Work with Compulsions as Energy Problems Not as Thinking Problems

I remember the first time I felt compelled to look and pay attention to something I did not want to and, after at least three years of concentrated daily work and putting up with the condition for over 20 years, I was right back at that initial point of compulsion.  Being forced to look and not wanting to.

I had removed 27 obsessions, 14 phobias and a number of other layered, intense secondary emotional responses, all of which had been triggered by the desire to fight the affects of this singular place in my mind.  They had done a good job of masking it from me – but now I was back facing the original, apparently unsolvable problem.  What I mentally paid attention to was not under my direct control.  Control of my attention mechanism had literally been taken off me.

The idea you cannot control what you pay attention to and that when it grabs your attention there is nothing, apart from temporary distraction, to relieve the pressure, is a very frightening experience.

The feeling for me came in the centre of my brain - some irresistible force grabbing the backs of my eyeballs and physically turning their attention to look at horrific imagery and my body felt ‘pushed’ towards taking action – but there was nothing to do.

I had received this experience after, would you believe, reading a newspaper article about someone being harmed and killed by a gang.  I had imagined the same thing happening to someone I personally cared about and the emotional responses were so strong it had conveyed a sense of reality to my Unconscious mind.  This was so effective my body was reacting as though the event were happening right now – but there was no event.

I felt stupid about the self-sabotaging problem I had created using just my own imagination but I had no idea how to undo the affects and there was no help I could see to explain the solution to me.  In fact any information I could get back then pretty much confirmed the condition was permanent and I was doomed.

I had read the triggering newspaper article when I was 21 and it had taken less than the a couple of days for the compulsive response to kick in and for me to establish the secondary emotional layers to begin fighting it.

The compulsive physical urge my compulsion produced was to get up and search the building I was in to find the person being hurt and physically stop the gang from hurting them.

So here I was, after over two decades of putting up with the emotional blocks and spending several years clearing them – right back at square one facing the compulsive urge and the feeling of its fierce grip in the middle of my brain turning my attention to look at things I did not wish to look at.

If you have read books on OCD or obsessions you may have read about how this is a ‘thinking’ problem.  So I am looking at my problem wondering what part of my thinking is turning my attention to look at the imagery over and over again and I notice there is no thinking I can immediately see.

I feel the pressure to look in the middle of my brain.  Thinking does not feel like anything and the thinking brain does not feel.  Feeling is an emotional problem.  Feeling is an energy problem.  The great news about an energy problem is if you remove the energy through feeling you remove the problem.

So I entered the feelings gripping the middle of my brain, forcing my attention to look, and over a couple of days this feeling started to reduce and the imagery in the background (in what I call the Reflection) behind this grabbing sensation started to come up, as did several other feelings.

I agreed to feel everything – and I agreed with the imagery and how I felt about that imagery but to do all this all I needed to do was find the feelings and go into them.

You know what?  Over several weeks I lost that compulsive urge to look.  I can still have those horrible thoughts and images – but I do not have the compulsive urge to keep looking at them.  No urge to look, no need to search buildings,  no gang to fight off, nobody being hurt.

If you have a compulsion you feel grips in the middle of your brain and it is a feeling you can go into I suggest you regard that is an energy problem and not a thinking problem.  Relieve the energy, relieve the problem.

Go in and you just could end up, to your surprise, coming out.

Regards - Carl

Three Reasons You May Feel Like Falling Down When Intensely Emotional

Quite a few people who talk to me about their extreme emotional states will talk about their fear of collapsing or fainting – especially about doing this publicly and being labelled an ‘attention-seeking drama queen/king’.

There are a number of reasons we may feel like falling down when highly emotional; here are three:

• The Mammalian Freeze Response


• Enraged Helplessness (depression)


• Physical reasons.

The Mammalian Freeze Response

Human beings have mammalian bodies – these are the bodies of prey animals.  We do not come equipped with fangs and claws.  Our brains, however, are the brains of super-predators because they can design predatory tools that far outweigh the power of those missing fangs and claws.

This omnivorous mixture sometimes creates a confused and conflicted human animal.

When we become intensely emotional our prey-animal mammalian bodies react like those of other prey mammals while our super-predatory brains fight this unwanted intrusion.  This in-fighting delays the body in going through this natural process (it can actually delay it for a lifetime).

Most people have heard of the fight-or-flight response, but there is a third response mammals have – the Mammalian Freeze Response.  Also called the Disassociation Response.  When a mammal is being captured by its natural predator it has the ability to ‘play dead’.  This is not a consciously controlled decision – it is an automatic function of mammalian biology.

It simply lays down and becomes still.

It is also called the Disassociation Response because the brain of the mammal temporarily disconnects from the body in order to reduce pain when being eaten.

If the mammal is not eaten there and then, and the predator wanders off, a short period of time passes before the mammal gets up; shakes itself off and leaves the scene.

When people experience intense emotional responses, particularly if they are anxious, their mammalian bodies sometimes react as if being ‘eaten alive’ and go through the play dead process.

At best they may want to lie down to allow the emotional response to pass through them.  At ‘worst’ they may feel as if six pairs of hands are dragging them to the floor against their will – their body feels heavier and heavier and the muscles become harder and harder to move.

Another common symptom is when they look at their hands they appear to be disconnected from their body (hence the ‘disassociation’ part).

This is not a dangerous state to be in unless it happens regularly – but it is alarming when it happens for the first time.  I suggest you speak to a doctor just to make sure that is what it is.  Their reassurance alone is sometimes enough to help this state pass.

Enraged Helplessness

Sometimes people experience environments they have no immediate control over and feel suppressed and ‘crushed’ in them but for some personal reason are compelled to remain in those environments.  Or they lose an environment (eg a loving relationship) they felt they needed in order to be happy and the environment is taken away from them.

They become sensitised to the situation and extremely emotional and enraged at life.  There may be a specific target or cause, but basically it is ‘at life’.  They feel a desperate urge to get back something lost (rage) alongside a state of not being able to get the lost thing back (helplessness).

When children do this we call it a tantrum; when adults do this we call it dangerous, unacceptable and attention seeking ‘drama queen/king’ behaviour.  This response is very strong – so strong people sometimes attempt suicide to demonstrate how strong it is for them.

The person feels they are repeatedly hitting a brick wall in an important area of their life and may demonstrate this publicly by throwing themselves at the floor – they may do this publicly because they feel others hold the solution to their problem.

If you feel ‘enraged helplessness’ you may act in this desperate way.  You could eventually have to accept that in the particular situation concerned you are in fact both helpless and enraged.

You may now need to take steps to get the emotional reaction out in a safe, non-public way while at the same time negotiating a different route towards getting the things you value so much (but it may have to be a different goal if the initial goal is unobtainable).

Again, this is perfectly normal behaviour – but if you do not want to listen to the opinions of others you need to take the inner turmoil to a professional counsellor trained in helping with this kind of thing.

It is a painful condition to deal with and heal but it can be done and the process can be accepted and cleared.

Physical Reasons

Physical illness can be masked by emotional issues.

Feeling faint can be caused by things like low blood pressure or having the flu or a lack of sleep.  Quite often with anxiety problems we get palpitations in our chest and panic as a result can lead to a feeling of light-headedness.

You may feel like doubling up and laying down with stomach cramps (prolonged anxiety can cause a change in stomach acid balance and lead to digestive problems).

Intense emotional states can make us feel like we are a bit of a hypochondriac and this fear of being labelled as such can cause us not to seek medical advice.  Do not do this – there may be a genuine physical problem developing.

Get it checked out and you will stop worrying about it.

Overall Solutions

When we feel intensely emotional we need to acknowledge the urge to fall down as a normal human condition – undesirable to our ego, but normal.

We should not ignore these signals – something is going on with us.  We need to get help to find out what the cause is.  A physical illness, such as a thyroid problem, can be masked when we just label it ‘emotional’.

Do not be too concerned about the opinions of others when going through this kind of thing unless their opinion is supportive.  I have found those who are negatively critical of others going through this experience tend to follow a similar path when they go through similar situations.  It is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

Humans are built in a certain way and there is no way of getting round this.  The urge to fall down every now and again comes with the package.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness: Removing Compulsions

What is a Compulsion?

A compulsion has two main components:

• an unpleasant triggering thought that repeatedly activates our unconscious attention mechanism accompanied by


• an emotional response generated within the body that makes us feel we need to do something.

A compulsion is the urge to do something preventative in regards to a potential threat.  This can be felt physically as a lifting sensation just below the chest area – it seems to come from the stomach.  It is very strong; very unwanted; and as a result of being unwanted is seen as unpleasant, painful and often interpreted as ‘abnormal’.

We can have compulsions in regards to very simple representations – simple images or words - behind which sit more complex reflections - scenarios in which we have strong imagery of things we value, or wish to protect, being harmed or destroyed.

Trouble is, because the scenario exists only in our minds, there is nothing we can do physically.  Unless, that is, you come to regard just feeling as something you do.

In a bid to calm the urge ‘to do’ for a while we may carry out physical ritualistic acts that reduce the tension - but the urge returns again and again because our Unconscious knows the main task still remains undone.  We have not completed the ‘doing cycle’ it requires us to do to the point our Unconscious can see the task as done and will then let the thoughts and feelings related to the feared threat go by just like our other thoughts do.

Compulsions can seemingly appear from nowhere but they may be supported by a foundation of prolonged anxiety or anger about the area of concern that has been there for some time.  The person becomes more and more sensitised to the issue in much the same way we do to a real-life external negative event that keeps recurring.

This repeated urge to do meets with a repeated ‘there is nothing to do!’ argument from our logical thinking mind (our left neo-cortex) which refuses the impulse to move towards the compelling imagery because the idea of physically doing when there is nothing to physically do looks completely illogical.

Is OCD related to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

I believe it is.  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a condition in which a person has been through a real-life event and has produced such an intense, overwhelming emotional response they are unable to process the response at the time of the event.

The event may be a one-off thing or a long-term series of related incidents that challenges our understanding of life and who we are in relation to that life.  In PTSD the healing process involves the person re-entering their recurring memories of the real-life experience and re-negotiating their route through the experience; through their thoughts, feelings and interpretations; to a point they feel they can let  go of it.  Most of this work involves the imagination.

I would suggest the only difference between PTSD and obsessions/OCD is that one is initiated by real-life events whereas the other is based on mainly imagined events with a real-life anxiety creating background leading up to it.

Our Unconscious Does Not Know the Difference Between Real and Imagined Events

Because we logically know an imagined event is not real we tend to invalidate it – we say ‘it did not really happen and therefore the urge to go and undo the imagined event should not be acknowledged – it should not be there’.

This is what our logical mind says.  It is what the logical minds of some brain experts tell us.  However, we are not dealing with the logical mind – we are dealing with the workings of the Reptilian, Limbic and right neo-cortex pattern creating minds.  We are dealing with emotional energies trapped in the body.

What they want our logical minds to do is not the same thing as what our logical minds think we should do.

What Should We Do when there is Nothing Physically to be Done?

We need to do what our emotional minds need us to do – we need to go into the compulsion, find the Reflection behind it, and, ever so slowly, explore and come to understand what it is that drives it.

Behind the imagery connected to your compulsion; behind the Representation and within the Reflection; you will discover things you are really passionate about; what you care deeply about; what it is in life you want to hold onto.

You need to validate this overly intense experience – accept it – but at the same time feel and release the emotional energy attached to it with a view to removing the intensity.  It is the shocking intensity of it that grabs at your attention mechanism rather than the images themselves.

Releasing emotional energy in this way is ‘doing’.

At some point you will come out of the other side of the Reflection, having fully explored it, having discharged most of the emotional energy attached to it.

The compulsion becomes milder and milder in its attention grabbing affects until one day you see the whole thing as a neutrally charged memory and are able to let go of it.

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?

Acceptance through Normalisation is Key to Healing Anxiety Disorders

In order to fully remove serious emotional problems and maintain a generally happier state we may need to challenge and change our ‘global view’ of emotions as a whole.  I call the transition from the globally non-accepting to accepting viewpoint of intense emotions ‘Normalisation’.  All emotional problems, including emotional disorders such as obsessions and phobias, are very normal life events.

They are undesirable, but normal.  Trouble is, sufferers are extremely good at hiding their suffering for very long periods of time (by the way, they are also good at healing and never telling anyone about it).  You may be surrounded by people suffering with emotional illness and not know it.  A survey carried out in the US a couple of decades ago produced results that shocked the government - it revealed over half the population could be classified as mentally or emotionally ill.  Think your emotional condition is an isolated and unusual incident?  Think again.

In my day job working in education I see three to four people a week with intense emotional problems such as phobias;  long term depression; anger issues and OCD - and I do not work as a counsellor or a psychiatrist.  They see many more.  I might see a person with a broken leg once or twice a year.  Yet I have never heard a person with a broken leg refer to their situation as abnormal.  Painful? Absolutely. Inconvenient? Definitely.  Abnormal with lots of self-criticism?  Never.  When I talk to people with emotional illness they make 'my condition is abnormal' comments continuously - and so do those around them.

I suspect the real reason we tell ourselves emotional problems are abnormal is because we, and society, just wish these foggy hard to sort out problems did not exist and by denying them access to our view of what normality is we can put them on hold for a future rainy day.  Unfortunately having an emotional problem makes every day a rainy day.  Broken legs have to be dealt with there and then because we cannot function in the outside world if we do not - but emotional problems?  They will keep - as long as we all decide they are abnormal.

Once we open up to the need to heal our emotional problems, however, we naturally have to declare our condition real and the transition to normalisation starts to happen - but it comes at a price that includes:

• accepting sole ownership for developing your self-management skills


• taking repeated risks


• expanding your pain barrier


• developing your learning process.

Accepting sole ownership for developing your self-management skills

Sole ownership of your emotional well-being lies with you.  You become the detective, the evil scientist experimenting on yourself, the decider, eventually your own skilled healer. There are no shortcuts and no immediate external rewards so your motivation to do this long-term work comes only from you. Let us add personal cheerleader to the list of new roles you need to develop.

Others may help with advice, with additional cheerleading and with other subtle things over time (for example counsellors support our unconscious transition to normalisation by creating an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance which you then pick up on).   Ultimately though the whole thing is your responsibility to carry out alone on a day by day basis in between seeing those helpers and advisors.  You decide when emotional healing should start and when it ends; this normal responsibility is the same for all of us.

Taking repeated risks

When you want to heal from an emotional disorder for the first time in your life you must learn how to disconnect from the outside world and risk going within - into the 'you' that is at that moment a very painful you.  When you get there you will be the only person who arrives.   As you approach these places inside they release more intense painful energies sparking ambivalence - the internally painful state in which two emotionally supported belief systems collide with each other.  I'm going in, do not go in; I am right, you are wrong; this will kill you, so why has it not killed me before?


One belief system craves change while the other wants to keep the status quo and screams 'you are making things worse!' and goes on to show you images of failure and how things could end in disaster if you continue.

This is both frustrating and frightening.  What if you get it wrong?  What if you get to a place inside and find you are trapped in a worse place than you were before you decided to take this journey and this worse place becomes your normal day to day emotional setting - would it not be better to stay just as you are?  What if you get inside an emotional response and discover you are evil and always will be? Maybe you will open up an emotional response and it will compel you to attack someone (anxiety disorders such as obsessions and phobias are built around the need to prevent these things happening - but you will not know this unless you are willing to take the risks).  We go through the same risk taking process as bungee-jumpers and parachutists do - it feels exactly the same.

We may not survivie - but we do.  Do it often enough and you will find the alleged risks just make you giggle a bit when the warning signals appear.  'Oh, that old chestnut'.  As you develop confidence in taking the 'going-in risks' you develop the understanding this is normal.   You do not remove the risk-taking process, you embrace and normalise it.  It works the same way for all of us.

Expanding your pain barrier

I have never had a broken leg and no, I do not want one thank you - but if I did have a broken leg and I recovered from it I would have expanded my pain barrier.  That is, I would have expanded my understanding of what I can go through without it killing me and would know what actions need to happen to get me back to good health.  Negative emotional responses tend to travel along the same nerve routes as our physical pain system and for this reason they register as though they were actually physically hurting us in our brain - but they do not and we can only learn about our emotional limits if we are willing to experience them.

Although what we feel is real, the pain created is actually based on our perception of an event rather than the reality of the event.  When we refuse to accept the nature of an external reality we do so with the intention of attempting to reverse the external reality and most emotional pain is about preventing or undoing something in the outside world that cannot be undone.  When we want to stop or undo our own intense response we may have limited self-management skills and make the mistake of using yet another painful emotional response designed to undo the first - now we have an emotional disorder.

All emotional responses are normal - there is no such thing as abnormal emotional pain.  It is how we work with our emotions that causes or relieves our pain.

If you had a close encounter with a lion and your fear caused you to move quickly away from it you would not stop to criticise your fear as it did the job of speeding you up and temporarily narrowing your thinking down to look only for an escape route - you would want it to do that.  You would accept both the external reality and your response to it.  You would be grateful to the response if it kept you alive.

The same system reacts in regards to other external situations but if we do not want to hear what the response is telling us about our external reality (for example it may be telling us to leave a harmful relationship but we are torn in our decision because we have a strong dream of having a wonderful relationship instead) we cling on to it; we wrestle with it and pin it down - and it fights with us in its determination to protect us but we refuse to see it for what it is and the message it contains.

It is absolutely normal for our emotional responses to transmit pain when we are in situations potentially harmful to us - if we are unwilling to experience the pain when it first appears we risk having to endure it for much longer periods later.  This is a rule of life.

Developing your learning process

Whatever you pay attention to improves learning and then what you learn improves what you are paying attention to.

Chances are the reason you became emotionally ill in the first place was because you made some bad external decisions for yourself and had no idea that was what they were - you found yourself trapped and powerless and began to self-criticise.  Learning stops the self-criticism first then it helps you release the emotional responses from which you gain insights and what you end up with is a route map for what decisions you should be making in the future according to the kind of person you are.  When you start working in this way you learn to trust yourself and the results give you confidence.

You learn a space exists between having an emotional response and taking external behavioural action.  As children we learn the limited model of 'have feelings: take action', but when we become much more powerful as adults this belief system scares the hell out of us so we turn to suppression.  Instead we need to develop the model 'have feelings; go to safe space to safely release feelings while gaining the insights contained in them and then take necessary actions'.

You learn that putting yourself first is very good for other people - how strange is that?  Strange but normal.

By seeing your emotional problems as normal and agreeng to work with them like you would any other real-life problem area you learn what lies beneath your immediately available day to day thinking is not the 'hell' you once saw it as but an amazing, commonly experienced resource most people are too frightened to access.

Break a leg.

Regards - Carl

Exposure Therapy Article - and a great blog - to check out ...

Found a good article on another blog on exposure therapy, habituation and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - the rest of the site is good too! Please go check it out by clicking here and leave a comment if this kind of thing is important to you right now.

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

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

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

Seth is Overcoming His Anxiety Disorder

This fellow is a fellow to follow - meet Seth; he's provided a brilliant set of videos on YouTube relating his journey to overcome his anxiety disorders. I'm going to post them on here and write my take on his journey but if you want to subscribe to his videos directly just click twice on the video and it takes you to his series.

His work is helpful (I think, anyway) to both anxiety disorder sufferers and those supporting them.



In this next video Seth talks about losing a friend due to his anxiety disorder. If you do lose friends when you start to reveal your condition (or even a partner) you need to try and not figure out why if they won't tell you straight - just get back to the work of healing your problem and let them deal with their issues..

Sometimes you can lose a friend simply because they've got a similar emotional disorder they've never revealed to anyone and you talking about yours can have a triggering affect.

I used to have a married couple as friends. I revealed my obsessions to them after knowing them for a few years and they stopped all communications with me. Seeing them in a local park a few months later I said 'Hi' and they completely ignored me and walked by staring straight ahead. It didn't bother me - the true test of friendship is that folks be honest and fair with you and they weren't.

Hope you like the next video (and please read the rest of the post afterwards).

Dealing with and overcoming anxiety 49 - Your true friends

There's one more thing to be a bit wary of and that's making friends with people who are attracted to you because you have an anxiety disorder. I once had a friend who was my friend because he felt superior to me - when I become more successful he didn't want to know me - then when he heard I was down in the dumps again I got a call from him to get together and I declined.

There are some folks who regard people with emotional problems as easily manipulated and 'useful'. You sometimes have to be brutal with yourself and not allow people such as these into your life.

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

Your Systematic De-Sensitisation Plan Part One

When I first started to write this post I did a '10 steps to desensitisation' type thing with carefully planned steps from easiest to hardest response and then I thought 'that's not really how it happens, is it? - not at first'.  You can't make a plan around something before you know what it is you're planning with, can you?  It's like planning to cook a meal in a stranger's kitchen when you've never seen the kitchen you'll be working in - it's not going to happen exactly the way you think.

I'm sure there are folks out there who have started such a plan themselves and then found all the planning they'd done with their logical minds is knocked for six by the reality of how hard desensitisation/exposure therapy hits when you first start.  It's a bit like putting the brakes on a juggernaut with a payload heavier than the juggernaut itself.  All those heavy duty emotional responses just carry right on through you regardless of you having a plan or not.

So I'm going to start off here with the blunt basic foundation of a plan today and I'm going to do the '10 steps' type thing tomorrow; which is perfectly possible once you've got through the shock period at the start of beginning 'the plan' (for me the shock period lasted three months before I was ready for a fully working 'plan' - I had one big payload to reverse into).  Here we go.

Firstly - It's YOUR plan

The first thing to know about your de-sensitisation plan is it's YOUR's.  It's not my plan or anyone else's. Although the overall pattern of recovery is the same for everyone who applies the approach of 'going towards' for long enough there is no 'right or wrong way'.  When you get into the day to day work involved your desensitisation plan has to fit in with your day to day needs, your personality type and your current and future belief systems.

Every single person is unique and so the path and the plan you develop and follow will be unique.  Having said that - it's a bit like travelling on a train - the train's the same train for everyone on it, but the experience of being on the train is an individual thing.

I've read the work of quite a few experts who have produced a lot of very good de-sensitisation plans, but the truth is that the path to de-sensitisation is a crazy paving path through thorny bushes, rather than a straight path that's easy to follow.  At first it can be really messy, depending on what your external life is like and the emotional complexity of your condition - people can have a single phobia or a whole collection of disorders going on (like I used to have).

Secondly - It's a 'Surrender Plan' rather than a 'Take Control Plan'


You're doing this plan because you've come to a realisation you don't directly control the process you're going through.  One of the most difficult periods is the time before you start the plan - and then it gets even worse when you begin!  Let's be honest here - we don't want to do an exposure therapy plan or a de-sensitisation plan (both the same thing) - if we did we wouldn't need a plan at all, would we?  We're doing it because we have to, we're desperate because nothing else has worked.

We wanted the 'quick fix' plan (such as seeing a hypnotherapist) - and even that was an inconvenience -  that didn't work.  So having done the 'Avoidance and Damage Limitation Plan' and having tried the ''Try Every Expensive Expert Other than the Exposure Therapy/De-sensitisation Plan' (and then maybe followed up with the 'I Mistrust Everybody and React Bitterly When Someone Reminds Me about the Exposure Therapy Plan') we finally find ourselves at the 'I Give Up' plan.

When you put it all together it's just a 'Surrender Plan', really, isn't it?

When I first developed the map for my personal exposure therapy journey there was only one sentence going on before it began: 'oh sh*t; that's it; I've had enough; I'm going in - even if it kills me'.  I always knew what I had to do, I just didn't want to do it. After downloading yet another 'international expert tells you in an e-book how to heal at a cost of £70' I read one sentence that stood out for me:  'if you have tried all the techniques I've offered here and they've been of no use to you then you could always try the exposure therapy approach - exposure therapy is 100% effective, but it hurts'.  I was hurting already - what did I have to lose?

So it's really only when you've started the plan that you start to understand just how unrealistic the first plan is and you start to draw up a real plan that's suited more to you.  Here are my recommendations once you're at this stage:

• Get Your Mindset Right


• Get Your Support Network in Place


• Get On With It


• Get Systematic.

Get Your Mindset Right

Here's the mindset I recommend as the 'plan' begins:

• Become More Selfish


• Prepare to Learn


• Release the Ego


• Go in; stay in; stay in some more; come out

Become More Selfish

Selfish people don't generally like the word 'selfish' because it implies ignoring the rights of others - but when I explain to them it means giving yourself time, taking your emotions seriously and doing what now suits you rather than everybody else they'll say 'oh yes, but doesn't everybody do that anyway?  That's not selfishness - that's just common sense'.

If you don't take proper care of yourself you can't take care of anyone else, period.  Give yourself time; make yourself 'worth it'; stop trying to please everybody else.  Make your healing a definite priority.  I remember the time when, in order to put my healing plan into effect, I deliberately started to think 'I need to be more selfish and say no more often otherwise I'll never heal'.  I'd always been about other people - and it had made me ill.

Before you put your healing plan into action you'll need to make sure you are at the centre of it if you want it to work.

Prepare to Learn

Your de-sensitisation plan is probably the most intensely stressful learning curve you will ever go through; so you may as well adopt the attitude of a learner.

Nature will become your teacher as you start opening up to the natural process of 'feeling'.  There's this horrible period when you start to learn you have no direct control over the process - it comes built into all living creatures.

Your only choice is whether or not you go through it, and allow the process to work through you.  Train yourself to observe what nature shows you.  You will learn, for example, how to switch off your judgemental logical mind in order to allow your emotional body and your pattern creating mind to meet each other with less interference so they can achieve the goal of emotional release.

Release the Ego

There's nothing wrong with the ego - it's the mechanism that protects our hard-earned thinking and intuitive processes - but in the case of an anxiety disorder it is currently defending beliefs that are hurting you in the long term while allegedly protecting you in the short term

The unconscious mind of a person suffering from an anxiety disorder, to be blunt, is full of crap.  Mine was - and to an extent still is, but I actively seek it out and destroy it.  We all have a little tub of belief-crap lurking inside of us but some have more than others and a lack of self-awareness is the cause of it - many people get so full of it they spew it out over other people without even realising they're doing it.  I try not to do this myself.

All the hidden belief-crap in our unconscious is emotionally supported - when you challenge these beliefs by 'going-into-to-come-out-of' they come up into conscious awareness and fight their corner.  These pain-laden beliefs will affect your body by mimicking a dangerous situation; for example they can alter your stomach acid balance; change your heart rate; cause nightmares; give you muscular aches and spasms and prevent sleep; threaten you with images of 'cancer' and raise your blood pressure - and your ego will for a time have trouble accepting this powerful fighting viewpoint is a pack of unconscious lies you somehow created and must now face and endure through the healing process.

You see, it's not just a matter of forming a new plan and being allowed to just get on with it - what you're doing initially is fighting several old plans that were working really hard for you until you turned up with your silly new plan and they want to show you just how wrong it is.

You will learn what blind faith really means at this point and it dawns that the grey blobby thing in your head isn't the most important part of the healing journey- your body is.

Go in; stay in; stay in some more; come out


No matter how complex or logical or carefully planned the plan is - if you're not approaching your trapped emotional responses the plan's lost before it begins.  By repeatedly approaching your unwanted responses and going into them for as long as you can you learn the full extent of the experience you are working with.

You experience your emotions at their most intense and you start to learn the limits of those responses - and you find you can endure that limit repeatedly for long periods of time - and still remain alive.  After a time the beliefs that said 'cancer' stop.  The beliefs that said 'it will kill me' are replaced by 'this is different from what I've done before and something's starting to happen'.

You learn about how your emotions affect your thinking (generally they close logical thinking down) and how your thinking affects your emotions - and how  different parts of your brain influence other parts.  But unless you approach and go into your emotions, unless you move towards the triggers that cause you to react, you will never learn these things and you won't change and remove your anxiety disorder.

No matter how higgledy-piggledy and detailed the logical plan is, the main plan of simply repeatedly going into your emotional responses is THE plan that underlies the more logical plan that you get to write down.  I often suspect quite a few of these 10-point-plans are written after the plan has already been carried out and our logical brains want to stamp a 'just look how clever I am with my plan' picture over it.  I'm being a bit harsh here maybe - but at first the plan is a brute force thing.

Get Your Support Network in Place

Oh dear, it's time to take a risk - the risk of telling people you see as 'professionals' - people you fear are going to lock you up and throw away the key or declare you mentally ill (all anxiety disorders are at times put under the heading of 'mental illness' but emotionally driven illness is very different to mental illness).  But don't worry, the professionals have seen an awful lot more of this kind of thing than you have.  The kind of people we're talking about here are:

• Doctors


• Counsellors/Therapists


• Psychiatrists


• Others

Doctors

In my experience there are some doctors who understand this stuff better than others - but there's no way of finding out which doctors are best for you until you start talking to them.  Go to your doctors and start talking.  Talk about your condition and your plan.  My doctors told me to take it easy and wanted me to start on Prozac and see a psychiatrist.    They helped me deal with the physical side affects of my exposure therapy plan; they reassured me when I started to worry about different things.  You need a doctor as part of your support network.

Counsellors/Therapists

Your doctor may refer you to a counsellor and a psychiatrist in addition to wanting to see you themselves.  Person-Centred Counsellors will not give you directive advice - they are trained to support clients in finding their own solutions through a process of exploration and reflection - but they will support you with your plan and may help put you in touch with a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, if your doctor has not already done so (you will lose the Person-Centred Counsellor from your network at this point).  A Person Centred Counsellor will support you indirectly through your de-sensitisation process; a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist will set you homework to do and help you develop a joint plan.

Just as with the doctors you may need to spend time finding the right counsellor, of whatever type, for you.  I went through three counsellors - with several months in between each - before I found a counsellor I felt completely at home with.  It might not have been that the counsellors were not 'right' for me but rather I was not ready for counselling - now even though my anxiety disorders are healed I still see my counsellor, albeit months apart, to work through any new material and stay emotionally happy.  If you think seeing a counsellor is a bit strange just keep in mind that all counsellors are compelled to have systematic counselling themselves if they wish to work as counsellors.  There's a lot of it around.

Psychiatrists

The job of a psychiatrist is to prescribe medication for emotional and mental disorders.  When I first went to see my new psychiatrist for the first time I was expecting to receive a 'counselling' experience - it quickly became clear to me this isn't what psychiatrists do.  After spending time writing all the details of our conversation down and reading my doctor's notes my psychiatrist told me I had a 'complex form of OCD'.  He also told me I had severe depression - which came as a big surprise as I'm one of the most positive-minded thinkers I know (I realised later my being positive minded all the time was a form of denial).

He went on to describe a plan to gradually put me onto heavy doses of Prozac and then spoke about the time I would be weaned off the drug (or not) several years later.  I told him about my de-sensitisation plan and I wanted to keep the Prozac at a low level so I could heal myself rather than rely on drugs.

He agreed to support me with this and within a year I had stopped taking the Prozac altogether and I had removed my obsessions and panic attacks.

I know it's difficult at first but every time you discuss and share information with these trusted professionals you see that they accept your condition easier than you do - the recognition that you have a problem and these folks take it seriously reinforces your confidence and the sense that 'you're worth it'.

The truth is they've seen so much of this thing you previously thought unique to you they regard it as common as the common cold and that's pretty common.

Others

Others are a different story - if you have kept your condition to yourself and now find yourself talking it out with friends it is possible you will lose some of those friends (were they really friends?).  Additionally you may have lots of opinions thrown at you; most of them unhelpful - well meaning, but not in line with your plan.  Things such as 'you need to exercise more' or 'you need a holiday'.

As you start sharing your experience you will be surprised to find other people you regarded as being super-calm people with no problems start opening up about their anxiety disorders - don't be fooled into automatically thinking this means a bond of camaraderie  - you may find yourself being avoided by these people because your bravery may make them feel compelled to behave likewise and the discomfort this causes can lead to their avoiding you.

I'm not saying don't do this - I'm just saying be prepared to learn a whole lot about the human condition during this journey you're making.

It's not all doom and gloom though - you may find people who have been through the exposure therapy themselves and can identify and support you in person or on-line.  There are quite a few such people about now (a lot more than when I was healing five years' ago).

Get On With It

Now you've got a support network (and you will need them, believe me) you can begin.  You're going to get it wrong; you're going to get frustrated; you're going to feel incompetent but nevertheless you have to get on with it.

Give up on the idea of doing it alone; stop thinking you're unique and no-one else understands your predicament.  Get out there and get help; share; lose friends if you have to by making the mistake of telling them about your condition.  But get healed.

Get Systematic

Now you're talking my language.  Systems are cyclical journeys and you must become cyclical.  There's a lot of talk these days about 'straight lines being the shortest distance between two points' well, that works if you're lining up a lot of exposure therapy cycles - because you need sleep; you need food.  There will be days of the week when you make more progress than others and you can plan to do more work on these days.

You also need to plan for rest and having some fun during the healing process.  By getting systematic you:

• plan your environments


• manage your inputs


• go through the de-sensitisation process


• get feedback on the difference between before and after (counsellors are great for this)


• start all over again - working cyclically.

I'm going to post more about this tomorrow (along with the 10 point plan type thing).

Regards - Carl