Escape Emotional Hell: End Your Difficult Close Relationships

The idea our closest relationships are meant to be difficult is a myth.

Life is meant to be difficult; our close relationships are meant to support us in getting through life.  In difficult times we bond closer – the relationships themselves should not be creating the difficult times.

They are meant to make us feel good despite what is going on in the outside world.  In close relationships worth having you do your best to support the others you relate to, right?

Not everyone thinks like this though.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are thinking ‘well I know relationships are meant to be difficult but I did not think they were supposed to be this difficult’, and you have been thinking this for some time, it may mean you are missing out on a fact staring you in the face but too painful to face up to yet:

• you are not in a relationship worth having.

You may not, in fact, be in a relationship at all.  Relationships are two way.  At least two people see themselves as being in ‘a relationship’; contributing to and benefitting from that relationship and each cares about the experience the other is having.  The most important factor is a sense of trust.  By thinking highly of them you have opened your Unconscious Mind to this other person and they can now dip right in and affect your feelings directly – so trust is vital.

The main criteria for developing trust in a relationship is that all participants relate.  If relating is blocked because of mistrust there is no relationship.  Do they mistrust you?

If the other person or people refuse to relate to you as you wish to be related to, if they treat you with mistrust or you find them untrustworthy, you need to acknowledge this and decide accordingly.

Your commitment, your investment of time and love and energy, the hopes and dreams you have for the future of this relationship could be yours and just yours alone.

Those negative emotional responses you might be having, the occasional outbursts of rage or crying or grief in response to how you are treated or not treated and then which you feel guilty or really bad about?  Those are signs your Unconscious Mind knows what is going on but your Conscious is refusing to listen to it.

We are surrounded by relationships working just fine without all that angst.  The people in them are having no difficulty making them work.  They just work.  You can have those kinds of relationships too – but you have to accept not everyone is suited to you; not even, unfortunately, blood relatives.

No, you cannot change your blood relatives genetically – but you can change whether or not you relate to them physically and emotionally.

If you are dealing with blood relatives who hold the threat of ‘excommunication from the family’ over your head while they act abusively towards you, relying on the myth of your having no choice but to put up with it (a myth you yourself maybe perpetuate and need to change) I would suggest you challenge those relationships.

But there is a risk you could lose them.  I have.  Two blood relatives of mine borrowed money from me continuously week after week for seven years.

One repaid me by stealing from me while the other ended the relationship when I explained I did not mind loaning the money so much as I minded the lack of warmth and communication in our family – when I loaned money I was ‘liked’ but if I did not loan money or the money was not wanted I was belittled – I wanted us to be a proper family.  I was met with a cold, heartless stare and an ‘I never want to see you again’ in response.

I respected that decision.

There are other blood relatives I have disconnected from for similar reasons  - but really I have not disconnected from them so much as made it clear what kind of relationship I was willing to have or not have and stuck to my ‘guns’.  I used to be emotionally very ill because I could and would not make this kind of tough decision – relationships that do not serve you and the others involved emotionally are a form of self-imposed torture system.

I have not come away from these things completely blameless – I often got very negatively emotional along the way.  But I have learned that when I feel helpless in getting a relationship  to work it is because usually the relationship is unworkable.

We have no power, right or ability to force others to like, respect or value our contribution to their lives.  When we feel helplessness in a situation like this it is because we are genuinely helpless!

The benefit of going through this experience is we get better at spotting, taking part in and enjoying empowering relationships as a result and avoid those potential relationships that would leave us high and dry and possibly emotionally sick again.

Testing Your Relationships

One way to test whether or not you are in a relationship worth having is to ask the other person straight whether or not they think the two of you are in a relationship worth having – when they ask why you are asking just tell them you are going through a phase of testing all your relationships.

How do each of you feel about the relationship?  Each of you should be able to explore the highs and lows and the worries and history of the relationship without either of you becoming too defensive.  This is not intended to be a slanging match – this is exploring the wonder of having a relationship at all.  How do each of you see the relationship developing?

Talk about the future of the relationship.  This may seem like a strange, frightening thing to do but we need to bust through that other myth: relationships are like magic and if you talk about the magic the magic will not work any more.

In every single relationship I have had that worked (and still works) this kind of discussion was seen as a perfectly natural and valid thing to have.  In those that did not work, and which were extremely painful to work on, these kinds of discussions were a taboo and were met with aggressive responses.

My personal experience is that making tough decisions in this area of life is of primary importance in emotional self-care (not just for yourself but for the others involved, too).

Regards - Carl

Obsessions and Phobias - How We Can Lose Direct Control of Our Emotional Process

You have total control of your emotional process up to the point you start trying to take total control of your emotional process.

You may want to read that again.

This paradox is difficult to see by the tired mind of someone who’s been at war with their own emotional system for a prolonged period of time.

Have you ever lived or worked with someone who had a desperate need to prove they were what they already were?  Exhausting, isn’t it?

The moment you see your own emotional energies as a problem is the moment your unconscious mind starts the internal battle of freezing those energies inside your body to prevent the ‘bad stuff’ from leaking out.

We do this ‘freezing’ by using our brain’s built in organic electrical resistance system to hold back the electrical signals coming up from the body (starting with the Reticular Formation in your brain stem) .

In order to directly control your emotions you must first understand you cannot directly control them.  You can delay them – but you should do this in the knowledge the only thing you can control directly is the process by which you manage their appropriate release later.  Once an emotional response is produced in the body you have no choice but to find a way to release it or it will make you sick.  So let me say that again:  the only aspect of the emotional process you have any control over is that of appropriate release.

It’s one of those areas in life where doing the opposite of what you may ‘think’ you should do is what gets you where you want to be.

The ‘Loss of Control’ Tipping Point

There is a tipping point at which the management of an emotional response shifts from being consciously and deliberately managed, by the thinking brain, to being an automated reaction driven by the emotional brain.  In the case of someone suffering with an obsession or a phobia this kind of reaction occurs whether you want it to or not and before you can consciously interrupt it.

This tipping point is reached when the management of the emotional signals coming into the brain shifts from what’s known as the ‘long processing route’ to the ‘short processing route’.

The ‘long route’ involves incoming sensory signals being sent upwards into the upper thinking brains for processing.  Here we have ‘association areas’ where incoming sensory signals are matched and mixed with information already known and trusted.  After full association has taken place (through good old ‘thinking’) we have integrated the new information and can make ‘sense and meaning’ of it.  Any emotional energy attached to the issue is discharged through the activity of your right pattern-making brain and any valid ‘data’ information is processed by your left ‘rational’ brain.  The issue is then either forgotten or stored in our long-term memory and we no longer pay attention to it.

It can take some time for this association process to complete.  However, if we are not willing to complete this process, if we are not willing to think about the sensory information coming in,  there is a risk we will ‘deny’ it and denial can lead to us forcing the new information to go through the brain’s sensory ‘short route’.

The ‘short route’ means the raw signals get sent downwards into the emotional brain for emotional processing.  There’s no ‘association and integration’ processing going on down there unless it involves an emotional response being released somewhere along the line.

Repeatedly refusing to consciously accept and release an emotional response when it comes up from your body into your brain causes the shift from long route to short route processing. This shift in processing is very difficult to reverse.  Difficult, but not impossible.

At the Centre of Both the Long and Short Routes Sits the Thalamus

Two Thalami , resembling the appearance a half-walnut, sit between the upper thinking brain and the lower emotional (limbic) brain. They  act as the centre-point of your  Perception – how you ‘see’ things.

Your Perception is a culmination of all the discussions and relationships going on between several of your brain parts, all of which have a slightly different way of ‘seeing’.  Your most powerful brain part in this decisional process is your left neo-cortex – your conscious logical thinking brain.  This brain part has the power to refuse permission for an emotional response to be processed by your upper thinking brain.

Problem is, once permission for release ‘upstairs’ has been refused the logical brain loses the right to influence how the emotional signals are processed by the lower brain.  It’s a question of losing the rights because at some point we refused the responsibilities.

The Thalamus is the brain’s main sensory signal ‘router’ – it receives all of your visual, sound and touch signals before either your thinking or emotional brain parts get to see them.  The Thalamus filters incoming signals on the basis of what the brain parts around it are telling it they see.  They also tell it what kind of signals they’re looking out for – and it goes hunting for them in the incoming signals.

If your conscious thinking dislikes one of your own emotional responses so much you refuse to accept it as a part of ‘you’ you may then refuse it permission to enter your thinking brain, this forces those signals downwards.

Your emotional brain now tries to manage your emotional process using other emotional responses – as a result your internal emotional system generates a self-perpetuating internal war making you constantly tense and, because your conscious brain is no longer involved in the process, your thinking becomes totally perplexed about what on Earth is happening.  The emotional responses are taking place without your conscious involvement other than you being informed ‘you’re having an intense emotional response!’.

This confusion further reinforces the idea that something is ‘wrong’ and the Thalamus will continue to identify your own emotional responses as an urgent, threatening issue requiring a repeated urgent emotional response – and it will send any and all related signals coming in straight down into your emotional brain for processing.

In order to resolve the problem you must reverse what you did.

You must allow for your emotional energy to come up through your body and enter your brain so you can start the association process.  Doing this will allow you to regain a sense of control because it forces the sensory signals back up the ‘long process route’ and the thinking brain regains the ability to say no to producing the emotional responses in the first place.

Unfortunately by now you will have established a very effective unconscious set of arguments as to why this is a bad idea – and these ideas are absolutely committed to the belief that what you are about to do will kill you.

I’m not joking – your unconscious believes that taking your thinking into the emotional response will kill you and it believes you just don’t ‘get it’.  Your unconscious believes you’re about to do something that’s the equivalent of going into a cage with an unfed lion.

But if you’re willing to go ‘into the cage with the starving lion’ step by step, through the process of exposure therapy, it can be done but the transition involved is a much more intense and painful journey than if you had processed the issue using thinking in the first place.

The question is: how much do you want control of your emotional process back?

Regards.

Carl

Self-Criticism is at the Heart of Most Emotional Disorders

It takes three seconds.

Three seconds to look at your own, frighteningly intense emotional response and say ‘I’ve gone insane’ or ‘I’m so stupid’ or ‘I’m a monster!’ or … insert your own negative self-criticism here.

This is all you need to do become emotionally ill.  Honestly.  An intense emotional response to something followed by a nice juicy heavy duty self-critical judgement.

You see, this isn’t just a mere string of words.  This is a viewpoint – this is a self-image viewpoint; it’s a snapshot picture you produce of ‘you’.  And when you say it, because you’re in the middle of an emotionally intense moment and because our minds remember our viewpoints best when we produce them in an intense emotional state, your mind will flash this belief through your brain and body.

And because this experience is so intensely emotional, your unconscious mind believes it to be real because you’re ‘feeling’ it and suddenly you see your own emotional process as ‘a problem’.  It’s not the situation you find yourself in that triggered the intense emotional response you’re having, oh no.  It’s you.  Oh my goodness, you’ve gone wrong!

And then you react emotionally to your alleged ‘internal problem’ by producing a secondary emotional reaction designed to freeze the first reaction in place – a double whammy.  You feel bad and then you feel bad about feeling bad … and bad about feeling bad about …

And, because the first emotional response still wants to come out and then the second response wants to come out too you produce further responses designed to hold those initial and secondary responses in place … and it builds and with each additional response you keep telling yourself how much more ‘insane!’ you are.  You are now at war with yourself.  Full blown unconsciously-driven-negative-self-image war.

Three seconds.  The words that created the viewpoint are hidden by all the intense emotional energy produced as a result of the viewpoint you’ve put in place and your thinking brain is now repeatedly hijacked, fogging your mind and memories to a point you can’t figure out what you did to cause this problem.

You can spend weeks to months working through the emotional response, then looking at the viewpoint but still being unsure what’s ‘wrong’ with you, and then you get what we call an ‘insight’.

Insights tend to appear ‘out of the blue’ when we’re not quite expecting them but when they do appear we may self-criticise for not finding them earlier (don’t do that by the way, the self-criticising for not finding the insight earlier thing, this is how insights work).

An ‘insight’ is a ‘view within’.  Guess what you’ll see when you see the ‘insight’?  Those three blasted words you thought all that time ago: ‘I’ve gone insane’.  That’s what you’ll see – those three judgemental words that caused you to form an instant, self-critical viewpoint you burned into your thinking and believed without question instantly and in the heat of the moment.

And within the same three seconds you will then allow yourself to undo that viewpoint.  You suddenly realise how powerful those initial three seconds were and how you need to make sure you never do that to yourself  again.  The next time you experience an emotional response that intense you’ll spot that you’re about to self-criticise and you’ll interrupt yourself (won’t you?  Please do).

Self-criticism in the middle of an intense emotional response – don’t do this.

When you discover your husband has had an affair with your sister thus destroying two of your closest relationships in one go, and you suddenly have an enraged urge to kill them both, instead of thinking ‘I’ve gone insane’ and starting to fight your own response go get practical, professional help to get the emotions safely out of your body without self-criticising or self-harming yourself or hurting them.

Also – don’t allow abusers or people who don’t respect you to provide you with self-criticisms you then start applying as self-critical judgements.  It has the same devastating affect.

The majority of emotional disorders are caused by the basic self-critical belief ‘I should not be feeling this’.  Seriously.

Acknowledge what you feel, accept it regardless of intensity and find a constructive way to get it out of your system as soon as possible - your chances of remaining emotionally well are then much higher.

In every instance where I have helped someone with an emotional problem (myself included) I hear the self-criticisms spew out:

‘My silly behaviour’

‘My accidents’

‘It’s stupid of me …’

‘I am dangerous …’

‘I need to be locked up …’

‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with me …’

and within a matter of half an hour to an hour I get smiles from these folks simply by showing them a completely different set of viewpoints to adopt (they don’t become well straight away – but simply realising they’re not what they keep telling themselves they are makes a huge difference – they’ve got their own insights to find and they’re on the way).

You know those three seconds?  Don’t do it.  Let yourself off the hook. Allow yourself to be a fully rounded sometimes emotionally-intense human being.  We’ve been feeling this way (and safely releasing the feelings over time and moving on to happiness again) for millions of years.

When you find yourself creating a negative viewpoint of yourself on the basis of an intense emotional response – stop.

Regards

Carl

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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

What Shape Do You Give Your Phobic Response?

These two videos are based around Exposure Therapy - which is simply another term for describing what goes on in systematic de-sensitisation but is much easier to say!  Please watch both videos and then go read the rest of the post below them (don't read the rest of the post before watching the videos as that would be cheating!).

While watching the two videos I want you to think about what 'shape' the two people involved see their emotional response as. What are their unconscious minds 'seeing'? Watch the videos - and then read further down.

Exposure Therapy: Behavior

Intensive Exposure Therapy

I want you to imagine that in your unconscious mind there are only two serious questions:  Am I the predator or is it the predator?  When we see predators what do they look like?  I sometimes ask people who are suffering with depression what shape their emotional response has - does it appear to be overwhelming to them and they fear that when they go in they will never come out?  If so their unconscious has identified the emotional response as a predator eating them.  Then I ask them to describe what actually happens and every time they tell me they go into the response kicking and screaming -  and come out a few days later feeling still terrible about the lack of control they have.  But even though they eventually came out they still 'see' themselves being eaten and digested by the experience.

Then I ask them: what if you see the experience as something you go into, and you eat it, and then come out, and every time you go in that predator you actually eat it from the inside out - what if that predator is really just a pile of food and you're just meant to finish the meal?

In their unconscious minds people with anxiety disorders have registered these situations as predators preparing to eat them - by going into the elevators and coming out again they're showing the unconscious they are still alive (therefore they are not entering a predator's mouth) but also they are able to show their unconscious they actually have more control over the situation than their unconscious believed they had.

The unconscious has to be 'shown' with visual patterns and physical actions (visual patterns alone can be effective but take longer to work).

Other people being involved in their initially painful adventures reinforces the unconscious mind's motivation to keep going but it also helps in 'normalising' the situation. Anxiety disorders are 'normal' conditions - they're not desirable, but they are normal, and they can be eliminated as long as we keep doing the work.

By repeatedly entering 'the mouth of the predator' our unconscious changes it's viewpoint of the shape of the situation from one of being engulfed in the jaws of a predator to one where we ourselves are the predator and have control. Did you see how delighted the lady was to show off how safe she felt now? Her unconscious believes she just ate the elevator.

When you enter an emotional response what shape do you give the process? Please leave comments below or email me at carl@managemesystems.com.

Regards - Carl

PS tomorrow I'm going to post about three different intensity levels of de-sensitisation process - two of which we do all the time.