Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 9) - Information Location and Control

What I’m going to focus on here is the idea you manage the same information using different parts of your brain and body and how the information affects you depends on which part of you is doing the managing of the information; rather than the nature of the information itself.

Let me put it this way: you usually process television news with your Left Neo-Cortex - your thinking brain - with some of the information leaking over to your emotional brain.  This means you have, on the whole, an objective viewpoint and you are watching the news from an outsider’s view.

If you had to process the same information using only your Limbic Brain - and this was sending signals to your image brain - your Right Neo-Cortex - you would be having very powerful emotional responses to what you saw and might never watch the news again.  The Right Neo-Cortex, working with your Limbic Brain, is where you manage your subjective viewpoints - when the same information is being managed here you are in the news.

Same information, but managed by a different part of you.

A person with an emotional disorder is someone stuck in subjective viewpoint even though their personal ‘news’ may have happened and in reality finished 30 years ago.  They’re still experiencing the sensations first hand from within the experience with the sensory signals being repeatedly sent to the Right Neo-Cortex for processing but being blocked.

They are sent there by the Thalamus.  Whenever sensory information is produced, either internally or externally, the Thalamus is the brain part deciding which part of you will receive those signals. 

The Thalami (because there are two of them) are a pair of oval structures sitting between your upper Neo-Cortex and the lower Limbic Brain and they send incoming sensory signals either upwards through what’s called the ‘long route’ or downwards to your emotion-processing Limbic  Brain through what’s called the ‘short route’.

The Thalamus Decides

The Thalamus is home to your automated prejudice and bias processes.

Although prejudice and bias may be frowned on socially, the truth is we are automatically designed to regard anything new and unfamiliar as potentially threatening until we have learned it is actually safe and then integrated knowledge about it into the rest of our thinking mind.  Integration can be a time consuming long-route process (this is certainly the case when working with an emotional blocking disorder).

We are, by default, designed to pay attention to negative information first, whether generated externally or internally, because it is this type of information that keeps us alive.  This is why most people glue their eyeballs to ‘negative news’ on the television more often than to nice self-improvement programmes.

Broadcasters are using what marketers call the ‘rubber chicken-neck affect’ of our negative bias process to get our attention and then we thank them for keeping us ‘informed’.  Unfortunately the good news, of which there is an abundant supply, doesn’t grab our automatic attention so easily so we have to deliberately focus on it through the practice of ‘gratitude’.

The Thalamus operates a referencing and routing system whereby it automatically feeds fresh information coming in to where that particular type of information is currently being managed.

If you currently manage sensory information of a certain type using mainly your Left Neo-Cortex the information is sent quickly through the long route and you receive the information as ‘thoughts’ which you associate with various other previously stored thought-based memories.

If you currently manage fresh incoming information of a certain type using mainly your Right Neo-Cortex this means you focus on such things as imagery and sound tones, not so much with thoughts, and in addition this also usually means there is a more emotional component to the way you handle the information. 

Picture a sunny holiday beach and having your feet massaged - thoughts or feelings and images?

You may still involve your thinking in resolving any problems associated with the information, but you also have to deal with an emotional response.  This means having to feel your feelings until they have been released while at the same time controlling your thinking in such a way it allows the emotional experience to pass safely through without you forming strong negative judgements about it (you have to stop yourself feeling bad about feeling bad or it turns into a vicious cycle).

If you currently manage fresh incoming information of a certain type using mainly your Limbic system the information is sent quickly down the short route and you have an extremely powerful emotional response affecting your entire brain and body - whether you consciously want to have the response or not. 

Short-route responses always produce intense emotional reactions.  For those of us suffering with emotional disorders this is a frustrating part of our organic design.  Your body reacts, your thinking brain is overwhelmed and then your mystified Pre-frontal Cortex, the part of you that watches yourself, cannot understand why you cannot prevent the response (unless you’ve been reading this!).

Avoiding Sensory Information Overwhelm

Many times a day Your Thalamus receives much more sensory information than your brain can cope with so it sends it into your body.

Your Conscious brain can only work with 4 to 11 bits of information per second with its optimum level  being at about 7 bits.

The senses feeding information into the Thalamus present it with a potential 2 million bits of information per second.  For this reason one of the main jobs of the brain is to reduce the amount of information getting through to the Conscious.

External sensory information entering the Thalamus is filtered allowing the Conscious and the Limbic Brain to focus on things they are currently looking for.  Internal sensory information, including emotional information, is filtered or resisted using the Reticular Formation, a structure in your brain stem.

All this excess unprocessed information does not just disappear of its own accord.  It stores in your body.

Your body acts as a dumping ground for all the as yet unsorted and repressed sensory information.  Focus on any memory and your body starts providing you with information on the environment you were in; how you felt; who else was there; what the weather was like and so on.  You can feel this information as it comes up.

If you feel inexplicably tense about something about the past and don’t know why it’s because experiential memories - energetic ‘ligand’ information - is stored in your body and needs processing.  

The Same Information is Scattered Throughout Your Brain and Body 

Every cell in your body is covered in millions of floating keyhole-like ‘receptors’.  Every single cell, regardless of what type of cell it is.  The receptors are different in type, according to the body part they occupy.  Rather than the cells of each body part having just one receptor type they have thousands of types with certain types being dominant.

What these keyhole receptors receive are key-like ‘ligands’.  Ligands are molecules containing instructions on how the cells should behave once they have attached to the receptors.  When a ligand locks to a receptor it transmits instructions into a cell body and the cell reacts.

All thoughts, feelings and physical responses are produced as a result of a ligand locking on to a receptor.  After the instructions have been carried out the ligand releases and moves away from the cell.

Ligands are transported in the chemical carriers known as ‘neurotransmitters’, ‘hormones’ and ‘peptides’.  This is our internal chemical information transfer system.

Our Electrical and Chemical Communication Systems

Some believe all genuine information - information of value in managing ourselves - is transmitted only through the body’s electrical communication system - the brain and nervous system.  This process uses a mechanism called ‘synaptic transition’. 

Electrical signals travelling along neurones in our brain come to the neurone end point and meet a tiny synaptic gap. The signal is transferred across the gap by chemicals (containing ligands) to the receiving neurone next in line and the electrical message continues on its path.

The electrical approach tells us everything we think is managed in the brain and the conclusion is if we focus on ‘positive thinking’ we can eventually bring our emotional world under control.

I can tell you without a shadow of doubt this doesn’t work for people struggling to remove an emotional block. 

Scientists tell us the true picture is different; there is much more going on than the electrical model alone.  Our main communication system is chemical.

Those gaps between our transmitting and receiving neurones are not so tiny.  In fact, many are inches apart from each other and not directly in line which means, in relative size terms of how far we used to think those thought-carrying chemicals travelled, is a massive change in distance and direction. 

We don’t just send these signals from single neurone to single neurone - we flood our brain with them.  A single signal sent out by one neurone travels to many others at the same time. 

In fact on average 98% of what our neurones receive comes from a chemically transported ‘ligand soup’ saturating our brain; only 2% comes from the nearest transmitting neurone.

The electrical system is there - but it’s operating in a ligand bath.

That’s why a single emotionally charged issue gets to dominate our minds regardless of what we’d like to think about.  We are flooded with an issue for as long as we are emotional about it.  Our brain isn’t being flooded with an electrical signal - it is being flooded with a chemical signal causing an electrical signal whenever a ligand attaches to any of our many neurone receptors.

The Information is Everywhere in Your Body

We used to think the blood-brain barrier separated these ligand-carrying chemicals into two types - ‘neurotransmitter’ ligands in our brain and ‘hormone’ ligands in our bodies. 

But this turns out to be untrue - the blood-brain barrier doesn’t keep them apart and the body carries the same neurotransmitters your brain does - even your immune system contains them.

Which means the chemicals containing ligands that carry thoughts across your brain synapses are also the same as those carrying thoughts around your body and it works the other way around too.  Feelings and thoughts are interchangeable according to where the information is being managed from.

What a very strange concept that is, eh?  Not so strange if you acknowledge that how you feel in your body dominates how you think until those feelings are released and the thoughts produced as ‘insights’ are then stored and forgotten.

Your body thinks.  It does not think in the same way your brain parts do but it acts as a memory store and when it stores experiential memory in the form of vibrational energy - created by ligands connecting to receptors in your body’s cells - it keeps reminding you those memories need processing.

Drawing the Information Together

Our body, every living bit of it, is information and our Conscious needs to learn how to draw it together and work with it if it is going to live in a happy overall ‘body-mind’. 

Scientists who work in the world of ligands and receptors tell us that by releasing a chemical signal into our blood we can draw ligands in towards different brain and body part receptors. 

What if, when we deliberately open up to our feelings, we send those attracting signals out and ligands containing the information we want to take a closer look at are physically drawn up into the brain? 

The information contained in these ligands, those we ‘think’ with, is the same information we ‘feel’ with when the ligands are stored in our body or being worked with in our other brain parts.

It’s my experience, and that of many others I have spoken to, the process has to follow a specific route - the Emotional Information Cycle.

Scientists used to say specific brain and body parts did specific things - so for example the Limbic Brain is also called the ‘Emotional Brain’ because all negative feelings were believed to be produced and contained within that small area - but now the view is more fuzzy. 

The information itself is scattered throughout your brain and body but how you experience the information depends on which part of you the Thalamus directs the information to for management of the information. 

How Do We Transfer Responsibility and Control of the Information from the Emotional Brain to the Thinking Brain?

Allow the part currently controlling the information to complete its role in the cycle. 

In the case of an emotional blocking disorder this means consciously forcing the cycle to complete.

Unconsciously you are already allowing all those pieces of information you are not blocking, including most or your emotional responses, to be processed by the cycle with little conscious awareness this is happening. 

Blocked emotional responses, however, need direct conscious action because you at some point sent conscious instructions to your Unconscious to stop the signals.  If you have repressed emotional energy trapped in your body you need first to start tuning into your feelings and set aside time to ‘go in’ to them.

For someone with an emotional disorder, such as a phobia or an obsession, this itself can be an overwhelming, mentally debilitating phase lasting hours, days and months, even when working daily to achieve transfer.

With these conditions you are not simply going into some negative feelings - you are turning the Unconscious in on itself - all anxiety disorders are caused by ‘Secondary Emotional Responses’; emotional responses designed to defend against Primary Emotional Responses.

These Secondary Responses are held in place by powerful Unconscious beliefs that need to faced, challenged and changed by your Unconscious seeing repeatedly that you can experience these intense energies and remain alive.

By ‘feeling’ the body transfers information, at the same time as releasing vibrational energy from the body’s cells, up into the Limbic Brain and the Right Neo-Cortex where it presents as images.  The Left Neo-Cortex makes sense of the images, translates them into words and the cycle completes once all the driving energy has left the body.

Shifting from Automatic Emotional Response to Automatic Thinking Response - and then Forgetting

The Thalamus switches the direction in which it sends fresh incoming information once it has seen the emotional energy cycle has completed in regards to the particular type of information concerned and the information is being processed by your thinking brain.

Discharging the emotional energy attached to negative images and thoughts turns them into bland thoughts which are managed mostly by the Left Neo-Cortex.

Now, when the signals arrive in the emotionless Left Neo-Cortex, you get asked if you want to produce an emotional response by sending the signals to your Limbic instead and you actually get to say no.  You can resist the previously automatic habit of sending the information to the emotional brain purely using thought and, finding you are now able to do this you don’t get emotional about the threat of getting emotional and so don’t produce secondary emotional symptoms.

Given the trouble you’ve gone to get the Thalamus to change the direction it sends these signals in its unlikely you’ll agree to hand the information back to the Limbic for management - but if this happens anyway and you produce another unwanted emotional response it means you simply have some more emotional energy to discharge through feeling before the transfer becomes permanent.

If the emotional energy attached to the information or issue has not been fully discharged you will still feel an ‘internal pull’ created by the Limbic which means either it has not yet completed its role in regards to this particular information or you have accessed another emotional layer that needs discharging (I write about emotional layering elsewhere).

If it’s quite a low level ‘pull’ you can pretend you didn’t notice it but personally I choose to schedule time to discharge all emotional energy.

Doing this, even with the lowest level intensity of emotional responses, allows you to complete an emotional cycle and ‘forget’ it - which means you store it away in long term memory unless required later. 

While it is very unlikely you will ever require the issue at the centre of the emotional blocking disorder later, usually because the issue itself no longer exists in reality, what you do want to remember is the process.

It is this process and using it as your automatic approach whenever you experience intense emotions that gets you back to being unconditionally happy as quickly as possible.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 8) - Learning to Love Your Right Neo-Cortex

Do you have a love-hate relationship with your Right Neo-Cortex?

I do - and so do most people who have had emotional disorders.  Hating your Right Neo-Cortex too much can lead to emotional illness.  It’s the part of your brain that processes negative emotional responses attached to negative types of imagery.

If you refuse to accept the need for working with negative thoughts and imagery you develop emotional blocking, which means you are at war with your Right Neo-Cortex - even though it is a part of you.  Blocking begins the moment you decide you are unwilling to feel your negative feelings and turn that unwillingness into a semi-permanent habit.  At this point your Prefrontal Cortex - the part of you that watches yourself - instructs the rest of your brain to restrain the signals coming through. 

Those signals don’t go away - they remain trapped in your body trying to gain release through the work needing to be done in your Right Neo-Cortex.  They keep bothering you until you start surrendering to the process again.

There was a time in my early twenties when I got so sick of my own intense emotions I began to hate and self-criticise them.  I reduced the ability of my Right Neo-Cortex to process the information coming through.  I mistrusted what it told me.  We are all capable of doing this without realising what it is we are setting ourselves up for.

It took me over 20 years later, after leaving two abusive relationships, to start opening up to my Right Neo-Cortex again. 

Opening up to your Right Neo-Cortex involves deliberately allowing the signals travelling through it to reach their goal - your Conscious Mind - and allowing what comes through to sometimes restructure your view of reality.

That’s what your Right Neo-Cortex is - it’s your ‘view of reality changer’.  You have to consciously explore it in order to figure out what reality for you is. 

In the short term I hate exploring the information provided by this part of my brain because the work is:

• painful
• slow
• tiring
• negatively informative
• illogical
• externally unrewarding.

That’s just how I see it in the short term.  In the long-term, however, I regard the work as needing to be done in the same way we need to do housework.   Despite the resentment and resistance that seems to always come up for a short period - which can sometimes mean for several days before healing begins - I know for a fact that on the other side of the work lies greater internal happiness and the revealing of information supporting more valid life choices.

I am also grateful for my Right Neo-Cortex because without having learned how it does what it does I would have remained emotionally ill for the rest of my life.  It isn’t the ideal way I’d like my emotional system to work, but at least it works.

It’s a bit like going to the gym - you don’t go to the gym to be in the gym, you go for the way it helps you deal better with the physical stresses of normal everyday life outside of the gym.

At the gym you work with weights at intensities above those you’d normally expect to handle and as a result build up greater strength and resistance to injury when carrying out normal activities or when dealing with physical emergencies. 

When working with emotional intensities strong enough to clear emotional blocks you get mentally tougher; you develop self understanding and discipline; you become more confident and eventually destroy those negative opinions about your organic self that led to blocking in the first place.

When I find myself needing to do work in my Right Neo-Cortex I’ll reluctantly set aside some time and space to enter my ‘emotional gym’.

How reluctant and resistant I am depends on the variables in that bulleted list of negatives I’ve given above.  Just because I know what I need to do, and that I’ll feel much better after I’ve done it, doesn’t mean I enjoy the doing!

Painful - Why is the Negative Emotional Process Painful?

Negative emotional signals travelling through the body use the same electrical and chemical communication system our physical pain signals do.

The same system telling you something is burning your skin or making you vomit also tells you when you’re enraged or afraid or grieving - and then triggers similar symptoms.  Both convey the same message: something important to you is under attack and you need to protect it now. 

Your negative emotions are warning signals designed to mimic physical damage with the intention of moving you away or towards something in order to avoid actual damage.

However, unlike a physical response, in which the pain is directly localised to the physical area being injured so we can automatically withdraw that part, a painful emotional response can be signalled everywhere throughout the body; affecting both our major organs and the way our brain operates; including the way we think; and for prolonged periods of time.

This is why our brain can easily make the mistake of thinking emotional pain itself has the same consequences as physical pain; leading to the development of beliefs such as ‘If I feel my painful feelings they will kill me’.  It actually works the opposite way. 

We can tolerate and release far more emotional pain than we can physical pain without it doing us actual harm.  Unfortunately if we avoid our emotional pain it leaves us ‘built up’ with trapped emotional energy and it is this trapped emotional energy that leads to psychosomatic illnesses.  It is not the painful releasing of emotional energy that causes illness but the holding onto it - in this regard emotional pain works in the opposite way to physical pain so it pays to teach yourself to focus on the difference.

Training Yourself to Accept the Pain of Emotional Release

A part of your brain called the Periaqueductal Grey (‘the PAG’ for short) operates as your pain threshold recording and management system.  The job of the PAG is to tell you what risks you can tolerate in order to bring about growth while avoiding death or permanent injury.

If you were to use exposure therapy as your emotional healing technique this would mean you intended to retrain your PAG as a part of the process.  The PAG eventually learns you can be immobilised physically and mentally by emotional pain, and for long periods of time, yet still survive and fully recover.  Not so with physical pain.

I remember going to a gym a few years ago with a guy who did an exercise we called ‘Jesus Christ’s’ using dumbbells - we called it that partly because the exercise involved a crucifixion pose and partly because you would quickly get to the point you wanted to blaspheme.  It got painful quick.

My friend always went further than I did - I would train my shoulders to muscular numbness then stop with him shouting ‘one more!’ in my ears; but he would always go beyond that point.  Then one day he stopped going.  He’d injured himself.  I’d seen a few weight training fans injure themselves the same way, including three young men who caused permanent damage to their lower spines trying to outdo each other on a lateral pull-down machine.  They told me their doctors had all told them they should never use that machine again.

Our PAG learn snot just from our own experiences but from those of others too.  It’s the job of your individual PAG to tell you what you can and can’t do physically as an individual.

But if it makes the mistake of thinking emotional pain operates by the same rules as physical pain the PAG stops you from doing the work necessary in the Right Neo-Cortex to remove that pain - and the pain remains in place (albeit at a lower level of intensity)!

Slow

You can un-think a thought in seconds but emotional signal work, in which you feel out the energy attached to an image in order to stop it bothering you, can take hours or even days. 

Where you have multiple emotional responses layered in your brain and body needing release it can take several years - in my case it took me about 5 years of daily work to get in touch with the original triggering emotional responses that caused my illness and by the time I got there I had removed 27 obsessions and 14 phobias, plus a few other emotional blocks, along the way.  Good training.

I remember the first obsession - it took me 3 months of daily work to remove because I had severe panic attacks every time I tried - I got rid of the panic attacks purely by feeling them at full intensity every day for those 3 months.  Really slow and painful stuff. 

I removed my first obsession within a couple of days once the panic attacks had reduced.  A few months later I cleared one of my last obsessions in 30 minutes flat. 

When you work in your Right Neo-Cortex you’re working slowly with lots of intense information and a lot of this information is being drawn up from your body.  That’s another good reason we resist working with it - but it’s where the path to emotional happiness is found.  How much you want to be happy decides how committed you are to getting friendly with your Right Neo-Cortex again over a long period of time.

Tiring

Your Right Neo-Cortex works even when the rest of you is asleep and if you’ve directed it to work on an intense emotional response be prepared not to get too much sleep because it may keep waking you up every time it accesses a new emotional layer. 

I’d sometimes wake in the middle of a panic attack not knowing how it had been triggered but I understood the process - my Unconscious, which is what your Right Neo-Cortex has direct access to, was working full throttle on my emotional blocks even while I was consciously unaware of it.

In addition, your Conscious Mind is only capable of working with 4 to 11 pieces of information at any one time and during emotional release your brain is flooded with millions of signals - more than it can possibly deal with ‘logically’ which causes mental overwhelm.

Prepare to be really tired when working in your Right Neo-Cortex. 

Negatively Informative

Your Right Neo-Cortex is the brain part through which sensory signals tell you when all that glitters is not gold.

It tells you when a ‘psychological contract’ has been broken; when people are lying or when the social atmosphere is, in some subtle way, abusive or shaming or operating against your best interest.  It tells you when you don’t fit in with certain types of company or behaviour.  It tells you when you’re not doing something you really enjoy (it also tells you what you should be doing but aren’t for some ‘logical’ reason, by the way).

It is the ‘gut instinct’ and ‘intuition’ interpreter (and is in fact directly linked to your gut area).  It tells you things you don’t want to know. 

Your Left Neo-Cortex, your positive-minded planning brain, may be so outraged and upset by the messages coming through your Right Neo-Cortex it refuses to accept the message as real.  It may demand word-based evidence to prove whether the signals in your Right Neo-Cortex are true - so for example it may drive you to try and get another person to ‘tell’ you the truth in words about how they intend to treat you badly rather than allow you to make your own choices based on how you feel about they are treating you in reality.

Your Left may argue the case as to why you should refuse to listen to those feelings talking to you through your Right Neo-Cortex, on the basis of logical information stored in regards to past interpretations.  You’ll think of responsibilities you must meet; dreams you’ve been working towards; financial and other disasters that could occur for you, and cared-for others, should you accept this new information.

I did this for a very long time.  I thought of many good logical reasons I should remain stuck in painful social relationships and why I should ignore the painful signals telling me to leave them.  I no longer do this - I listen to my Right Neo-Cortex.  I watch behavioural patterns; I trust my senses; I make choices based on my feelings alone.

Illogical - Oh No It’s Not!

Your Right Neo-Cortex, linked as it is to your emotional energy release process, is logical in its own right.  Your Right Neo-Cortex communicates only with your internal Unconscious.  Your internal Unconscious is a moving universe of interactions.  It is MASSIVE.  That doesn’t mean it’s stupid.

Your Left Neo-Cortex communicates directly with the external world.  It’s job is to match your thinking up to the thinking of others in ‘external logic harmony’.  The reason my Left Neo-Cortex is allowing me to type this for you to read is because it believes itself able to produce an externally logical structure, with names and descriptions, you will be able to accept and understand.

The logic of the Left Neo-Cortex and the logic of the Right Neo-Cortex are two entirely separate worlds.  The Right Neo-Cortex never criticises the Left Neo-Cortex - it just screams at it for acceptance.

As long as the Left Neo-Cortex regards the Right as stupid and illogical it will refuse to allow the Right to pass on information to the outside world or complete an emotional information cycle.  Sharing your inner experience with the outside world through ‘expression of the self’ is an important part of emotional self-acceptance.

The Left Neo-Cortex is made biased against the Right Neo-Cortex through external social programming.  Change your social programming by changing what you read, what you tell yourself and choose your social circles that support what you tell yourself and that illogical Right Neo-Cortex opens up a whole new world.

Your Right Neo-Cortex is much more logical than your Left will ever be.  Your Left Neo-Cortex decides what to think when you’re in a certain place.  Your Right, if you listen to it, decides what place you’re going to be in to do that thinking.

Think about that one, Mr Oh-So-Clever Left Neo-Cortex.

Externally Unrewarding

You’re going to go in a room on your own, shut the door and work almost silently on yourself for hours and days - maybe even years - struggling up some internal mountain of emotional pain and no-one in the outside world is ever going to know about it or appreciate how hard you’ve had to work at this thing.

Where’s the fun in that?

We’re externally programmed to be obsessed with external appearance but the true path to happiness is in how you appear to yourself.  The quality of your self-image is decided by how often you work in your Right Neo-Cortex.

External rewards are there to be found as a result of working on your inner world but because you do not control their arrival or what form they take you can’t rely on them as a goal to work towards.

You can cheat a bit though - I’ve cheated by setting up a blog, writing about my successes and speaking to others about my healing experiences.  Eventually we do need to express our inner experience to the outer world in some beneficial way or we haven’t fully completed our information cycle - we haven’t acknowledged what we’ve learned from our Right Neo-Cortex if we don’t do this.

But, when you first enter a strong emotional response, you may need to cut off from the outside world and go inwards - into your Right Neo-Cortex.  This can seem self-indulgent; timewasting and any other externally driven negative viewpoint held in your Left Neo-Cortex you care to add.

The reward is internal.  Internal freedom; internal emotional control; internal acceptance and - best of all - internal happiness in greater quantities.

The greatest internal reward is liking yourself.

If you can learn to accept the need to work towards liking your negative self - experienced through the Right Neo-Cortex as it is - you’re just about there.

Regards - Carl

Drilling for Emotional Wellness – Turn Your Anxiety Disorder Relapses into Victories

So you have established a drilling platform consisting of your professional supporters (doctor; maybe a psychiatrist and definitely a counsellor) and for several weeks, months or maybe even years now you have been drilling down into your emotional responses with the intention of releasing them using your Conscious Point of Focus as a drill bit.

You have stopped denying; you have stopped suppressing and repressing as much as you used to and now you have been feeling and releasing trapped emotional responses for a while.

Maybe if you had an obsession you stopped having that obsession and if you had a phobia you stopped having that phobia.  But suddenly they are back.  The whole thing appears to be back.  You call this a relapse.

You feel stunned and helpless.

What you have known for a while though is there was still a sense of tension inside but you could not pinpoint exactly what it was.  It was related to some kind of painful memory; to something that laid the foundation for the anxiety disorder to take root.  Suddenly those feelings are coming through but not only are you getting just the old memories and the old feelings attached to them you are also having to deal with the apparent re-ignition of your obsession or your phobia or whatever else it is you have been suffering with and thought you had finally got rid of.

What to do now you are having a relapse?  For starters stop thinking of it as a relapse.  You just hit a gusher.

What Happens When You Reverse Emotional Blocking

During emotional blocking, which is what causes emotional illness, we build complex thinking networks in our neuroplastic brain designed to hold our trapped emotions and unwanted thoughts in place.

You can think of these networks as though they were cave entrances and tunnels.  The trapped emotional responses they are designed to block keep trying to breach the defences of these blocking networks – the energy of the emotional response meets with more emotional energy determined to keep it in place.

When we reverse emotional blocking the emotional energy we force ourselves to release brings these networks fully to life temporarily raising horrific thoughts fully into conscious awareness.  This can be so effective we may feel as if we have entered an alternate reality.

Normal, happier thinking is closed down during the release process.

Once the trapped emotional responses relating to a particular set of memories is released, however, these thinking ‘caves and tunnels’ in our brains go dark and dormant.  They are no longer transporting or blocking energies.  But they are still there.  You can think using them but you do not get very emotional when you do.

Although you can discharge the energy that kept bringing them to your conscious attention It takes a very long time for these brain networks to collapse completely and sometimes they never do (but they will stop bothering you because they are no longer being energised).  Until, that is, you hit another ‘mother lode’.

Your Unconscious Acts LIke an Automatic Drilling Machine

When you deliberately and repeatedly reverse the emotional blocking process you are reorienting the direction in which your Unconscious mind travels when it detects emotional pressure.

In blocking mode you trained it to automatically avoid your emotional responses – now unblocking it automatically digs down when you are not paying conscious attention.  When it hits another layer of trapped emotional energy the energy comes up and for a while lights up all those old, unwanted thinking networks.

How to React to This

See it as a much needed gusher – see it as a release of trapped energy travelling along these old networks that will eventually evaporate just like it did before and realise that the newly discovered and de-energised brain networks will soon be joining the ranks of the other dark and dormant caves in your brain.

If you see it as a thinking problem you may start to try and block the thinking again – this only restarts the blocking process.  See it as a welcome release of trapped energy and it becomes a victory.

Regards - Carl