What Shape Do You Give Your Emotional Responses?

A man in his early twenties is talking to me about how he can feel his depression coming on again and he is dreading it.  I ask him to explain to me what happens - does this experience stay permanently or does it arrive, make him feel terrible for a while, then leave?

He tells me it passes eventually but he hates the experience and dreads it returning all the time.  'So, as it approaches, would I be right to assume it looks like you are about to be dragged down into a dark bottomless pit of despair and this time you might never come out as you have the other times - do you see something like that as it approaches?'.  He says yes, he does.  'Does it feel like you are being eaten alive?'.  He nods and smiles at the same time.  I can see he is picturing this imagery in his mind.  'I am being eaten alive'.

'So as it approaches you sense it overwhelming you; eating you alive; do you get a sense of being suffocated by it?'.  He nods.  'What if you were to change the way you see it.  Let us look at it as though it were a hill of energy that needs to be eaten and what is really happening is it comes to you to be eaten and then when you have eaten enough of it the hill lowers a bit; but it keeps building up because rather than eat the smaller amounts of this energy as they come to you to be eaten during the day you keep backing away from it and the hill builds up again; then this hill seems to overwhelm you.  What if you decided to go eat the whole hill, over a period of time, until it was all gone?'.

'What if you see yourself as a Pac-Man, for example, and you decide to deliberately go eat the hill before it comes to you?  What if you got into the habit of deliberately going to find it'.  That gets a smile as he pictures the scene.  'That is weird' he says.  'No-one has ever spoken to me like this before'.

Next I explain to him the way we see our intense emotional experiences is crucial to whether or not we get rid of them.  I learned this the hard way - by starting with lots of mostly ineffective verbal self-talk for several years then accidentally discovering the power of imagery to change the way I worked with my emotions.  I played with changing how I saw various aspects of what I was going through and started to get results.  When I say 'accidentally' though, that is not quite right.

For some time, as I kept telling my Unconscious 'we are going in' again as I followed my exposure therapy plan, I had strange imagery coming up such as pictures of rooms in the countryside and hills.  These images had no emotion attached to them so I tended to ignore them - then one day I realised my Unconscious was providing these images as tools.   I had been telling it repeatedly what I wanted to do and it was saying 'try this' to me.  Once I started playing with the imagery while in the centre of my emotional responses I started to see a change in whether or not the emotional responses cleared from my body.

If you apply certain types of imagery when either approaching or in the centre of an emotional response you can introduce a 'way of seeing' that will convince the various minds in your brain to release the response.  See the response as an approaching predator and your Reptilian Brain will gear your whole body up for fighting it and your upper brains do likewise.  See it as something you want to move towards and eventually release occurs.

The Shapes and Movements You See are Important in Emotional Self Management

You see a high wave of dark emotional energy coming at you and you know it is going to leave you all washed up at the end.  To your Reptilian brain, the brain part build around your brain stem and responsible for managing your bodily reactions and rhythms, this identifies the emotion approaching as something of a gaping jaw which, at the very least, will leave you in pain and wounded.  If you feel as though the emotion is suffocating you this triggers a specific response in an organ in your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is part of your Limbic brain (your specific emotional response brain sitting over your Reptilian Brain).  Scientists tell us the amygdala is like a 'suffocation alert system' and mimics the moment when a predator has you by the throat.

The amygdala creates a specific image of the trigger (your emotion) and produces a strong fight or flight response whenever the potential suffocating experience approaches.  Your hippocampus, an arched structure at the rear of the amygdala, memorises the territory surrounding the threat - it is the trigger of 'anticipatory fear'.  In a real life threatening situation it improves our survival odds by producing emotional responses to such things as predator footprints - but when it triggers in relation to our own emotions it is a real nuisance - for example you may start having emotional responses in regards to your bedroom door which you sit behind for days when in the middle of your emotional misery.

All of this kind of thing happens because of the way we 'see' our emotional responses.  It causes us to do our best to avoid and fight them off - and this freezes them inside of us.

So How Might You Change How You See that Trapped Response So You Can Eventually Get it to Go Away?

Quite often when I start talking to people about this way of changing how we see they start talking to me about their own application of this method - it is the first time they have come across someone else who talks about this kind of thing.  A lady recently told me about her ‘Special Room' approach.  That got me quite excited as I've got 'A Room' as well!  I did not tell her about my room though, everybody has a right to their own room.  My point here is this is a universal technique that people rarely talk about (I guess NLP practitioners use this kind of thing a lot?).  Once our Unconscious knows we definitely intend to go in and heal the inner turmoil it may well start providing the imaging tools for doing so - but will you recognise when these imaging tools appear?

Anyway, my favourite technique is 'the Hill' (it is all done in the imagination, by the way, no actual hills are used in the writing of this article).

The Hill – an exercise to try if you have an obsession or phobia

To begin, move yourself consciously towards your emotional response, but do not go into it yet.  You are standing next to your hill.  Feel the tension between you and the hill - if you feel fear, feel that - but remember the truly intense stuff is at the centre of the hill.  The Hill is a perfect hill shape with sloping sides and it is a hill of pure emotional energy.

If you can see what you think the 'issue' is at the centre of the emotional response imagine the issue sits in the centre of the Hill.   Stay there a while, to one side of the hill, picturing the scene and sensing the emotion nearby.  While you are waiting here I will talk to you about 'tone'.

Tone

Imagine you are an adult trying to talk a small child into believing their new bedroom does not have ghosts and is not dangerous, but the small child is very frightened of the new room.  You decide, in your ultimate wisdom as an adult, the best way to get the child to accept going into this room is to frighten them into it.  You turn to the child and with all the love and best intentions in the world you scream 'get in that room right now! Of course there are no ghosts in your room there are no such thing as ghosts you stupid child; get in there and stop being so ridiculous!'  Question: does it work, this method?  Or does it make the child not just frightened of the room but of the whole house and you included?

I used to have a phobia of public speaking which I did not know I had until I spoke to my very first class - I would freeze up completely.  I discovered if I told a joke here and there and got a laugh it changed my emotional experience.  After a few months I no longer needed humour to get me through - I actually lost my negative experience through the process of repeatedly standing in front of the group and changing the tone of how I saw what I was doing.  Eventually the new tone became permanently fixed and now I get really excited when I get to talk to groups.

So here you are standing next to  your hill of energy, possibly full of fear.  Let us change the tone of that energy so that when you enter it you have a different experience to the one you had before.  You know that lemony sweet yellow powdery sherbet dab (I ate these as a child).  Make it a hill of that, or some other powdery substance you like.  This changes the tone from experiencing, for example, the pain of a horrible panic attack to 'releasing the energy of the sherbet dab'.  It still hurts - but your underlying Unconscious brain notices the change in tone and becomes more willing to allow the release process to happen.

Time to Enter the Hill

Having waited next to the Hill for a while now what you have demonstrated to your Unconscious is that you have a degree of control over the experience.  It is not coming at you - you are acknowledging there are feelings to be released; you have moved towards it; and you have paused on the edge.  As you enter the Hill now just think about how you can change the negative tone of this experience (sherbet dab time) and move towards the very centre of the hill.  If there is an issue at the centre of the hill just be with that as well.

Now imagine that by simply being at the centre of the hill you are absorbing the energy of the hill.  Your body strips the energy from the yellow powder and a faint yellow gas starts to radiate out of the top of your head.  This now shows your Unconscious you believe you are radiating the energy away.  Believe it or not, if you do this right, this is what actually ends up happening (did for me, anyway).  Your Unconscious will allow the trapped emotional response to flow.

It is very unlikely you will achieve full release in one go.  When you have had enough, move out the other side, feeling the lowering in emotional energy levels as you do so.  Sit on the other side of the Hill for a while and then go in again or, if you have had enough, go off and do something else.  But before you do - just recap with your Unconscious to strengthen your understanding of what just happened.

You went into the very centre of the response, at its very worst, then came out the other side.  You survived.  Now to finish off tell your Unconscious not only did you survive - the  hill has reduced in size.

Do this with enough focus for long enough and you will see real shifts both in the movement of emotional energy and in the way your Unconscious sees the emotional response.

Using this method I removed severe panic attacks and 27 obsessions.

Not Realistic?

What you learn when you do this kind of self-work is that seeing, and changing how you see, is everything.  External reality has very little to do with what goes on inside our heads and that is the true reality of emotional self-management.

Regards - Carl

See Differently Feel Differently – Shifting from Objective to Subjective Viewpoints and Back Again When Working with Mood Disorders

This post looks at unemotional Objective versus emotionally Subjective Viewpoints, explaining how they are interchangeable and how acquiring new Objective Viewpoints can become your most effective mental tool.

Sit awhile and look at something with me, will you?  I would like to share some Objective Viewpoint models with you.

When we look at something from a certain position we call this our ‘viewpoint’. We have two main types of viewpoint:

• Objective


• Subjective.

An Objective Versus Subjective Viewpoint Model

Draw an imaginary line with ‘Objective’ written at one end and ‘Subjective’ at the other.  Imagine yourself moving along this line between these two viewpoint extremes.

Can you see that the Objective end of the line is a very wide black line, several metres wide in fact, and it tapers down to a very thin black line when it reaches the other, Subjective, end?    Just walk up and down the line a minute to check this out.  At the Subjective end of the line it is only a millimetre wide.  If you cannot see this please take a closer look – thick line at one end tapering to a thin line at the other.  See it now?  The thick-to-thin tapering line you see is an indicator of how wide angle your viewpoint is according to where you are on the Objective-Subjective viewpoint line.

Now see yourself as just a pair of eyes.  All you are is a pair of eyes, sitting on the Objective-Subjective line.  The degree to which your eyes are open or closed matches with the thickness of the section of line you are currently standing on.

You move to the Objective end and your eyes open several metres wide (amazing, eh?); at the Subjective end of the line your eyes narrow to a millimetre.  Problem is, you do not have full control of where you stand on the line and you are not quite sure how this mechanism works quite yet.

You can deliberately move yourself to another position on the line for a while, but some kind of natural gravitational force eventually pulls you back to your original starting place.  The width of your view seems fixed.

In the distance a very large circle appears.  In the middle of the circle a message is written.  You cannot quite read the message and you do not know if you can, or how you can.  The message starts flashing for your attention; but because you cannot read it you get quite frustrated.

You notice that getting frustrated causes you to move towards the Subjective end of the line a little and your eyes start to narrow, matching the narrower width of the thinning line.  As a result, your focus starts to change and you can see the message in the circle slightly better but not enough to read it.

You also notice the narrower your viewpoint becomes the more the circle seems to move a little towards you.  In some ways this is a bit alarming – you suspect the circle up close must be really huge and overpowering.  You are not sure how you will cope with it up close.  You do not know whether being close to the circle and its message is a good or a bad thing.

Suddenly the circle starts changing all colours of the rainbow to get your attention and the message is flashing even more intensely than before – it looks really important, but still you cannot read it.  You feel yourself getting really frustrated about this and this upset state is creating a tingling in your battery.  You have got a battery? You did not realise you had a battery, did you?  Well you do now and now it is tingling you notice it.

For the first time the tingling sensations cause you to look at what is behind your eyes and there it is – a battery.  Well, I never did, where did that come from?

It dawns on you the frustrated sensations you are producing as a result of not being able to read the message on the circle are charging the battery fixed to the back of your eyes (in real life you call this your body).  The more frustrated you get over not being able to read the message on the circle the more charged your body-battery becomes and the further towards the Subjective end of the viewpoint line you move – and so the narrower your vision becomes and the closer the circle with its message gets.

Each time you move towards the Subjective end of the line the tingling increases in intensity and now it is so painful you start to fight it.  You no longer want to read the message; you do not care about the message; you want to get off the line!  You do not like the whole system!  How do you stop this and make it go away?!

All of a sudden you get so emotional the energy propels you straight to the end of the viewpoint line and you are totally Subjective.  At the same time the circle with the message on it comes rushing towards you – wham!

The circle is now so huge in your narrow viewpoint, and the tingling sensations so strong they are agonisingly painful, you have nothing but confusion going on both mentally and sensually.  You are a mess.  To top it all now you are too close to be able to see the message let alone read it.

All you see now is a small section of the line of curvature of the circle.  This battle of how you position yourself on your viewpoint line is so overwhelming, so painful, you just give in and decide to feel your pain.  You surrender to it.

After a while, you notice yourself starting to move back towards the Objective Viewpoint.  It is slow, but you start to move and the circle starts to move slowly back to its previous position.  One day you are able to look up at the circle and you can read the message clear as day.  It says:

‘To empty your emotional battery just look at this message and release your energy for long enough and you will naturally return to your Objective Viewpoint’.

By the time you get to read the message you have already learned how this works and the message just confirms it.  Now if you could have been told what the message said before you went to all that trouble …

You and I have just shared an Objective Viewpoint.

Objective viewpoints are wide-angled and emotionally neutral; Subjective viewpoints are narrow angled and highly emotionally charged.  To remove an extreme Subjective Viewpoint such as an obsession or a phobia, you must move towards, experience and release the emotional charge attached to the image or situation.

Once you have done this you will return to an Objective Viewpoint position..

Objective Viewpoints as Maps

Objective Viewpoints are relatively low energy mental patterns that work for us in a similar way a paper map from your local newsagent does when you are planning to go hiking in unfamiliar territory.

If you are familiar with using these types of maps, and have come to trust them, you will just open them up and start planning your route straight away.  So let us pretend you are walk leader for a group.

You open up your map and first thing you do is look at the map scale to plan distance versus time ratios and assess contour lines to select the appropriate path through those too-steep hills.  You look for features of interest to visit and those to avoid.

The map so far is based on the past experiences and impressions of other people but past experience is not all you consider – the next thing you look at and plan for are more serious, present-time, potentially subjective experiences.

You check the weather because some of those hills may be safe in good weather but in rain they become treacherous slippery slides.  You plan your start point and your end point according to the abilities of what you and your companions can do today.

You have your grandmother with you and she has a hip problem.   Three miles into the walk your grandmother tells you she can go no further.  You all come to a complete stop.  On your map you see there is a cottage nearby and you go to the cottage to ask for help and advice.

You are now having a very Subjective experience.  All you can think about is helping your grandmother.  How is your Objective viewpoint working for you right now?  The walk is forgotten – all you see is your grandmother.

Subjective Viewpoints as Experiences on the Map

Your viewpoint becomes Subjective when you see some specific element of the map relating to you personally which suggests you need to change direction.  Something in this particular map is moving towards you or you must move towards it.

You expect either conflict or see a need for co-operation between you and the thing identified and to overcome the situation you release emotional energy as a stimulant.

Subjective Viewpoints have intense emotional energy attached to a very narrow range of features in the Objective landscape:

• the triggering issue


• your emotional response to it.

The emotional response is produced in order to help you physically overcome the triggering issue.

Once the triggering issue has been dealt with (eg once your grandmother tells you either her hip is now fine or she has been taken to hospital) and as long as you have discharged the emotional energy produced, you will return to an Objective Viewpoint.

Mood and Emotional Disorders

If you have an emotional disorder of any kind you have become trapped in a Subjective Viewpoint position by the intense energy attached to it.  By studying how you transition between viewpoints in regards to relatively mild emotional experiences you can come to understand and apply the same model towards extreme emotional experiences -  achieving eventual freedom from their affects.

If you suffer with an obsession, for example, you are stuck in the Subjective Viewpoint of a Subjective Viewpoint.  You are looking at yourself from a short distance away, watching your emotional reaction, then emotionally reacting to what you see in yourself.

If you discharge the energy attached to the second Subjective view by feeling the energy out you will gradually move to a position where you can see the Objective Viewpoint and then develop the confidence to undo the primary emotional response and any other underlying emotional issues you have.

Once you have seen and embedded the new Objective healing model in your brain, and proven to yourself it works for you, you will keep applying the same model.

How did you get this way in the first place?

Unfortunately it can take just seconds to transition from Objective to  Subjective viewpoints but weeks or months of effort to transition back; this does not just apply to emotional problems:

• a pleasant looking letter turns out to be an unaffordable bill


• a man coming towards you with a leaflet in a city centre turns out to be your long lost brother


• a boring report up for discussion at a meeting turns out to be a report on your personal low productivity levels


• your sixty year old mother, who has lived with you for twenty years without having a boyfriend, tells you she has a new man staying the night and he turns out to be a friend of yours in his thirties who sleeps around and often brags about his exploits with older women to you and all your friends.

Just think about how quickly these kinds of events affect your ‘way of seeing’ and how long it might take for you to recover from their emotional and real-life practical affects.

Awareness comes in seconds; recovery happens over weeks or months; this is the standard pattern, am I right?  But when we become Subjective about our own emotional responses we crave quick removal of them and because we cannot achieve this we get frustrated and emotional with ourselves and tell ourselves something is wrong with us.

We become Subjective about our Subjectivity and this creates a self-perpetuating feedback loop that keeps us emotionally charged and charging.

The transition back to an Objective Viewpoint, when it comes to how we see our emotions in this situation, is the same long, unwanted kind of journey we face in regards to any other unpleasant experience we face in life. We do not recover overnight.

Objective Viewpoints are More Powerful than Subjective Viewpoints – But You Have to Get Subjective About Implementing Them

Behind every Subjective Viewpoint there is an Objective Viewpoint driving it.  Behind your emotional reaction to your own emotional reactions is a view telling you your condition cannot be healed; this is you and you just need to keep avoiding the problem and holding it in check..

When you choose to go into the painful experience repeatedly and long enough, however, a new cold, mental model starts to appear and this is the opposite of the model currently running the show.

As you start to implement your new model – the one you believe will lead to healing – your currently held Subjective view rises into your conscious mind and starts to fight its corner.  It searches for every piece of ammunition it can throw at you to stop you implementing your new plan.

Your new Objective Viewpoint must become narrowed and emotionally charged in order to begin to fight the old version.  You get frustrated and more determined and Subjective.

Emotional and mental ambivalence is produced as your different viewpoints engage in war with each other inside your mind and body.  Your new Objective Viewpoint must win if you are to heal.

To defeat an obsession you must become more obsessed with going towards it than you currently are with moving away from it.  To beat a phobia you must become more aggressive about going towards what you fear than you are about staying away from it.  To relieve depression you must be more determined to feel and release the anger driving it than you currently are with not doing so.

All of these new approaches require new Objective Viewpoints driving them and the only way to find and develop the new is to go take a very close look at the old first, regardless of how painful it is.

Observation is everything.

Look long enough and you will see the cause of your pain is you have remained emotionally charged but were not willing to go through the viewpoint transition process.  It hurts, just like any other Subjective viewpoint situation in life does, until you face up to and deal with it.

Confused?  Why Not Seek Advice?

If we feel overwhelmed by all this emotional tension we can start to freeze up in confused indecision.  We are aware our viewpoint is narrow and want to widen it so we can see the bigger picture before making a decision.

We seek advice with the intention of borrowing more informed Objective Viewpoints from trusted sources who do not wish to take unfair advantage of our situation.  Our intention is to find, select and apply a new Objective Viewpoint like a mental overlay on the situation in order to bring about a resolution so we can forget about the issue and move on.  We decide to trust and apply an Objective Viewpoint given to us by another person because:

• they demonstrate they understand our experience


• they convince us they have consistently applied or seen others successfully apply the new viewpoint recommended.

Can you think of a borrowed Objective map you applied to any area of your life that helped you sort out your thinking and behaviours eventually leading to a resolution despite how you felt about the situation – particularly where it took months to achieve the outcome?  I can think of several I use regularly.

Usually when we look at our mental maps with a view to resolving a Subjective Viewpoint issue our wish is to return to the pre-subjective place we came from.  In real life this option is rarely available – we are forced to take some kind of experiential journey during which we work through our fears and emotions, and arrive at a new place with new knowledge.

Things we found unacceptable previously become gradually acceptable; things we felt we could not do we find we can.  We grow; we detach from old beliefs and the emotions linked to them and move on to the new.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Disorders and Fictional Stories – Four Viewpoints Travelled

External fictional stories mimic how your internal emotional system works.   When your mind travels through a fictional story, in a book or at the movies, it shifts you through four viewpoints without your being consciously aware of it.

The four viewpoints you travel through when going through an external story or an internal emotional journey are:

• the Objective viewpoint


• the Subjective viewpoint


• the Acceptable viewpoint arguing for the ‘acceptable’ solution (which you believe will lead to mental and emotional Congruence)


• the Unacceptable viewpoint arguing for the ‘unacceptable’ solution (which you currently believe is the cause of your mental and emotional Ambivalence).

If you are consciously aware of the journey through these viewpoints when observing an external story you are probably either a student of fictional story structure, a critic, or feel the writer of the fictional story is not very good at their job.  To get full enjoyment from a fictional story you need to be carried along and willing to ‘suspend your disbelief’ long enough to travel the story journey as if it were real.

If you are struggling with an emotional disorder, however, the reverse is the case.  You need to be consciously fully aware of these four viewpoints in order to stop the negatively charged internal stories currently running you.  They may have the power of conveying a sense of reality but the truth is they are nothing more than emotionally charged internal stories.  You need to become writer of your own internal experience to heal from them.

A person with a phobia or obsession is being dominated by an incomplete story running through their body.  The only thing you need do in order to complete such an internal story is travel through the four viewpoints enough times in order to fully discharge the emotional energy attached to it.  Unfortunately this is not a simple mental exercise – it is a very difficult physical experience.

The most effective way to travel through these viewpoints is to begin discharging the energy (not by trying to think your way out of it).  Shifts in viewpoint are created this way -  through ‘feeling’.  In order to do this you take your conscious point of focus into the centre of your feelings much like you would first have to go to a cinema if you intended to watch a movie.

Just a caveat here – make sure you have a professional support network in place (eg doctor; counsellor) before you decide you are going to start going towards your inner internal negatively charged stories.  When working on internal stories not only do you watch your own ‘movie’ you also play all the characters involved at the emotional level.

We enjoy fictional stories, and other similar external journeys, because they mimic the full experiential path we follow when we produce and release an emotional response in relation to a real or imagined triggering event.  External fictional stories allow us to do this while staying in control of how emotionally involved we become with their theme.

Think of a fictional story you really enjoyed.  You enjoyed it more than others due to the degree of emotional satisfaction you gained.   The story built your emotional responses up (with your co-operation) and then provided the means for emotional release by story end.

We deliberately avoid external fictional stories where we judge they will either produce no emotional content for us whatsoever or they will produce emotions so intense we will not be able to release our response by story end.

Unfortunately when dealing with a trapped and incomplete internal stories they are usually the kinds of story we would not wish to observe in the outside world.

Let us take a closer look at the four viewpoints now, but as we do I would like you to keep in mind – I just realised this while writing and it may do your head in a bit – we will travel through the four viewpoints while looking at the four viewpoints.  It is holographic in nature, this viewpointy thingy.

The Objective Viewpoint

The Objective Viewpoint is the most peaceful viewpoint of the four – you feel emotionally neutral here – when you do not feel peaceful here it is because you have tipped over into the Subjective Viewpoint.

The Objective Viewpoint actually appears twice in the viewpoint cycle – at the beginning and after the cycle is completed – so we could say there are actually five viewpoints with the first viewpoint being the pre-story Objective Viewpoint and the fifth viewpoint being the post-story Objective Viewpoint.

In the post-story Objective Viewpoint you have completed the external or internal story journey and the overall Objective Viewpoint has been changed.

The Objective Viewpoint has you sitting on a hill looking down on the story battle ground like a proud military general.  As you watch the different characters below struggling to fight it out you have a current opinion of who should win and who should lose based on moral arguments - in fictional stories main characters act as representatives of arguments in a theme (in internal emotional turmoil you are struggling with these arguments in the state known as ambivalence).

You are distanced from events.  As the story unfolds you develop a logically stepped understanding of the whole picture and are able to work with expectancy in regard to what should happen next to the characters and arguments involved..

You may understand the motivations of each side of the argument but you know one of the arguments has to surrender its hold and the other must win.  If this is not achieved in an external fictional story you expect to see a sequel ensuring it is later - or you class the story as a bad story.

If this story completion does not happen in regard to an internal emotional story you remain stuck in crippling tension until it does.  You are emotionally blocked.

With fictional stories you sit in judgement at the end as to whether or not the outcome was appropriate given the different paths of cause and affect.  If you find the story outcome does not match your current moral framework you change your framework or again judge the story a  bad story.

When you have an internal, unresolved emotional issue you believe just will not complete, as your current Objective Viewpoint wants it to, you may do likewise and also declare it ‘bad’.  My experience of being someone who once suffered with obsessions and phobias, and of working with others who have had similarly intense emotional problems, is not only do we declare the individual internal story bad – we believe our entire emotional system is bad.  We go to war on ourselves over it without realising that in the majority of our experiences our emotional system is working just fine.

Your Objective Viewpoint of a thing, of anything, is fed both by your left logical neo-cortex and also your pattern making right neo-cortex.

Time-Out for Emotional Disorder Sufferers: The Data Stripping Process

If you suffer with an emotional problem, or are trying to help someone who is, the following six short paragraphs may be some of the most important paragraphs you ever read:

The job of your left logical neo-cortex is to organise unemotional information in chronological order and link it up to other unemotionally charged informational structures in your brain.  To make sense and meaning of it, and then to let it go and stop paying attention to it.

Your brain must make sure this process is completed in order to let go of an emotional experience.  This information is then stored in your unemotional memories for reference purposes later.  To help this process your left neo-cortex is able to ‘name’ the data and record the data chronologically.

‘Naming’ the data means your logical brain is able to put a fence round it.  It is the difference between looking at a glass of water you believe you control and looking at a choking fog you believe controls you.  We call it ‘fog’ and we instantly feel differently about it.  Does this make sense?

If you cannot name a thing your logical brain will repeatedly ask the rest of your brain to look at it because until you are able to fence it in like this your logical brain cannot deal with it and you will not be able to let go of the experience – you will keep experiencing it until you can fence it in in this way.

The job of your right patterning neo-cortex is to strip emotional energy from your emotionally charged experiential scenes and then transfer emotionless data over to your logical neo-cortex so it can organise it logically.

By moving your Conscious Point of Focus either towards a pattern (image) held in your right neo-cortex, or towards a trapped emotional response held in your body (towards intense feeling) you immediately start triggering this emotional stripping and data transfer process.  Once the emotional stripping; data transfer; naming and storing process is complete an emotional disorder is removed because the different parts of your brain will stop paying attention to it.

OK – back to the Objective Viewpoint:

At the point the full model of a story has been built in your logical mind, and experienced by your pattern creating emotional mind to the point it no longer finds experiential enjoyment in the story, you have completed the journey and achieved a different Objective Viewpoint which becomes set. You now ‘let go’ of the story.

I was a teenager when the movie Star Wars first came out.  I saw it at the cinemas six times in as many weeks – first as an individual and then because all my friends were going to see it.  After the sixth time I no longer wished to see it.  Emotionally it was ‘bone dry’ for me by then.  I saw a re-run a couple of months ago and all I could think was how the flashing lights on the walls of the Millennium Falcon spaceship looked like pointless flashing plastic lights.  And I realised that was what they were.  A very different experience from when I went to see the movie those six times!

This process exactly matches the process you go through when working to remove obsessions and phobias through exposure therapy.

You do not consciously control this process – it occurs as a side-effect of the way in which our attention system works.  In order to complete the process you just ‘go to the movies’ – especially those now showing in your nearest emotional world.

Regardless of how intense or problematic your own internal emotional issues may be they operate in this way.  You will see this in others when they have a fixed opinion changed by external forces and then resettle into a new opinion (by the way, if we were to say they should think more flexibly before they changed that would be our own Objective Viewpoint talking!).

The Objective viewpoint exists as the norm until something happens to pressure it into changing.  So let us have something happen to you.  Let us have your partner, the one you have been married to for ten years without any sign of trouble, ask for a divorce.

The Subjective Viewpoint

In a fictional story it does not make much difference to you that various characters have different Objective Viewpoints – that is what drives the tension in a story.  But when the Objective viewpoints held by others drive them to radically affect your future you will generally react with your Subjective viewpoint.

In a fictional story you see the main character tootling along in normal happy- life mode until their lives are severely disrupted by some incident.  As a result they become emotionally responsive and have to deal with one crisis after another until achieving the final solution and return to their own, less emotional, Objective-viewpoint-lives.  As observer of this you empathise but are not subjected to it.  You get the luxury of sitting in judgement on character reactions through the entire story.

When it happens In real life you are the Subjective Character.  You sense others are sitting in judgement on you.  When the partner you have been with ten years tells you they want a divorce your reaction is from the Subjective Viewpoint.  You are being rejected by their Objective Viewpoint.

Next they tell you they have been having an affair for those ten years and since your name is not on the property paperwork you lose your home.  By the way, their lover is turning up in two hours to move in.  Their lover arrives and it is your best friend.  You only have one best friend.

You think about everything you have invested in these relationships and everything you stand to lose and the various ways in which you have been betrayed.

You open up to and acknowledge all the little undermining behaviours your partner engaged in but which you ignored or forgave because you loved them.  All the signals about the affair were there but you ignored them.  You declare yourself an idiot.  You cannot believe how the two of them have fooled you like this!  You want to wreck the house, you feel so angry.

Now your soon-to-be-ex partner tells you they never loved you because underneath your pleasant facade you were this unreasonable angry monster.  This tunes straight into your self-critical unconscious beliefs. Was I an angry monster all the time?  Am I responsible for the end of my relationship?

You find yourself torn between two Objective Viewpoints.  Could you have been a better person or is your partner solely responsible for what is happening here?  Should you accept your rage  or should you feel guilty instead?  You become ambivalent.

If you have an obsession or a phobia the ambivalence is created by the question of whether or not you should keep trying to move away from the trigger causing the condition or if you should move towards it and defeat it.  Can you defeat it?  The argument of moving away seems to be the natural decision – but you keep wondering if you could get rid of this problem by going in the opposite direction.

And all the time you are adding self-critical judgements to the mix declaring your internal story bad when in reality it is just a story not yet completed..

Welcome to the battle between the Acceptable Objective viewpoint and the Unacceptable Objective viewpoint

In fictional stories, from the Objective Viewpoint, you get to oversee two journeys travelled by two opposing arguments represented by characters who are both subjectively and therefore emotionally attached to the outcomes of the story.

You will tend to automatically adopt the the Subjective Viewpoint of the character you identify with most.  Most of us identify with the ‘goodie’ because it is more comfortable to do so as it fits within our socially programmed moral framework.

The question that first comes up for you when you enter the world of story is ‘who is the goodie and who is the baddie?’ because you want to identify with the goodies.  You feel good when you identify with goodies because they are more like normal people whereas baddies are concerned with making things much worse and do not seem the least bit family orientated.

If the ‘baddie’ is a fully rounded character, however, you can find yourself understanding and quite liking the ‘baddie’ as well.  In Batman movies you may find yourself liking ‘The Joker’.  Everyone likes a sense of humour, right?  What if, half way through the movie, you discover the goodie character murdered their grandmother for an inheritance?  I recently watched a movie with a flashback scene in which an alleged hero shot a pregnant woman because she irritated him – I hated him for the rest of the movie and was pleased he got what was coming to him (but I also wondered where the hero in the story had got to).

What you experience, in a relatively painless way in stories, but very painfully in your own emotional world, is ambivalence and your craving for an eventual state of Congruency.

Ambivalence

Ambivalence occurs when you believe two opposing arguments at the same time and are equally emotionally charged and attached to both.  In a story it is regarded as a necessity of the plot, but when we hold these arguments internally it can be agony.   In the scenario of being dumped by your partner you are torn between

• holding yourself responsible for the failure of your marriage and feeling sorry for the experience your partner, who you still love despite their deceitful behaviour, has allegedly had to go through as a result of living with not-good-enough you (poor them) while at the same time you feel


• enraged at how these two important individuals, partner and best friend, have conspired for years to destroy your hoped for future and everything you invested.  They have ruined your life.

You see yourself wanting to kill them but also think yourself responsible for their behaviour.  Feeling both enraged and guilty you do not know how to deal with this ambivalence.

Are they the good guys or are you the good guy?  Which is which?

Here you are struggling to get back to the Objective Viewpoint – the viewpoint that knows what is really going on and which, if you could just sit there right now, would really show you what you should do next for the best.

This is why counsellors (relationship counsellors in this case) are worth their salt – they are instant, trustworthy and experienced Objective Viewpoints for hire.  Love these folks.

Prior to this point you saw all divorces as ‘their’ divorces.  Other people got divorced and you could see the reasons they got divorced.  They are so blind to their faults!  Now in the land of Subjective viewpoints it is a different world altogether.

Now you find yourself having an extreme emotional response to losing something or someone you personally have a stake in and you wish you did not have to change your Objective Viewpoint in line with what is going on in reality.

But you do - and you find it a real struggle because you are trying to sort out who the goodie is, who the baddie is, and how you can mentally figure the whole story out and then hopefully once you have done all this everyone will come out looking like a good guy.

The Difference and Similarity Between Internal Stories and External Stories (Real-life versus Fictional Life)

When you engage with an external story you engage with a carefully designed construct with a socially acceptable morality message built in.  Most stories with socially unacceptable morality messages get censored out.

Also, you engage fully with the most moral character – you attach to that argument and stick with it for the whole story.

In external stories the baddies get what is coming to them and the goodies get their rewards.

In real life stories though baddies often benefit for long periods of time and good people have bad things happen to them – and then get blamed and punished for it as well!  Not only that, whereas in fictional stories the goodie characters may have only just a pinch of self-reproach here and there in real life goodies tend to be full of self-criticism.

So what should we do in order to sort all this out when it comes to working with what we do feel and should feel if we want to complete our own intense internal stories so getting to a new painless Objective Viewpoint as quickly as possible?

Understand that Emotional Responses Have Nothing to Do with Morality – they are Simply Arguments in a Story with Energy Attached

The problem with your internal emotional stories is you contain various Subjective and ambivalent viewpoints at full emotional strength.  The argument for taking revenge on your partner and your best friend is as strongly emotionally supported as is the argument against.

The argument for moving towards the imagery and emotional responses driving emotional disorders is as strong as the argument for moving away from them.

You contain the full story – warts, flowers and all.  You are capable of any of these options.     But you are also capable of discharging the story in private, removing it fully and still arriving at a new, emotionally neutral (and happy) Objective Viewpoint.

All you need do is repeatedly visit the story enough times you discharge the emotional energy attached, travel through the four viewpoints and end up letting go of the whole business.

You will remember the internal story in terms of logical data, but you will not experience it.

I swear those flashing lights in Star Wars are just that .

Regards - Carl

Obsessions and Phobias - How We Can Lose Direct Control of Our Emotional Process

You have total control of your emotional process up to the point you start trying to take total control of your emotional process.

You may want to read that again.

This paradox is difficult to see by the tired mind of someone who’s been at war with their own emotional system for a prolonged period of time.

Have you ever lived or worked with someone who had a desperate need to prove they were what they already were?  Exhausting, isn’t it?

The moment you see your own emotional energies as a problem is the moment your unconscious mind starts the internal battle of freezing those energies inside your body to prevent the ‘bad stuff’ from leaking out.

We do this ‘freezing’ by using our brain’s built in organic electrical resistance system to hold back the electrical signals coming up from the body (starting with the Reticular Formation in your brain stem) .

In order to directly control your emotions you must first understand you cannot directly control them.  You can delay them – but you should do this in the knowledge the only thing you can control directly is the process by which you manage their appropriate release later.  Once an emotional response is produced in the body you have no choice but to find a way to release it or it will make you sick.  So let me say that again:  the only aspect of the emotional process you have any control over is that of appropriate release.

It’s one of those areas in life where doing the opposite of what you may ‘think’ you should do is what gets you where you want to be.

The ‘Loss of Control’ Tipping Point

There is a tipping point at which the management of an emotional response shifts from being consciously and deliberately managed, by the thinking brain, to being an automated reaction driven by the emotional brain.  In the case of someone suffering with an obsession or a phobia this kind of reaction occurs whether you want it to or not and before you can consciously interrupt it.

This tipping point is reached when the management of the emotional signals coming into the brain shifts from what’s known as the ‘long processing route’ to the ‘short processing route’.

The ‘long route’ involves incoming sensory signals being sent upwards into the upper thinking brains for processing.  Here we have ‘association areas’ where incoming sensory signals are matched and mixed with information already known and trusted.  After full association has taken place (through good old ‘thinking’) we have integrated the new information and can make ‘sense and meaning’ of it.  Any emotional energy attached to the issue is discharged through the activity of your right pattern-making brain and any valid ‘data’ information is processed by your left ‘rational’ brain.  The issue is then either forgotten or stored in our long-term memory and we no longer pay attention to it.

It can take some time for this association process to complete.  However, if we are not willing to complete this process, if we are not willing to think about the sensory information coming in,  there is a risk we will ‘deny’ it and denial can lead to us forcing the new information to go through the brain’s sensory ‘short route’.

The ‘short route’ means the raw signals get sent downwards into the emotional brain for emotional processing.  There’s no ‘association and integration’ processing going on down there unless it involves an emotional response being released somewhere along the line.

Repeatedly refusing to consciously accept and release an emotional response when it comes up from your body into your brain causes the shift from long route to short route processing. This shift in processing is very difficult to reverse.  Difficult, but not impossible.

At the Centre of Both the Long and Short Routes Sits the Thalamus

Two Thalami , resembling the appearance a half-walnut, sit between the upper thinking brain and the lower emotional (limbic) brain. They  act as the centre-point of your  Perception – how you ‘see’ things.

Your Perception is a culmination of all the discussions and relationships going on between several of your brain parts, all of which have a slightly different way of ‘seeing’.  Your most powerful brain part in this decisional process is your left neo-cortex – your conscious logical thinking brain.  This brain part has the power to refuse permission for an emotional response to be processed by your upper thinking brain.

Problem is, once permission for release ‘upstairs’ has been refused the logical brain loses the right to influence how the emotional signals are processed by the lower brain.  It’s a question of losing the rights because at some point we refused the responsibilities.

The Thalamus is the brain’s main sensory signal ‘router’ – it receives all of your visual, sound and touch signals before either your thinking or emotional brain parts get to see them.  The Thalamus filters incoming signals on the basis of what the brain parts around it are telling it they see.  They also tell it what kind of signals they’re looking out for – and it goes hunting for them in the incoming signals.

If your conscious thinking dislikes one of your own emotional responses so much you refuse to accept it as a part of ‘you’ you may then refuse it permission to enter your thinking brain, this forces those signals downwards.

Your emotional brain now tries to manage your emotional process using other emotional responses – as a result your internal emotional system generates a self-perpetuating internal war making you constantly tense and, because your conscious brain is no longer involved in the process, your thinking becomes totally perplexed about what on Earth is happening.  The emotional responses are taking place without your conscious involvement other than you being informed ‘you’re having an intense emotional response!’.

This confusion further reinforces the idea that something is ‘wrong’ and the Thalamus will continue to identify your own emotional responses as an urgent, threatening issue requiring a repeated urgent emotional response – and it will send any and all related signals coming in straight down into your emotional brain for processing.

In order to resolve the problem you must reverse what you did.

You must allow for your emotional energy to come up through your body and enter your brain so you can start the association process.  Doing this will allow you to regain a sense of control because it forces the sensory signals back up the ‘long process route’ and the thinking brain regains the ability to say no to producing the emotional responses in the first place.

Unfortunately by now you will have established a very effective unconscious set of arguments as to why this is a bad idea – and these ideas are absolutely committed to the belief that what you are about to do will kill you.

I’m not joking – your unconscious believes that taking your thinking into the emotional response will kill you and it believes you just don’t ‘get it’.  Your unconscious believes you’re about to do something that’s the equivalent of going into a cage with an unfed lion.

But if you’re willing to go ‘into the cage with the starving lion’ step by step, through the process of exposure therapy, it can be done but the transition involved is a much more intense and painful journey than if you had processed the issue using thinking in the first place.

The question is: how much do you want control of your emotional process back?

Regards.

Carl

Suffer with Agoraphobia (or any other anxiety disorder)?

My intention with this blog is to create a personal management 'hub' that links to the best systems and sites (at the lowest cost and greatest effectiveness possible).  If you've read around this site much (or my ezinearticles) you'll know I'm working on a book on healing obsessions - but I have also healed myself from several other anxiety disorders and what I know is once you learn the healing pattern for one anxiety disorder, or any other trapped emotional block, you can heal them all.  In my day job I come across quite a few people who are halted in their tracks by this kind of thing and these conditions are quick to appear (but really difficult to remove).

I promised myself when starting this blog I would not attempt to duplicate or copy material already easily available (I may elaborate on it but I won't just duplicate it).  Today I came across a brilliant site for healing agoraphobia (fear of open spaces).  I suggest if you suffer from an anxiety disorder of any kind you go sign up for Stephen's free newsletter and other materials.  I have and I can tell you this chap has really got his stuff together.

If you don't want to read the rest of this post, go here now.

If I were to set up a site dedicated just to agoraphobia (and other phobias) Stephen's site would be what I would aim to create.  He talks in his very first newsletter about the need for faith; about proper planning - well, about lots of things that relate exactly to my experience.  I no longer suffer with anxiety disorders but I'm going to read everything he produces if I can - he speaks the language anyone wanting to heal from an anxiety disorder needs to hear.

The more you immerse yourself in the message he delivers the greater chance you will absorb the unconscious understanding in the message.  I can't stress highly enough how 'on the button' Stephen's material is.

Regards.

Carl