Emotional Healing – from Complex Resistance to Simple Release

Humanity did not create humanity – we just like to think we did.

Thinking we did and then trying to operate ourselves and our emotional responses along the ‘logical’ patterns established in our left, logical thinking neo-cortex causes us to create complex arguments for resisting the emotional release process nature has provided us with.

‘I should not be having this emotional response’ is our ego’s way of trying to establish control, using nothing more than it’s ability to resist the release of emotional energy, over what millions of years of life has put in place for us to access.

Here is an ego-busting fact: the organic connections linking our emotional lower brain to our upper thinking brain are separate from the connections linking our upper thinking brain to our lower emotional brain – and they are much, much stronger. 

It is biologically impossible for your thinking to eliminate the need to acknowledge the influence your emotions have over you.  You can work with your emotions and you can reduce their negative affects by learning to release them so quickly and to such an extent you hardly ever have to struggle with them - but you cannot permanently resist and ignore them.

As a defence mechanism for protecting our hard-won thinking structures the ego is neither good nor bad – but it needs to surrender its hold when dealing with emotional release or it causes us to live a life based on lies and denial and this leads to emotional blocking and overcharging – what we refer to as emotional illness or disorders.

You are organic.

You did not create your emotional system nor any other part of your organic being; natural life did that for you.  Your body obeys the same principles every other mammalian body on the planet has to – what you or any other person you interact with thinks about this fact makes no difference. 

As a baby you knew exactly how your emotional system worked and you worked with it – as an adult, especially if you have an emotional disorder of any kind, you have most likely been socially programmed to resist it.

Sometimes resistance is a social necessity, but this resistance can go too far, to the point it makes you organically sick as you become emotionally overcharged due to habitual extreme emotional blocking.

Let me repeat - you are organic.  You are only able to think because nature made you so you could think; you see imagery in your brain because nature designed you to see things that way; you feel because nature said you needed to feel in order to stay alive and it wants you stay alive long enough to create new life and any new life you create will also have to obey the same principles of organic living you have to.

You can train your emotional system; you can learn from it; you can see it as your greatest resource or your greatest enemy - but you cannot remove it without removing yourself from life.

When you open up to organic truth you actually open up to your true natural self – and it can hurt like hell at first – particularly if you have an emotional disorder of any kind.

The greatest blow to our egos comes when we start to accept we are powerless to change our biology – we may feel helpless and depressed about it.  If we do the ‘feeling work’ required, however, the time comes when this apparently helpless state transforms into knowledge, understanding and then successful, if very slow, emotional progress with eventual unconditional happiness being achieved more often and then almost permanently as a result.

From Complex Resistance to Simple Release

When we suffer with an emotional disorder it is because a collection of socially programmed ‘memes’ (thought patterns adopted from those around us) have combined with our own self-criticisms, alongside our unmet wishes and wants, to form a complex ‘mental resistance stew’.  

You may be or have been in a situation that created an intense emotional response or a number of emotional responses running closely together and you began arguing with the responses themselves – that they should not be happening. 

They were making a bad situation worse.  You were not reacting to the situation in the way you would wish and your emotions were driving you against your conscious will.  You hated yourself.  More truthfully, you hated your organic self.  Why could you just not react perfectly – like Ghandi or Mother Teresa or some other saintly figure might in the same situation?  Your emotions made you feel stupid.

You saw your emotional system as working against you.  Resistance Stew emerged in your body and mind.  This kind of stew contains complex arguments against feeling your feelings. 

Your logical mind continually builds resistant layers, one over the other, supporting the unconscious resistant beliefs already in place – while wondering at the same time when help is coming from some external source to stop it all.

Unfortunately the only way to get rid of this Complex Resistance Stew is to eat it.  Taste it.  Challenge it by going through it.  At first when you start to do this the whole thing looks even worse because you bring together all the feelings, all the images, all the thoughts.  Your logical mind is swamped by intense hormonally driven stimulation and it resents having to go through this because it knows these things only exist within the confines of your own mind and body and not in the real world.

What a mess.  But if you eat the mess, if you enter it and digest it for long enough, simplicity starts to emerge. 

There are only three main elements to the development and removal of an emotional disorder; but first let us look at the normal emotional process:

The three main elements of your normal emotional system

(please note this model ignores what goes on in terms of external behaviours and feedback from external sources)

• Words work together to interpret, describe, and produce
• representational Images which lead to the production of and attachment to
• Feelings triggered in your lower Limbic brain the chemical outputs of which are produced in your body as energetic drives and vibrations.

Together the overall result is ‘Experiential Reflection’.  That’s the first half of the emotional cycle and now:

• Feeling energies come back up from the body driving the production of
• images which act as release valves through which the emotional energy attached is allowed to escape through the process of full body and mind vibration and when the emotional energy has passed through our body and mind and the
• (Limbic) emotional brain sees the full emotional cycle has been completed it stops producing new emotional responses and this then leads to the revealing of the
• image-building words that initially produced them.

Finally, because we find that thinking in certain ways or being in certain situations causes us this intense emotional pain we either decide to change the way we think in those situations or instead decide to avoid those situations as much as possible and keep the word-based thinking structure we have in place.

The important thing here is that a conscious decision has to be made and acted upon in regards to future internal thinking or external actions during the emotional release process – if it is not the release process will not be completed and the response will be triggered all over again.

Add mental resistance to the emotional process though and things start to work against us.  Resistance complicates the emotional process by using the left neo-cortex to create secondary imagery that shows bad things will happen if the emotional process is allowed to run its normal path.

We refuse to make changes to our thinking or our external actions and instead go to war on our emotional system itself.

Our ego does this – it says ‘I am special, my thinking structure is more important than my biology and I should not have to listen to what my organically created emotional response system is telling me’ (our emotional system is the source of our intuition, by the way, and when we block it like this we eventually enter a state of deep self-mistrust). 

A blocking emotional system works likes this:

• Words work together to interpret, describe, and produce
• representational Images which lead to the production of and attachment to
• Feelings triggered in your lower Limbic brain the chemical outputs of which are produced in your body as energetic drives and vibrations.

Again, that’s the first half of the emotional cycle but now those:

• Feeling energies come back up from the body driving the production of
• images which act as release valves through which the emotional energy attached is allowed to escape through the process of full body and mind vibration but they are met with
• argumentative conflicting images showing either that the feared things depicted in those images will actually happen if the emotional energy escapes or even worse - as yet unforeseen terrible things will happen if the energy is allowed to escape; and now, seeing that the emotional cycle has not been completed the
• (Limbic) emotional brain concludes the initial situation that led to the production of the emotional response still exists (and is even more serious a threat than it first assessed) and therefore re-produces a more intense emotional response to deal with the perceived threat which causes the thinking mind to be overwhelmed with sensory stimulation and prevents the identification of
• the words creating the secondary images now being used to fight the normal emotional process and because it cannot see that it itself is the cause of the problem the logical thinking brain fights even harder to block the even more intense responses coming through and round and round it goes.

What we effectively end up with now is a very energetic, never-ending ‘story’ working within us.  A battle between an argument for emotional release versus a number of arguments against emotional release.  One of the two sides has to lose the argument for the story to complete – and it is an argument our logical mind can never win because it has not yet accepted the logical structure of our organic body and how the emotional system works within it.  Our relatively small, low power, low energy thinking brain wants to run the show and finds itself forced to learn a long-term lesson it hates.

If we could see the various sentences driving the argument against emotional release and put them into one sentence it would say something like this:

‘I do not like the normal emotional process’.

What it tells us is that we are organic and all we have to do in order to release an emotional problem (including getting rid of all the negative imagery and thinking that comes with it) is feel.

Detect it; feel it; watch the negative imagery and thoughts go by: acknowledge the negative elements but don’t criticise yourself or hold on to  them with questions of ‘why must I suffer with these?’. 

Accepting negative thoughts and imagery are occasionally a part of being human means you eventually stop complicating the emotional process by creating difficult to remove arguments against it. 

If you have an intense feeling go into it – stay there long enough and the imagery will appear.  Feel emotions through the imagery and then any embedded thoughts attached will appear and you then get to change them so the emotional response stops being triggered. 

Feel your feelings when you produce them and everything else falls into place.

Simple.

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?

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

Mindmapping to Balance the Left and Right Brain

Mindmapping is an approach that helps in exploring new ideas; recording your life experiences and working through emotional issues. As often as I can I swing open my A4 journal to draw an A3 sized mindmap across two pages. I start with a central point (such as the date) and then link off from it on everything I've done that day.

At the bottom of this post there a video on iMindmap from Tony Buzan (I've never used this software but would love to); to the left there's a sample mindmap I produced using Inspiration 8; these are paid software packages but you can get free, if not quite so colourful, mindmapping software. I've put a link to a list of free software at the bottom of the post.



My approach to mapping is to write one word or a short sentence (or a quick sketch) and then revisit the map putting in little 'tick boxes' to tick when an action has to be performed.

I record feelings, images, scenarios, actions.  The initial steps use my right brain and then I move over to left brain activities.

I transfer the actions to a small notebook and tick off completed actions through the working day - this is a left brain process.

If you're right brain dominant (which I am) leading a left-brain life can leave you feeling unfulfilled and on a treadmill of to-do's - but those to-do's still need to be done!

You can increase your Mind Power using mindmapping to bring your left and right brain thinking together. Mindmapping is particularly useful when you want to record the outcomes and insights achieved during intense emotional work (exposure therapy, for example, produces overwhelming sensations that 'hijack' the thinking brain - mindmapping allows you to record what you learn experientially without asking you to 'pull yourself together' in order to engage the left/logical mind).

Hope you enjoy the following article from Dr. Vj Mariaraj:

How to Increase Your Mind Power by being a Whole-brain Thinker Using the Technique of Mind Mapping
By Vj Mariara

The term ‘ambidexterity’ means being adept in using both right and left hand. It is a rare inborn trait but it can be learned. The versatility displayed in the use of each hand determines a person’s ambidexterity. Michelangelo, Leonardo Vinci, Einstein, Fleming, Harry Truman, etc., were all ambidextrous. In modern times, you will find many, who were originally left-handed but in the course of their childhood, acquired right-handed habits (at school or home) and thus became ambidextrous.

Along the same lines, we could say we are being ambidextrous when we are multi-tasking – talking over the phone and taking notes or riding a bike, etc. The difference being that instead of our hands, we are using both our right and left hemispheres to successfully juggle our tasks. We have all heard about some people being ‘right-brained’ or ‘left-brained’. In essence it means that the person displays more ‘right-brain’ or ‘left-brain’ oriented skills, although we are all the time integrating both hemispheres in our daily activities.

‘Right’ brain qualities involve imagination, risk taking, artistic abilities, highly philosophical, creative, etc. ‘Left’ brain qualities, on the other hand, are practical, conformist, seek order, have good comprehension skills, etc. Thus ‘right-brain’ people are said to think subjectively, holistically and have strong intuition, while ‘left-brain’ people tend to be more logical, analytical and highly rational. It is found that more often, left-brain thinkers are engineers and scientists, while right-brain thinkers end up being artists and poets.

How and why is it that some people are more adept at certain kind of thought patterns than others? The fact is that while we may inherit certain mental traits and capacities, how we use our mind is what determines our mental prowess. As children we are innately right-brained, displaying great creativity, imagination, spontaneity, open-mindedness and enthusiasm but ironically, as we grow, social, cultural and racial influences constrain these natural traits.

The most comforting thought however is that we can greatly improve our mental abilities by choosing to change our thoughts and applying our mind in a particular direction. Thus if a person is a known conformist, who always walks down the beaten path, he could deliberately try new things, learn to take risks and think imaginatively.

When we combine the power of the two hemispheres, we will be working at our full potential. Ambidextrous mind or whole brain thinking - as it is also known - enhances our brain functions and injects a heightened level of awareness. To foster an ambidextrous mindset, we can work on right-brain learning activities by including patterning, metaphors, analogies, role-playing, visuals, and movement into reading, calculation, and analytical activities. Conscious effort to incorporate left and right brain activities, human consciousness studies, reflective thinking and meditation are excellent means to achieve an ambidextrous mind.

One easy technique that helps in such whole-brain thinking process is Mind Mapping. It aligns the mind to the diffusion of thought and paves way for streaming thoughts and linking new associations. Association essentially is finding the links in logic and ideas, and when these are explored in full, it leads to insight, imagination and creativity.

If we look at great discoveries, we will find the application or association of principle (s) to another. Pertinently, colors, pictures, symbols, etc., highly enhance our learning process as they invoke vividness, clarity of perception and easy dissemination. Mind Mapping technique employs all these aspects and therein lies its power and dynamism. When learning and understanding is done using the Mind Map technique, it naturally becomes a highly effective and powerful way of gaining knowledge. It sure is an ideal way for fostering an ambidextrous or whole brain thinking culture.

Dr. Vj Mariaraj is a Mind Map enthusiast and has been using Mind Maps for the past twelve years. He has created over 5650 Mind Maps. To learn more about mind mapping and to download a free Mind map of a Business Book, send an email to freemindmap@aweber.com

Article Source: Vj Mariara
How to Increase Your Mind Power by being a Whole Brain Thinker Using the Technique of Mind Mapping

My favourite mindmapping software is Inspiration 8, which I've used to produce some of the work on this blog. The main site is here but you can buy Inspiration relatively cheaply on both Amazon and Ebay (just type 'Inspiration software' into the search boxes on the right). I started with version 6 and just kept buying the next upgrade off these sites.

There are also some very good free mindmapping software programmes; here's a list from Wikipedia.

Tony Buzan's iMindMap Mind Mapping Software

Whilst many products have claimed to allow you to Mind Map on a computer, none have managed to fully duplicate Tony's world renown process. Until now that is! iMindMap™ gives you the infinite visual variety, portability, freedom, brain friendliness and effectiveness of traditional highly proven Mind Mapping techniques. Watch our free videos on computer based mind mapping to find out more.

How do you use mindmapping? Please leave a comment.

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


http://EzineArticles.com/?Panic-Attacks,-Social-Phobia,-Obsessions-Or-General-Anxiety---How-to-Beat-Them-With-One-Approach&id=1999346

Found this interesting article about trauma and counselling below.  There's a mistake in our thinking when we think the problem with emotional disorders lies in our 'thinking' - emotional disorders such as trauma are caused by a blocked and frozen emotional response.

The solution lies in finding a way to get the emotional responses flowing and eventually released from the body.  In some cases healing a traumatised response may take as long as the original experience that caused it.

Trauma And Counselling

By Pedro Gondim

Trauma, stress and memory

The word 'trauma' originates from the Greek 'wound', and it refers to both psychological and physiological aspects. Trauma occurs as a result of a serious event and it has deep roots in various levels of the human mind and behaviour.

What causes trauma? Psychological trauma is a broad concept, and its origins are co-related with two well-known mechanisms of the human mind: stress and memory.

Albeit commonly associated with negativeness, stress is an evolutionary advantage. The stress triggering mechanism allows most people to react to dangerous situations prior to consciously detecting it - also known as 'fight or flight' response. The level of a stress response generally dictates the intensity of psychological trauma in an individual.

Memory and trauma are interrelated processes - without the memory of a traumatic event, psychological trauma is non-existent. In addition, memory also plays an active role in the incidence and intensity of stressful responses. Once stress is triggered by an event (a stressor), several processes instigate the assessment of the situation by higher functions of the mind (prefrontal cortex - responsible for decision-making).

If the situation does not constitute danger, the stressing mechanism will gradually shut down and the body will return to normal functioning. If the situation reflects danger, the individual will need to decide what to do - and in that process - the amygdala (a part of the limbic system which plays a key role in human emotions, particularly fear) directs the hippocampus (a central region of human memory) to imprint that information differently from other events. This long-term storage of the memory is explained by its emotionally-attached significance.

Such a mechanism is another 'smart' human feature. Next time the same stressor (or similar) is identified, that memory will be instantly retrieved in order to assist in the individual's reaction. At a subconscious level, there will be an overstressed response to the event. At a conscious level, comparison and previous experience will induce better decision making.

Trauma and Health

Trauma is inevitable in our lives. From the birth of a child, to all stages of its development - traumatic events are common and also part of the 'human experience'. However, the level of trauma caused by an event dictates the short and long-term effects of that occurrence.

For instance, trauma can be related to several mental illnesses. Conditions such as Schizophrenia, Depression, and Bipolar Disease can be triggered by traumatic events. One condition in particular, is directly related to trauma and very common in the counselling context: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD).

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD) occurs when an individual develops a set of behaviours and reactions based on a traumatic event. The traumatic experience interferes with normal functioning, causing the affected person to present avoidance behaviour.

This condition can occur at any age and traumatic stress can be cumulative over a lifetime. Responses to trauma include feelings of intense fear, helplessness, and/or horror. This condition has roots in the relationship between stress, trauma and memory.

It is perceived that PTSDs are originated from a 'defect' in the brain's memory processing functions. As previously described, emotionally attached events are stored differently (at a 'deeper' level). These memories include stressful and traumatic events, particularly those which resulted in some kind of harm and emotional distress to the person.

Upon the identification of the same stressor (or similar) that caused a reaction for the previous situation, the body would instantly trigger an overstressed response. However, in most cases, the new event will not constitute a threat. For instance, a noise could be a stressor from a situation in which a person ended up being assaulted. The same noise, or something similar, could occur in other situations which are harmless. Unless that stressor is reinforced (results in danger over time), your brain will adapt to the stimulus and gradually reduce the stressful response. This process is called 'extinction' (Pavlov's Theory).

If extinction fails to take place, the individual will continue to react (stressfully) to the original stimulus, or similar ones. This is the case for PTSD sufferers. Because the human body is not prepared to maintain stressful status continually, side effects will appear. These effects are both physiological (Coronary Heart Disease, ageing acceleration, etc) and psychological (fear, avoidance, etc).

This explains the occurrence of PTSD in war veterans who were exposed to stress over a long period of time and accident survivors who have been exposed to a highly stressful and traumatic situation.

Trauma and Counselling

The effects of trauma may vary greatly among people. The extent, frequency and intensity of each event are presented according to each person's mindset and previous experiences. And because traumatic events are cumulative over life, it can be quite difficult to provide a treatment that comprises all problems derived from separate traumas.

Most people adapt to trauma in their lives, and through the extinction process, do not experience much psychological harm derived from past events. However, for patients with PTSD, and other stress-triggered conditions, the situation requires further attention.

Currently, counsellors use three major treatments to combat PTSD. These treatments are largely based in psychotherapy, introspection and conditioning:

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on modifying an individual's behaviour by changing their thinking. Therapists believe that by focusing in the individual's perspective, it is possible to bring about behaviour change, and therefore, cope with the trauma. This form of treatment is recommended by the World Health Organisation and it is widely used to combat PTSD symptoms.

Debriefing is single section-based treatment which occurs shortly after the traumatic event. The debriefing process evolves on the 'traumatised' individual's verbal expression of the event. It is suggested that by 'letting out' those memories and feelings, the person is more unlikely develop suppressed emotions, which reduces the effects of trauma. Debriefing is widely used for professionals that deal with traumatic events on a daily basis (e.g. paramedics).

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing is a technique based on a psychophysiological approach. According to the theory, the overload of emotions derived from traumatic events interferes with the individual's information processing episode. That interference, at a physiological level, produces 'flawed' pathways of memory retrieval, which in turn, results in the non-logical perception of the event. For instance, a victim of rape, albeit aware that the fault was of the perpetrator, continually invokes self-blame for the incident. The process of desensitisation and reprocessing would serve to reprogram those pathways, resulting in the extinction or partial extinction of negative symptoms.

About the Author: Pedro Gondim is a writer and publisher for the Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors. The Institute is Australia's largest counsellor training provider, offering the internationally renowned Diploma of Professional Counselling. For more information, visit http://www.aipc.net.au.

Source: www.isnare.com

Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=127882&ca=Self+Help

From tomorrow I'm gong to be doing a few posts on the father of Humanistic/Person-Centred Counsellling; Carl Rogers.

Regards - Carl

Seth does an exposure therapy session and talks about setbacks

Seth goes through his daily exposure therapy routine here (which involves challenging himself to drive further and further away from home).

There are several things to notice:

Acting Like an Expert

No-one is as expert in an anxiety disorder as the person who has it - if you have one you have to start to realise that.  Do you notice how Seth reports on his experience as though he's sitting on the outside of it rather than as a subjective victim?  This is the objective viewpoint at work and he is using his camera to enhance the affect.

If you want to achieve something in life you have to start acting and behaving as though you already have.  This perspective changes the way you function at an unconscious level.  Nothing improves the motivation to learn something better than wanting to teach it to help others; even if you haven't quite learned the lessons fully yourself yet.

Seth has a really good grasp of the process - he's just got to get through it is all.  With lot's of positive self-talk and fierce disciplined determination he will do.



Something else Seth spoke about was 'anticipatory anxiety'.  There are three main types of anxiety involved in this work:

• anticipatory


• actual response


• after-shocks (this stage of the response tends to be accompanied by a sense of helplessness and despondency).

There is a way of seeing all three of these as just one stream of energy which helps you stop thinking about 'which type of fear is it?'  Imagine you have a river of negative energy stored in your body related to the situation you fear; as you approach the situation to which the energy is connected you start opening up and allowing the river through; in direct exposure mode you're letting the full flowing river go by without trying to halt in; in after-shock there's still a period where the emotional energy dregs are still seeping through.  If you picture yourself as releasing a portion of the store of trapped energy every time you do this it helps to make it a more positive experience.

In the next video Seth talks about another experience that all recovering anxiety sufferers go through: setbacks

Dealing with and overcoming anxiety 53 - A setback

Please leave any thoughts, arguments or advice below.

Regards - Carl

Getting Ready for Growth? Prepare to Fail Forwards

Half way through writing this post I had to go to work and tripped, almost falling flat on my face in front of a bunch of strangers (I had already written the first few paragraphs as they appear here and thought it a bit ironic).  But if you want to get somewhere, you've got to take risks.

When babies learn to walk they start by learning to fall forward one step at a time.

With each brave step they risk face-planting into the floor and it's amazing to them when their legs keep appearing in front to stop them doing this.  'Eh, I can do it' they gurgle in baby talk.  Parents are impressed too - they know their child is going to do it eventually because all able-bodied babies do - but it's still a real achievement.  It's not just the walking forward that's the achievement - it's the willingness to bravely take risks in order to develop that says so much.

On the negative side for parents is the awareness their child has just become a hurtling mass of energy on rocket-powered legs and needs watching and chasing a lot more.  Now the parents have to lay down rules and fill the child's head with 'should's' and 'should not's' - and quite rightly too - but the need for safety can eventually get ingrained as an unconscious command that says taking more 'baby steps' in new situations is a dangerous thing to do.  It's good to be safe, but if you're too safe you're not learning; not growing.

Babies achieve this new skill partly because they're determined to copy what the giants around them are doing; partly because they want to 'grow up'; partly because it puts a smile on mum's face and gets lots of attention.  Mostly though they do it because that's the way nature designs human babies - to take carefully measured risks and fall forwards.

It's the same when we first learn to cycle; first go swimming (I had to be rescued by a lifeguard the first time we went to a public baths) and first start school.  We really have no idea if we're going to manage these things until we've been doing them for a while already and we realise 'eh, I'm doing this thing and therefore must be able to do it.  Cool'.

Doing new things and getting into the habit of going through the risky learning cycles involved expands the territories we travel in and the types of social influences we produce and receive.  As we get older the new learning cycles become more complex; we notice a shift in motivations and responses from others; but the growth cycle is still the same old 'baby takes first steps' cycle and there's no way of getting round it.

As we grow older, however, the stakes get higher and we develop a fear of failure - particularly when we start to associate the risk of failing with the harsh punishments and responses of others who, for a variety of reasons, think we should be doing things with a higher success rate attached (usually for them) or things that don't keep reminding them of how few new baby-steps they've been taking lately.

We can discover as adults that not taking new baby steps makes us feel safer - but the trouble with 'safe' is it also means no growth and it also means our learning pathways grow stale.  We feel stale.  Stay 'safe' long enough and you forget how the learning cycle works altogether.  I know highly qualified people who spend most of their time complaining about the lack of opportunities around yet moan about how less able people are getting the jobs they should have.

Do you have a degree?  Were you motivated to get your degree because you thought it would mean you could sit on your backside and the jobs would come bounding towards you or did you get the degree so that your leap would be stronger?

I know both types of people.  I know people who got degrees in order to achieve an 'oasis of safety' and use their intellectual achievements to develop clever strategies to keep themselves stuck right where they are.  They blame others; they resent going for interviews and argue that because they're so intelligent they shouldn't be doing their present job.  Sometimes they sabotage the progression of others out of spite.  They use their stronger legs for stamping purposes.

I also know people who acquire stronger legs and then start leaping; usually carrying others along with them.  Having 'stronger legs' doesn't mean you can stop falling forwards - it means you now get to fall forwards faster and with bigger leaps.

Let's not call it 'falling forwards' - let's call it failing forwards.  In a nutshell, if you're never failing, you're never succeeding.

Below are a collection of short videos  that go on to enforce this message (the longest is Honda's video).

Please check out the START-STOP-CONTINUE-WAIT exercise at the end of the post.

In this first video we look at moving out of our 'comfort-zone':

The Key to Personal Growth | author Dr. Brian Walsh

Sometimes we resent the growth cycle because we're not willing to invest in and develop a 'boring' habit ...

and here it is being said again ...

If you want to Succeed, first learn to fail! Kiran Mazumdar Shaw on Carving your Destiny!

Ready to start failing forward?  This 'START-STOP-CONTINUE-WAIT' Exercise can help give an holistic structure to your actions if used on a weekly basis:


Take a sheet of A4 paper or larger and split it into 4 sections and write the following headings at the top of each section:

• top left section: START


• top right section: STOP


• bottom left section: CONTINUE & IMPROVE


• bottom right section: WAIT

Now write an action into each section that will involve a little bit of risk; eg:

START

• Do one thing a week that I've never done before in regard to something I think is important


• do one thing a week in some unfamiliar area that I think is not important but is 'different'


• Suggest to my fellow team members we hold a 'brainstorming' session once a week to talk about developing new things


• Ask the IT guys if I can spend a day doing work experience in their role (after clearing it with my boss)


• Read one book a week on self-development/taking risks.

STOP

• Procrastinating - break things down into little steps and get something done; stop letting a bit of discomfort hold me back


• telling my team mates how no-one wants to hear what I have to say (given that I expect everything I say to just be 'accepted') when I rarely say much and there's no point in applying for internal vacancies as 'management know who they want anyway' (this may be true but if you're letting it stop you from even trying you need to get this out of your thinking)


• criticising myself for feeling a bit awkward when I try new things - this is part of the cycle.

CONTINUE AND IMPROVE

• further develop the draft holiday management spreadsheet that Dave and I worked on - ask the opinions of others on the design (and take the risk they won't like it)


• get some new swimming goggles - the old ones are about to go; try a new swimming centre


• experiment with some on-line guitar courses in preparation for a 'real-life' course in September


• develop and maintain my CV in a variety of formats so it's quickly to hand if I need it for any job that comes up.

WAIT

• don't spend too much on the on-line guitar course as there's a class starting up at college in September I can go to


• for the woman I've asked for a date to get back to me rather than pressure her - take the risk of not seeming interested enough and risk losing the opportunity - there'll be others


• for the kind of job I actually want to do to come up rather than just applying for everything under the sun.

At the end of each week come back and review your actions and ask yourself if you took enough risks this week to actually make sure you 'grew' in some way.  Applying a little bit of risk rather than taking one huge leap in one particular area will ensure the growth remains steady and balanced.  Although sometimes you may want to deliberately 'go for it big time' in one particular area.

Do you have a particular way of dealing with the need to 'fail forward in order to progress'?  Please share it with others by leaving a comment.

Regards - Carl

Strategy for Healing Supermarket Phobia

Having been someone who used to suffer from many obsessions and phobias I think I tended to take the 'bull at the gate' approach to most of them and it worked for me - I think for folks with obsessions the obsessions pursue them whereas people with phobias go out to pursue the phobia.

In this video an expert who has overcome a social anxiety problem discusses the 'baby-step' strategy he used.  If you'd like to subscribe to his other videos just double click the video and it'll take you to his YouTube channel.



The need for control is very strong in people with anxiety disorders and this is generated by the 'way things should be' thinking in the left neo-cortex logical mind. Getting the desire to be in control of the emotional process out of the way so you can 'lower' yourself into the process, thereby learning to control it indirectly, is key to overcoming anxiety attacks. The idea is that you let the experience flow through you and eventually it evaporates of its own accord.

Was this video helpful in any way? Please leave a comment below.

Regards - Carl

Overcome the Naysayer's

'They'll never change' is one of the most untrue statements we can make about other people - the truth is 'they'll' change (and so will we) whether they want to or not because those who don't change under their own steam get changed by life events around them regardless.

People sometimes say this to others in a bid to keep them 'categorised and controlled'; at other times it's simply a cynic who sees a half-glass-empty world (cynics are not necessarily always a bad thing to have around, to be honest, I'll talk about why in a later post) - but more often than not it's because we don't want someone else to change because we don't want to be changed by them (or shown up to be the kind of person who doesn't cope well with change).

So when you start bouncing around with energy in regard to a new idea prepare to get negative feedback on that enthusiasm - and it'll be usually labelled as 'common sense'.

Here's a nice article about what to do when this starts from Jason and Rebecca Osborn:

Success - How To Overcome The Naysayer’s

By Jason Osborn

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said, “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”

Sometimes the closest people to you are the ones that stop you form achieving greatness in your life. You go to them, full of excitement, to tell them all the great things that you want to do in life. Instead of hearing the support and encouragement from your friends and family, you hear words of doubt and fear.

They may not be saying these things to purposely hurt or discourage you, but they don’t want you to fail or get hurt. So, to stop you from getting hurt down the road they try to stop you at the beginning.

Still, others may try to tell you why it can’t be done and how there are many obstacles in the way that can’t be moved. They look at who you are currently and don’t see the greatness that’s hidden on the inside.

Don’t let these people stop you from reaching your greatness. Here are 4 ways to overcome the naysayer’s.

1. Protect Your Dream.

Whenever you have a burning desire to do something great in life, it’s very hard to not tell everyone you know. You just assume that everyone will be just as excited about it as you are. Minimize the amount of naysayer’s in your life by not telling everyone. You will probably still have people who are negative, but a few naysayers’ are better than a ton of them.

2. Surround Yourself With Greatness.

If you want to do great things in life you need to be around others that have done great things. I’m sure you have heard the saying ‘Success breeds success’. If you are always around people who have never accomplished anything, and never want to accomplish anything great, it will be hard for you to do it yourself. Successful people will help you understand how to overcome the obstacles that you will face. Which leads me to the next point.

3. Get A Coach Or A Mentor.

If a professional sports team wants to be the best, they hire a coach to help get them there. If they don’t have a coach that can encourage them, train them, guide them, and give them a good kick in the backside when needed, they will never become a great team. Find someone that has done something similar to what you want to do and have them mentor you. Keep this in mind, they are probably very busy and may not have any interest in coaching or training anyone. Don’t let that stop you. If they can’t or won’t, keep looking until you find someone who will. Also, bring something to the table for them as well. You need to give to get.

4. Your Past Doesn’t Dictate Your Future.

You may not have a successful life but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a successful future. Naysayer’s will always try to remind you of your past failures or inadequacies. Keep improving yourself and keep growing. Learn from your past but don’t let it stop you from having a great future. If there is something that you need to change in your life in order to achieve success, then change it. You are the deciding factor on how great your life is going to be. DON’T let your past dictate your future.

If you want to do something great with your life, there will always be someone there to tell you that it can’t be done. Practice these four keys and you will be able to overcome the naysayer’s.

Source: www.isnare.com

Have you got a technique for dealing with the naysayers? Please leave a comment below for others to read.  Here's a link to one of my favourite books for folks who are 'stuck in place' by all that negativity glue around them:

Seth tells Us How to Support Someone with an Anxiety Disorder

In these two videos Seth talks about the support an anxiety disorder sufferer benefits from but there are some caveats I'd add:

• while it's OK to ask for this kind of support from parents or siblings it's not OK to ask for it from children or those who have their own emotional difficulties - the last thing you want is everyone tippy-toeing around you - it just makes things more tense


• in some cases the reason for the anxiety disorder developing in the first place is because the family is seriously dysfunctional and may actually have been criticising the sufferer for years beforehand - this can lead to an unconscious self-critical inner voice - it's like an echo of that person's outer experience - in such cases the person needs to get external (professional) support


• there's a limit to what family and friend supporters can do - they've still got to be themselves. As Seth says though - people are only human.

Two other points I'd like to make here:

• I don't fully agree with the 'relaxation and peace and quiet at all times' approach - I believe exposure therapy needs to be achieved through cycling through both of these stages; in my experience it's experiencing intense emotions for long enough that clears them but you do need to have peaceful rest periods in between - I don't think Seth's suggesting 'no stress ever' but I wouldn't want people to think isolation and total peace are the answer either


• strangely enough depression is not an emotional response - it's a withdrawal response in which the cognitive function (our thoughts) pull back into the lower brain in an effort to avoid painful stimulation - the problem with this is that our thinking pulls back into our emotional brain and so ends up moving closer to the disturbing and ruminating thoughts.

I'll write about depression in more depth in future posts.

Regards - Carl

Your Systematic De-Sensitisation Plan Part Two

In yesterday's post I discussed how a 'systematic desensitisation/exposure therapy' plan is really a 'surrender plan' and went on to say when you first start it can come as such a shock to the system the idea of it being a 'plan' can seem ridiculous because of how overwhelming it is.

I also discussed the need to establish a support network (and you should see these people on a regular cyclical basis for their input and help to be effective).

In this post (and it's another biggie) I'm going to cover the following points:

1. Focus on How You Want to Feel


2. Practice Every Day


3. Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop a Subjective Viewpoint


4. Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers


5. Establish a Weekly Cycle


6. Focus on One Reaction at a Time


7. Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points


8. Judge Progress by What You Can Do


9. Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts


10. Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are.

1  Focus on How You Want to Feel

The first step of any successful system is the identification of a desirable outcome.  Imagine yourself free both of the emotional problem and of the restrictions it places on you - what would you do?  How would that freedom affect your relationships with others - and with yourself? Visualise a place where you want to be emotionally peaceful.  A state where you can be completely content; not be festering on 'how do I deal with my emotional problem?'  This kind of thing is achievable.

What if your desired outcome is not realistic? What if when you get 'there' it's not exactly how you envisioned it?  It does not matter.  When starting towards any goal in life, unless it's a very short-lived one such as 'putting the butter in the fridge' (and sometimes even that doesn't happen if you trip on the kitchen carpet)  we have to accept that final-destination type goals are variable - we never really achieve exactly what we envisioned.  What we do achieve, however, is the journey towards 'different' and 'better'.  As long as we stay on the journey we will keep re-visiting our desirable outcomes and things will gradually improve.

If you have multiple emotional problems you will eventually find yourself having a greater amount of 'emotional free time' to play with and it is realistic to set a goal of having a greater percentage of time free from emotional issues.  If you have a single emotional problem you could start your desensitisation plan on a Friday and be completely problem-free by Monday; but this is unusual - in most cases it will take several weeks and sometimes months.

Although you may not achieve an idealistic new 'you' all the time it will be a much happier you than who you are at the start of the process (instead of being happy 100% of the time you may have to settle for being happy 90% of the time; sigh).

2  Practice Every Day

You have to be careful when you practice, however.  'Opening up' an emotional response fully can leave you feeling exhausted and your focus of attention, especially if you're exposing yourself to an obsession, can be skewed for the rest of the day.  When is your best time of the week for spending 'intense' time?  Try to save the most intense work for those times.  Most days you need to be just 'skimming the edges' of the response.  This will teach your unconscious mind slowly that the response itself is not so dangerous - and it will prepare you to bring the intense work to easier fruition.

Additionally it is around the 'staying with the feeling but not fully going in' that you may get insights into what the response relates to.  If you have had a response for a long time it's easy for the information about the 'issue' to which the response relates to be lost.  For example, if you had a frightening experience in an enclosed space but forgotten the detail you may be confused when having a strong response to a new place that reminds you of it.  By skirting around and exploring the feeling at a lesser intensity you can raise the memory and this gives you a bigger picture to work with.  This helps.

By the time 'intense work time' arrives you will be itching to get in there and accept that the intense emotional response is linked to a viewpoint you accept. Let us say your reason for panicking in enclosed spaces is because you imagined suffocating in such a place but you've told yourself to stop being silly and refused to feel and release the panic.  Would it be silly to panic if you were suffocating and had a strong fear response - no, in fact it might save your life.  So we gradually figure out what the issue is (if we're not sure) and bring that and the response together.

Try not to work on your emotions when walking on busy streets or driving or operating machinery (if you can help it - sometimes the work just follows us around whether we want to switch it off or not).  Keep aware of any situation in which you could be injured or killed due to  not paying attention to the outside world.   I came close to being hit by cars twice because my attention just wasn't on what was going on around me.

Desensitisation work is very distracting.  It dominates your focus of attention and wipes your short-term memory.  You can end up doing such things as not paying for goods when leaving a shop because you can't remember if you paid at checkout or not (I didn't do this but I did upset a newsagent once when he wanted my money and I'd put it back in my pocket because I thought I'd paid him already).  These things happen.

So try and pick a safe place to practice and don't intend to 'open up' completely if you've got some other complex responsibility to meet.  If you've got the day to yourself though, go for it.

3  Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop an Objective Viewpoint

A subjective viewpoint is that of the person affected by the emotional response - this is the viewpoint of a person believing they are being 'done to' and, I hate to say it, it is the viewpoint of a 'victim'.

An objective viewpoint is that of the person sitting on the outside of the emotional response who is able to study it; test it; re-draw it and play with it and figure out how to bring the response under control and then stop it.  This is the viewpoint of a laboratory scientist who treats the subjective viewpoint as a test subject.

Transitioning from the subjective view to the objective view is very, very difficult and takes time.  A Counsellor can assist in making the transition as they sit on the outside of the experience and unconsciously coach you in how to sit in their place while they also sit in your's.  A Counsellor is very unlikely to tell you this is what's happening - it just happens.  You get used to the idea of 'sitting outside the experience and looking in'.

Why do you need to develop the objective viewpoint?  Because it's the decision-maker when it comes to the argument between two other viewpoints that are involved.  When you have an anxiety disorder of any kind and you decide to remove it you've got a war going on inside of you between these two additional viewpoints.

The third viewpoint we're dealing with is that of the trapped emotional response fighting for release - this is the emotional energy contained in the anxiety disorder. In a fictional story this viewpoint would be called the 'Protagonistic Viewpoint'

The fourth viewpoint is the resistance to the release - driven by the parts of you that don't want to go through the releasing experience.  When you want to keep the disorder trapped the disorder is the bad guy and the commitment to keeping the response trapped is the good guy - but when you start to desensitise the argument for and against release is reversed.  The anti-release viewpoint, in a fictional story, would be called the 'Antagonistic Viewpoint'.

The Objective Viewpoint, the part of you that sits outside the experience looking in, decides which of the two viewpoints wins the fight.

4  Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers

During my healing I would constantly surprise myself as I came to realise the issues behind my responses.  At first all I could see were the emotions themselves and I was 'sailing blind'.  But as I repeatedly went into the emotional responses I started to see the 'issues' appear and I'd think 'well, I agree with me thinking that - I can understand it'.  Once I got to this point I was ready to 'unitise'.  It can be difficult to release an emotional response when you don't know what triggered it.

However, I've also released a trapped response without knowing the trigger, particularly when the response, such as panic attacks, was based around the fear of another response!  It's not so easy to remove these responses because you can't clearly see the cause - it's a bit like being afraid of murky fog - you can't clearly identify things.  Nevertheless, the trapped response will evaporate if you keep going.

5  Establish a Weekly Cycle

It's a good idea to build the healing cycle around your appointments with your counsellor - this way you work towards providing the counsellor/doctor/psychiatrist with a progress report.  You can see your counsellor once a week and then as your healing progresses move the appointments further apart.  Each week you should aim to move a little bit further forward - but remember that just being on the journey is enough most weeks.

6  Focus on One Response at a Time

Your intention should be to move towards the 'maximum intensity point' within the emotional response and regard yourself as working in small emotional release cycles.  What happens, whether you plan for it or not, is that by just moving repeatedly into the most intense part of the response you force the emotional release cycle to complete.

Trapped emotional responses form 'layers' in our bodies and when you complete an emotional cycle you remove the top layer and move onto the one below - until one day they're all gone!

I have been reading recently that you should create a scale where level 1 is the mildest fear response and level 10 is the most intense and you should try and keep yourself at 'level 3' or there's a risk of re-inforcing the emotional response .  This may work well with phobias - but it's not quite so simple with obsessions.  I have also recently seen a report by a respected doctor that states desensitisation does not work on obsessions. Sorry but this is utter rubbish.  Desensitisation and exposure therapy work on all emotional responses as long as you're willing to do the work necessary, it's that simple.

Personally when I wanted to heal from my obsessions I wanted to heal as quickly as possible - I just could not be bothered with all that scales malarkey.  I was a Level 8 no matter what and it was Level 12 that finally sorted it out for me.  But yes - focus on one emotional layer at a time.

7  Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points

I'm a bit of a workaholic - I like a list of 'things I did today' at the end of every day and one of my arguments against doing the emotional work was that it was not 'productive'.  By combining the emotional work with some tedious and mentally undemanding task such as wallpaper stripping or ironing (mind that hot iron - ooch) I could do both the 'self-indulgent' emotional work and also find myself with a stripped wall or the ironing done at the end of it.

I could not do complex intellectual work and the emotional work at the same time - I could not even write my experiences down during the emotional work because if you're doing the emotional work right the logical mind, the intellectual, judgemental and interfering left neo-cortex, is hijacked and shut down.

Another distraction I combined with the intense emotional work was pleasant relaxing music; it took the edge off the pain -  my favourite was the Theta Meditation System music from Dr Jeffrey Thompson (there's a link below) - but I bought a whole stack of other relaxing music to use too.

You should reward yourself at regular intervals (especially after completing a period of desensitisation).  This all creates a more pleasant after- affect.  'Yeah, it was unpleasant, but look, I got the wall stripped'.

8  Judge Progress by What You Can Do

One of the problems with judging how well you're doing on the basis of how you feel when it comes to emotional desensitisation is it's all relative to how you feel right now.  You could have got rid of thirty unwanted emotional responses but if you're stuck in the middle of response thirty one and you look to how you feel as an indicator of how you're progressing you'll come up with 'I feel terrible!  It's not working!'.

This is yet another great role a counsellor can serve - acting as an external 'milestone marker' - someone who reminds you of your progress; of what you were struggling with when you first met and what you can do now as opposed to way back then when you first started.

Base progress on what you can do - on the places no longer off limits to you emotionally - rather than how you feel.

9  Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts

Trapped feelings look for, and produce, strange thought patterns in order to try and gain escape from the body.  Once those feelings have left the body through the correct thought pattern that created them in the first place (the 'triggering issue') all those strange thought patterns that kept catching your attention disappear.  This is how it works.  Accept the strange thoughts as a part of the healing process and don't give them too much time and weight.

10  Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are

At some point your anxiety disorder will start to disappear.  Your panic attacks will stop; your phobias will be gone; your obsessions will be distant memories.  The question you have to ask now is: what caused them?  Anxiety disorders can be caused by sudden shocking events - but I suspect it's more usual for them to appear after an anxious foundation has first been laid down for quite some time.

To maintain emotional happiness you have to be watchful for any future negative emotional responses - and hunt them down; feel and release them; at the earliest opportunity.  If you don't do this you risk a relapse into your anxiety disorder.  I've written a previous post called, I think, 'Get the Vacuum Cleaner Out' - when you get a hint of a negative emotional response find it and go into it as soon as possible.  Having this approach will keep you free of further anxiety problems.

If you don't remove negative feelings in this way, as a habit, the dirty dogs will start nipping at your heels again and they don't go away.  But then you already knew that.

That's the end of this post.  Please note that because it's a generalised view of the desensitisation process there may be some parts of it that need to be adapted slightly for different conditions.

All comments; criticisms and discussion points are gratefully received and if you would like to put a post on the blog in response to this post please email me at carl@managemesystems.com and I'll gladly post it (as long as it's relevant and above board etc) with a link back to your site.

I'm thinking about taking the whole week's posts on desensitisation and producing a free pdf download and an mp3 too - would that be of any use?

Regards - Carl