Drilling for Emotional Wellness: Emotional Representations and Reflections

I want you to imagine your inner life consists of two main elements:

• Representations


• Reflections

Representations

Representations represent Reflections – they can be a simple shape, a word or our mental image of a person.  They are quick to appear in our minds and in most cases we are quick to let them go.  We might call them thoughts – but they are the kind of thoughts that lead on to other things.

We let a Representation come and go easily when it briefly catches our attention mechanism because we do not see it as important.  When the Reflection represented has either already been fully explored or is so emotionally uninteresting to us we have no urge whatsoever to explore it it will flow through our mind without our trying to stop it.

Reflections

A Reflection is an experience in which several Representations interact with each other.  Each interacting Representation offers us another journey into another Reflection.  They form a ‘scene’ in which different directions are offered to us each with an alternative possible outcome.

The result of entering an unfamiliar reflection is to find yourself in a state of uncertainty.  This does not cause too much stress if the reflection is built around an area of thinking to which you do not have a lot of emotional energy attached.

For example, two scientists discussing alternative theories of particles produced by a particle accelerator may hold your attention for a short period of time.  If they argue over the possibility of the next accelerator test creating a black hole that could swallow you and your family they may get more of your attention.  If they tell you they are building the accelerator where your house currently sits well, it is unlikely you will pay attention to much else for a long while.  You may be particularly emotional about it.

In the above scenario you might select the image of the scientists or the image of the accelerator or the black hole as your Representation – but what it represents is the Reflection containing information about what you expect to lose and how you feel about it.

Emotionally intense Reflections produce ‘flashing’ attention-grabbing Representations.

Emotionally charged Representations grab the attention of your unconscious attention mechanism and may enforce a compulsive response we would rather not have  Compulsion is a physical urge to do something about the content within the Reflection.

We usually feel compelled to pay attention to representations when they represent a survival-related threat to us or trigger a response designed to protect something of value.

What one person regards as a survival-related issue may be different to what others do.  This is why different Representations mean different things to each of us at different times.

A couple of quick examples of Representations/Reflections:

• college certificates represent money; success; respect; a life of purpose and enjoyment – you see this represented by ‘certificate’ – you feel compelled to physically go somewhere and do things to obtain your certificate but not to get the certificate – to get the things in the Reflection behind it


• a bullying boss represents losing a big battle and getting sacked; blocked career paths; bad references; you being labelled a trouble causer; emotional illness – all this is represented by the image of the boss – on the surface it appears you feel physically compelled to go places or stand up to or run away from your bad boss but in the reflection you discover the true things feared are your own possible failures.

How Does This Information Help in Drilling for Emotional Wellness?

In obsessions and phobias we are quite often presented with the Representation and shy away from it because it looks silly or unnecessary or we just do not understand what is going on when this apparent simple image appears with a very strong set of emotional responses attached.

The emotional response, however, is not really attached to the Representation – it is attached to the Reflection behind it.

A phobic afraid of lifts (elevators), for example, may have a reaction to the lift door (the Representation) but the Reflection contains information on how it felt to be helpless; how it felt to feel suffocated; the imagined embarrassment of having to go to the toilet in a lift if you were trapped there and then have your rescuers discover the result– imagery like this may lurk in the reflection and be the real thing behind the obvious image of the lift doors.

In compulsion what happens is the emotional energy in the Reflection ‘flashes’ at us through the Representation; telling us there is something behind the Representation we need to go into and explore.

By going through our Representations into the Reflections behind them and exploring their hidden meaning we discharge the energy within.  We turn those Representative flashing attention-grabbers into just neutrally charged thoughts that appear for shorter and shorter periods until one day they hardly bother us again.

A lack of understanding of this process can leave us standing at the flashing doorway to an emotionally charged Reflection wondering what it is we are supposed to do next.

Regards - Carl

Emotions Come with a Purpose, a Role and a Need – You Can Use this Knowledge to Heal Phobias and Obsessions

Emotions have a purpose, play a role you ultimately decide the nature of and have their own universal driving need.  Understanding all three aspects of your emotional responses will help you in their management and removal.

Emotional Purpose

Your emotions are concerned with three things:

• defending your territory


• maintaining your current territory


• managing the risks involved in expanding your territory.

In the animal world control of a specific territory as a source of food and safety for the period it takes to raise new offspring is a survival-strength issue.  This is the same for humans but in addition we also use the same emotional responses in defending intellectual property such as our ideas, our hopes and relationships.  All products, quite often, of the imagination.

Anything you are capable of imagining you are capable of attaching a survival-strength response to if what you imagine is linked in to your deepest values.  If you value the freedom of having a mobile piece of territory, for example, you may really value your car.

The science of Proxemics studies the emotional effects on people of their environments and how those environments are arranged around them (it is closely related to the study of body language).  What Proxemics tells us is that the distance between you and a possible threat makes a difference in your level of emotional intensity when you have a reaction to the alleged threat.

A threat within your ‘intimate space’, within say a foot of your body, produces your most intense reactions.  If you have a phobia this will occur as you approach the external object to which your phobia is attached and you will notice it gets more intense as you approach.

In the case of an obsession the imagery you are afraid of is at the centre of your intimate zone – in your mind.  For this reason obsessions are among the most distracting types of emotional triggers you can have.

Even here, though, the issue is one of territory.  A phobic person has that problem because their Unconscious believes they have entered predator territory as they approach the feared external object or environment while the sufferer of an obsession has an Unconscious belief a predator (the unwanted image) has entered their mental territory and needs forcing out.

Although these reactions are fed by imagined scenarios they produce exactly the same emotional responses as real life events would.  The trick of getting rid of these conditions is to  treat them as if they were real life events but use the same tool that created them to remove them – your imagination.

Thankfully you do not have to recreate the real life events themselves in order to get rid of these conditions.  A person with a fear of elevators can use an empty elevator (sometimes even just an imagined elevator or a small cupboard) and a person with an obsession is both blessed and cursed by the fact the whole issue sits inside their own body and mind.

Having been produced in order to deal with an alleged territorial issue an emotional response needs to make itself known by being expressed.

Role

The overall purpose of an emotional response is to get the body to move physically in a direction in order to perform a specific, survival related act.  Three examples:

• anger


• disgust and


• fear.

Anger is the response to a threat of losing territory and the urge to take it back.  If the territory is being repeatedly threatened or taken away the response can turn to one of blind rage.  If you are having this response you will see at the centre of it the urge to move forward and then take back something you regard as central to your survival.

You will temper this reaction according to circumstances, but at some level the animal part of you is reacting to losing important territory.  How you mentally change the context of what you see as your territory alters the intensity of your reaction.

If you decide to become self-critical for feeling anger at the loss you may turn this anger inwards and it becomes depression.

Disgust is about an undesirable predator infringing your territory and dirtying it with their physical and behavioural habits.  It is about poisoning your territory.  The urge here is to push away and reject.

You can have a disgust reaction to bad food but also to unacceptable behaviour impacting your values.  Disgust is an ‘I have had enough’ response.  If you become self-critical at feeling disgust you can develop a fear of it and it can turn into an obsession.

Fear is the urge to avoid a predator entering your territory or to avoid the threat of a predator when you enter their territory.  Fear is about moving away quickly when the predator appears.  If you become self-critical of your fear you will hold it in place using both anger and secondary fear and you create phobias and panic attacks in this way.

With all three emotional types self-critical behaviour will keep the emotions trapped in your body.  Trouble is, the role of an emotional response is to express itself by getting out of your body.

The way to express an emotional response is to give it what it needs.

Need

Emotional responses only have one need.  To escape you.

If, however, you have identified your own emotional responses as predators encroaching on your mental territory, also needing to be got rid of, you will find yourself with more than one emotional response to deal with.  You will have to spend some time changing the way you see your emotional process so you no longer see it as being full of predators and no longer produce the secondary responses designed to hold them at bay.

You’ve got to let them cross your land and go out the other side.

Just because you know the territory being defended exists only in your imagination does not mean you can ignore the need of the emotional response wanting to leave your body.  The triggers may not be real but your responses are and you must take them seriously.

When you reject an emotional response as unworthy of release it fights you in order to meet its need – it looks for any external stimulus that barely resembles the original trigger to project itself onto.  When a trapped emotional response keeps begging for release you will find yourself having strange thoughts.  Thoughts of evil things happening; painful thoughts that are not the ‘normal’ you.

We call this projection.  Projection is where people take an emotional response created in one experience and project it onto an unrelated situation later.  This can happen with all our emotions and is a signal the emotional response is creating alternative thinking routes through which it hopes to escape your body.  Projection does not work very well – it is better to identify the original thought-path that created the response and allow the emotional energy to escape through that.

Purpose, Role, Need

Set aside a safe place in a room where there are no distractions.  You may want to use objects or imagined scenarios as tools onto which your attention can focus.

Allow your emotions to project onto those tools.  This may seem like a very strange and unrealistic thing to do – but your emotions will not agree with this view.  They will come up.

Acknowledge their right to ‘defend’ your territory – even just temporarily during the projection process.  Even though you know they are lying to you about the alleged threat, let the energy express itself at the target tool – let projection take place.

Do this repeatedly, until the energy has projected and expressed to the point the need of  your emotional response has been met, whether it is a normal emotional response or a phobia or an obsession or any other anxiety disorder, one day your emotional response will be gone.

Regards - Carl

Obsessions – Five Questions Answered

• What is an Obsession?


• What Drives an Obsession?


• Why is an Obsession so Difficult to Remove?


• How Can I Remove an Obsession?


• How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

What is an Obsession?

An obsession is a secondary emotional response designed to try and remove or hold back the sensations produced by an intense primary emotional response. The primary emotional response is attached to an image of the issue it was originally produced to deal with; these primary responses are usually concerned with preventing something terrible happening.

The secondary response is created when your logical mind does not accept the need for the primary response or the image to which it is attached and begins to fight it. It fights both the emotional response by 'squeezing it down' and also the image by trying to get it out of the brain.  Both of these approaches fail to work.

Attempting to remove a thought-based image from your brain just repeatedly re-creates the thought you are trying to remove because you have to think about what you want to remove before you can remove it.  This loop goes round and round in our thinking.  Fortunately, you do not have to succeed in this goal in order to remove an obsession because obsessions are not driven by thoughts.

What Drives an Obsession?

Obsessions are driven by the trapped emotional responses held in place by the refusal of your logical mind to grant them release.  This is the only thing that drives an obsession.  Just so we are clear:

Obsessions are maintained and driven by emotional responses only.

They are not driven by your thinking – your thoughts are a by-product of the emotional response looking for a way out of your body.  Release the emotional energy attached to the image and the image disappears from your conscious mind as a side-affect.

Why is it so difficult to heal obsessions?

The answer to this question is complex; here are three main reasons obsessions are difficult to get rid of:

• Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs


• The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Your Six Minds


• Painful Physical Symptoms

Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs

The majority of your brain works with visual signals.  How you ‘see’ your overall emotional system decides whether or not you allow or block certain types of emotional responses to pass through it.

One of the first things I ask people suffering with emotional problems is ‘how do you see your response – what shape does it have for you?’.  If you regard your obsession as a predator, approaching with  an arched back preparing to once again suffocate you into submission, your unconscious will naturally try to hold it back from approaching.

As you start to heal from an obsession your visually based belief systems are unable to deny the new patterns emerging and these patterns create new thinking pathways in your brain – new physical links through which fresh thinking patterns send their signals – old neural links are decommissioned and eventually fade altogether.  The price of this re-writing of the brain, if we use Exposure Therapy, is intense emotional pain for various periods of time.

To your Unconscious seeing is believing and, if you decide to heal your obsession using Exposure Therapy, you will see quite a lot of things in ways difficult to explain to others and which may seem silly.

Your visual belief systems are difficult to access because they are spread out, and reinforced, by the conversations going on between, at least, six minds.

The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Six Minds

Your overall ‘mind’ is actually a combination of the workings of several sub-minds. A mind is a mechanism that either blocks or allows electrical stimulation to flow through it to the next mind in line.  When it comes to a particular obsession at least five sub-minds are involved in the blocking process and all 5 need to be persuaded to change how they see your obsession.

Out of your six minds only your Body-mind feels compelled to deal with the issue and the other five are at war with it.  The six minds are:

1. your Body-mind (when your Body is emotionally charged it is the most powerful mind of the six – it is the mind that generates the most emotional energy you will ever feel; once produced this energy either floods or, if held back threatens to flood and dominate, the work of the other five minds until the energy is fully discharged – when it fails to achieve discharge your body feels tense)


2. your Reptilian-mind (this mind observes both what is going on in your upper minds as well as ensuring your body is geared up to meet the challenges coming downwards – your Reptilian-mind has no contact with the external world other than what it sees second hand through your upper minds - it observes these signals in limited terms of predator versus prey and cannot tell the different between real or imagined threats)


3. your Emotional-mind (Limbic System – this mind is designed to store both specific images of threats and also general images of the environments surrounding those specific threats – the emotional-mind is the home of the mechanism that maintains both normal fears and anxiety disorders such as obsessions – this mind can be moulded and managed through indirect behaviours and is the core of your Unconscious)


4. your Logical-mind (left Neo-Cortex  - this mind thinks in words and what I like to think of as ‘low-level imagery’ built from words - this mind is the source of both the original problem in emotional blocking but can also become leader in applying the solution when dealing with obsessions once it understands and accepts a new way of seeing the emotional process as logical in its own right)


5. your conscious Pattern-mind (right Neo-Cortex – your pattern mind releases emotional energy faster and more effectively than any of your other minds when consciously applied – working with your unconscious it is able to recognise and consciously use new imagery forced into being by the healing process)


6. your Ascending Reticular Activation System (this is a net-like structure connecting your brain minds; it acts both as a resistance system and an activation system – using this system you are able to allow or block emotional responses from entering the brain; some scientists believe the ARAS is the home of your sense of self).

All six minds need retraining, both as individual minds and in how they work with each other, in order to bring about and maintain healing from an obsession.

Thankfully, if you decide to use Exposure Therapy in order to heal your obsession, only one general approach is needed to ensure this retraining happens.

Painful Physical Symptoms

Obsessions ‘pressure-cook’ your emotional responses in such a way as to make them some of the most intensely painful emotional experiences you can endure.  Should you decide to take the Exposure Therapy route to healing you can expect physical and mental symptoms like these:

• your current intense feelings get much worse (things feeling much worse is actually an indicator you’re doing it the right way)


• sleeplessness and extremely lurid, frightening nightmares


• additional emotional responses previously hidden from your conscious such as frequent panic and rage attacks – issues that did not affect you previously may suddenly start looming large


• overwhelm of your thinking processes to the point all you can do is sit or lay down and ‘feel’ – probably accompanied by intense imagery and the regurgitation of long-lost painful memories or feared imaginings


• palpitations; high blood pressure (mine doubled for several months); a change in stomach acid balance

I do not sell it well, I know.  Here is one more:

• Mammalian Disassociation Response; the symptoms of this include sensations of being pulled to the ground and, when looking at your hands getting the distinct impression they are not attached to your body.  The cause of this is a mechanism all mammals have designed to reduce the sensations of pain when being eaten by a predator.

How Can I Remove an Obsession?

Exposure Therapy can heal most anxiety disorders and simply involves changing your mental direction.  Your brain is a mapping system and the pen that draws the maps is your conscious focus.  Obsessions are maintained by our minds repeatedly trying to run away from the natural affects of our own emotional energies.  Change the direction of your focus by 'going in' and the pen starts drawing a different type of map.

By consciously taking your point of focus into the emotional response and then observing, without prejudicial judgement, what happens when you remain in the response for long enough, you will force your different minds to adjust.  You will see trapped energy begin to move; you will see that the responses hurt, but they do not kill you.

To succeed you must eventually surrender to your emotional process totally and trust your body to know what it is doing; this is difficult because we are socially programmed not to trust our bodies.

Because it is so difficult I recommend you try other options first before trying Exposure Therapy – try hypnotherapy or counselling and see if anything like that helps.  I have been told by an EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) practitioner, an ex-NHS nurse whom I completely trust, that EFT can be used to clear obsessions gently.

So try other options first if you can and then, if you find yourself at a point of despondency and extreme frustration - so extreme you are willing to try anything - then try Exposure Therapy.

A word of caution: establish a foundational support system before you begin to experiment with this approach.

Once you start the Exposure Therapy approach to healing an obsession you may find it very difficult to stop yourself.  I found myself working on this process in my sleep and because I had 27 obsessions to remove it went on for several years.

If you do exposure therapy in regards to a phobia, for example, your perception tells you the object you fear is external to you – you have to imagine yourself approaching, or actually approach, the related external object.   With an obsession you are both blessed and cursed by the fact your perception sees the problem as being ‘inside’ and, if you are desperate enough, you will work night and day to get rid of it whether you want to or not.  You literally turn your trapped emotional energy in on itself.

Once you get to this stage you will find yourself so enraged by the condition, so determined, so aggressive and attacking towards it you will want to destroy it.  You will think about nothing else but destroying it.

In order to remove an obsession you must become more obsessed about thinking about it than you previously were about not thinking about it.  Does that make sense?

How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

Three main steps:

• Get professional support in place


• Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place


• Share your plan with those who can be trusted

Get professional support in place

I recommend the following as a minimum:

• your doctor


• a counsellor


• a psychiatrist (maybe – usually recommended by your doctor)

I found the advice of my doctors invaluable – one of them was the most supportive person I had in my life until I met my counsellor.  She recommended a psychiatrist who tried to put me on heavy doses of Prozac but agreed I could stick to low doses during my self-healing programme – the psychiatrist was amazed at my progress. My doctor was able to reassure me at various times when the physical symptoms I experienced were particularly worrying (the symptoms of anxiety disorders can mask other conditions so it is important to get reassurance from your doctor).

The counsellor I found I still see today on a monthly basis – this lady supported me every step of the way during healing and has been invaluable as my ‘self-acceptance coach; milestone marker and cheerleader’.

You need the support of these people if you can get them.

Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place

For a number of reasons you may not be able to do direct work on yourself unless it is in private.  This work will be time-consuming and you do not want to be disturbed.  That is not to say you will not need a break or a distraction now and again - this work is exhausting – but the more focused and concentrated your self-work is the faster you will make progress.

A couple of other good reasons for working this way is to remove the danger of taking your moods out on others (and you will get moody – that is really the whole point!) and, even more importantly, doing this work while out and about can be life-threatening, especially when crossing roads or using machinery, as it can completely dominate your attention.

Share your plan with those who can be trusted

I have no problem sharing my experience with anyone – but there are people who are made uncomfortable by friends who tell them they have strong emotional responses to everyday inanimate objects and I have lost so-called friends due to this.

There are also malicious gossips around, so you may want to keep an eye out for those too.  However, if your primary concern is getting well you are going to have to get really courageous and be willing to pay any social price that presents itself.

Pay attention to how others react to you – but remain true to yourself.

Any questions or comments?

Regards - Carl

Obsessions Develop in the Fertile Ground of Intense Worry

I had a chat with a friend over lunch last week.  She and her husband had been planning a big holiday abroad but a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland had grounded all flights and they had to cancel – she told me she felt guilty because while her husband was gutted she felt nothing but relief and she could not bring herself to tell him.

She explained their dog was old and had health problems.  She had worried for several months that leaving her dog with someone else while they went on holiday would cause the dog to die prematurely.

Just before talking about this she had been discussing my interest in helping people cure obsessions and told me she had once had obsessions but they had faded away of their own accord.  Since starting to worry about her dog, however, she had started to get repeating images in her mind about his anticipated painful death and wanted to know if I could shed some light on what might help stop her previous condition developing again.

Her first question was what causes the problem?

I explained the repeating imagery in her mind was driven by unreleased emotional energy; the body is a battery that has to be fully discharged in order to stop the repeated stimulation of the mind in this way.  All we need to do to stop this is feel our feelings for long enough and eventually they fully discharge and the condition clears.

The next question she asked was but what is my brain doing to cause that energy to be produced? Is it a mental illness?

No, it is not a mental illness but it can create emotional illness and emotional illness produces thought processes and reactions in the brain we can interpret as mental illness.

Emotional illness is simply an indicator we have a body-battery overcharged with emotional energy.  If you are in an angry mood your brain thinks angry thoughts and this pattern is similar with all our emotional states.  See things this way and you stop seeing emotional illness as a thinking problem – although it is initially caused by incorrect understand the thinking processes are completely normal and you are able to change them both by working on the way you see your feeling processes and, even more importantly, by working with your feelings directly..

Intense worry is based around anticipatory fear, rather than fear produced by an actual event.  What we anticipate is a failure to cope with an approaching situation in terms of our own emotional response to it.  Intense worry is a precursor to developing obsessions.  The structural thinking and feeling pattern in obsessions works in exactly the same way.

We could be thinking things along the lines of ‘I would not be able to cope if such and such a thing happened – I could end up killing myself to escape the pain – it is that unacceptable to me’.

Because our belief system involves the possible threat of our own death the Unconscious gets involved.  It associates the images we have of the life-threatening situation with our most intense emotional responses and it uses these to warn us we have to prevent the feared situation arising – it believes the situation could kill us.

The evidence we would cope with our responses to the actual event is presented to us over and over again but we cannot see it.  The intensity and prolonged nature of these protective negative anticipatory responses far out-performs the actual reactions we would have if the horrible event happened in real life.

The Unconscious does not have the ability to judge whether or not what it does is based on reality because it is connected to the outside world through the processing taking place in our upper brains – it cannot tell imagined threat from real threat.  It simply pays attention to what your upper thinking and feeling minds are doing and responds automatically to your imaginings.

The truth is you will cope with the anticipated event when it actually occurs. The only way you would not cope is if you decide not to.  If you look around you there is plenty of evidence of people coping with losing far more than a loved dog or even a loved parent or a loved partner.  We can cope with much more than that – we just wish we did not have to.  I did not say all of this to my friend using exactly those words, by the way, but she soon got the gist!

So if I want to stop myself going through this again what do I have to do?

Because the emotional responses are already being produced it means your unconscious already operates as though the belief you would not cope is proven fact.  It believe your upper thinking minds have seen the evidence.  So you have to do several things:

Set aside some private time in a place you feel safe in and will not be interrupted and tune into your feelings with their attached images.  Move your focus as close as possible to the feelings first and you will usually find the imagery appears of its own accord (in full-blown obsession the images appear whether you want them to or not).

As you feel the emotional pain tell yourself the following things every now and again:

• I do not like these feelings but I can cope with them


• if this horrible event occurs I would not like it; I will find it difficult; but I would cope with it and I would eventually come out the other side


• these horrible feelings will eventually pass through my body and I will be relieved of this pain


• the reason I have these feelings is because I care deeply about the loss of my dog (or whatever it is) and I like myself for being the kind of person who cares this much

You should repeat this process as required until the emotional release has been completed to a level you feel ‘at peace’ with the anticipated event (discharging emotional responses completely can mean you lose emotional attachments and memories and you may not wish to do this).

So what does that do then? my friend asked.  Will that stop me from getting obsessions again?

Yes – and if you are a worrier it will help you relieve and remove your worrying habit.

The Unconscious is ‘show not tell’ – it needs to see evidence you can cope with a thing, often more than once, before it will stop producing an emotional response to the threat of it.  Once the anticipated ‘I will not cope’ belief has been demonstrated to be false by the fact you went right into the worst of your reactions and, obviously, coped (!) it will switch off the alarm bells and stop bringing the previously alleged dangerous emotions to your attention.

All of your minds, including your rational thinking mind, will see your emotional process in a completely different way.  They now see it as having an organised structure (it may be different in small ways for each of us but your emotional process will become much clearer and rational to you) and like all things clarified in this way you become more confident in working with it – next time you will know what to do.

Your Self-Image will be strengthened by repeatedly telling yourself your painful feelings are based around how much you care – caring is the basis of all emotional pain.  An incorrect understanding of our caring mechanism leads to self-criticism and self-criticism leads to non-acceptance of ourselves.

Non-acceptance of ourselves leads to emotional blocking – worrying is low level emotional blocking.

Worrying for long enough lays the fertile ground for full-blown obsessions to develop.

Regards - Carl

Self-Criticism is at the Heart of Most Emotional Disorders

It takes three seconds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My silly behaviour’

‘My accidents’

‘It’s stupid of me …’

‘I am dangerous …’

‘I need to be locked up …’

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

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

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

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

Regards

Carl

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