Emotional Vibrations Part 5 – Managing Your Social Environments

In Part 2 of this series of posts we took a look at Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; a pyramid shaped model explaining we have to satisfy our basic needs first before moving on up to meeting the higher level needs of Loving, Self-Esteem and Self-Actualisation Needs.

In Part 4 I began talking about the Self-Image as a moving picture we develop of ourselves in terms of Social Worth.  I think I explained we base this moving picture on our own observations of overall physical vibrational tone (our emotions); which itself is a product of how we are reacting to both our past and current social environments.

The part of our brain which does the observing, the Prefrontal Cortex, is not itself emotional – it acts as co-ordinator of all our sensory information.  It also performs the role of signal interpreter acting then as direction finder/goal setter.

Put simply it’s your ‘Control’ mechanism – but it can easily make mistakes.  In the case of those of us who have emotional disorders it has made the mistake of misinterpreting the signals and making the wrong decisions in what they’re telling us because there are other beliefs we have emotionally attached to.

The Biggest Decisions You’ll Ever Make

The most fundamental decisions you can start making are your social environment decisions.  You need to be willing to emotionally detach, partially detach, and re-attach, on the basis of which social connections cause you pain and which bring you and others mutual benefit.  Unless you are willing to do this you cannot achieve full emotional healing – ever - because you are not allowing you to be YOU.  This is a life-long process.

Of course I’m not talking here in terms of where the people you associate with are physically located – I’m talking about the types of people you associate with.

Your Self-Image is almost entirely based on the evidence you get from social acceptance/rejection feedback and so to manage your self-image effectively, both for your and everyone else’s benefit, you have to give yourself permission to leave, alter or explore alternative social connections when you’re in social pain.  You have to do a little accepting and rejecting of your own.  You not only have to do unto others as they do unto you – you have to do it at the earliest opportunity before they’ve even get to fully do it to you.

This is where intuition comes in.  Sometimes we can be over-intuitive; we can run from things before we’ve even had a proper look and got the facts.  That’s not my personal experience, however – 9 times out of 10 my intuition was spot on.

I became seriously ill with multiple emotional disorders because I refused to leave an environment  toxic to my emotional well-being for 13 years – my intuition was screaming at me through my emotions and I ignored it.  It took another 15 years, after I’d left the physical environment, before I finally detached from the people concerned.  I remained attached for as long as I did because I believed it was the ‘right thing to do’ and then detached fully when it became obvious it was no longer the right thing to do.  It became ‘obvious’ purely on the basis of unrelenting social rejection and my wish to develop a positive self-image.

Over the years I have learned to listen to my intuition rather than my ‘right thing to do’ thinking patterns and found myself getting happier and happier despite believing I ‘shouldn’t be really’ as a result.

Indirect Control

The Objective Mind – the mind full of models of ‘how things work’ – is the mind best suited to planning your social environments because your Subjective Mind makes decisions on the basis of old emotional attachments.  However, your Objective Mind needs to search the Subjective regarding such things as experiences you enjoyed and felt you grew as a result of; these are the places you need to go to more often in the future if you want to develop a long-term Positive Self-Image.  Your hobbies; your strengths; moments when others complimented you on a skill you weren’t aware of.

You have to manufacture a future for yourself that’s going to lead to ever-increasing stimulation of the positive social kind.  Put yourself in social environments that will guarantee a Positive Self-Image.

I’m going to have to stop writing now as I want to work on a book but below I’m going to leave you with three mindmaps to look at:

• a model of how the Self-Image develops


• Your Self-Image Enemies


• Your Self-Image Friends.

There’s a lot of information in these diagrams – if you want to ask a questions/discuss/comment please leave a comment in the comment box below!

Double clicking on any of these images will open them in a new window.

HOW THE SELF IMAGE DEVELOPS: (start at the little red arrow and follow the cycle from left to right)

The differences between a controlled and an uncontrolled self-image:

Your Self-Image Enemies:

Defeated by using your Self-Image Friends!:

Regards.

Carl

Emotional Vibrations - Part 1 - Your Dominant Vibrational Tone

You vibrate.  How are you vibrating right now (how do you feel)?

Is there a tone you mistrust or don’t understand?  Have you had emotional experiences you felt were wrong or abnormal or too powerful - or do you find yourself stuck in them?

This post concerns itself with how important our negative vibrational tones (negative emotions) are - and the fact they can dominate every decision we make from the point we create them to the point we identify and evaporate them.

I’m not joking when I say you vibrate.  It’s a biological fact.

Sticking out through the surface membranes of every cell in your body are the heads of tiny molecules called ‘receptors’.

These receptor molecules have tails travelling down through the membrane surface into the cell body below them.  Tails that never stop contorting into different shapes.  When excited they can change shape at a rate higher than 10’000 times a second.  They vibrate.

What excites your receptors?  Your ligand molecules.

Ligand molecules travel around your body and brain, carried in the liquids we call hormones and neurotransmitters.  Our ligands carry messages from one part of the body (including the immune system) to others.

Ligands are molecular keys; receptor heads their molecular locks.

When the right ligand locks on to the right receptor head it transmits a message into the receptor.  The receptor then transmits the message deep down into the cell by vibrating its tail; for each vibrational tone there is a different rate of shape-changing activity that creates it.

With millions of receptors vibrating on its surface, a whole cell produces vibrational energy and with billions of cells vibrating, your body produces an overall vibrational tone.  We buzz, hum, and sometimes we scream.

Each emotional state is the product of a different vibrational tone or frequency.

Your Dominant Vibrational Tone Controls How You Think and Act

It also dominates how you think about how you think; how you feel about how you feel; how you react to how you act.  These tones can become self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecies.

Sometimes, when we’ve been stuck with the same vibrational tone for too long, we make the mistake of calling it ‘our personality’.

When a person is emotionally ill they are being controlled by a feeling; not so much by a set of thoughts.  The negative thoughts are produced by the vibrational energy as it connects with the brain’s receptors.

Yes, you can trigger a negative vibrational tone using your thoughts - but more often than not the tone affecting you was stimulated by an external event and you accepted someone else’s opinion of it.  Sometimes this is accidentally brought about; other times it may be deliberately engineered by someone manipulating you.

No-one ever woke up in a morning and thought ‘I know, today I’ll deliberately think in a way that causes me to feel like cr*p for the rest of my life’.  The fact you may be completely unaware you have been given a negative vibrational tone; or of the original circumstances creating it, is something needing to be faced up to and explored before the affects can be removed.

Those affects can be subtle.

Some Things You Should Know About Exploring Your Vibrational Tones (Your Feelings)

Everything I share with you here I learned through direct experience through a long, drawn-out process of trial and error.  I tried for years to out-think my various emotional problems and then, when that didn’t work, I just decided I would go repeatedly into the feelings themselves instead and just stay there for as long as I could.  Even if it killed me (which was what my thoughts were telling me it would do).

Panic attacks; multiple obsessions; phobias; rage attacks; depression.  I cleared the lot using the ‘go into the feelings and ignore the thoughts’ approach.  It took three years of constant daily work to remove my disorders.

In the first three months I cleared my panic attacks; another year and I got rid of my obsessions and phobias; another couple of years reduced and removed the primary responses I had tried to avoid for over twenty years.  I still have those primary responses to deal with now and again - just like every other person does, but I no longer have the problem of having emotions I can’t get rid of.

During this journey I learned a lot about how our emotions - our vibrational tones - work; including:

• They store in layers


• you have to name, acknowledge and normalise their affects on you, before you can remove and forget them


• You have to manage your environments if you want to stay well.

They Store in Layers

By ‘dominant vibrational tone’ what I mean is the vibrational tone you see most often projecting into your thoughts and sometimes out into the world through your behaviours.

Underlying the outwardly most obvious tone there will be other vibrational layers driving those upper conscious behaviours.  Let’s say for example your current dominant tone is anger.

The anger may be produced due to someone or something stopping you from exercising your right to meet a responsibility.  Above the anger layer may be a sense of guilt and a dislike of your perpetual angry state - which means you are angry at being angry which means you believe you should not be angry and so are deliberately keeping yourself in the situation that makes you angry!

You not only feel responsibility for the thing you are given no rights to look after - you also take responsibility for your reaction to the situation too.

Below all this is a layer of fear.  You regard the thing for which you believe you have responsibility, whatever it may be, to be precious.  You’re afraid something bad will happen to it if you’re not allowed to look after it and the consequences are just unacceptable.  Nevertheless, you are still not given the rights to manage this responsibility.

You find you are also afraid because every time you lose your temper it even further weakens the level of rights you have.  You feel trapped and self-critical.  You hate how you are responsible for the whole situation and you cannot seem to bring it under control (or yourself).

Below these levels, however, is also a layer of love.  A layer of care for others or the thing or person you feel responsible for.  You  may no longer be able to see this layer when you’re struggling with the layers above - but it’s there.  We don’t have the above negative layers of vibrational reaction unless we actually care deeply first.

And, after years of struggling to look after the subject of our care and being perpetually denied the rights to meet our responsibility, our resolve to take back control gradually weakens and we finally let go of the sense of responsibility.

But we find ourselves still being influenced by these various vibrational layers we’re stuck with.

When I first started going into my feelings as a strategy for removing my emotional disorders my intention was to go straight into facing the most obvious obsessions and get rid of them - all in three months flat (I have a little chuckle at that memory).

Obsessions are constructed when we have an intense primary disgust response to an image but then regard the disgust response as abnormal and become afraid of it.  This causes the imagery to continually reappear in the conscious mind; each reappearance being accompanied by the strong feelings driving the process.

Obsessions are a ‘hyper-vigilance reaction designed to make sure a dreaded thing doesn’t happen even though it has never even come close to happening.

The only way a person can cope with the condition, if they don’t remove it, is through enforced distraction.  It’s a bit like determinedly reading a novel while a hungry lion pants in your face.

I decided to reverse the avoidance/distraction strategy I had used for over twenty years and go mentally towards the imagery instead.  All emotional hell broke loose inside.  I experienced continuous severe panic attacks.

My stomach chemistry changed; my blood pressure shot sky high (at one point I went into hospital and a nurse told another it was the highest blood pressure reading she’d every seen).  I ended up having EKG tests.  I experienced the ‘mammalian disassociation response’, my doctor repeatedly asked me to slow down my self-work and go onto drugs supervised by a psychiatrist but at that time I couldn’t and wouldn’t.

It took three months of daily work to reduce the intensity of the panic attack response to a point I could start working directly on the obsessions.  My Unconscious definitely didn’t want me to do this.  Initially I found with every single obsession I approached I would have a minor sense of panic, imagery of death would fill my mind, ‘you can’t do this; you won’t cope’ thoughts would appear.  I had no idea if I could actually do what I was trying to do.  I was full of self-doubt that never seemed to go away - but I had to try.

Then I got rid of my first, most obvious, obsession.  Hurrah!  Another one appeared.  An old obsession I remembered from a few years back.  I got rid of that one after a few weeks.  Hurrah!  Another one appeared.  Got rid of that one.  I was getting good at this now.  I cleared another in thirty minutes flat and laughed to myself about the idea of being fully cured by tea time.  Another one appeared.

The next one took a few weeks.  The next one, too.  I noticed some of my phobias were starting to disappear of their own accord (an obsession is a fear of something perceived as dangerous being inside the self; a phobia is a fear of something perceived as dangerous being outside the self).

Although I always had some self-doubt every time I approached an obsession the more obsessions I removed the less intense the fear was and the fewer the ‘don’t do it’ thoughts there were.

Every one of these responses was got rid of by my agreeing to feel the vibrational tone of whatever feeling presented itself next, regardless of what I thought about it.  I learned to hunt inside for the sense of feeling and go into the feelings repeatedly no matter what kind of imagery or thoughts came up.

Twenty-seven obsessions and fourteen phobias later I had learned an awful lot about the emotional process and not one of these responses returned.  ‘Do you know’, I thought to myself ‘I think they work in layers’.  Some research followed and I discovered they do.

The Hippocampus, a peapod shaped brain part in the Limbic Brain, creates chronologically layered maps of our emotional responses and keeps those maps until the vibrational energy attached to them is fully discharged.  Once you have discharged the vibrational energy attached to a map, the map disintegrates and you reveal the next map below it.

Once the panic attacks and the obsessions and the phobias had gone, I had to deal with the depression.  Depression, in my case, was caused by trapped rage.  Trapped rage at what?  I didn’t really know at that time.  I found myself expressing my rage in a closed-off room at people no longer around to hear it (thank goodness) for all the ways they’d done the dirty on me.  And then it hit me.

As I’m working through all this intense emotional stuff, releasing the vibrational energy, I realise I’m starting to access a layer of emotional tone I cannot identify.  It feels very strange.  It feels extremely painful.  I remember it was this tone that made me feel suicidal when I was 19 years old.

A burning sensation over my entire body closing my thinking down and making me feel my world has come to an end.  I feel a mixture of anger, sadness and grief.  This particular vibrational tone dominates how I see my thinking, how I judge myself.  It damages my self image by making me feel ‘not good enough’ in a number of ways about different things.

I am not good enough.  During my daily work in this tone I start to realise the sheer power of what this tone has done to my thoughts and feelings.  It makes me feel isolated and dark.  It is physically overwhelming.  All my emotions from this point on - from the point at which this vibrational tone began dominating my body and mind - looked abnormal.  Nothing about me looks right to me any more when I’m under the affects of this tone.

Strong memories come up that put me back in the original circumstances that led to this tone - circumstances that went on for years and involved different people.  I can see there’s a common thread of some kind running through all of this in my personal history but I can’t bring it all together yet.  Can’t put my finger on what it is I’m seeing.

I find this vibrational tone sparks off a lot of other unwanted emotional responses too - but I still can’t figure out what it is I’m experiencing.  Then I get an insight.  This is ‘shame’.

About a year before this insight I’d been talking to a friend about my previous battle with obsessions.  She had spoken to her mother, a social worker, about the underlying causes of obsessions and her mother had told her in her experience shame was often the underlying cause.  At the time of speaking to my friend I hadn’t yet accessed the ‘shame’ layer.

Here it was.  I had entered the ‘shame’ layer.  I’ll be talking about shame in a later post.  I had now moved on to the next stage of what it takes to remove the affects of a negative vibrational tone.  I had named it.

You Have to Name, Acknowledge and Normalise

… their affects on you, before you can remove and forget them (negative vibrational tones).

What am I talking about here?

Naming

“Until you’ve named a thing, it owns you” - David Allen.

The short-term step in completing a vibrational emotional response internally is to convert it from imagery into words, naming it.

Once you’ve named an experience and discharged the energy attached to it then you can forget about it; unless you want to share the information with the outside world or bring it back to help you deal with another similar problem.

You feel the energy out of your body, causing you to transfer management of the information from your emotion-processing Right Neo-Cortex to your thought-processing Left Neo-Cortex, which by default means the information has to be given a name.  You then store the name in your word-based memories.

Until you can name a thing you will not be able to stop your ‘what the hell is that?’ attention mechanism from looking at it.  Take a look at everything you see around you now and pick out the thing you don’t know the general name of - can you do it?  Before you knew its name, you wondered what it was called and what it did.

You wanted to know if it was safe.  If you think a thing may be dangerous, especially if its one of your own emotions, you’ll keep looking at it.  You’ll keep bringing it up while saying to yourself ‘what the hell is that and what do I about it?’.

You don’t need to know every aspect of everything around you in order to be able to stop paying attention to it - just enough to know it’s safe.  Or, if it can be dangerous, you want to know it’s been made safe and is under your control.  Once you know just enough to know what it is, what it does, and whether or not you need to do something about it, and if not that it’s ‘safe’ - you can forget about it.

When you realise you don’t have to do anything or you’ve done the thing needing to be done (which, in the case of a negative emotional tone is to feel it out) you can let it go.

Acknowledging and Normalising

To acknowledge means ‘to recognise the truth of’.

What do we need to acknowledge?  The fact we are organically designed to be mostly driven by our emotional states.  The nature of our thinking is decided. on the whole, by how we feel.

Happiness is achieved through proper management of our feelings, our overall bodily vibrational tone, rather than through proper management of our every thought.

One of the problems you come up against when trying to focus on the negative thoughts you do not wish to think is you must recreate those negative thoughts in order to try and un-think them.  People suffering with obsessions, for example, are stuck in this loop.  Our memories are designed to keep regurgitating any thought or image with unpleasant emotional energy attached.

A negative thought without emotional energy attached is an ‘objective’ thought which you see yourself as being on the outside of.  A negative thought with emotional energy attached is a ‘subjective’ thought which you see yourself as ‘being in’ and needing to do something about.

So, when you tell yourself ‘I definitely don’t want to think those negative thoughts that make me feel bad so I’ll cover them over with lots of other positive thinking’ what you’re actually doing is attaching negative emotional energy to the negative thoughts and raising their importance in your Unconscious attention mechanism.

You took an objective thought and made it subjective.  You shifted a piece of information being managed in your thinking mind over to your emotional mind for management - which guarantees you’ll change your vibrational tone for the worse.

People suffering with depression are making this mistake.  Brain scans show that when people try to withdraw from negative thinking because of the painful emotional energy attached their brain activity pulls back from the thinking Neo-Cortex down into the Limbic Brain area - the very brain part spark-plugging the negative emotional energy response.  Their thoughts now become much broodier and they have trouble connecting with the outside world, or in developing the new options in thinking that would cause the depression to lift.

If you have a pleasant, happy vibrational tone, negative thoughts will sail right on by without much notice.  If you have a negative vibrational tone, particularly if it’s based on a self-critical self-image, every negative thought or feeling will get caught up in the ‘what the hell is that?’ attention net - you stop and question the meaning of everything going through your mind.

Most Westerners are programmed to believe ‘thinking’ is the thing to focus on in order to improve the quality of our vibrational tone and of our thinking itself.  It isn’t.  For long-term emotional well-being you must focus on discharging your feelings - your physical vibratory sensations.

Several months into my own self-healing journey I began to understand I was training myself to surrender to my true organic nature.  I remember telling my person-centred counsellor ‘I’ve been forced to accept my emotional system is designed by nature and there’s nothing I can do about it’.

The statement seemed a bit strange to the both of us at the time but it was a turning point.  I was just giving up the mental fight to ‘out-think’ and surrendering to the emotional energy; allowing my own body to sort itself out.

Our thinking minds think they control us as if we were quick-fix mechanical mechanisms. Change a few interlocking thought patterns and ‘hey presto'!’ you’ve got a fully functioning happy human being.  In reality we are an overall energy field or, as Dr Candace Pert, author of ‘Molecules of Emotion’ puts it, ‘flickering flames’.

We have to work long-term on our flickering flames inside if we want to become and remain happy.

A mood - a vibratory state - determines how you think. No amount of positive thinking can overcome an emotional state.  You must complete the emotional cycle; releasing the vibrational energy, in order to become your happy self again.

Normalising

Each of us has a view of what ‘normal’ looks like in regards to any area of life we look at.

The ‘norm’ for a thing is its behavioural range, with upper and lower limits.  When behaviour lying outside of those limits occurs we regard this as ‘abnormal’ (which means in some way unsafe and therefore needing to be avoided or defeated).

Until we reach a point at which we have to challenge the unconsciously, socially programmed ‘norms’ we’ve been given, we operate as if they were an obvious truth.

People with emotional disorders have been given a narrow range of ‘acceptable emotional responses’ to work with.  They regard their intense vibrational states as lying outside the normal range.

The truth is, when it comes to emotional responses, human beings do not get to decide what normal looks like.  Nature does.  Although we refer to obsessions, phobias, panic attacks and depression as ‘emotional disorders’ they are nothing of the kind.

One of the illusions we suffer from when struggling with these conditions is the idea we are unique in having these experiences.  If we reveal what’s going on inside our heads to others, no-one else will understand.  They’ll lock us up and throw away the key, right?  But the truth is, ‘they’ could be struggling with similar emotional problems of their own and are disguising it just like we are.

Emotional ‘disorders’ - caused by nothing more than a body overcharged with emotional energy needing to be released - are very common.  They are undesirable, but they are common.  Which means by default they are not ‘abnormal’.

It is impossible to have an abnormal emotional response.  It is possible to channel the vibrational energy involved into an abnormal, destructive behaviour - but the response itself is absolutely normal.  It’s what you do with it; how you behave; that decides how appropriately you manage it.

We are all capable of vibrating emotionally in the same way.  We are all capable of becoming emotionally ill (vibrationally overcharged) and then producing thoughts in line with that emotional state.

People with obsessions, phobias, anxiety disorders, anger disorders, depression - and any other emotional problem you care to focus on - produce the same kinds of thoughts as every other person with that particular trapped emotional state.  They hold similar viewpoints and travel a similar internal journey causing them to create them.  That’s why we are able to diagnose what type of anxiety disorder a person has. It is a common experience.

Remove the emotional state and you remove the thoughts.  Most of us don’t like this fact because it’s a slow and painful process.

Sharing with Others

Earlier I mentioned ‘naming’ as the short-term path to healing vibrational energy problems but in the the long-term the full path to normalisation is to share this difficult inner struggle with others, having them come back to you with acceptance and confirmation of it as a shared human experience.  I’ve found repeatedly when talking with someone who’s had or is struggling with an emotional problem disclosing you’ve had a similar experience immediately stimulates their willingness to open up.

It dawns on them their experience is not so strange after all.

It took me several years to overcome this barrier.  I thought once I started to tell others about it they’d ‘lock me up and throw away the key’.

Sharing information on how you feel, think and act while under the influence of strong vibrational tones, in a safe accepting environment, and having others confirm they have the same understanding of the experience, is what finally helps you release the problem and the memory of it.

But not all environments are accepting.  Some of are directly responsible for causing the problem to develop in the first place.

In the next post I’ll be writing about vibrational environments you need to identify and avoid if you want to remain emotional happy.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 11) - Talking to the Washed Up Volleyball and …

… liking what it says?

There is a never ending conflict between the current nature of your self-talk and the nature of the feedback you receive from your different environments.  Are you normal?  Are you acceptable?  Do you need to change?

Or do you need to change your environment instead?

Ever been ‘sent to Coventry’ - given the silent treatment?  This is a standard social punishment technique. Or have you ever received negative feedback?  Did it hurt? If it did: did the level of pain you felt vary according to who the person giving the feedback was; the social situation and the type of relationship you thought you had with them? 

The reason we are vulnerable to feeling pain when exposed to this kind of thing is because the final stage of completing our internal emotional information cycles depends on feedback from sources outside of our control - ‘out there’. 

We have a built-in need to express, and then receive positive feedback on what we express, in order to feel safe in our environment.  The nature of the feedback matters to us.  It decides things for us.

You cannot complete your internal information cycles, so achieving happiness, when your external environment is so hostile you are not even allowed to express yourself out into it. 

In such an environment we have only two choices to make: do I stay and make my environment adapt to me, or leave to find a new environment?  This decision is based on self-talk.  Unless you are a young child, or an adult with some severe disability, no-one else but you can make this decision for you.

You have a problem when most of your self-talk is based on subjective memories of how others treat you, rather than your own self-produced objective understanding.  Particularly when you’ve received negative feedback from those you see as ‘special’. 

We let ‘special’ people into our inner world, attaching to and valuing all they say and do.  Unfortunately we’re at a disadvantage if they do not behave likewise.

We open up our Unconscious to them, trusting they have our best interests at heart. Sometimes what they say and do becomes what we say and do to ourselves - it’s called brainwashing. Mental and emotional marination.

Allowing yourself to be mentally and emotionally marinated by the negative opinions of trusted others means after you’ve left their company you walk away thinking you are the negative environment who imposed yourself on them.  This is often the cause of low self-esteem.

We need to be careful out there - but we also need to be even more careful in here too.  We need to keep control of our self-talk.

In an earlier post I explained the Left Neo-Cortex, the thinking part of us, will not allow the transfer of information confirming a negative self-image.  It remains stuck in the Right Neo-Cortex, keeping us emotionally charged up about it.

This is because a negative self-image means we are not in balance with our environment.  All living organisms have a continuing need to know whether or not they and their environment are in tune - their survival depends on it.

We repeatedly send signals out asking ‘how am I doing here?’ and we need positive signals coming back or we start to question the imbalance.

The true measure of how successful we are in managing our internal world of information is decided by whether or not we, as a whole being, are being accepted or rejected in our external environment (socially and physically) and whether or not we can trust the feedback signals we receive from our own unconscious.

We want to know we are normal.  A person who regards themselves as abnormal, in any way, is by default a more anxious person.

Expression

In the film ‘Castaway’, actor Tom Hanks plays a FedEx employee stranded on an island.

Discovering a washed-up volleyball he paints a face on it, calls it ‘Wilson’ and starts talking to it.  In the character’s mind Wilson acts as a feedback mechanism and he’s so emotionally dependent on Wilson’s company he experiences genuine grief when Wilson gets washed away by the sea later. 

At the start of the film we see Tom’s character concerned mainly with solving logistical and time management problems; he does not come across as a people-orientated man.  As events unfold, however, we see the part of his nature that keeps him going is his emerging need to reconnect with people - he doesn’t just have conversations with Wilson, he also talks to a picture of his wife as if she were present too. 

Have you ever spoken to someone not present?  I have - particularly when clearing emotionally charged memories.  I’ve had full-blown arguments with imaginary people; telling them exactly what I failed to tell them when I had the real-life opportunity. 

I’ve achieved quite a few insights and cleared some very painful emotional responses doing that.  Is this normal?  For me it turned out to be essential.  I know a lot of people who’ve used this kind of approach to resolve their inner demons - including a counsellor friend who cleared an emotional response by beating up her imaginary ex-husband with an imaginary baseball bat. 

And, although this method was usually painful to go through, it allowed me to finally accept it was they, not I, who were creators of the unacceptable environments I had left. 

We need to express, using whatever method best suits us at the time in a safe environment, in order to clear out our emotional baggage and accept our emotional process.  It’s how we work.  Quite often the reason people develop emotional disorders is because they’ve been brainwashed by a hostile environment, created by one or more other people, into repressing this need.

We can express in a variety of ways, but the two main types are Unconsciously and Consciously.

Unconscious Expression

Unconscious expression is all about energy release.

When you manage information in your Unconscious, through your feelings and your image-based Right Neo-Cortex, you are managing vibrational energy.

This energy projects outwards through your physical mannerisms, voice tone and behaviours. Do you have any personal habits you’re only aware of when others point them out?  I have a few.

When I’m concentrating I tend to have a ‘Mr Sad’ introspective face.  People sometimes comment ‘Carl, don’t look so sad’ and I reply ‘I like being sad, it cheers me up’. 

If I’m walking somewhere with an intention of doing something I find meaningful I tend to lean forward a little bit - I’ve had colleagues refer to it as my ‘purposeful walk’. 

As a child I would always have a red nose because if I got excited about an idea I would rub my nose furiously (looking like a rabbit cleaning itself) and I had a lot of ideas.  I still have this tendency but it’s not as bad as it used to be; some folks think it’s due to heavy drinking but it’s not.  Honest. 

So if I’m thinking excitedly about something while walking towards it you’ll see me leaning forward with a sad expression sporting a bright red nose. All driven by unconscious energy.

We express unconsciously through all the things we physically do or don’t do.  If a friend tells you three times they definitely want to do something with you but three times they don’t show up what are they really telling you?  It’s their Unconscious expressing what they really want; overriding what they’re consciously planning. 

If you were to point the difference out between what they’re saying and what they’re doing they might admit, perhaps emotionally, you’re right.  Experience has taught me to watch what people do; rather than what they say - because our Unconscious energy is what decides the future in the long term.

I’ve also learned not to blame or point out these inconsistencies unless absolutely necessary - why bother?  It just causes bad feeling on all sides. 

Let’s say, though, that instead of people pointing my unconscious habits out to me in a playful way, as they usually do, there’s a real atmosphere of social rejection in which I am being punished, maybe being shouted at or ‘sent to Coventry’.  What do I do then?  To escape the pain of social rejection I may decide to repress my unconscious energies.

Repression of Unconscious Expression

We can tune into our unconscious energy and create different routes for releasing this energy as it arises - so if I know I can do this, and want to, I can find ways to change my current automatic physical responses by directing my expression of energy into other activities.  For example, if a situation makes me angry on a regular basis I can take that anger to the gym and get a better workout instead of releasing it directly at the original trigger.

Alternatively, I can decide to use the energy produced to leave; avoiding the trigger creating the anger response in me.  Or I could use the energy aggressively to tackle the trigger head on.

Trouble is, both the retraining and the leaving options take a lot of time and effort.  I’m only going to do these things if I am willing to funnel the energy into achieving a new goal or if the pain caused by staying where I am is intense enough to drive me away.  The third option, tackling the trigger head on, could involve negative consequences outweighing any benefits gained.

The last option, and its the option all people with emotional blocking disorders have taken, is to trap the emotional energy inside my body so I stop expressing outwardly altogether.  I pretend the energy is not there.  I try to fool my environment - and myself - in the hope my environment will give me positive feedback.  This is ‘denial’.  When the positive feedbacks still fails to come and the trigger keeps triggering my unconsciously driven response I am well on the way to being emotionally ill.

In any environment where the act of expression itself is rejected, no matter what form it takes, we are susceptible to looking at our unconsciously produced energies and, after deciding they are unacceptable for whatever reason, start trapping them inside.

Those of us who adopt the blocking option can become skilled at it, masking our external expressions to the point when we finally start to talk about our inner struggle with others who may have been around us for some time they think we’re lying. 

A blocking person can seem completely calm and ‘together’ on the outside while living in hell on the inside.

The trouble with unconscious energy is it doesn’t just disappear because you don’t want to express it.  It keeps attempting to come up for release and finds various alternative routes to try and project out of the body-mind system.

If we look at people suffering with obsessions, for example, their trapped physical energies are trying to escape through various strange images.  The sufferer is consciously forced to see ever-repeating imagery wondering why on Earth they are unable to stop this from happening in their brain - they believe it’s a ‘thinking’ problem.  It’s actually an energy release problem.

Once the energy has been released, simply by feeling the feelings attached to the imagery, the images disappear as a side affect (just a note here to say that although this is a ‘simple’ process it’s still a difficult and painful thing to do). 

If you’ve opted for blocking, so repressing your emotional energies as a solution to deal with a long-term rejecting environment, your first step may need to be leaving the environment generating the need to repress.

Conscious Expression

Emotional outbursts occur when the unconscious, working through the emotional Limbic, overrides the restrictions placed on it by the master conscious controller of you - your Prefrontal Cortex - and projects itself unrestricted onto the outside world.

Outbursts are particularly likely to happen during the period of life when we are dealing with our most important life choices but at the same time lack the self-control mechanism provided by the Prefrontal Cortex because it is not yet fully formed and connected to the rest of our brain and body.  This period occurs between puberty and our mid-twenties. 

Up until then parents and other responsible adults need to act as the controlling mechanism (unfortunately it is also the time when when we are most vulnerable to the influences of irresponsible adults and the manipulative plans of others who can see our naivety).

The command to engage consciously with your unconscious signals, transferring them to your image and thought processing Neo-Cortex, comes from your Prefrontal Cortex.  This part of you looks backwards at the incoming sensory signals like a rower in a rowing boat; deciding which signals it will pay attention to and which it will block.

It is the part of you that forms a judgement about your self-image and decides what directions you should move in to achieve a positive one.  It decides which of your sensory signals will be forwarded on to your Motor Cortex for physical action to be stimulated.

Physical conscious expression involves talking; writing; drawing; and all your other deliberately planned physical actions. Nice, neat and appropriately packaged for you and others to accept and look at (unless you’re in an environment which refuses to accept your consciously controlled expressions and then don’t be surprised when unconscious expression kicks in and overrides it all again!).

What we need to receive, in response to whatever method of conscious expression we use (and we really do NEED this), is acceptance. 

Unfortunately, because you can’t rely on other people to give you this, you need primarily to learn to give it to yourself. 

When I was emotionally ill I distinctly remember the moment when I decided ‘I need to be more selfish - I need to give myself the absolute right, above everything else, to get happy’.

Once you decide to do this for yourself the next step is to stop tolerating non-accepting environments because they will wear your commitment to self-acceptance down.

Achieving Total Self Acceptance

I like dealing with people who have achieved total self acceptance because:

• they are congruent - what they consciously and unconsciously express match up; as a result of this …
• they don’t tell me what they think I want to hear; so they don’t fool or manipulate me and I can decide quickly whether or not I should invest in developing a common positive-feedback environment with them and if I don’t …
• neither of us feels bad about that - in fact we simply reaffirm our individuality and our right to be who we are.  There is nothing wrong with not being suited to someone else or deciding not to share an environment of some form with them if you are completely unsuited.

Here’s a personal life example: an attractive woman I’ve known for about 15 minutes in total approaches me and asks me to take her back to my place in order to have sex.  I’m taken aback by the direct nature of her approach and I suspect she uses this approach a lot and often gets the results she’s looking for.  I don’t do this kind of casual thing myself so I just laugh it off.

She comes back to me a few weeks later, still interested, and asks me what I look for in a woman.  I tell her ‘honesty - if a woman is honest with me that allows me to make a valid decision about whether or not I should get involved with her and I can’t complain if it turns out later she is exactly the kind of person she said she was’.

So this lady says to me ‘well, I’ll tell you honestly if you get involved with me you’ll find I’m not the kind of woman who sticks to one man and you’d have to accept I see other men for sex too’.

I thanked her for her honesty - and I respected her for it and still do (no, I didn’t get involved). 

She was self-accepting of who she really was and so was I.  When it comes to identifying what a ‘positive feedback environment’ looks like it doesn’t mean you need others to conform to your idea of who they should be.  It means you’re allowed to be who you are.

Choosing and Creating Positive Feedback Environments

I had to get more selfish in order to heal from my emotional disorders.  I had to be willing to end relationships I had long-term emotional commitments to because the others involved had got used to treating me without respect and as though there was something ‘wrong’ with me.

The only thing wrong with me was that I had put up with years of being treated as though there was something wrong with me!  I had come to believe it myself - and it had affected me at the unconscious level.

If you are coming out with expressions such as ‘I need to toughen up’; ‘I’m too soft’; ‘I shouldn’t be letting these things get to me’ - it means you’re forcing yourself to stay in environments you’re unconsciously absorbing negative signals in and you’re trying to pretend otherwise.

We need to live in environments that support our individuality as a person; forget all the gender based prejudices; the shaming tactics and the social politics of it all.  We are individuals foremost.  There is no ‘should be’ when it comes to who we are.

If you are someone who has developed an emotional disorder as a result of not being allowed to express yourself in a rejecting environment it means your body is overcharged with emotional information and the environment you were in has convinced you your feelings are abnormal and you should not complete your own information cycles.

Normalisation

We need to express and gain acceptance so that we can normalise our experiences; name them mentally and let them go.

Imagine you’re listening to a five year old child talking to their teddy bear and when it comes to their doing the voice of the teddy talking back to them you hear them speak, in a deep teddy bear voice: ‘you’re not normal - I think you should see a psychiatrist. You’re not good enough to be playing with the likes of me; I think it’s you who should be locked up a toy box somewhere, not me’.

Would you think that strange?  That’s the kind of self-talk people with anxiety disorders are inflicting on themselves.  They need to find environments in which they can consciously express their unconscious world.  They need to do this so they can bring out and ‘normalise’ their inner experiences as they finally complete their internal information cycles.

Regards - Carl

Depression as a Reaction to a Lack of Freedom

Are you sitting still? Are you sitting still on a regular basis?

Pretty much all religions include the act of regularly 'sitting still' and communicating with our spiritual source as a necessity of becoming a congruent, holistic human being. Atheists need to engage in this practice too if they wish to remain emotionally healthy.

The excellent video below is full of useful information and the need to 'sit still' in order to become unconditionally happy is one of the messages that stands out for me. The first message delivered though is that depression is a reaction to not getting what we are emotionally attached to.

Some things I would add here are:

• Practice gratitude for the things you have, especially when you've just lost something


• don't attach to the outcomes of things; instead attach to the doing of them and being the kind of person who does those things - I deliberately don't attach to the outcomes of things in order to prevent the likelihood of depression developing and as a result of this I've become a constant idea producer with a success rate of about 60% of my ideas being accepted by others (and I remain happy regardless of what others do)


• avoid people who insist they are 'half-glass-full' thinkers but constantly fester on what others didn't do, rather than what they did, and spend their time in immobilised bitterness judging and blaming others - they'll make you depressed just by being around them; especially if they target you with that attitude.

Oh, and did I mention regularly practice stillness?



I've put some Amazon resources below.  If this video had meaning for you or you know of related resources please leave a comment below.  Double-click on the video above to watch other videos from this gentleman - he's got some great stuff.

Regards - Carl

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