional response.  Of course it's not quite that simple - if it was we wouldn't get into these emotionally overcharged states in the first place.

Some trapped emotional responses can be cleared within 30 minutes; some have taken me several years to work towards and release - usually the more difficult to remove being related to events I experienced over 20 years ago.  Some triggering events have been 'sharp' while others are very vague for a while until we expand the viewpoint and recreate past scenarios that lasted over several years and involved several people.

Regardless of the emotional type, intensity or the triggering situation or issue that created the response, the basic method of repeatedly approaching the 'three core elements' has proved an effective strategy time after time for me and others I have spoken with - even if one of the three elements was weak or difficult to understand at times.

As you move towards 'unitisation' of the three elements you become increasingly aware there is a focal point where all meet.  The focal point may be external, internal or 'widebeam' (meaning you're probably actually making a social statement that you haven't quite heard yourself - I'll explain this further down).

Where the focal point for bringing the three elements together is located depends on which type of anxiety disorder you have (in reality it's not located anywhere other than in your own perception - but that may not be absolultely right.  The science of biophotonics suggests the centre of emotional energies lies just outside of our bodies and I always get a distinct sense of moving my body into an external emotional response when I do this kind of work.  It takes quite a bit of experimentation and honest intense self-observation; including paying attention to any 'visual cues' that your unconscious may send you, to figure out where the focal point for bringing all three elements together lies in regard to each and every emotional response.

People sometimes tell me they have only phobias but as they continue opening up to me I can tell they also have or are developing obsessions - they just haven't seen the difference between the two conditions in themselves yet.  When I advise them to start de-sensitising as soon as possible, and seek counselling support, their usual response is 'I'm not ready yet'.

The trouble is the longer you leave such things the worse they become because trapped anxiety conditions are 'active association builders' - they don't heal with time.  An intense emotional response held trapped within the body can easily generalise and as we fight the response it just produces more responses.  Waiting for the condition to 'calm down' before we decide to face up to it produces the opposite affect.

Phobias

In phobias the focal point for bringing the three elements together is external - so you have to move your body physically to the location of the object or situation to begin the de-sensitisation process.  You can achieve this using the power of the imagination alone but won't know if you've been completely successful until you're again in the presence of the physical object.

Having a phobia isn't so bad if what you're phobic about is something you rarely come across such as ancient stone bridges or hot air balloons (I would imagine de-sensitising to a hot air balloon could turn into an expensive hobby).  However, if the phobia relates to things like kitchen knives or birds or plastic piping (and I know people who are phobic to these things) life starts to become more difficult.

When I had my phobias I was phobic to street lights; pens; bollards; shovels; sweeping brushes; saucepans and several other objects (I had 14 phobias in all and I had trouble remembering what they were just now - that's how effective de-sensitisation is).  These phobias were also linked in to my obsessions.  The two external and internal focal points this created bounced and fed off each other.   Incidentally - you can still lead an apparently perfectly 'normal' external life while all this is going on simply by denying yourself the need to face your emotional pain.

All of the phobias and obsessions I had were sparked by a two year period of anxiety caused by a failing relationship that led to low self-esteem, followed by my reading a newspaper article that caused me to have a deeply shocking emotional reaction.  I was 21 when I read that article and it took me about 24 years to deal with my response to it.  I didn't deal with it because I thought it was 'silly' and I had 'bigger responsibilities to deal with'.  Look what happened to me.

In phobias developing a de-sensitisation programme involves moving towards an external trigger and allowing the emotional response to release while re-training the unconscious mind to see the situation differently.

Removing anxiety disorders is more about experiential learning, rather than mental learning - the actions of the body re-train the beliefs of the mind.  The training does eventually lead to the re-routing of neural pathways in the brain and until this is achieved there is a possibility of the reaction coming back as a 'setback'.  Repetitive retraining by going through the de-sensitisation process over and over again eventually makes the change permanent.  There comes a point when you can remember having the reaction, then almost missing it(!) once it has gone; and then you completely forget about it - unless you want to write blog posts about it and have my problem of remembering what you were afraid of, that is.

Obsessions

The focal point for bringing together the three elements of healing an obsession is held internally in the brain.  Obsessions are powered by intense trapped emotional responses attached to images (or sounds) held in our minds and in order to de-sensitise we must do exactly the same thing as we do with phobias - repeatedly move towards the trigger (the image or sound or whatever it is that keeps bothering us).  Incidentally, simply the suggestion of a shape is enough to trigger a panic attack when you have an obsession and that may sound strange until you consider what kind of a reaction you would normally have if you saw the shadow of a lion against your kitchen wall - shapes have meaning for us.

The great thing about having an obsession is the tools for healing are all built into you - no need for the production of a hot air balloon; the horrible thing is they never stop following you around.  The trick to healing an obsession is, for a while,  to become more obsessed about following it than it is about following you.  Only an obsessive can produce the determination it takes to call the bluff of an obsession.

Panic Attacks and Generalised Anxiety and/or Social Disorders

This is my experience - yours may be different - but all my panic attacks and general anxiety responses were based around 'vague' - at least at first that's how they appeared - triggers.  I learned to go 'widebeam' on the point of focus. Instead of moving towards a focal point where the three elements came together, I would sometimes find with these 'vague' problems that I was actually sending things outwards.  When your body wants to tell the world something important, it wants to tell both you and a whole collection of other people. It may not be that individual hot air balloons are the trigger - it could be a collection of hot air balloon pilots that you've got a problem with.

An example of this is where you had a traumatic childhood event happen to you and you can see it's going to happen again and you're trying to warn the relevant people that someone is at risk and they completely ignore you.  You may have stopped telling them about it verbally, but your body is still telling them about it emotionally.  Your logical mind may have forgotten the content (or trigger) that's causing your condition - but your body is still carrying on the fight.

It took me three months of daily practice before I could even get close to working on my obsessions effectively because every time I even considered 'going in' I would have an immediate intense panic attack.  And they would last for hours until I got distracted - after which time I just felt continually bad.  I could never quite see what it was I was afraid of - but by repeatedly going towards the obsessions I started to think differently and my unconscious started to produce lots of 'pictures' - which at first I completely ignored.

It started to dawn that the pictures were 'try this approach' plans my unconscious had started to produce - even in my sleep - and I started to use them - and they started to work.  Over months of this (I think we're talking about 18 months here) I developed a subjective viewpoint of what was occurring.  Like an evil scientist testing and experimenting on myself I gained a bigger picture of the 'subjective me' and I became aware I was developing a part of my mind I had previously been unaware of - I called it 'the Silent Observer' back then - I've discovered it's actually called the ARAS - the Ascending Reticular Activation System.  We've all got one and we all need to learn how to use it - because it's 'us'.

What I've learned is that eventually 'vague' becomes clear as day - there are no anxiety disorders without structured reasons and plans behind them.  It's really just a matter of how hard are you willing to work to find out what the plan is.  If you're looking at an emotional response and can't figure out what the focal trigger point is - go widebeam.

How to go widebeam?  Here's an example:  let's say you're having a strong reaction to a memory involving one person and you can't figure out what you're emotionally saying.  Just remain with that person, and look around for other related memories.  Add other people who were around at the time.  Think about other events that happened in the time period before and around that event.  Bring up other emotional responses (especially the painful ones).  Did you feel guilty about something then?  Do you STILL feel guilty about it now, knowing what you know with hindsight?  Challenge and question.

If you still haven't picked up the 'issue' you haven't spent long enough with the experience.  You can only de-sensitise when you've eventually discovered what it is you're saying to these people - and agreed to release the emotional charge.  Keep going in ... and look for what you're saying outwards ... re-build the entire social scenario if you have to ... eventually you find the widebeam focal point and kaboom - the energy is released and you actually end up liking yourself a whole lot more when you see the true motivation behind the feelings.

To summarise:

To de-sensitise to phobias we go towards external triggers; to de-sensitise to obsessions we go inwards to internal triggers; to de-sensitise to generalised conditions we go inwards and outwards and look for the 'widebeam' that we're projecting outwards.  Don't impose what you think the answer is; what for the answer to be presented to you.

Finally - I keep reading material by respected psychiatrists/psychologists (and bloggers) that say de-sensitisation doesn't work for obsessions and generalised disorders as well as it does for phobias - well, you could have fooled me. I have used de-sensitisation to remove at least 50 emotional blocks including fear, rage and disgust attacks - some of them easily, some of them with difficulty, some of them with very 'vague' triggers (at first).  The truth is you just have to keep 'going in to find out what's going on'.

Tomorrow I'm going to post about developing a detailed systematic de-sensitisation programme.

Please leave any comments or questions (or constructive criticisms) below or write to me at carl@managemesystems.com

Regards - Carl

Elevator Phobia Email

I recently received an email from a blog member (Henry) - with his permission I've reprinted his email and a reply to him below.

Henry is overcoming a phobia of lifts/elevators and planes (I think closely related to claustrophobia in his case as he indicates he prefers lifts without people in them - I know someone who won't get in a lift unless it already has several people in it).

I've put links in Henry's original email so you can check out the articles he mentions.

Something to focus on here is that regardless of the type of anxiety disorder or emotional problem concerned, the overall approach to healing any emotional disorder is the same.  Once you develop and understand your own effective healing approach you will find this to be consistently true.  The free pdf (The Semantic Mind) I mention in my reply is what I'm working on now - I intended it to be on here weeks ago but I keep finding more to write - it should definitely be on here soon!  This document talks about focusing on your body as the source of the energy fuelling the problem, rather than what's going on in your brain.

One of the hardest stages of the healing process is to do what I call 'going into the out of' and Henry has already started this journey.  The stage he is at now reminds me of my own experience of healing the phobias and panic attacks I used to struggle with.

Speaking to other people about these things is also an important break-through step, particularly because it 'normalises' these conditions for us and they then start to appear more acceptable to our unconscious.  Self-criticism on the basis of  'normal versus abnormal' just gets in the way of healing.   I know many people in my day job, for example, who appear completely 'together' on the surface but have powerful long-term phobias they regard as 'strange' and therefore don't dare face or discuss.

Realising these conditions are normal life events (they're not desirable, but they are normal) is an important part of the healing journey and I hope I get this across in this post.  Anyway,  as always, I write too much.

Here's Henry's email:

Hi Carl,

I have wanted to contact you since reading your insightful article published on Helium.Com entitled "How to handle anxiety and panic attacks".

You have described the internal psychological and subconscious processes of anxiety disorders clearer than just about any other source that I have read. Now I am glad to come across "The Three Elements of Emotional Acceptance" on another site as well as your blog and email address.

I have an intense phobia of enclosed places including elevators and planes.  I can only really be in touch with my reaction when I am in the confines of an elevator or a plane.  I do try exposure on my own, but it is very measured and not prolonged or intensive enough.  I have also experienced some rare setbacks which have eroded my confidence and have confirmed or reminded me that I am unable or unwilling to tolerate these remote but painfully traumatic worst-case experiences.These setbacks include being momentarily stuck and what I call near-miss or as-if misinterpretations.

I try to approach elevators with mindfulness and intentions of acceptance such as: "It is OK to be stuck; I can wait it out if necessary; It is not dangerous just frustrating and uncomfortable; It is only my feeling or anxiety; Even if it is stuffy and poorly ventilated, I can still breathe if it got stuck".

This has helped to an extent, but my intentions and supporting experience are still weaker than the pain or expectation of pain that I experienced or that I expect when my unfulfilled reaction to escape is triggered.

I even had an elevator game where I would remain on a motionless, empty elevator with the door closed for several minutes or until it was summoned.

As you mentioned: "To remove all emotional blocks..the unconscious must be taken into the emotional block and kept there.. After a while the truth dawns that the lion is not really dangerous and the unconscious makes a permanent change".

I know that elevators are reliable and I will take them when not crowded or too stuffy, but I am still very apprehensive about tolerating the rare and unexpected scenario that I have briefly experienced in the past. I have been reluctant to engage a Cognitive-Behavioural therapist because I do not see how I can be assisted with this as I ultimately have to do it on my own.

Carl, I would appreciate any thoughts or feedback that you could share. Please feel free to contact me at your convenience.  Thanks for listening and for sharing the wonderful articles.

Here's my reply to Henry:

Hi Henry

Many thanks for getting in touch it's lovely to hear from you. That Helium article was one of the very first things I wrote in regard to emotional healing but I do get the occasional email from people just like yourself as a result of it. The internet is an amazing thing, eh?

At the moment I'm working on my book on healing obsessions and am writing a section called 'The Semantic Mind - Your Body' which I'm going to put on the blog as a free downloadable document and people with any kind of emotional disorder will find it interesting I think.

Writing this document has kept me away from the blog for about 6 weeks so I'm pleased you've got in touch as it gives me a chance to do a good post - you set such an excellent example of 'what to do' I couldn't resist doing this; thank you for agreeing to my using your email in this way.

Congratulate Yourself

Congratulate yourself on what you're doing - you're on the way. I worked with two people face to face about a year ago; one had a phobia of lifts and the other had a phobia of cats and neither could bring themselves to do what you've already started. I put a lot of effort into these folks and by the third meeting they just stopped turning up without telling me why (I suspect they developed a phobia of me!).  The mistake I think I made here was I tried to 'soften the blow' by giving them some of the theory first - I felt if I told them straight what they needed to do they'd just refuse - I no longer think that way.  You have already made the decision to get on with it so it's easier for me to reply to you.  I'd be interested to know if it was the Helium article that persuaded you to take these steps or if you were already planning this process and the article just spurred you on?

I notice you mention not being able to get exposure that's prolonged or intensive enough - sounds like you're a bit frustrated about that but keep going, you'll get there. I had a chap with panic attacks talking to me a while ago who told me his counsellor had given him similar advice to do what you're doing and he'd fallen out with the counsellor over it - I advised him to listen. That's a good counsellor.

Increasing the Intensity

You understand this concept well - the fact you're frustrated at not being able to do this shows you 'get it'.  I remember my own doctor telling me to 'take it easy' because she felt I was trying too hard to heal and I understand why she said this but it's sometimes like being on a roller-coaster ride when you're just going over a hill - it does what it does and it's actually harder to stop than it is to just continue.  At first glance a person reading this might wonder 'why does he want to make it worse?' but that's not what you're doing here.  What you're doing is moving closer to a trapped emotional charge held within the body - you're not creating new charge, you're moving towards discharge.

The only additional emotional response you're creating is the frustration at not being able to discharge what's trapped inside and that will pass if you continue as you are doing.  Eventually you will start to notice changes.

You are wondering how to increase the intensity (in other words how to move closer to the trapped charge). It would help if you could recreate the experience in your imagination' or by arranging a physical experience that's similar but closer to home/easier to get to. You will need to be able to do this systematically and without interruptions otherwise you won't be able to focus in for long enough.

At this point, however, having the intention of 'moving towards' will eventually get you there. Does shutting yourself in a small cupboard, for example, create the same affect? Don't do something that's actually dangerous though, eh?! You need to be comfortable 'in reality' whilst moving into your buried emotional sensations.

The unconscious performs a number of functions for us but one of the most important functions is to protect us from pain - this works great when you don't want to start the emotional discharge process but works against you when you do want to start but your unconscious is convinced you won't 'survive' the experience.  At this point it helps if you can see your unconscious as a protective waiter who comes to the table and asks 'are you sure you're ready for this dish?'.  Then it brings you samples to taste - and asks if you're ready again.  The frustration is that of a hungry customer wanting the waiter to bring the full meal.

Don't worry, if you keep asking the waiter eventually brings the full meal.  Then when you've had enough the waiter takes it away again ...

"The Three Elements of Emotional Acceptance" Article

You're already demonstrating you understand this model; you know you've got trapped energy in your body that needs to be 'fed through the issue' and you've got to bring that up; you know you've got to bring yourself to accept the whole process as it happens; but I'm just wondering what the issue is: do you think it's about a fear of suffocation or more a social fear of other people closing in on you?

If you continue as you are doing you should eventually see these things appearing with more clarity. There are slight differences between obsessions and phobias - obsessions are based around 'shapes and experiences' held as reflections internally - an image will keep reappearing in the mind and an overwhelming emotional response accompanies it; with phobias  it's the same model but it only arises when you are close or know you are going to be close to these 'shapes and experiences' externally. If you can recreate that scenario strongly enough in your imagination you won't need actual lifts/planes to do the work necessary to clear the experience from your system.

Emotional Hijacking

'These setbacks include being momentarily stuck and what I call near-miss or as-if misinterpretations' - what do you mean by 'being momentarily stuck'? Do you mean not being able to think properly? That's normal - it's called 'emotional hijacking' and that's what you have to give in to.

When I (finally!) get 'the Semantic Mind' on the blog you'll be able to read more about this but basically what I say here is that the body runs the show and our job is to try and get the thinking minds to stop thinking so much and move on to allowing the body to do its job. Our minds must surrender to this hijacking for a given amount of time (as long as it takes, in fact - all judgemental self-talk gets in the way).

Trouble is it works much more slowly than our thinking minds do - for example it took 3 months of difficult daily practice for me to overcome my panic attacks and I did this by just allowing myself to 'feel' - with this I didn't get to identify the 'issue' in the Acceptance model as the issue was another emotional response so I couldn't logically identify and label it.

Much later when a single sentence popped into my mind along the lines of 'what's wrong with me?' it dawned on me that a single self-critical sentence was the cause of my panic attacks.  The interpretation that something was 'wrong' had caused a severe emotional reaction and it happened so quickly I didn't know I had caused it.  Often the thing that's 'wrong' with an emotional response, and which causes us to produce secondary blocking emotional responses in regard to it, is a belief that something is wrong.  We are socially programmed to believe that emotional responses are bad.  Inappropriate harmful external actions are bad, but the belief you must necessarily produce a harmful action as the result of a painful emotional experience is incorrect.

We can release an intense emotional issue without doing anything in the external world - we just have to be willing to endure that period of emotional hijacking.

Releasing Trapped Energy

'I try to approach elevators with mindfulness and intentions of acceptance such as: "It is OK to be stuck; I can wait it out if necessary; It is not dangerous just frustrating and uncomfortable; It is only my feeling or anxiety; Even if it is stuffy and poorly ventilated, I can still breathe if it got stuck".

So you're worried about the lift getting stuck and being unable to breathe - that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to be afraid of; but the problem is that right now there is no current ' real problem' and you know this and need to release the energy attached to the problem that really only exists in an imagined scenario.  Here's something to think about:

I want you to imagine that at some point you had a genuine need to release a lot of energy into your body to deal with what looked like a genuine threat along the lines of the fears and issues you describe (because even though your fears are currently unfounded they are based around things we would naturally be afraid of when such things happen).  The energy produced to deal with your initial response is still trapped in your body. When you're in a similar situation now the energy inside is being told 'eh, we're near the issue' and so it wants to come out.

What you're feeling when you approach lifts/planes now is produced by your system releasing a bundle of trapped energy. The only thing you have to concentrate on thought-wise is 'I'm releasing the trapped energy' and allow it to come out for as long as it takes.  A caveat I would add to this is that there is probably a 'triggering response' set up in your unconscious mind for releasing new emotional energy but after a while this mechanism 'habituates' and stops triggering so the release of new energy stops.  The unconscious mind may be irritating, but it's not stupid - in fact in conjunction with your body it runs the whole show.

Re-Interpreting the 'Pain'

This has helped to an extent, but my intentions and supporting experience are still weaker than the pain or expectation of pain that I experienced or that I expect when my unfulfilled reaction to escape is triggered.  I even had an elevator game where I would remain on a motionless, empty elevator with the door closed for several minutes or until it was summoned'.

Lots of things to write about here!  I'm going to pick out some of your words and turn them into paragraph headings; then I'm going to talk about taking steps to re-interpret the pain in order to get your unconscious to see things in a different way - this may help it to surrender to the necessary emotional hijacking more effectively.  You have already started to do this but may not be aware of how subtle differences in the way you talk to your unconscious can make a difference.

Intentions

At this stage you should focus on a simple process: go in; experience; observe; come out.  Then do it again.  Then do it again.  Then do it again.

The intention here is to show your unconscious that what you've previously convinced it is a survival-related threat is not dangerous at all (I'm not talking here about the lifts/planes environment but your trapped emotional response itself - you have programmed your unconscious to believe releasing the emotional discharge itself is dangerous) .

Keep going in and coming out and there'll come a point when the unconscious will take over and do what needs to be done.  With your thinking mind you have hit the limit of what you can 'thoughtfully do' just by taking yourself into the response - the job of your thinking now is to observe and record information on what starts to happen.

By going in you tell the unconscious you are ready; when it really believes you it will allow emotional hijacking to take place.  By going in and then coming out again, and realising you are still alive, you reduce both the sense of threat and also start to instill a sense of having some degree of control over the process.  Achieving the understanding that 'I don't like it but I do get to have some influence over what I do with it' starts to build confidence.

As all these things progress and develop, observe.  Don't dictate what should happen with 'expectations', observe, but equally don't become self-critical over having expectations and getting frustrated they're not being met - frustration is a part of the journey.  If you observe closely enough you will see the 'little tricks' that will ensure you never suffer with this problem again.

Eventually you'll learn how it all works as opposed to how you would like it to.  One of the hardest things we have to learn here is that we are natural, organic beings first and not in control of everything.  We are not logic-based machines as our egos like to pretend we are.  Your organic body is designed to sort this kind of problem out for you, but you have to allow it to.

Supporting Experience

The only supporting experience that would have any meaning for you in this situation was if you had a professional history of observing and helping others go through the emotional healing process you're working with or if you have previously had another phobia/anxiety disorder you have healed from (as I said earlier the approach that heals one emotional disorder can be used to heal them all - they're all slightly different in flavour and certain 'tweaks' can affect one emotional disorder better than another - but the same basic approach works on all of them.

Once you've healed your phobia you will have all the experience you need to heal another one much more quickly should it ever happen again.  Don't chastise yourself for 'not knowing exactly what to do' - you don't know what you don't know until you take the learning steps that lead to knowing and the learning is an 'experiential' process rather than an intellectual one. One of the benefits (yes, there are benefits) of working through this kind of emotional blockage is you more naturally come to associate uncomfortable emotional periods with achieving unconditional happiness as a side affect and so are more willing to endure periods of discomfort for the later reward.

The Game:  'I even had an elevator game where I would remain on a motionless, empty elevator with the door closed for several minutes or until it was summoned'

I like the word 'game' you use here - this kind of remark tells me you know what you're doing and are on the right path.  Can you see the 'tone' this gives to what you're doing?


The unconscious responds not just to being 'shown' the situation is not dangerous by being taken into it repeatedly, but also to the 'tone' you communicate to yourself as you do this - even if it is a scenario taking place just in your imagination. The unconscious does best when repeatedly 'shown with tone'.

This may seem a minor thing, but it isn't. If you think of your unconscious as a toddler who you are trying to convince to sleep in a room with the lights out it's a similar conversation. The unconscious has to be gradually persuaded - tell your toddler off for not being willing to sleep in the dark room and you get exactly the opposite affect of that wanted.  When you use this kind of fun-tone in your self-talk you start to re-interpret your 'pain'.

Acceptance Power


I pick up from the things you write that you are looking for something with greater catalysing 'power' to get you through the Acceptance process more quickly (my intentions and supporting experience are still weaker than the pain or expectation of pain).  You're already aware that the standards set by your logical thinking - this thinking is based in your left neo-cortex - is struggling and frustrated by the work and this mind is telling you 'not good enough'.

But by now, as a result of the work you've done so far, you will have sensed and be curious about the 'differences' you are experiencing by deliberately going into the emotional response itself (this is the MOST powerful thing you can do, but the power of it is overwhelming and the brain translates this as 'pain' at first).

What you're looking for now is a translating method that turns what you're experiencing at the emotional level into something you can understand and adapt to at the intellectual level so you can set yourself more realistic targets (am I right?).


Re-Interpreting the Pain Using Imagery Techniques

By 'seeing it as a game' you have already started the intermediate translation process using the mind that 'sees'.  This mid-stage mind has slightly more power than the logical left neo-cortex, but still much less than the unconscious and the Semantic Mind (your body).  The mind I'm talking about here  is your pattern-making mind in your right neo-cortex.  You 'see' with this mind and if you 'see' your experience as a game you communicate strongly to your unconscious in a warmer tone.

OK, I'm going to give you a tip-top secret.  Don't share this with anyone, they won't understand how important this is and you may lose friends.

When I was working on removing my panic attacks (which, as I say, took several months) I did exactly what you're doing - minus the elevators and the planes - and in the middle of it asked my unconscious to provide me with something I could use to speed the process up.  I started to get some very strong imagery appearing and at first I didn't realise what it was - it just seemed totally unrelated.  Then it started to dawn that my unconscious had been provided 'new ways of seeing' and I'd not understood what they were for.  What I'm going to give you now is my 'Sherbet Dab' imagery technique - believe it or not this helped heal my panic attacks a lot faster.

Evaporating The Sherbet Dab Technique (don't laugh - and yes, there's a certain lady I know who's going to rib me over this one)

There used to be a sweet I ate as a child called Sherbet Dab - Sherbet is that usually yellow coloured sweet-stinging-sour-tasting sweet.  Remember it? It's still around.  Go to the sweet shop and buy some.

When this appeared for me I'd been wanting to find a way to change the 'tone' of the emotional pain I was feeling and I started to say:

when I feel the panic symptoms coming on I'm going to imagine that I'm moving into a hill of sherbet; I'm going to imagine I'm converting the sherbet into a yellow gas as I release the energy and I'm evaporating that yellow gas out into nothingness around me.  This pain isn't pain - it's a sweet and sour thing; it doesn't really hurt.  I'm just absorbing sherbet into my body, converting and releasing it.

From then on every time I started to feel the sensations of intense panic I would introduce this imagery and go further into the 'sherbet hill'.

I've never eaten so much imaginery sherbet before.  But it worked.  There are some other techniques I'll be sharing in that book I'm going to finish one day - but you've got to be open minded to use them.  One thing to learn is that when you're working with the unconscious mind you're not working with 'reality' but it's interpretation of your reflections of reality.  Tell it that pain is the releasing of a sticky sweet'n'sour energy source and it'll eventually believe you.

Anyway, it was fun while it lasted and no Sherbet Dabs were harmed during the making of that experience.  Now, take a look at the things I've just written - can you see how the 'tone' of the experience is completely changed by applying this pattern?  We even got a laugh (I did, anyway) out of it.

Give it Time

Patience is required - that's one of the more difficult lessons when healing an emotional problem because the healing hurts.  A broken leg takes about 6 weeks to heal and an emotional problem works in a similar action and time-bound way.

I had a guy telling me a while ago that emotional problems were 'abnormal' so I pointed out to him that people never regard broken legs as 'abnormal' but we've got this daft idea that emotional blocks are abnormal when I know many more people with emotional problems than I do with broken legs.

Emotional problems are even more like having broken legs than having broken legs are - they're not desirable, but they are normal, and they take time to heal.

If you're expecting your thoughts to quickly resolve an emotional problem just ask yourself how quickly would your thoughts heal a broken leg? It's the same principle. It's the action of taking yourself into the emotional response/place you fear that eventually causes the healing to occur; it just takes time. Your intention is working exactly like it should be doing.

I have been reluctant to engage a Cognitive-Behavioural therapist because I do not see how I can be assisted with this as I ultimately have to do it on my own.

I would always recommend getting good professional support if you can (depending on your available resources).

I accessed counselling support both through my GP and through work - my counsellor was a person-centred counsellor, not a CBT. My GP also arranged for me to see a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with a complex form of OCD and also severe depression (at the time I couldn't believe I had depression because I was so 'positive minded' but they were right; it related to a personal loss when I was in my early twenties).

When I decided to start healing (I had suffered with obsessions and panic attacks etc for more than 20 years beforeI decided to get sorted) I set myself a three month target and went to see my GP and told her my plan.  She wanted to help through the use of a psychiatrist and medication but I asked her if we could hold back on that (it actually took 3 years to heal my obsessions but that's good going - some folks remain ill permanently because they can't do the kind of self-work I did and you're doing - both my psychiatrist and my GP told me they were amazed by my progress when I started as they're used to dealing with people who are 'stuck').

Three months into my healing agenda I started to collapse with what's called the 'immobilisation response'. The immobilisation response is something that mammals do when their unconscious believes they are about to be eaten. For people it creates the sensation that your body is physically separated off from your mind - when I looked at my hands, for example, they didn't appear to be attached to my body. It's also called the 'disassociation response' and the purpose behind it is to reduce your physical pain by detaching your conscious mind's connection to your body - an impala goes through exactly the same response when attacked by a predator.

At the time I thought I was going into a diabetic coma! (I'm not diabetic but I searched it up on the internet and that was the conclusion I came to). My GP saw me straight away and explained she saw this kind of thing all the time and it was normal for someone with an anxiety problem. As soon as she explained it the whole problem disappeared of its own accord and a few weeks later my panic attacks had gone.

I did ask for a cognitive behavioural therapist myself but I don't think there was anyone local.  But to tell you the truth I'd already got my own plan together and I dare say it mirrors quite closely what a CBT would probably tell me to do (it looks as though you feel the same way).

However, having a counsellor and a GP (and for a shorter period a psychiatrist) helped me enormously - I'm going to write an article on ezinearticles about this shortly.

That's all for now, Henry.   I would love to hear of your progress (and please if anyone else wants to contact me like Henry has write to me at carl@managemesystems.com or leave a comment below).

'Keep going in, you will eventually come out'.

Regards - Carl

Suffer with Panic Attacks? Here's a useful site ...

Click here to see lots of interesting material on this site which provides a free Panic Prevention email course. I'd recommend you sign up for the free course if you have any type of anxiety related problem - not just panic attacks. There is an audio programme available for under £20 (to me that's really good value) and links to other useful material.

If you're just considering what kind of strategy might help you heal your anxiety problem I'd recommend signing up for every freebie you can get and then pick the option you feel most suited.

I've been receiving the emails from this site for a few weeks now and they know what they're talking about.

Another well-known panic attack expert is Dr Claire Weekes (I read all of her books when wanting to heal from panic attacks). There's an article in my ezinearticles list on what 'emotional acceptance' is in practical terms - which I had trouble understanding when I read her material - but I highly recommend her writing and she writes from the point of view of someone who is both an experienced doctor and a self-healed sufferer of panic attacks.

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