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

… liking what it says?

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

Or do you need to change your environment instead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unconscious Expression

Unconscious expression is all about energy release.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repression of Unconscious Expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conscious Expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Achieving Total Self Acceptance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choosing and Creating Positive Feedback Environments

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

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

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

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

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

Normalisation

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

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

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

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 10) - Focusing on The Limbic

The Limbic is where your most intense negative emotional responses are attached to sensory stimuli.

Those sensory stimuli can include images, sounds, smells and, strangely enough, the physical sensations of emotional responses themselves.

Positioned close to the middle of your brain the Limbic has evolved from what used to be the area used for detecting smell and avoiding suffocation. It sits below the Thalamus, the brain’s signal routing system.

Whenever your Thalamus sends a sensory signal straight to the Limbic, via what is called the ‘short route’, you experience an immediate full-body emotional response.  Thinking doesn’t get a chance to directly intervene in the reaction - it happens and your conscious is informed afterwards.

We create and maintain anger, anxiety and other similar negative responses in the Limbic.

Other emotional brain parts, such as the pleasure/reward system (based in the medial forebrain bundle) and the disgust response (managed in the insular cortex) also affect us but, if you can learn to work with the Limbic in reducing negative response levels, you can use the same approach to improve how other emotional brain areas perform for you as well.

The main parts of the Limbic we want to focus on when thinking about emotional healing are the Hippocampus and the Amygdala (there are two of each sitting symmetrically alongside each other below the Thalamus, so they’re sometimes called the Hippocampi and the Amygdalae).

The Hippocampus

The Hippocampus is our environmental and territorial mapping system.

Shaped a bit like a runner bean pod it creates cellular maps using incoming sensory signal information. These maps are so accurate scientists using a brain scanner can identify where test subjects are in a computer maze game by looking only at the live scans of their Hippocampus.

Journeys are mapped here - real and virtual - in specific detail.  The Hippocampus stores its maps in layers.  When we reflect on memories of a previous journey or repeat a real-life external journey we begin accessing these layered maps.

As soon as you enter unfamiliar territory the Hippocampus starts the map-building process and another layer is created.

If you have an intense negative emotional experience in an environment the Hippocampus will map where that occurred in the territory and will also map other environmental details present at the time of the experience.

An entire map can switch from feeling ‘safe’ to feeling ‘dangerous’ instantly due to one negative event occurring when you are in that map - for example if you have an argument with a colleague or are abused in some way on the way to work by a passer-by it can take several days for the Hippocampus to retrain itself to see those places as safe again.

Anticipatory Fear

Once a negative experience has been mapped in a particular territory or situation your Hippocampus will trigger anticipatory signals preparing you for fight or flight when that territory or situation appears to be approaching.  The closer you get to the specific triggering point in the map the more intense the emotional response becomes.

If your general approach to this process is to change your route to avoid the trigger (for example you change your job to avoid a colleague) the Hippocampus not only maintains the original map but goes on to trigger the same avoidant responses in new situations where the sensory signals only vaguely resemble the original.

Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there.  Your entire Unconscious watches the direction you take in regards to the energised map in question and if you repeatedly avoid facing it, as well as other things vaguely reminding you of it, the map spreads, and you now start developing full-blown emotional responses to those vague reminders as well.

The whole process is designed not just to protect you when you find yourself directly in the presence of the original fear-triggering situation, but prevent you entering its presence in the first place.

A single map of this nature can affect your whole body-mind and stimulates beliefs that you cannot cope - both with the original situation and now with the steps leading up to the situation.

Secondary Emotional Response Signals

Most fear-inducing things in life can be avoided.  Having these fears is not a problem because we don’t come into contact with the triggers on a regular basis.  A fear of lions; a fear of bungee jumping; a fear of sitting in a bath full of venomous snakes; a fear of looking foolish in front of others at an important social gathering we have been asked to speak at; a fear of slipping on ice this year because last year we slipped over and broke our hip.  These are all natural fears to have.

We could overcome them if we really wanted to - and some people do and then like to show off about it.

Difficulties arise for us when we have to come into contact with these triggering situations on a regular basis, but have not yet removed the natural fear response attached to them.  Coming into contact with them means we now have an ‘emotional problem’ to deal with.

Things get even more difficult if, when we keep coming into regular contact with these things, we refuse to internally complete the emotional response process needed to adjust and become comfortable again.

We are now vulnerable to producing secondary emotional responses; particularly if we are being socially rejected by others (or believe we are) because of our fear or if we negatively criticise our own emotions.

Secondary emotional responses are produced with the intention of removing or reducing the affects of primary emotional responses when we believe our own primary response is wrong or abnormal.

Produced with the intention of removing the symptoms of fear, or whatever other negative emotion is involved, the actual result is to trap the emotional response and then magnify and pressure-cook it.

And, because Secondary responses are usually applied using the same type of emotional response as the Primary, we cannot ‘see’ what we have just done.  There’s no visible join - we’re left mystified as to why the response has become so unbelievably, overwhelmingly intense.  We create an ever-repeating emotional loop with both the Primary and Secondary responses triggering and fighting each other.

Panic attacks are the result of a fear of fear; phobias are a fear of feeling fear in the presence of an object or situation; rage attacks and depression are caused by anger at having to feel anger or grief, sadness or shame; obsessions are caused by a fear of an intense disgust response.

The Hippocampus Maps Primary Emotional Responses When a Secondary Response is Produced

When we produce a Secondary emotional response the Hippocampus identifies the ‘symptoms’ of emotional responses themselves as dangerous.  The strange thoughts and not-usually-felt feelings are themselves identified as things to be avoided or fought.

The Hippocampus now starts building organic maps in regards to your own, allegedly dangerous, responses.  You create layers designed to defend against these internal emotional layers and their behavioural affects, building what I call ‘lands of the mind’; in the same way it builds maps of the external world.

Your own emotional system becomes the threat your emotional system wants to avoid.

When you decide to compel yourself to start accepting your own feelings again you have to take an actual journey inwards, in just the same way you would if the threat were mapped as an external threat.  The journey is long; fraught with multiple emotional responses designed to warn you of the hidden dangers - and every physical sensation looks like a potential killer.

The Argument Between Reality versus Imagination

One of the arguments you may come up against, if you have an emotional disorder and want to remove it, is that this inner journey is an imaginary thing and so therefore not ‘real’.

We have a tendency to think of things outside of ourselves as being ‘real’; therefore genuinely existing and worthy of attention; but things happening mentally and emotionally inside of us as somehow ‘false’, so not as valid.  We tell ourselves we should maybe ignore these inner parts of ourselves most of the time.  This is, to a great extent, a socially programmed illusion designed to make us more useful to others.

The truth is, whether you think you are managing external or internal reality, it is all the same internal process.  You are not, in reality, capable of fully experiencing or controlling external reality.  Internal reality is your only reality.

Everything is an internal adjustment process.  Whether you approach an apparently ‘external reality’, as mapped by your Hippocampus, or what you see as an ‘internal unreality’, it is the same internal mapping system you are travelling through and reacting to - not the actual environment.  You are consciously approaching a place in your own brain.  It is all real; it all operates by the same rules.

We project this internal, emotionally charged map onto the external world and react to it as if it were ‘real’, until we learn to retrain those internal maps telling us the threat does not really exist -and all of this happens only inside of us.

This is why you can remove a phobia or an obsession, or any other trapped emotional response, without having to revisit the actual original external fear-creating situation that caused you to map it in the first place.

The whole thing is real, and valid, fully mapped, inside your own Limbic brain.

Projection

Ever had others project their currently stuck internal maps on to you when they react to you as if you did or said something you did not actually do or say?  I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me about 4 or 5 times where the consequences seemed to go on for long periods before dying a natural social death.

If you’re aware of the nature of ‘projection’; and care about how it affects you and others, you can reduce how much you do it to others and avoid the affects it has on you when others project their trapped emotional maps in your direction.

It’s not just individuals that do it to each other either - whole groups, even nations, can remain stuck in frozen prejudice - treating others as if something that happened once, decades ago, is still happening today.

The responsibility for changing these internal maps lies solely with the person or group doing the projecting.  The reason we project is because we have not fully travelled the journey mapped in our own Hippocampus - we have not completed the emotional information cycle and trained our Limbic to see the original threat no longer exists - perhaps it never did.

Now let’s take a look at the almond-sized brain part that sits at the end of the Hippocampus.  The part of us where the most intense, most painful emotions we are capable of producing are generated.

The Amygdala

While the Hippocampus maps environments surrounding specific threats, the Amygdala stores imagery and other sensory stimuli of the specific threats at the centre of the overall reaction.  The most intense emotional responses you are capable of producing are attached to the sensory constructs mapped here.

It’s as if you travel along a corridor-like map in the Hippocampus in order to reach the fear inducing signals stored in the Amygdala at journey’s end.

The Amygdala operates as a ‘negative sensory signal register’.  It stores sensory lists of all the things you have an intense negative response to.

People; objects; sensations; shapes; sounds.  Anything can be registered here.  These things will normally appear perfectly harmless to you - unless they are being managed in the Amygdala.

As you move consciously towards the sensory stimuli being managed here you may get a sense of your being suffocated by the intensity of the emotional response attached.  Latest scientific research tells us this is exactly what the amygdala responds most strongly to - a sense of suffocation.  The reaction is designed to kick in when a predator has you by the throat.

When you feel overwhelmed by an emotional response, as it closes down your ability to think clearly while filling your mind with imagery attached to intense unwanted physical symptoms, it can be easy to see how this experience itself can mimic suffocation, convincing the Amygdala to list the emotions themselves as a suffocating, life-threatening experience.

Completing Emotional Information Cycles in the Limbic

Apart from the emotional cycles related to bonding and reproduction, which can keep recharging and discharging for a lifetime, the emotional process in the Limbic is designed to produce singular negative responses which can be permanently discharged and removed.

All of your negative emotional responses; primary or secondary, are designed to be discharged after serving their purpose.

If you have an emotional blocking problem, in which you are producing a Secondary emotional response to a Primary, it will take some time and effort to achieve emotional freedom, but it can be done.

When your Limbic is given the job of managing a specific set of sensory signals it acts like a spark plug to the rest of the body and brain, causing the release of hormones containing those molecules known as ‘ligands’ throughout the body-mind.  These molecules attach to your various body and brain parts causing them to become vibrationally activated - that is, producing energy intended to drive physical action - the fight, flight or freeze responses.

If you have not yet faced up to the threat (the original stimulating trigger at which the emotional charge is targeted) your body remains in a state of charged alertness - full of high energy emotional information signals.  Ready for action - tense.

Full discharge only occurs when you have made the journey through the Hippocampus maps towards the Amygdala registry where the image and other related sensory signals are stored.  You will know when you’re getting closer to full discharge because the painful negative emotional affects get stronger and stronger.  When your conscious mind arrives at the triggering sensory signal - perceived as being external or internal - that’s when you are at full emotional discharge.

This is how it works when you use the systematic desensitisation approach (exposure therapy) method, anyway.  This is the method I used and which some other therapies use.  There are other methods, such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which can be used to remove the feelings in a more gently way.

Emotional Acceptance

I’ve written elsewhere on the blog about the process of emotional acceptance and I’ve put a link to an article about it at the end of this post.  Achieving emotional acceptance is concerned with training your thinking brain to surrender to the full emotional process by bringing a stop to how you think your emotional process should work and learning how it actually does work - and accepting just how overwhelmingly powerful it can seem at times - yet still be safe.

When you mentally deny an emotional response the right to discharge the signals keep driving up from the body as though to say ‘eh, we’re still here!  You’ve got to do something!’.  If the Prefrontal Cortex - the part of you watching you, decides to block release of these energy signals they stay active. Your body remains tensed and ready and emotionally energised and it keeps telling your upper brain about it.

If your thinking decides to try and block the signals using Secondary emotional responses it intensifies the situation even further.

So the answer to how we allow the Limbic to complete its information cycle so we can get rid of our emotional problems is really simple. We reverse what we are currently doing and start to discharge the energy attached to the sensory signals through the process of feeling our feelings.

Feelings attached to individual sensory constructs, not thoughts, and whether or not you move consciously towards or away from them, is the language of your Limbic and the rest of your Unconscious below it.

You accept an emotional response by moving towards it.  This allows the Limbic to complete its responsibility in regards to the information it contains - and from there, following discharge of the emotional energy, the energy-stripped informational content of the experience is passed up as imagery into the Right Neo-Cortex then transferred into thoughts in the Left Neo-Cortex.

Regards - Carl

Article: The Three Elements of Emotional Acceptance

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 7) - Narrow Versus Open Mindedness

I’m narrow-minded about open-mindedness.  How about you? 

I find a continually narrow-minded social environment intolerable and stifling and refuse to change my narrow view about that unless there’s a really good reason to.  I am also narrow-minded in favour of opening my mind up to my internal emotional processes.  I believe it has to be done by everybody at some point, in the right environment, if they want to be happy.

Narrow-mindedness operates in your Left Neo-Cortex.  Open-mindedness operates in your Right.

No-one is totally narrow or open minded in the way they think or see something - both brains operate at the same time.  It’s a question of balance.  Which side of your brain dominates at any one time depends on the situation or context you are focusing on and how uncomfortable you are willing to be during focussing.

A few years ago I attended an interactive team development seminar for managers on how to develop teams using different managerial styles.  There were about 20 participants, all team managers, all of whom knew me well.

In one exercise four flipchart boards were put up with different types of management styles written on them.  The characteristics of the personalities of each type of management style were listed and after going through a questionnaire we were all scored and asked to go stand near the board our score showed our management style to be most like.

Out of the 20 I turned out to be the only one standing near the board headed ‘Task/Goal Orientated’.  Almost everyone else was standing over near the ‘Social/People Orientated’ board.  ‘What are you doing over there', Carl?’ a couple of them asked me.  ‘You’re one of the most people- orientated managers we know’.

Listed on my board were such characteristics as ‘Drives change’; ‘Domineering’; ‘Dictatorial’; ‘Single Minded’.  I explained that during my period as a team manager I had developed a strong view of what an open-minded, co-operative and high performance team looked like.  Before becoming a manager I would have stood over at the ‘People Orientated’ board with everyone else.

But since becoming a manager I had found myself having to enforce my view of what this ideal team atmosphere should look like due to having to deal with folks who thought they had a right to disrupt and dominate teams I managed.  Occasionally the odd ego-driven person would see the open natured approach I used as a weak management style and would launch some kind of attempt to dominate relationships within the team - and usually expected to get their own way.  Only they didn’t and couldn’t understand why not - given I was so apparently ‘easy-going’.

On the surface it looked as though I hadn’t really thought about my management style much because most of my team managed themselves.  In reality I had a very narrow viewpoint of how my team should operate; how individuals in it would treat each other and how we would deal with the external world.

I can think of a number of areas in my life now where on the surface I may appear not to have thought about things much and am easy going - but it’s not the case really.  I am very narrow-minded about certain things; but I’ve developed the narrow-minded approach to that area after a phase of being open minded, exploring issues through my Right Neo-Cortex, first.

As a result I have no fear of transferring narrow-minded thinking held in my Left Neo-Cortex over to my Right for further exploration; I know that once a new opinion has been formed and proved its value in moving me towards a better self-image or an important goal often enough it will shift back to the more comfortable Left as a retrained narrow-minded ‘fact’.

Narrow Mindedness focuses on the External and the Past

Your Left Neo-Cortex, the part you think in words with, is concerned with your external world and facts you have learned in the past about it.  In brain-mapping terms you have thousands of maps stored saying ‘go here and that happens and you do this and then that happens …’ and so on.

Some of these facts were given to you by trusted sources as emotionless bits of data that went straight into memory storage.  Others were acquired through ‘experience’ - a process by which your Right Neo-Cortex informs you of full-body energy release occurring during which an emotional cycle is completed and then the information left after the cycle completes is passed over to your Left and stored as an emotionless memory.

Whenever being ‘narrow-minded’ we are working in our Left Neo-Cortex and looking for mentally held, quickly retrieved emotionless reference data on solutions that worked for us (or for others) in the past.

As we use this data from the past (we call it ‘thinking’) to resolve any external situation occurring we compare how our factual data matches with what’s going on in the external world in real-time.   Where the two meet we call that  ‘reality’. 

Opening Mindedness focuses on the Internal and the Future

Your Right Neo-Cortex sees in pictures, feelings and other senses such as sound tone and is concerned with your internal world and the experiences you are currently processing or may experience in the future.  The brain maps here don’t operate in the same way the Left Neo-Cortex does.

Here multiple moving image and pattern maps, some attached to intense energy waves held in your body, interrelate and exchange information. These images and patterns are produced by a mixture of what comes from your Prefrontal Cortex, your Left Neo-Cortex and the full energetic informational content of your entire body.  

Options and Choices

Paradoxically we increase our options and choices in the outside world by working on our inner world - not the outer.  Think of any external life area or environment you ever wanted to move into and your first step was to agree to change your inner self first.  Whenever thinking about what kind of an external experience you would like to have or move towards it pays to first to explore your previous emotional history and move towards doing more of those things you have enjoyed emotionally in previous environments. 

Chasing the next salary raise - a Left Neo-Cortex logical thing to do, will eventually lead to you leading a passionless, inhuman lifestyle where you find you have sacrificed your true self.

With the Left Neo-Cortex we may look outwards thinking the new opportunities, the answers to problems and achieving happiness are ‘out there’.  But they’re not.  Adaptation is achieved internally. 

People struggling with depression after a loss of some kind, for example, get stuck in their thinking partly due to believing they have limited options and choices because the outside world took their options away; they start moving away from depression once they start to build new life options; release the emotional energy attached to their losses and any frozen beliefs and deliberately choose to try new things. 

All the information you need to access in order to complete any internal information cycle is already contained within you.  You just need to be willing to look for it.

The work is slow and painful when your default setting is to avoid your internal world - when you are ‘Left Neo-Cortex Narrow Minded’ about how you should work internally.

Playing with Your ‘Narrow Thinking’ and ‘Open Seeing’

Narrow mindedness gets a bad press - ‘they’ll never change’.

Open mindedness also gets a bad press - ‘they’ll believe anything anyone tells them’.

Whenever we label narrow mindedness as ‘bad’ we just got the Left Neo-Cortex to criticise the way it, itself, processes information.  The same thing happens when the Right Neo-Cortex sees emotional responses as ‘weak’.

Any negative self-criticism of the emotional process is false information.  You have to get narrow minded about that.  ANY SELF-CRITICISM OF THE WAY YOU PROCESS EMOTIONAL INFORMATION IS FALSE.

Self-criticism of this nature stops the self from figuring out and accepting how you really work.  So whenever a negative self-criticism arises in your brain grab it; accept you are capable of producing negative self-criticisms (don’t criticise yourself for self-criticising or you’re just repeating the pattern!) and challenge it.

Here are a few narrow-minded beliefs I have acquired by first going through a number of ‘open-minded’ journeys.  I used to believe the exact opposite of these beliefs - then I began to open up to the possibility those opposite beliefs might be wrong (this involved exploring emotionally painful experiences stored inside and learning from what the emotions told me about life).

These are now re-fixed in my narrow thinking brain and whenever I find myself emotionally charged I refer back to these, and many other new ways of looking at things I deliberately embraced, in order to achieve and remain emotionally free:

• If I do not schedule time for working with my negative feelings they will work on me 24/7 until I do - so I will always schedule time
• I achieve happiness by going through my feelings not around them
• Negative feelings drive thoughts; negative thoughts never drive negative feelings (no-one would watch the news if they did) - get rid of the feelings and you get rid of the thoughts
• You cannot feel a feeling that is not already waiting to be felt inside of you (your body is a battery)
• Feeling is an action in its own right - I do not need to take external action in order to complete an internal information cycle
• I am neither my thoughts nor my feelings - I am the observer who watches the flow of these things and alters the nature of the flow
• There is no such thing as an abnormal feeling regardless of intensity or type
• I will work to remove any negative self-criticisms of my protective negative feeling protective system
• Whenever I feel rage I am trying to protect something of great value - once I figure out what it is I am protecting and accept it’s OK to feel that way I will be able to release my rage safely
• I am often powerless over what happens in the external world and that’s fine
• I will tackle, avoid or leave emotionally painful environments sooner rather than later.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 5) - Your Left Neo-Cortex is Your Conscious Filing Cabinet

I am now communicating directly with your Prefrontal Cortex through your Left Neo-Cortex.

My Left Neo-Cortex is talking directly to your Left Neo-Cortex by sending the signals processed in my Left up to my Motor Cortex (positioned in the top of my brain) which then activates my fingers to project my internally held ‘words’ onto an external surface which you can then read.

You produce visual signals on reading this surface and these are transferred into your brain from your eyes; first into your Thalamus, your brain’s sensory signal filtering system, which decides these are safe, unemotional ‘words’, after which it then sends these signals towards the visual processing areas at the back of your brain, then through your Left Neo-Cortex towards your Prefrontal Cortex.

If your Thalamus interpreted these same signals as dangerous they would be sent a slightly different route into your emotional brain.

The only reason I feel motivated to create these visual signals for your brain to read is because I know, in my Left Neo-Cortex, you will have roughly the same language programming in your Left Neo-Cortex as I do.

The Left Neo-Cortex is the place in which you store 'what you know' because it acts as your organic filing cabinet from which your Prefrontal Cortex later draws known information when required.

It is the place where final completion and closure of emotional information cycles takes place, where 'insights' are stripped of emotional charge and integrated as newly learned facts alongside other known 'facts' already filed away.

Once these insights and facts are stripped from an emotional experience and transferred to the Left Neo-Cortex you are now able to 'forget' emotional issues and move your attention to other things.

The symbols you are reading with your eyes right now are being processed at the rear of your left brain, near your visual cortex, They are then sent forwards to a sound association area, still in your Left Neo-Cortex, and you are identifying which sounds these symbols you see are attached to in your left, logical association memories. You name the strings formed by these associated symbols and sounds 'thoughts'. Thoughts are your brain's way of representing journeys already made, and repeatedly mapped, in your logical mind.

Now, if as you read this information I seem to be repeating myself with just a few small tweaks added each time I’d agree with you.  And that’s one of the points we need to see in regards to this stage of completing an emotional information cycle.

By experiencing a blocked emotional cycle repeatedly you do two things: you release the emotional energy driving it and you develop and gather logically structured thoughts about it which you then think over and over again until they become a part of your permanent thinking structures. 

By nature thoughts can be quite boring and emotionally un-stimulating but you need to pay attention to them when they appear in the midst of your more attention-grabbing feelings.

We Use Thoughts to Create Representations 

If I've arranged these symbol-sounds we call words in the correct order, and by 'correct' I mean in the socially accepted order you've been trained to receive and communicate language grammatically in; you will now be able to locate the thought sequences already stored in your brain and go on to generate what I call 'representations'.

Representations are objective, unemotional viewpoints of journeys which should be taken when certain circumstances or situations present themselves again. They are beliefs of 'how things should be' and 'how things are'. They are automated procedures to follow; fast and effective in guiding you from A to B with a minimum of mental attention and almost no emotional energy production involved.

The only time we change our 'how things should be' and 'how things are' representations is when they are effectively challenged by new information arriving in conscious awareness. If new information acquired in this way is an addition to the information we're already working with this may feel like an acknowledgement of what we already know. If, on the other hand, new information received goes directly against what we currently believe or want to receive we may find ourselves feeling uncomfortable and confused about what to do with it. Feeling uncomfortable and confused means we have now started using our Right Neo-Cortex.

I refer to Representations that have had emotional energy attached in this way, and so have been transferred back over to the Right Neo-Cortex, as ‘Reflections’.  Reflections are experiential full-body activities.  Your Right and Left Neo-Cortices swap Representations and Reflections with each other all the time - the deciding factor of which is which is made by whether or not an emotional charge is attached.

How Do You Know When an Emotional Cycle has Completed?

Stripped of emotional energy the information regarding both the subjective content of the emotional response (for example, the imagery) and knowledge about the process of extracting the energy itself, is transferred over from the Right Neo-Cortex to be stored in your Left Neo-Cortex’ lined-up filing system. 

You will remember you once had an emotional response that was difficult to clear but you also know how you removed it and how to remove it should you struggle with a similar problem again; you roughly remember the content and some of the physical responses involved - but you cannot generate the same intense emotional responses you once had in regards to the same imagery.

You may have some feelings come up, but they are mild in comparison to how you used to feel.

You have now re-established a sense of direct control over how you manage the information because your Left Neo-Cortex has several information management qualities your Right Neo-Cortex lacks such as:

• being able to resolve problems at the speed of speech
• being specific; the Left Neo-Cortex thinks convergently; drilling down onto identified targets with a specific intention in mind
• being externally focused - it communicates with the outside world and can draw on the logic of others in resolving problems
• providing structure - and in providing structure to your thought-based responses it makes your world look controllable which leads to fewer strong emotional reactions.

But of course, the best outcome of completing your emotional information cycle problem is that, unless you deliberately want to remember it so you can write about it and explain the cycle to others like I do, you are now able to file it away in your Conscious Filing Cabinet and completely forget you ever had it.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 4) Dealing with the Power of Your Unconscious

Your brain is an organic map writing system.

It is also an ‘association machine’, associating positive and negative places and situations with positive and negative emotional responses in order to move you behaviourally towards and away from those places and situations mapped.  Consciously this linking takes place in the Right Neo-Cortex under the watchful eye of the Prefrontal Cortex.

When it comes to completing an emotional cycle the Right Neo-Cortex is also the brain part in which you disassociate these memories and their attached responses through the mental act of focusing coupled with the physical act of feeling.

Usually the overall emotional process operates at just the right intensity for you to be aware of the right directions to take, at what pace and for what duration, without overwhelming you with the powerful energies of the emotional process itself. 

Now and again you may experience a life-threatening emergency during which your emotional system forces your mind to shrink to pinpoint focus on the threat.  When we can see the benefits of this reaction we usually accept it even though we may still dislike it.  If an intense fear reaction prevents you being bitten by a vicious dog, for example, you will find it easier to accept the symptoms of the reaction than if the same response is produced when you approach an empty elevator and don’t understand the unconsciously held triggers as to why.

(Strangely enough, we can even learn to enjoy an unconsciously driven negative experience - which is why we spend time engaged with fictional action and horror stories).

While baseline unconscious reactive settings are genetically programmed into us, such as the automatic urge to withdraw from pain, many more are added by conscious interpretations of new life events.  If repeated enough times these new reactions become learned automated responses also managed unconsciously. 

Internal Maps

Your brain’s mapping system does not just create maps of the outside world - it also creates maps of your internal world too. These internal maps can be positive or negative and are emotionally attached the same way your maps of the external world are.

When you create negative maps of your own negative internal responses you create a negative self image and start fighting the warning signal system of your own Unconscious. Your Unconscious turns against itself declaring your own thoughts and feelings to be ‘wrong’ or ‘abnormal’.

Your Unconscious is now stuck in the world of denial; suppression; repression and secondary emotional responses. You are in a war against your own intuitive process. Intuition, the means by which we bring together all our Unconscious signals in order to make decisions suitable for who we really are, is shot to pieces in this war. Nothing you do seems right - you’re trying to do everyone else’s ‘right’; you don’t even know what your own ‘right’ is any more.

We become over-sensitised (hyper-vigilant) because our emotional responses are being repeatedly triggered due to our refusal or inability to leave the triggering situation (sometimes because of our belief it’s us that’s the problem) combined with resistance to the emotional response process itself.

Like an organic pressure-cooker we produce an emotionally overcharged Unconscious;  a painful battery desperate to discharge yet terrified things will blow-up internally in some way if we do.

In a perfect world our brain would be master controller of our entire body (and beyond) at all times and these crazy-paving paths we dance between our inner and outer worlds would be straight and clear. Trouble is, our Unconscious has several powerful minds, each with the power to override the one in our heads.

Hello, fellow segmented worm!

According to Dr Candace Pert (mentioned in previous posts) our body operates like that of a segmented worm. Control of mind and body - the bodymind - is moved between the segments depending on which segment is sending out the strongest peptide (hormones and neurotransmitters) signals at any one time.

Try not going to the toilet; not eating or drinking; not breathing - you’ll soon get the gist of this idea.  On second thoughts, please don’t try any of those things and if you do I’m not responsible for the consequences, OK?

Gut Feelings

I’m not a very good cook. I’ve never to my knowledge created mood-altering meals to order. At the time of writing this I am, however, lucky to be working in a college teaching catering and we have several of the UK’s top chefs supervising our meals. A few years ago the managers decided to combine the student canteen with the college restaurant resulting in award-winning food at canteen prices. Woohoo!

Sometimes when I’ve had a hectic morning’s work I’ll go there intending to have a quick meal before the next ‘emergency’ but the food stops me in my tracks; slows me down and totally changes my mood. There’s also a pub just round the corner serving a chicken, ham and leek pie, with chips and peas, and that meal and that meal alone at that pub has the same affect. I don’t know what they’re putting in these meals, I suspect there’s something in the pastry - but my Unconscious loves them. It feels completely satisfied and energised for five to six hours afterwards.

It comes as no surprise to me then that the unconscious is based mainly around our digestive system and heart, which is why when you’re emotionally negative you’ll feel a lot of tension coming up from just under your sternum.

This is certainly the area for me where I experienced the most painful emotional symptoms during my healing process.

We used to think Seratonin, the chemical that communicates ‘satisfaction’, was only found in the brain as a neurotransmitter but it turns out we have more of this satisfaction-triggering chemical in our digestive system as a hormone then anywhere else in the body - it’s what your stomach produces when you feel full.

The heart is also rich in all the molecules of emotion, including all those neurotransmitters to be found in the brain. They’re not there by accident - your heart operates like a secondary brain to the body.

It doesn’t stop there.

In addition to digestion and circulatory segments you have a reproductive segment; a waste disposal segment and an autonomic brain based in your spine allowing your body to react first and tell your brain about it later.  These different parts of you are all capable of taking control of what your brain thinks about at any one time.

The ‘molecules of emotion’ driving you are active in your skin, in your immune system and many other parts of your body.   

Your whole body talks. Are you listening to it?

When releasing negative emotions you may ‘suffer’ from heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, sweating, changes in stomach acid balance and yet - strangely enough - releasing in this way leads to an improved immune system (tests show that when a person releases trapped anger, for example, their immune function improves).

The ‘molecules of emotion’ are driving these changes as the vibrational energies they produce allow each of your different bodily segments, and other interweaving parts, to ‘speak’ when you are willing to listen.

If you listen for long enough, letting those segments release, your Prefrontal Cortex eventually becomes the ‘last segment standing’ and you feel like yourself once more.

When deliberately completing a trapped emotional cycle you may find yourself entering a state of shock, of freezing and overwhelm, as the sheer power of the Unconscious hits you.  Counsellors refer to this as ‘opening up’ (I don’t recommend you do this without professional support if available although I did do this myself on a daily basis for several years during healing without a counsellor being present).

It may seem you have entered a very strange world, a frightening and abnormal world no-one else ever talks about, but the truth is one of your ‘segments’ is releasing whenever you allow your feelings to flow and this is completely normal.

Flow - not removal - is the thing to focus on.  Once the intensity of the initial emotional flooding starts to pass and the vibrational discharge is allowed to die down you can concentrate on deliberately finding and consciously entering any remaining ‘puddles’ ensuring full discharge takes place and, gradually, the information cycle will finally complete.

Regards - Carl

Where Superconscious and Unconscious Collide - Completing Your Emotional Information Cycle (Part 3)

Your Superconscious and Unconscious collide in your Neo-Cortex (your conscious mind).

Your Unconscious is everything below your Neo-Cortex, including your body.  Your Superconscious is your Prefrontal Cortex just behind your forehead.

We store memories, experiential states and the thoughts that go with them, both in our brain and body. When we ‘remember’ an experience we draw up and mentally reconstruct the situation we were in at the time - different aspects of what we remember are stored in different places. We’re not alone in this. Scientists tell us, for example, that when a bird has an unpleasant reaction to a toxic berry it stores information on the size and shape of the berry in one place; the taste memory in another; the shine-level memory of the berry in yet another and memories of the unpleasant physical consequences somewhere else. When it sees another similar berry these different memories are brought together and reconstructed to cause the bird to avoid it.

Let’s say you had an argument with someone in the past and for you the argument remains emotionally unresolved. If you want to you can draw up the emotional memories from your body in such a way it takes you right back to those moments. You re-enter the location or atmosphere; re-visit the person; re-generate the verbal content and tone of your argument and enter the emotional vibratory state you produced at the time causing the sensations to be re-felt. When these memories come together against your will, which is what happens when you are suffering with a trapped emotional response, you may find them upsetting - but rather than see yourself as a victim of a bad experience you can instead deliberately enter into it intending to complete and resolve the argument without the other person ever knowing you did so or taking any external action.

It may be you found the initial experience so painful your only concern was with escaping it as quickly as possible. During the argument things said to you, by a then trusted person, went straight into your unconscious. Left unchallenged, these criticisms have been damaging your self-image or self-esteem and now in the safer revisiting of the experience (in which you know its full limits) you are able to see things more objectively. Drawing up those negative judgements made against you now means you have time to carefully challenge them; re-frame your opinion of yourself and release the trapped emotional energies repeatedly driving these re-forming memories into conscious attention.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But it’s not at all easy. In fact for someone with an emotional disorder making the change means going through a series of internal battles before the war can be won; sometimes for months and, as in my case, for years. This war takes place between the Superconscious (your Prefrontal Cortex telling the rest of your brain and body how you intend to feel) and your Unconscious, telling how you currently feel.

This big argument between the two meets in the Neo-Cortex.

Whenever you ‘change your mind’ it is the Prefrontal Cortex that drives this. But there is a problem when you change your mind - you are confronted by all the years of biased interpretations and learning you previously sent down into it and oh, how we value the miserable work we’ve put into creating and keeping it there!

The argument is ‘it’s kept you and your loved ones alive and safe this long - so why risk it?’. Most of your current unconscious programming probably doesn’t show up much in your Neo-Cortex - with all those nasty emotional responses attached - until you fully commit to doing the opposite of what it keeps telling you to do. And then the emotionally driven arguments appear telling you such things as:

‘You cannot change how you interpret the past - that’s lying to yourself. You’re trying to pretend the other person was wrong. You need these bad feelings to remind you to stay on track and protect what you value’.

‘Don’t go into these painful feelings - if you go in you will never come out and then what? You will have to commit suicide to escape them - or you may get cancer and die. There is no you on the other side of this. This is you!’.

‘This is your punishment in life for not being good enough’.

‘Normal people do not experience these feelings - you’re crazy!’.

‘If you talk to someone else about what’s going on inside not only will they start avoiding you they might call the police who will then lock you up and throw away the key. You’ll be sectioned and drugged and electrocuted or even lobotomised. Your kids will never see you again’.

‘You can’t change yourself - it’s who you are. It can’t be done’.

As you keep moving inwards images start to come up accompanied by overwhelming emotional responses which cause normal thinking to shut down and the evidence being presented to the observing Prefrontal Cortex by the Unconscious is that the new approach will cause the entire self to close down (die).

If you imagine yourself as an organisation, with your Prefrontal Cortex acting as senior management, your Unconscious as the front line workforce threatening to go on strike and your Neo-Cortex acting as the day to day supervisory managers trying to keep normal productive life going on in the meantime it provides quite a good model. Both sides are well intentioned, but one has to win over the other to prove its case in regards to the new direction being taken.

You will see this kind of inner battle in the simplest life situations. For example you start a new job thinking your college training makes you an expert only to discover you’re once again ‘at the bottom of the ladder’ and have to learn whole new skill sets to thrive in the workplace. Or you suggest a new idea to someone and get criticisms for feedback.

As the Prefrontal Cortex drives these inner changes home it is confronted by these old arguments against change, and they are powerful arguments that change your actual body chemistry for a while. Now the Prefrontal Cortex has to agree to come up with alternative ways of thinking. You must give yourself permission to like yourself. You must accept the feelings you are experiencing as normal given the thought seeds, buried deep in your memories, that are driving them.

Whenever these thought seeds appear in your conscious mind (in your Neo-Cortex) your Prefrontal Cortex must grab them and deliberately change them or they will just carry on festering away in your Unconscious again.

‘Not only was I good enough I was outstanding - it was they who had the problem’.

‘These kinds of feelings are normal for anyone having to deal with that kind of situation’.

Whatever thought seeds you need to plant in your Unconscious in order to bring about inner happiness you plant right in the middle of this argument phase - repeatedly and whenever you have to. It doesn’t matter if these thoughts are not someone else’s truth - the truth is they’ll be your truth.

Achieving internal happiness, not re-writing history or making everyone else look good, is your goal here.

Regards - Carl

Completing Your Emotional Information Cycle (Part 2) - Opening a Closed Mind

Your Prefrontal Cortex opens and closes the Electrical and chemical information channels in your brain

We tend to think of the brain as a fixed structure but it can be physically trained in the same way a muscle can. There are two communication systems running your body and brain:

• the electrical system, operating through nerves and neurones;
• the chemical system, based on the transportation of ‘ligands’, molecules carried in liquid form acting as the neurotransmitters and hormones (also called peptides) of our brain and body, transporting information signals triggering different things to happen - including the production of moods.

Dr Candace Pert Ph.D, a research professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Centre in Washington DC, famous for discovering the Opiate Receptor (she has also discovered many other things about our emotional information cycles) tells us the Prefrontal Cortex can restrict the flow of electrical signal information travelling through the brain by sending instructions to brain ‘way stations’, instructing them not to allow certain brain signals through (she says at the moment there are seven of these brain ‘way stations’ known to us). .

The brain is interlaced with anti-emotional signal resistance mechanisms, including the Reticular Formation in the brain stem and the Ascending Reticular Activation System (ARAS), an extension of the Reticular Formation which spreads fan-like throughout the brain. Without this resistance system you would be so overwhelmed by emotional signals coming up from your body you would never wake up.

When it decides it doesn’t like a particular set of signals your Prefrontal Cortex can use these and other built-in resistance systems to deliberately block their effects.

Dr Pert tells us the Prefrontal Cortex can also resist chemically transported (ligand) information by shrinking blood vessels. This reduces both the level of communicating ligands reaching certain parts of the brain and also the amount of glucose - the brain’s only food supply - reaching those brain areas. The Prefrontal Cortex literally starves itself of the ability to think and feel about things it doesn’t want to. Brain scans confirm that during depression brain activity physically moves further back into the brain as a result - which unfortunately moves conscious awareness further down into the Limbic Brain - the automatically more emotional and worrying brain area. This is a self-defeating strategy causing the sufferer to remain emotionally blocked. Depression really is an act of ‘pushing down’ your thinking and feeling processes.

In order to open up to the emotional responses, so allowing the signals through and the energy to evaporate, we need the Prefrontal Cortex (that is, ‘you’) to start sending instructions to the brain’s way stations to start allowing the electrical signals to come through and open up the blood vessels in the brain to allow more of the chemically transported ligands through so all that emotional energy can be released.

In her writings Dr Pert tells us the good news is we can fully reverse the process and return to full unrestricted brain health once we start putting the self-work in.

To be more ‘open minded’ is not just an intellectual process composed of a few thoughts - in the brain it is a physical act. Opening the mind can be a slow, difficult process when it comes to accepting certain types of information. Although I often use the term ‘going in’, because that’s the sense I got during my healing process as I would target my next source of emotional pain and move towards it - the truth is the healing process is one of opening up to. Your Prefrontal Cortex opens up the channels of communication, allowing the signals, both electrical and chemical, to come through.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles - Your Prefrontal Cortex & Neo-Cortex Working Together (Part 1)

You may already know your Neo-Cortex is a layer of 'gray matter' only a few millimetres thick covering the left and right halves of your brain. You may also know the Right Neo-Cortex processes and stores imagery, with or without emotional energy attached; while the Left Neo-Cortex processes and stores logical, unemotional, word-based 'thinking'.

When you are awake the Left and Right exchange information with each other continuously, under the watchful eye of your Prefrontal Cortex.

During sleep the Prefrontal Cortex shuts down for about 75% of the time; the Left Neo-Cortex almost completely shuts down (apart from those brief moments where you come back to conscious awareness again); the Right Neo-Cortex remains active - it never sleeps.

For about a quarter of your sleep cycle your Right Neo-Cortex and Prefrontal Cortex communicate with each other and you experience ‘dreaming’ as a result. Dreams form as the Prefrontal Cortex and Right Neo-Cortex work together to create patterns of meaning from emotional signals rising up from your body. Unfortunately you cannot heal a blocked emotional response during sleep - you have to be fully conscious to do that.

If you are suffering with an emotional disorder (a blocked emotional response such as panic attacks or obsessions, for example) and you want to heal yourself, it helps to become more consciously aware of how these three brain parts, the Prefrontal Cortex, the Right Neo-Cortex and the Left Neo-Cortex, function together. In order to bring about full emotional healing, which means full completion of an emotional information cycle through the process of self-directed exposure therapy, all three need to be involved.

You need to be awake, focused, and ready to store freshly obtained ‘factual’ and logical information; both about the subjective experience (how you feel about being subjected to the experience of the content of your internal emotional story itself), and also the objective, ‘outsiders view’ of the emotional release process as your emotional cycle completes (using the Left Neo-Cortex to store the final facts revealed).

Once you start to develop an objective viewpoint, especially when you finally see successes in clearing these cycles, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the reality of the natural emotional process. That is not to say you will like having this new knowledge stored as a ‘fact’ in your brain. Blocked emotional responses are unpleasant whether you know how to remove them or not.

You also need to be consciously (observantly) moving inwards; towards your emotional energies and any attached imagery, using the hunting drive of your Prefrontal Cortex. Your intention is to meet, fully explore and engage with your emotional energies in addition to the images and other sensations they are attached to with the intention of disconnecting those energies and images from each other through the process of ‘feeling’.

Please remember, as I state in most of the things I write on the subject, you need the support of a doctor or other medically qualified professional while going through this process. It is a physical process and, although the symptoms are unlikely to be life-threatening, they can be very uncomfortable and frightening in themselves - there is also the possibility the symptoms are masking other things your doctor should be taking care of.

Your Prefrontal Cortex compels you to go into the hated emotional experience; your Right Neo-Cortex produces various types of imagery in relation to the energies being brought into conscious awareness and the feeling process then strips energy from the imagery involved. Imagery with no direct meaning disappears while ‘factual’ information is transferred to the Left Neo-Cortex with the Prefrontal Cortex agreeing the situation producing the information is no longer ‘active’ and can be forgotten until needed later.

During my own healing process I deliberately and knowingly completed this cycle 42 times; clearing 27 obsessions, 14 phobias and a long-term panic attack condition over a three year period. Unknowingly both you and I have completed thousands of such cycles throughout our lives.

Can you think of any?

Regards - Carl

Your Prefrontal Cortex - Your Superconscious

Positioned just below and behind your forehead the Prefrontal Cortex looks backwards, like a rower in a rowing boat, into your brain and body (it is listed as the ‘Front Cortex’ in the diagram above). 

It performs your Executive Functions.  As your Strategic Senior Manager the PFC develops and monitors your long-term self-image and self-awareness process as you travel various journeys through different environments. 

'You’ lives there.

Central you is unconditionally happy you with the role of your PFC being to repeatedly return you to that state.  When you are internally emotionally conflicted it is the PFC that tells you 'you are not yourself'.

I became more aware of the workings of this brain-part about three months into my self-devised healing plan during which I was carrying out daily self-exposure therapy sessions in regards to my obsessions.  Until then I hadn't known it even existed and became gradually more aware through the functions it performed. 

Initially I imagined I had somehow developed a new place from which to look at things, almost like a new personality, but in truth I was learning to shift my consciousness - the point from which I saw things - into this part of my brain.  I did this by asking just one question:  'how does it (my emotional process) work?'.  I had spent years telling myself how it should work, but it wasn't working that way.

Simply by repeatedly looking inwards, watching my emotional system for prolonged periods of time without critical judgement, I began to change my inner dynamic.   Other parts of my brain's conscious activity, such as my thinking chatter, began shutting down quicker while memories and pictorial information were being accessed more often.  I was now in the habit of hunting emotional energy responses and matching them to imagery to which they were attached - then moving consciously towards both.

At first I named this newly discovered part of myself my Silent Observer.  I called it 'Silent' because it did not work in word-based thinking.  I called it 'Observer' because I noticed the moment it saw a particular part of myself in a different way permanent changes began to occur in the way my emotions operated.  They began to release in dramatic bursts and then disappear.

Initially I had started the process of going in using just my thinking word-based brain - I would mentally talk to myself a lot - but this new picture-based part was taking over the job and any thoughts for or against working on myself would quickly die down.  After I had done the self-work for a couple of months I couldn't stop going in even if I wanted to - it was now automated.  Day and night my Silent Observer forced me to go into emotional reactions I hated.

For a specific period during sleep the Prefrontal Cortex works on the imagery flowing through our brains - we call it dreaming - and during this time it talks to the Unconscious through the Right Neo-Cortex (your Conscious Pattern and Picture Mind).  It decides which images are dreams and which are reality.  It establishes a visual map of how different areas of your life are connected or disconnected.  By the way, your Right Neo-Cortex never sleeps and your Unconscious uses it to talk back to your Conscious all of the time.

I watched as my Silent Observer observed, experimented and tested my emotions like a cold hearted scientist.  The 'Observing' moments began to increase in number.  The Silent Observer began spending more of its time away from what was going on in the outside world because it was getting results internally it had always previously looked for out there.  I imagined it to be like an ecstatic engineer who had been trying to bring an old engine back to life for years and suddenly understood what needed to be done. I started to experience a great deal of frustration - something overwhelmingly determined had lit up in the front of my head and was angry at how long the change process was taking. 

Now starting to develop a belief I could actually remove my obsessions my Prefrontal Cortex pursued anything new it spotted like a rabid hunter.  It wanted to get the work done before any external-world event could distract it.  I would occasionally wake in the middle of the night to find myself having a panic attack in my sleep, shaking and sweating with a pounding heart.  A new emotional layer, with new imagery, would come up into consciousness and my Unconscious would fight back with arguments such as 'I can't go there, it'll kill me!'.  My Silent Observer - the Prefrontal Cortex - would say 'that's an acceptable risk, carry on'.

My doctor, who I had been seeing regularly, advised me to slow the self-directed exposure-therapy process down as my physical symptoms were getting more severe.  I had started making regular trips to the hospital due to having strong heart palpitations; my stomach acid had become imbalanced and my blood pressure had rocketed - one nurse told another a reading she took from me was the highest she'd seen in her career.  But I couldn't stop.  I explained to my doctor it was like I'd gone over the curve of a rollercoaster ride and to stop now would take more effort than to just go with the ride.  My Prefrontal Cortex  had won the battle - it was going to keep working on my inner world now whether my Unconscious wanted it to or not. 

The Prefrontal Cortex is our predatory brain part. 

It forces us to hunt.

It performs multiple functions such as:

• acting as self-motivator; moving you in different directions, in different physical postures and generating different emotions according to different environmental contexts


• your main source of judgement (is it you or is it them?); it decides what 'real' is as it assesses the meaning of the many signals reaching it through the rest of your brain - sometimes, when it's tired and sleep deprived, those signals get sent straight to the emotional Limbic brain in error and you can find yourself reacting automatically to something without knowing why


• managing your value systems - it decides what goals in life you are emotionally attached to and moving towards, and how you prioritise or line up your journeys towards those goals, one over another, and then redesigns your brain to adapt your behaviours to support the value hierarchy this creates for you.

And there’s more.  The Prefrontal Cortex also produces:

• hope: it projects picture-based suggestions of wonderful environments you could move towards and calls on experiential sensual memories to enhance the affect; it triggers the initial production of Dopamine causing you to become pleasantly attached to the idea of something (craving) and moving towards scenarios built only in your head and then Seratonin to make you feel satisfied when you reach the goal


• despair: it projects picture-based horror stories telling you about things to be avoided; about things pursuing you and which you (allegedly) need to keep a continual lookout for - it triggers the initial production of Adrenaline and Cortisol in order to stimulate fight, freeze or flight reactions (and it can do this in regards to your own emotions too) causing you to avoid scenarios that do not yet exist in reality


• depression: in depression it initially produces rage at being detached from something seen as a high value priority to the self-image; when rage does not ensure reattachment it then attempts non-cooperation with the process of life itself by withdrawing electrical activity in certain parts of the brain; it pulls back into the lower Limbic brain in a bid to avoid acknowledging the painful loss but paradoxically causes itself to set up home in the very worried, brooding brain


• gratitude - it can train you to start upwards from rock-bottom by learning to appreciate every little positive thing; you don't do this by default - this is a re-learning process


• intuition - the Prefrontal Cortex can learn to pay closer attention to certain signals it previously ignored so sharpening its ability to see 'in-between' signals; to shift from a subjective experience to an objective viewpoint and then make better informed directional judgements.

A lot of this activity is carried out in the imagination - the Prefrontal Cortex's image manipulation and association tool.  But we’re not finished yet - it does even more than that:

• it creates logical cause-and-affect memories by deciding which of your brain's signals should be kept and stored as named 'facts' for later retrieval


• it records visual patterns, using these as templates for future actions - it imposes these patterns on your internal and external world; it is the creator of both positive and negative expectations and also of disappointment and pleasant surprise


• it is a solution hunter - searching through your many internal signals for sense and meaning and it does this because it is also your direction-finder - to find 'meaning' is to find 'direction'.

also, of most importance in emotional healing it is the part of you that:

• consciously affects neuroplasticity - the connecting and disconnecting ability of your brain's neural pathways


• it can persuade the Unconscious to co-operate in re-establishing emotional flow by forming new connections


• it is the part of you that, when it hears the mantra 'you can't cure your emotional condition, you can only manage it' decides that message is unacceptable and tells you to proceed towards full healing anyway


• it's the part of you that finally decides to override your social programming, making the achievement of internal unconditional happiness your top priority while developing the view that if you do this your social environment will benefit anyway as a result.

Oh, one more thing - it's also the part of you that made you emotionally ill in the first place because it previously made some wrong decisions about the direction in which you should travel in order to find your unconditionally happy self.  Sorry about that.

Your Prefrontal Cortex is Your Superconscious

We use the Prefrontal Cortex all the time but we may not become consciously aware of it until we start making plans to move into a new environment.  It is this part of us that keeps reassessing just how much we want to move, and then drives us on, making us increasingly determined despite coming up against obstacles.  It reminds us of what we're moving away from and what we're moving towards.  It will even lie to us to get us there by promising things it has no way of knowing exist for sure (we call this faith).

Because we're not consciously engaging with it all the time we may regard it as a part of our Unconscious, but it's actually our Superconscious.  Our overseer and future programmer.

It instructs the Unconscious, which then goes on to automatically work on behalf of the Prefrontal Cortex's instructions once they are imprinted enough times.  Whereas the Unconscious is concerned with self-protection and maintaining the safer status quo, the Prefrontal Cortex is concerned with taking measured risks and trying new things.

The Unconscious and the Prefrontal Cortex are in constant discussion with each other, with your Conscious thinking mind - your Left Neo-Cortex, sitting between the two.  When suffering from an emotional block your thinking mind experiences the discussion as a non-stop fight it can’t quite figure out by using it’s sole resource and tool - thinking.

When deciding to heal emotionally, by using a technique such as exposure therapy, you force your Prefrontal Cortex to reconnect with the parts of the Unconscious it is currently avoiding, getting your word-based thinking mind out of the way and entering their more picture-based discussion. 

Trapped emotional energy is released and the old neural pathways the energy once travelled through start to disintegrate like disused railway lines.

New ‘happiness pathways’ are created and they become your more permanent way of thinking and feeling (this is not a theoretical change in thinking, it is physical reconstruction of the brain - it hurts and takes time to achieve). 

In the next post we look at the Left and Right Neo-Cortex and the roles they play in your Emotional Information Cycle.

Regards - Carl