The Meaning of Meaning in Emotional Self-Management

As a creature more animal than plant you are a biological meaning machine and you are reading this to see if it gives you any additional beneficial meanings to add to the meanings you already contain.

What is ‘Meaning’?

Meaning is about sense of direction.  When we look for the meaning of a thing we are asking what direction, if any, we should take in regard to how we deal with it

While all plants need to remain in a fixed position in order to stay alive adult animals die if they do not move.

To aid them in deciding what directions they should go in when they do plan to move nature provides animals with two major tools:

• brains


• emotional response systems.

Brains are cellular mapping devices that record landscapes travelled using the process of memory (our brains can also record imagined landscapes travelled).

Emotional response systems are designed to initiate emergency reactions; to move animals away from unexpected threats and towards reward opportunities whenever they arise in the external world.  They also provide map-connected alert systems by attaching emotional reflections to specific memories in our mental maps.  They inform future decision making by rising up into our conscious whenever we move towards these external landscapes to remind us of our previous experiences.

Most of our decision making is made on the basis of these emotionally mapped alerts.

How do I think versus how should I think; how do I feel versus how should I feel; how do I behave versus how should I behave – these are all questions based around need for changes in direction.

When we ask ‘what does this mean?’ what we are asking is ‘what direction do I now go in, having received this new information, and what can I expect to receive as a result?’.

When We Come Across a New Thing or a Known Thing Changes We Ask Meaningful Questions

• will it eat me or should I eat it?


• Is it controlling me or am I controlling it?


• Is it something I should not react to at all – should I stop seeing it?


• Do I move away from or towards it or do I just stay where I am?

Once we have taken a close enough look at the new or changed thing and decided our direction of thinking, feeling and physical behaviours we tend to just keep on travelling in the same direction decided until the pressure to change direction again dictates otherwise.

Meaningful Cycles

Meaningful cycles have a standard model for animals:

• we leave from a safe starting point


• we journey outwards into a usually well-mapped territory collecting resources and experiences


• we return to the safe starting point and discharge our ‘excess to requirements’ resources and experiences.

This is meaning in action – where am I going; what will I do; how do I get back home and what will I return with and offload when I get home?

We may not really notice the presence of one of these ‘meaning cycle maps’ until it is taken away from us or we are blocked from completing the full cycle in some way.

When we cannot complete our meaning cycles we feel frustrated and uneasy.  Take the external territory away and we react as if we are on the brink of starvation.  Take the ‘safe home’ away and we lose our reason for being in the territory – we feel lost (this is the cause of an identity crisis, by he way – we temporarily believe we have lost us).

Fail to complete your meaning cycles for long enough and you start to feel disconnected from who you truly are.

Your emotional meaning cycle is biologically programmed into you.  When you do not meet the needs of this cycle you can expect to get an outcome as reliable as if you did not eat food.  If you do not pay attention to your emotional world you will become emotionally ill.

Society is lying to you when it tells you it is possible to remove strong emotional responses using thinking.  Thinking can alter the rate you produce and build up energy levels but if you have already produced emotional energy in relation to an experience you must discharge it.

No amount of thinking can alter this unless the thinking is designed to get itself out of the way so emotional release can take place.

You do not control your emotional cycle – it controls you.  At least, it does until you discharge the energy contained.

I remember telling a counsellor several years ago I had just that week realised nature had designed my emotional system and I had to surrender to this fact.  It really hurts to know this!  All you control here is when you will accept and allow yourself to be taken through the cycle.  You have no say in whether or not the cycle affects you.

Just as if you do not eat you die of starvation, if you do not discharge the emotional reactions you produce and collect when dealing with ‘out there’ you become emotionally ill and this changes both your thinking and behaviours as a result.

Emotional Disorders Block Our Inner Return Home

Your Conscious Point of Focus goes out into the world.  Its home is your brain.  Your body is home to your brain – your brain never gets to go out.

For your Conscious mind to be at peace when it returns home your body must also be emotionally peaceful.  A brain in an emotionally overcharged body is an unhappy home for your Conscious.

If your body is flooded with negative hormonal chemicals your brain is is in turn also flooded with a different set of negative chemicals and these dominate your thinking ‘mood’.  A negative mood produces a negatively thinking mind.

Your brain consists of ‘you and your brain family’ with ‘you’ being an information processing point known as your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ and your family consisting of the other minds living in your brain.  Your You observes and processes information (thinks) at a rate of 4 to 11 bytes per second.

Whatever you consciously think about is ‘you’ at that time.  This bit of ‘you’ likes to go outside of your body, collect little bits of electrical information, then return home with it intending to distribute the content so the rest of your brain and your body will benefit.  We call this ‘learning’ and it contributes to our ‘personal growth’.

We like personal growth.  It feels good sometimes because we get external social acceptance when we do it and the occasional physical reward.  In most western cultures we are trained to see personal growth as something to be found out there.

But while your Conscious Point of Focus is out there your ‘family at home’, your other brain parts, are processing information your Conscious Point of Focus has made itself deliberately unaware of.

‘Moods’ are emotional responses to our environment for which we cannot immediately identify the trigger.  We know we feel bad but we cannot pinpoint why.  Moods are the result of not paying conscious attention to the information entering the rest of our brain and body.  When our body and our unconscious minds have been picking up information we could do with paying conscious attention to, but have not, they communicate it to us with moods.

While your Conscious Point of Focus processes information at 4 to 11 bytes a second, the rest of your brain receives it at 2’000’000 bytes (two million) per second – that information is going somewhere.

While your Conscious Point of Focus can be controlled in such a way as to deliberately ignore, for example, abusive environments, your other organic mechanisms do not have this ability.  They absorb the information and then later try to tell your Conscious about it and the need for you to deal with it.

They need your Conscious Point of Focus to go into the mood itself in order to discharge the feelings involved and complete the meaning cycle.  This will also result in deciding on any new directions needed to resolve the cause.   Quite often the only thing needed is to observe the mood at close quarters for the whole thing to discharge and disappear.

You need to be returning to your inner world on a regular basis or, at some point, you are going to have a huge experiential backlog to catch up on.

Scenario – imagine you are an international salesperson

You leave your family at home while you travel abroad and what you expect to be paid in, and take home for your hard work at the end of your working period, are little boxes of electrical energy you think will make all the difference back home.

You have been away a while when you get a text from your partner at home, it says: ‘honey, a really large box of energy has arrived, think you should come home to process it.  We do not need those little boxes at the moment’.

You text back: ‘Sorry honey, am too busy getting this little bit of energy out here for you, you know we talked about this.’

‘Honey, another big box of energy has arrived.  I really need you to come home; stop trying to get the little boxes of energy out there when we have got these big boxes to deal with!’.

‘Honey, you are being silly.  You know we need these little boxes of energy.  Do you know how hard I have to work to get these little boxes of energy out here?’

‘We now have ten very large boxes of energy needing your attention here.  COME BACK HOME IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE SUCH A HELL YOU WILL NEVER WANT TO COME BACK HOME EVER!!  DO YOU HEAR ME!!’’

Well, that one gets your attention.  You go home – but as you get home what you find is a home so hostile with kids so mean you no longer want to go home again.  It has become a really painful place to go – you are not ready for this.  You turn and decide you are going to stay out there.

But if you are ever going to be happy again you have to turn and go home at some point because, like all the other meaning maps in our lives – the only way to complete this cycle is to return home.

Between you and your happy home though lie several layers of emotional pain to work your way through.

We Should Base Our Meaning Cycles on Our Own Inner World First in Order to Prevent This Problem Arising

Valuing your own internal emotional meaning cycle above everything else is the most important thing you can do in maintaining emotional well-being.

If you do not know you need to stick to a regular habit of returning  to yourself you lose the ability to quickly return when a problem ‘at home’ arises.

Returning to yourself is essential for emotional well-being.  You know that sense of being distanced from who you really are?  It is not an illusion.  In depression, for example, brain scientists tell us there is an actual withdrawing of thinking from the upper brain.  We have the ability to physically cordon off our thinking and feeling centres.

How Do Emotional Disorders Develop?

Emotional disorders arise when we get so desperate not to return to our inner home we attempt to set up a secondary home outside.  To keep us held in this new place we produce emotional responses designed to resist the continual call from our Unconscious reminding us we need to return to our true inner self in order to complete emotional release.

All we see now when we look back is emotional predators lurking in the shadows of our inner world, blocking the way.  We do not really believe ‘home’ is there any more.

But, if we are lucky, one day the pull to return to our true selves gets so overwhelming we finally give in to our organic emotional process and start to tackle the internal predators, one by one, to get back there.

‘OK, honey, you win.  I’m coming home’.  Now that means something.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Disorders - What Controls Your Conscious Point of Focus?

Scientists tell us the Prefrontal Cortex, a relatively small area of the brain just behind your forehead, performs your ‘executive functions’ – planning and controlling what you do with your brain and body.  It carries out these plans by directing your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ to open up to certain sources of stimulation.

Your Focus acts like a pen to the cellular map writing ability of your brain – whatever stimulation you deliberately open up to determines what gets written into your neural maps.  The more you consciously and repeatedly focus on the same things the more intense and permanent those new maps become.  You have the ability to write and re-write whatever you want to as long as you are willing to do the work involved in the writing – the work is hard.

How you use your tool of conscious focus can either lead to or heal serious emotional issues.  Your Conscious Point of Focus is generally called ‘what you think about’. Usually we assume thinking means working with strings of just words in our heads.

In our brains words appear to us as sounds we identify as ‘verbal self-talk’ – of course they are not actually sounds but neural energy creating an illusion we are hearing sounds.  When we translate these stimulations into the written word we convert those sounds into pictures and these pictures act as representatives of both sounds and shared social meaning for others (have you ever looked at words as though they were pictures and also sounds with meanings attached to them?).  Words are an example of our ability to ‘associate’ different types of stimuli in such a way we do not even realise they are actually different types of stimuli combined.

Words are quick-fire representations of other things, streams of these representations flow through our conscious and we shape these streams into logical thinking patterns – but we use those patterns to build:

• pictures


• shapes


• sounds


• smells (or at least, memories of smells).

We can also reverse this process.

When meanings are related to our value systems they are also attached to powerful emotional responses.  We see new patterns in regards to these sources of stimulation in our minds and link these to previously learned patterns.  The patterns are created because of differences in intensity, vibrational tone and duration.

We can deliberately choose to focus on any of these things using our Conscious Point of Focus, but we need to choose wisely because our focus is a limited resource.

Although there are several options here in regard to stimulation type, there is a limit to the number of stimulations we can deliberately pay attention to at any one time.

Our conscious brains can only work with 4 to 11 bytes of electrical information per second.  The greater the number of bytes of information we work with at any one time  the harder it is to make sense or even remember what we did in our thinking.  Once the incoming rate of information goes to 11 bytes per second you react with stress due to information overload.

When your conscious focus works at full throttle in this way your neo-cortex uses up a lot of glucose energy and gets tired more quickly in comparison to other parts of your brain.  There is a limit to how long you can focus on those bytes.  Biologically, thinking really is hard work.

Cut It Out

Your Prefrontal Cortex has the job of choosing what to focus your 4 to 11 bytes of conscious attention on whilst dealing with the fact your brain receives stimulation from your senses at roughly  2’000’000 (two million) bytes per second.

In order for it to be able to resist this mass of distracting stimulation, most of which comes up from your body as a result of brain signals stimulating hormonal responses previously being sent downwards, your PFC controls a stimulation-resistance-system.

By the way, this organic resistance system is the same system you use to suppress and repress your emotional responses.

The main stopping valve of this system is the root-like Reticular Formation in your brain stem.  The Reticular Formation is designed to control the level of electrical/emotional energy flooding up into your brain at any one time.

From your brain stem the Reticular Formation spreads upwards and outwards into the net-like Ascending Reticular Activation System (also known as the ARAS - this system makes us consciously aware of the world around us).  Different parts of your Reticular system have the ability to reduce and filter electrical stimulation in different parts of your brain.  For example, there is a layer of reticular material surrounding the Thalamus, the main sensory signal router sitting between your upper conscious brain and lower emotional brain, acting like the insulation you find on household wiring.

Without this built-in resistance system you would be unable to focus on anything other than a mass of sensory information.  In the case of emotional disorders, however, the resistance system has been used so effectively it has led to a state of internal overcharging and to trapping the emotional charge in the body.

An emotional charge trapped in the body keeps the body on high alert and this leads to an internal battle for control of your ‘Conscious Point of Focus’ between your Prefrontal Cortex and two other internal attention management systems; your:

• Orientation Response and your


• Emotional Alert System

When these two mechanisms are activated they repeatedly snatch control of your Conscious Point of Focus away from your PFC and it, in turn, repeatedly snatches control back through the process of deliberate ‘distraction’.  This produces a constant state of physical tension in the body as your Conscious fights with your Unconscious over which should control your conscious focus..

When a person does not suffer with an emotional disorder their mental focus naturally comes to rest on whatever their senses are resting on at the time.  There is no internal battle for control and no sense of tension.

Your Orientation Response and Your Emotional Alert System – Your Emergency Situation Managers

Your PFC is concerned with long-term strategic self-management.  It works with such things as changing your self image; deciding what kinds of environment you would like to eventually live in; planning the route it will take to get there and putting in place the motivations you will need to keep yourself energised along the journey.

Your Orientation Response and your Emotional Alert System, in contrast, are emergency problem solvers designed to work with unexpected life events.  One is an automatic process designed to search for and identify potential threats while the other is designed to galvanise the body into urgent life-saving action by responding to those threats when identified by the Orientation Response.

Is that a Spider?  No, it is a Bit of Fluff

Our Orientation Response is the mechanism that drags our attention away suddenly from what we are currently doing to pay attention to something new we have just become vaguely aware of entering our environment.

Out of the corner of your eye you spot a small fuzzy blob on the floor and you look to see if it is a spider.  It is a bit of fluff.  You go to run a bath and spot something black against the white enamel.  You cannot resist looking.  It is an apple seed.  How did that get in there?  Who has been eating apples in the bath?

Your Orientation Response is partially pre-programmed by your perceptual bias.  Your perceptual bias is your unconscious list of things you want to avoid and is decided on previous experience.  So when you go into the bathroom you are now pre-programmed to check the bath for things that should not be there.

When you leave the bathroom you are now pre-programmed to find out how the apple seed got there.

The response is also designed to pay attention to the new, the fast moving, the tiny, the potentially itchy, the unknown; the large; that scraping sound you hear that sounds like it is in your house.  The only way to satisfy this response is to consciously pay attention to the source of concern until you have fully looked at it, identified it as safe and then let it go.  This completes the release cycle for this part of our conscious focus mechanism and you can then return to what you wanted to focus on earlier.

Until you pay attention to an unknown and unexplored stimulus for long enough, and in enough depth, to the point your Unconscious attention systems believe it to be safe, they will keep grabbing the attention of your conscious focus.

Admit it – you looked for that bit of fluff, I know you did.

If you have an obsession and you do not understand how obsessions work, and you lack confidence in working with such things to the point you cannot just put it to one side without it grabbing at your conscious focus against your will, it is the orientation mechanism that keeps causing this to happen.

The other reason is because your body is on High Emotional Alert.

Your Emotional Alert System

A real-life event or an imagined event (imagined so effectively your Unconscious emotional system thinks it is real) triggers an emotional response.  The emotional response travels up through the body towards the brain to meet up with the issue identified by the brain in order that your overall body and brain together take appropriate external action to deal with the alleged problem.

Trouble is when the emotional response reaches the brain your brain says ‘not yet’ and your PFC pushes the energetic response back down into your body.  The response stays in place, the body remains energised, waiting for the ‘go’ command from the brain.  And it waits, but not for long.  It travels up to the brain from the body again, repeatedly making the attempt to link up with the issue but  again the brain says ‘not yet’.

Your body remains in this state of continued emotional pre-release and the emotional response, now held in place for a prolonged period of time, starts to desperately seek release through projection - it comes up for any stimulus that even slightly resembles the original issue.  Unfortunately by now the brain may have forgotten what the original issue was and refuses to acknowledge the response needs to release at all.  ‘What, you again?’.  Your PFC refuses to allow the emotional response to leave the body declaring ‘something is wrong with my emotional system’ but the response keeps showing up.

Your Orientation Response is continually re-triggered by this because you have no idea what is causing the repeating imagery this not -sure-what-it-is message is what the Orientation Response is triggered by.  Your brain keeps being constantly re-stimulated by the emotional charge attempting to leave the body through the normal release process but because you will not allow it release it just keeps the vicious circle going.

Want to Switch the Vicious Circle Off?

In order to removal an obsession or any other emotional problem you have to switch off the emotional alert driving it.  There is nothing you can do about your Orientation Response – but once it has taken a good look at your obsession and at the emotional response attached to it, and realises what is there is just ‘fluff’, it will stop demanding your Conscious Point of Focus be directed to it.

Your PFC is fighting the reality of how your emotional system works by creating belief systems that cause your lower brain parts to join in with resisting release.

In order to stop the battle going on inside it must change its approach and agree to taking your Conscious Point of Focus directly into the emotional world it has spent so long fighting.

By systematically surrendering to the demands of its rival competitors for control of your conscious attention it will gradually release the emotional response behind the high alert emotional state and find itself returning to its rightful place as natural, relaxed controller of your conscious focus.

Regards - Carl

Our Thoughts Are Just Thoughts and Our Emotions Are Just Emotions

We watch the most horrific true stories on the news and we take almost all of it for granted without having an emotional response – yet we can watch the same kind of information float through our internal thoughts and feelings and declare ourselves to have ‘gone wrong’ and try to grab hold of these thoughts and feelings as though they were more real and more life threatening than real external events .

This leads to us giving our internal thoughts and feelings much more credence than maybe we should.  Michael Neill explains one of his own experiences below.

THE ULTIMATE PSYCHOTHERAPY

 




Over the past few days, I've had the pleasure of spending time with Dr. Robert Holden, the UK's preeminent happiness psychologist and a regular guest on the Oprah Winfrey show.

During the course of our conversations, which have covered everything from positive psychology to wine tasting and from the true meaning of enlightenment to the secrets of playing "happy golf", he said one thing which has been sitting in my mind ever since.

"In many ways," said Robert, just before driving a golf ball 240 yards down the center of the fairway, "the ultimate psychotherapy is simply to relax about things."

While it was just a passing comment, the reason it has been humming along inside my mind ever since is that it so directly mirrors the experience I have with my own clients. The moment they relax about what it is going on in their heads or in their lives, things start to change for the better.  Their mood lifts, they begin to enjoy themselves and their work and their friends and their partners more, and before long they begin having a stream of insights into whatever it was that was bothering them in the first place.

It's almost as though the more weight and gravitas we bring to bear on something, the harder it is for us to hear our own wisdom in relation to it.  The more lightness of touch we are willing to allow, the more easily and naturally that thing begins to shift, seemingly all by itself.

One of the most profound examples of that in my own life came when I was dealing with the suicidal thoughts that filled my head throughout my teens and on into my university years.  I had fallen afoul of a bizarre paradox of university policy which insisted that as I had "confessed" to suicidal thoughts I had to have mandatory psychotherapy to stay enrolled in the school, but if I actually spoke about having suicidal thoughts during that therapy they were duty bound to report me to the powers that be and I would be automatically expelled.

This led to an awful lot of time talking about nothing and getting wound up tighter and tighter as we danced around what was going on without ever once going to the heart of the matter.  I worked my way through the school's team of psychotherapists one by one (in fairness, I wasn't very nice to them) until one doctor actually did something bizarrely effective.

She told me that to her ears, I sounded absolutely fine, and that it was quite normal for people to think about suicide from time to time.  She pointed out to me that there was a huge distinction between thinking about suicide and actually wanting to kill myself - and for the first time in nearly six years I began to relax about the whole thing.

Up until that point, everyone (including me) had been so frightened about the content of my thinking that none of us had noticed that the only problem I actually had in my life at that point was my thinking.  A few days later, I had an insight which confirmed that distinction in an extremely visceral way, and as I wrote in You Can Have What You Want:

From that day forward, rather than continuing to treat the "suicide thought" as a problem to be solved, I recognized it for what it was: just a thought, no more significant than "chicken or beef", "plaid or stripes", or "I wonder what she's wearing under that?" (Hey, I was 19!)

On reflection, I can see that I had benefited from the ultimate psychotherapy. I had been given permission to just relax about my problems instead of driving myself crazy trying to solve them.  And as is so often the case, the moment I allowed myself to relax, my wisdom bubbled up to the surface and the problem dis-solved in the light of my own insight.

One of my favorite analogies for this phenomenon comes from the amazing Dr. George Pransky, whom Colin Wilson once described as "(a) modern psychologist who seems to me as important as William James, Abraham Maslow, and Howard Miller."

He describes our wisdom as being like a flute that is constantly playing in the background of our lives.  The reason we can't hear it is that we tend to have a brass band playing full volume inside our heads.  In order for us to hear and be guided by wisdom, we need only allow the brass band to quiet from time to time and we will hear the flute almost immediately.

And while relaxing into a quiet mind may seem like a difficult thing to do in the midst of a challenging time in your life, it becomes exponentially easier the moment you begin to see that the solution to our most difficult problems nearly always shows up the moment we stop looking for it. Worst case, you get to take a bit of time off from your problems and enjoy your life a bit more. Best case, you create the space for insight, laughter, and miracles.
Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy your day!

With love,

Your Two Emotional Permission Points

You have two Emotional Permission Points and they ‘live’ in your left, logical thinking neo-cortex.  You will see them, if you look for them, whenever you are in a situation that suggests an emotional response may be needed.

Permission Point 1: Emotional Production

Think of a moment in your life when you were in a position to produce an intensely negative emotional response to a situation - but chose not to.

You got a taste of the emotional response rising up through your body but  chose not to release the ‘full blast’.  The people around you were unaware, after the situation passed, you had felt an emotional response coming on at all and you retained a sense of control.

Do you remember a moment like that?

Chances are you sensed the emotional response approaching and applied a mental model that changed the context of the situation for you.  The normal reason we reduce and remove our emotional responses is because by giving ourselves a different route out of the situation through the use of an alternative thinking template we manage to regain our sense of control over how we are affected by the situation and that sense of control reduces our sense of threat.

Can you think of another situation in which you granted permission for Emotional Production?  Chances are it was the right thing to do.  An important point to remember is that ‘feeling bad’ in response to a situation is not the same thing as ‘being bad’.

I’ve seen a lot of evidence that a well controlled emotional response can create an exquisitely appropriate outcome – you just need to make sure you do not overdo it.

Oh, and you also have to take responsibility for making sure you fully complete the emotional cycle.

Permission Point 2:  Emotional Release

The emotional response is produced in the body and the feelings come up – your logical thinking brain then receives a request from the body for the emotional response to be released.

If you refuse to release the emotional response you block it and It will not leave your body until you change your decision.  You may block it without realising you did.

If you block the response because you have decided it will do more harm than good to release it at that time and plan to release it in more appropriate circumstances you are practicing ‘suppression’.

Suppression means you are consciously aware of the emotional response and its trigger and can later process the response in order to return to a non-emotional state.  Suppression is a useful social tool.  Suppression is a good thing most of the time.

If you permanently refuse permission for release, however, maybe because you disagree with the emotional response itself, this leads to repression.

In repression the trigger and the response become separated as we attempt to ‘destroy’ the emotional response.  What you end up with is a trapped emotional state that just appears to be the ‘new you’.  This new you could be a constantly angry you or a constantly disgusted you or a constantly fearful you (insert the emotional response of your choice).

All because you refused emotional release at Permission Point 2.

If you give yourself the right to produce the emotional response at Permission Point 1 you must also take responsibility for granting release at Permission Point 2 (at some point).

Obsessions, phobias, panic attacks – all emotional disorders - are caused by the failure to grant release when the emotional response comes back up through the body.

If you give permission for emotional production you must also make sure you give permission for appropriate release.

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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Social Programming Versus the Organic Self - a Barrier to Emotional Healing

On your journey through life your Unconscious collects social shoulds.

As a child these go into your thinking processes automatically.  By adulthood you have developed an anti-should-shield called your 'sense of self'.  You now begin resisting new information as it arrives in your Conscious and start to assess whether or not this new material is right for you by comparing it to what you already know.

Trouble is, by this time what you already know has been built using shoulds implanted and assessed as being right for you by other people.  While doing their implanting those other people wanted you to do what was right for them rather than what was right for you - even though they did so believing they had your best interests at heart.  We are all subject to this programming and schools are designed to orientate us in this way.  I am not saying this is a bad thing - just that the socialisation training provided does not give us the programming we need to be happy - just enough programming, of the right type, to suit the needs of those around us.  Society is extremely selfish in this regard.

Occasionally you may become aware of how powerful an embedded process this is when, for example, you want to instil new thinking habits designed to make yourself happier, and your old shoulds rise up unexpectedly to challenge them.  This challenge is not a small challenge; this challenge is a painful, meet-you-outside-for-a punch-up challenge that produces strong emotional responses.  New shoulds are often seen as threatening, even when they would be good for us.  A recent example of this for me was when a friend asked to borrow a self-esteem improvement book, after openly telling me she had low self-esteem and wanted to do something about it, then passed the book back unread after several weeks because she was too frightened to read it.

There is a difference between what external society wants you to be doing and what your organic self needs you to do - your happiness is dependent on how you manage the conflicts created by the differences between the two.  Emotional illness  is a glaring signal you have got the balance wrong.

Why do we get the balance wrong?

Society is left-brain (logic) dominant and programmes us to hide our emotions because they are inconvenient; they are unprofitable; they take up ‘valuable time’ and, worst of all, they remind our dominant intellectual minds we are organic first.

Your brain was actually created by nature to serve the needs of your body – not the other way round.  You would have no idea of the meaning of words like 'profit' or 'time' if it were not for your social programming.  In order to heal from an emotional disorder your logical thinking mind has to temporarily accept and surrender to biological control.  When you do not allow your body to speak because your socially programmed shoulds refuse it the right to do so it fights back with more intense emotional responses.

In a Buddhist community you would be socially programmed to see working with your emotions as an absolute daily necessity; if you were a member of a tribe in Africa a visit to the Shaman might be expected.  In Western civilisation, however, we are only just scratching the surface of our organic reality.  In Western society we actually have to employ professional listeners and pay for expensive medication in order to return to an emotionally balanced life - this is because having an emotional issue in our society is seen as a taboo.

What we pay for when we use the services of counsellors (and I would not take these professionals away for anything, do not get me wrong) is their help in de-constructing the negative messages society has spent years shoving into our heads.  According to society you should:

• think positively - this is not possible when your body is overwhelming your brain with a powerful negative emotional discharge; positive thinking can be used as a form of denial and can block the release of emotional responses in this situation


• pull yourself together - in order to do this you actually have to let yourself 'fall apart'  first so that full emotional discharge (preferably in private) takes place leading to a return to a relaxed state - your biology is designed to work this way


• do the 'right thing' - usually something you say to yourself when in a situation where the wrong thing is being done to you - for example you may be in a painful relationship where you believe the right thing to do is make the relationship work because you have children and you have been programmed to think that way - but your partner is being unfaithful while you just live in hope that one day doing the right thing will pay off ... meanwhile you get emotionally ill because you are constantly afraid of losing the relationships with your partner and children ... what is the right thing, exactly?


• not be feeling this emotion - you have no choice in what type of emotions you feel; nature has designed your emotional system this way - emotional illness is due to emotional overcharging of the body; not to abnormal emotional type - there is no such thing as bad or abnormal feeling - our feelings are sometimes our best indicators as to whether or not we should move towards or away from something (in the case of emotional disorders our feelings are often lying to us because they are based on false unconsciously held beliefs about ourselves - that does not make the feeling wrong)


• be less sensitive - it is very inconvenient to others when you notice something, feel something and express your sensitivity to it - this common should tells you to put yourself in a nice convenient wooden box and pretend you are not human.

So What Should You Do?

If you want to heal from an emotional problem you should say hello to your organic self - and be willing to acknowledge, challenge and even trade in your old social shoulds for your own self-directed shoulds.  But who am I to tell you?  After all, as far as you are concerned, I am society.

Regards - Carl

The Thalamus - a Brain Part that Can Make Liars of Us All

Do you get angry when you'd rather not?  Have you tried 'shouting an obsession or phobia out?' - you know, that old trick about going 'STOP!' and that's supposed to interrupt the response before it happens (but it still happens).

Are you frustrated you have emotional responses before you can consciously control them?  Do you feel angry towards others who challenge you to face up to the pain within, particularly when they seem to have no such pain?  This inner-world-versus-outer-world conflict is caused partly by the work of the Thalamus.

It's the job of the Thalamus to make the decision whether or not you get to react mostly emotionally or mostly with thinking to a situation.

Unfortunately how you think about how you feel makes very little difference to how you currently feel - it's whether or not you're willing to feel that decides if one day you will be able to just think about an issue.

The reason we can't change our emotional responses using our thinking is because all of our senses are routed to enter 'behind' our conscious thinking brains.  Your visual centre, for example, is at the rear of your brain and visual signals entering your brain do so below your thinking neocortex.  The decision as to whether it is your upper thinking brain or your lower emotional brain that gets to respond to a stimulus is decided before your thinking brain receives the signals.  The fact our eyes are at the front of our heads maybe creates the illusion that our visual and sound signals go straight into our thinking brains, but it isn't so.  For people suffering with emotional disorders this is an extremely confusing and frustrating fact of our biology.

You cannot directly affect this routing process through thinking - but you can indirectly change it through feeling.

I firmly believe the decision to send sensory signals upwards or downwards is made purely on the basis of the levels of currently held emotional charge in the body produced in regard to particular sensations/images/sounds.

The job of which direction incoming signals are sent in is made by your Thalamus.

The Thalamus (or Thalami)


All sensory information entering the brain is routed through the Thalami - two walnut sized structures that sit side by side and lay between the conscious thinking brains and the unconscious, emotionally responding Limbic Brain.

Your Thalamus receives all the information coming in from your senses.  It filters these signals for information relating to those images, sounds and sensations already attached to strong emotional responses.

If your emotional responses are already firing in response to related information it sends the signals downwards into the emotional brain before your thinking brains have any say in the decision.  Your thinking brains are informed of the decision by the fact your body produces physical symptoms.

The Thalamus believes the more emotionally charged your body is in regard to an issue the more life threatening a situation actually is.  If this is not the case in reality your entire emotional system begins living a lie.  Your conscious thinking brain picks up on the fact these reactions are liars and in most cases it does the opposite of what it needs to do to release the lie (ie feel and release the painful feelings) - it refuses to allow the feelings release from the body and this just perpetuates the signals-being-sent-downwards cycle.

The feelings are real but the triggers to which they relate don't exist.

Have you noticed how people who habitually lie put up a terrific fight before allowing themselves to go through the 'truth recognition process'?  Quite often we think of such people as 'devout and deliberate liars' but most liars are just people craving pleasant feelings while trying to escape the build-up of emotional pain that accompanies the 'reality shifts' involved in feeling negative emotions such as guilt and loss of social power that the Thalamus has been producing for them.  They started one lie that produced pain for them, which they didn't face, and they've been running ever since.  Even people who don't habitually lie can have this problem. In obsessions, for example, the life threatening image or sound they believe will kill them is completely harmless.  Consciously they know this; unconsciously they don't.

Lies may appear manipulative, 'evil', or things produced by  people living on a planet completely opposite in nature to our own - but it's really their Thalamus and their inability to manage it's decisional process causing this false reality to be maintained.

The emotional release required to adjust the Thalami settings is always intensely painful and involves a shift in our perception of 'reality' that can be quite a blow to the ego.

The pay-off of tuning into true reality and reversing the polarity of the Thalamus so it sends the signals upwards for thinking instead of downwards for emoting is the release of current negative emotional energy, prevention of the further build-up of unnecessary negative responses.  This is a huge step closer to being unconditionally happy.

Hurts like hell, but it does the job.

Regards - Carl

How the Body Works : The Thalamus

The Thalamus The thalamus, shown in red, is part of the forebrain. It plays an integral part in relaying sensory information from the sense organs to the cortex. Acting as a major relay center, the thalamus passes incoming messages on to higher centers in the cortex. A thalamus with its nuclei color coded is represented here. Some nuclei deal with several different types of messages, while other nuclei deal with only one type. The lateral geniculate body relays information to the visual ...

A Bit More About Person-Centred Counselling and the Johari Window

One of the most difficult things for people in pain to do is to accept themselves, especially those parts of themselves causing the pain.  It's very easy to make the jump from feeling bad to thinking 'I am bad'.  Angry people, for example, are not 'bad' people.  They've usually got something to be angry about!

A key element of an effective Person-Centred Counselling relationship is Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR).  UPR creates a sense of external acceptance that gradually affects the unconscious of the client - 'well if they can accept me as I am then I guess I can'.  But it's more than a verbal sentence - it's an overall sensory experience.

UPR assumes all people are basically good and a Counsellor must hold their client in high regard if they hope to support them properly.  This doesn't mean every Person-Centred Counsellor can do this with every client.   During my Person-Centred Counsellor training we were asked to consider what kinds of clients we would not be able to offer UPR to.

I, and quite a few of the other trainees, immediately responded we could not work with people who had sexually abused children - we found the area far too emotive for us to guarantee UPR for a client of that nature.  However one trainee explained he found the way child abusers developed fascinating and was currently counselling an abuser and did not feel disturbed by the client at all.

I would have no problem working, for example, with gay or transsexual clients.

If your counsellor, for whatever reason, is unable to treat you with Unconditional Positive Regard they should refer you to another Person-Centred Counsellor who can.

We definitely see evidence of UPR as Carl Rogers continues to work with Gloria in the videos below - we also see another important principle at work - Client Autonomy.  Despite the fact Gloria keeps asking for 'advice' she eventually develops her own solutions.  This approach helps the client better understand the acceptance process while learning they can actually cope with and develop strategies of their own to manage it so improving their confidence levels.

CARL ROGERS AND GLORIA COUNSELLING - PT 3

CARL ROGERS AND GLORIA - COUNSELLING - PT 4

CARL ROGERS AND GLORIA - COUNSELLING - PT 5

Finally I thought I'd finish off by giving you a bonus video about the 'Johari Window'.  It's a useful model and something helpful to be aware of - there are always things about ourselves we do not know or have become blind to.  There's a link below the video to get more detailed information and some free downloads.

Johari Window @ Yahoo! Video

If you're interested in getting further free information on the Johari Window (including a pdf or word diagram) please click here: businessballs .

Regards - Carl

About Person-Centred Counselling - Meet Carl Rogers

Could you tell your mother you can't understand why she married Dave when it was obvious that Jack was the better man out of the two?  Can you tell her you have fantasies that Dave will fall under a bus some day and Jack will replace him?  Do you like yourself when you think this way?  Person-centred counsellors are trained to adopt a certain approach to their clients that helps them to accept and work with the unacceptable parts of themselves.

I've recommended Person-Centred counselling (aka Humanistic Counselling) to a few friends who have all benefited from the experience but there are usually some standard questions such as 'what do they make you do?' or 'will they give me the answers?'.

The videos below are of Carl Rogers - considered the 'father' of Person-Centred Counselling (these videos are still being used in the initial training of counsellors today).  I'm posting three videos today and three tomorrow - they show you what Person-Centred Counselling is like.

Carl Rogers

Here Carl Rogers meets Gloria - and we start to see how the client has control of the session. None of this is scripted; it's a genuine first session.

CARL ROGERS & GLORIA COUNSELLING - Part 1

CARL ROGERS AND GLORIA COUNSELLING PT 2

Ever had counselling or have questions about the process? Please leave a comment below.

Regards - Carl

What Shape Do You Give Your Phobic Response?

These two videos are based around Exposure Therapy - which is simply another term for describing what goes on in systematic de-sensitisation but is much easier to say!  Please watch both videos and then go read the rest of the post below them (don't read the rest of the post before watching the videos as that would be cheating!).

While watching the two videos I want you to think about what 'shape' the two people involved see their emotional response as. What are their unconscious minds 'seeing'? Watch the videos - and then read further down.

Exposure Therapy: Behavior

Intensive Exposure Therapy

I want you to imagine that in your unconscious mind there are only two serious questions:  Am I the predator or is it the predator?  When we see predators what do they look like?  I sometimes ask people who are suffering with depression what shape their emotional response has - does it appear to be overwhelming to them and they fear that when they go in they will never come out?  If so their unconscious has identified the emotional response as a predator eating them.  Then I ask them to describe what actually happens and every time they tell me they go into the response kicking and screaming -  and come out a few days later feeling still terrible about the lack of control they have.  But even though they eventually came out they still 'see' themselves being eaten and digested by the experience.

Then I ask them: what if you see the experience as something you go into, and you eat it, and then come out, and every time you go in that predator you actually eat it from the inside out - what if that predator is really just a pile of food and you're just meant to finish the meal?

In their unconscious minds people with anxiety disorders have registered these situations as predators preparing to eat them - by going into the elevators and coming out again they're showing the unconscious they are still alive (therefore they are not entering a predator's mouth) but also they are able to show their unconscious they actually have more control over the situation than their unconscious believed they had.

The unconscious has to be 'shown' with visual patterns and physical actions (visual patterns alone can be effective but take longer to work).

Other people being involved in their initially painful adventures reinforces the unconscious mind's motivation to keep going but it also helps in 'normalising' the situation. Anxiety disorders are 'normal' conditions - they're not desirable, but they are normal, and they can be eliminated as long as we keep doing the work.

By repeatedly entering 'the mouth of the predator' our unconscious changes it's viewpoint of the shape of the situation from one of being engulfed in the jaws of a predator to one where we ourselves are the predator and have control. Did you see how delighted the lady was to show off how safe she felt now? Her unconscious believes she just ate the elevator.

When you enter an emotional response what shape do you give the process? Please leave comments below or email me at carl@managemesystems.com.

Regards - Carl

PS tomorrow I'm going to post about three different intensity levels of de-sensitisation process - two of which we do all the time.

Just for Fun - the Difference Between Male and Female Brains

A couple of years ago I sat and watched a science programme that showed the brain scans of five men and five women as they went through a series of 'multi-tasking tests'.

The tests included such things as a mock kitchen being set up with a number of simultaneous tasks needing to be performed within a time limit.

It was no surprise that all the women came in at the top half of the list - apart from one man who performed better than everybody else. He was gay.

The scientists said the brain scans revealed different brain structure patterns between men and women and the gay man had a female structure that looked more female than the women in the test - gay people have the brain structure of the opposite gender.

I think this Youtube video explains the difference between male and female brains quite well, don't you?

Tale of Two Brains

Another part of the programme followed the journey of a female transsexual undergoing hormonal treatment before having 'the big op'.   Her brain scans revealed that as the months of hormonal therapy were passing she was not only developing the external appearance of a man - her brain structure was changing too.

The scans showed her brain's emotional centres had gone from four areas that 'lit up' when she was emotional to only one (apparently us blokes only have one emotional centre and we find it extremely difficult to get in touch with it).

The lady who wanted to become a man said she found it really frustrating she couldn't cry as easily any more and couldn't release her emotions when she wanted to.

The programme explained that women deal with emotional problems most effectively through talking to other women, while men need to spend time alone in order to get in touch with that single lonely emotional centre they have to get by with - hence the need for men to 'go walkabout' or go sit in the shed at the bottom of the garden.

Did you know there are  'Shedologist Societies' for such fellas? I kid you not.

Regards - Carl

Notes on Positive Psychology

Came across this excellent article that summarises and provides links to various useful happiness-related sites and self-tests.  Some of the headings I want to write stuff about in future posts with my own twist on things - quite a lot to take in all at once and 'use immediately' but over time you can deliberately integrate this material into your daily thinking.  Please comment on anything that particularly stands out for you (and go check out that site listed at the bottom of the article).   Was it useful?

Notes on Positive Psychology

Regards - Carl

The Brain from Top to Bottom - Great Resource

Check out this great interactive site by clicking on the image below.  I wrote to the developer a while ago to ask if I could have permission to use some parts of it in a Camtasia video I want to put together on the ARAS (Ascending Reticular Activation System) and he's told me to go ahead - that's a little time away yet but there's no point in me holding back on my disovering this site.

It really is a great tool if you're interested in this kind of thing and has some great stuff on anxiety disorders and depression - let me know what you think!

Carl