Obsessions Develop in the Fertile Ground of Intense Worry

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

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

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

Her first question was what causes the problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards - Carl

Birth of an Obsession: Did You Lock the Door?

Well, did you lock the door?  Did you really lock the door or do you just think you did?

A pal was describing to me how her mum has to keep going back to check she locked the door and has been diagnosed with OCD.  In this post I am going to talk about what starts the obsessive process and how full blown obsessions develop (and also how to start getting rid of them).

WORRY

The 'itchy' nature of things that bug and worry us is how obsessive thinking is initially triggered.  Obsessive thinking, fuelled by unreleased negative emotional energy, lays a foundation for full blown obsessions to develop later.  The important thing to concentrate on here is 'fuelled by'.  Take away the fuel of your worry-engine and you take away the worrying.  I will explain how to do this near the end of the post.

Worrying About Worrying

There comes a point when we know for sure that door is definitely locked but the worry keeps grabbing our attention and then we start to worry about why we are worrying.  It is not the actual lock that bothers us but the emotional attachments held within the body linked to multiple dire and painful possibilities.  We do not think we could cope with our own emotional responses to those possibilities if they ever happened.

The brain likes to represent things for us (it is very efficient and effective like that) and represented behind the focal point of that little door lock, and the little key we keep with us, is a whole host of scary stuff we imagine lies in wait if we get that door-locking-process wrong.  Criticising yourself for worrying about the lock distracts you from facing up to the real concerns behind it - those things you do not believe you could cope with such as:

• finding your home ransacked by burglars and even worse finding them still in your house when you arrive


• losing things you have worked for all your life


• precious memories tainted (eg jewellery from your mother) by having items stolen


• loss of the belief your home is 'safe'


• wondering if the burglars will come back and what kind of evil people do such things


• the concern you will be irreversibly damaged by the event.

These are all representations - products of our imagination.  Knowing that is all they are causes us to criticise ourselves for being emotionally attached to them and refusing to feel the emotional responses associated with those underlying representations.  We regard our emotional responses as 'over-reacting' and consciously try to stop worrying; we try to freeze the process.  We attempt to stop both the thinking and the feelings involved.

Trying to Stop The Thinking Does Not Work


Fighting worrying thoughts with additional counteractive thinking such as 'I should not be thinking about this repeatedly because it only exists in my imagination', and then trying to distract yourself by deliberately focusing on nice things to think about instead means you must first think about what it is you are trying to avoid thinking about - and this keeps re-creating it. Doh.

Un-think a pink elephant - can you do it?  Try again.  Try again.  Later when you are around the thing you do not want to think about, such as that lock, you think 'I hope I do not think about it otherwise all those negative sensations will come back with it'.  Guess what you just did.  Yup, you thought about it.

Feelings Are The Key to Stopping Worrying


You are actually designed to cope with all of your feelings in all real-life scenarios regardless of content or intensity.  Feelings work in a specific way.  They appear, you feel them, and they eventually move through and out of you - if you let them.  When you try to stop this process in its tracks you develop an 'I would not be able to cope with my feelings in that situation' belief system (in truth it is because you do not want to feel your negative feelings, rather than because you cannot, but who can blame you for not wanting to?).  Nevertheless, to heal this worrying you must feel your feelings out.

By refusing to acknowledge these imagined scenarios as being a valid part of your built-in emotional response system you refuse to release the emotional charge attached and you keep the festering 'I could not cope' message running in your brain and body.  When you set out to deliberately destroy these worries, because you see them as 'wrong', you then risk creating secondary emotional responses.

SECONDARY EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

Secondary emotional responses cause obsessions; panic attacks; phobias and a whole host of other anxiety-related disorders.  Although they are intended to remove a primary emotional response they merely cement it further in place - they fail to work in the same way trying to un-think thoughts fails to work and they keep regenerating the problem.

In most cases a secondary emotional response is a repeat of the primary response: we can generate anger at being angry (rage attacks); fear of being afraid (panic attacks).  We can also generate  fear of feeling disgust and also anger towards feeling fear.  It is often easier to notice the second type of secondary emotional responses because they produce different physical sensations, whereas 'fear of fear' and 'anger at anger' can seem to blend into an overall painful mass and we have difficulty seeing which is a primary and which is a secondary response.

When you have a secondary emotional response your thinking and feelings have been geared up for war against your own original emotional response.  The determination not to have the primary response is so strong you are trying to physically remove the entire thinking/feeling process from your body.  This cannot be done.  Instead you must aim for the goal of flowing the energy through your body until the overspill is down to a reasonable level and your mind stops regarding the situation as a problem.

In the case of a phobia of door locks, for example, you have created a secondary response that causes you to emotionally fight every door lock you come across just in case it causes you to have a fearful emotional response.  In the case of an obsession you have the image of a door lock repeatedly flashing in your conscious mind attached to the most extreme emotionally intense responses you are capable of producing.  And because you know it's not 'real', you keep fighting it.

HYPERVIGILANCE

Hypervigilance, or being super-aware, is designed to keep you alive in long-term immediately life threatening situations.  You are unconsciously driven to look for evidence of things even slightly related to the perceived threat.  When you are hypervigilant your holistic thinking is shut down as you focus solely on looking for sensory signals related only to the trigger.

Feeling hypervigilant  is the difference between seeing a wild, hungry lion on your television and having a wild, hungry lion in your home.  Lions on the telly engage your conscious thinking brain in seeing nature at its most powerful and beautiful; lions in your home engage your unconscious emotional brain in contemplating the painful deaths of you and your loved ones and cause you to have powerful physical responses.

A heavy breath; a moving shadow; scratching claws; sharp teeth.  In hypervigilance your unconscious emotional brain runs you and automatically produces the signals that tell your senses 'danger!'.  But you do not need a real lion in your home to become hypervigilant.  All you need to achieve this state in normal every day life is to refuse to engage your conscious thinking brain in working with your negatively charged emotional issues.

Refusing to consciously work with an emotional issue does not make the issue go away - it forces the issue downwards into your unconscious emotional brain.

Because your unconscious emotional brain does not know the difference between imagined and real scenarios it assumes it has received the information because the scenario is real.  When your unconscious emotional brain takes control of dealing with issues you refused to deal with consciously your risk of hypervigilance is greatly increased.

Two other things that can increase the risk of hypervigilance are:

• the feared event, or something similar to it, actually happening or having happened in the past so your unconscious mind has evidence such a threat could be real


• having your sense of control over the prevention of such imagined events being undermined; for example a partner who always leaves the door unlocked when they go out.

Becoming hypervigilant towards triggers you know to be false in the present moment means you have emotional reactions you do not want or understand.  Your unconscious brain creates imagery, sounds and sensations that appear in your conscious brain against your conscious will and you have physical reactions, driven by extreme emotional responses, that exactly mimic the false situation as if it were real.  If there were an actual lion in the room you would welcome this reaction because it could keep you alive - but when you know these reactions are happening around imagined events you continue to fight them; continue to try and force them out of conscious awareness but send them repeatedly down into your emotional brain for unconscious processing.

To undo this unconsciously driven nightmare you have to do just one thing: consciously reclaim your feelings.  The earlier you start the better.

HOW TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT YOU LOCKED THE DOOR

When a person develops OCD or an obsession in regard to whether or not they locked the door they've taken what started out as a fear-laden area of worry, refused to spend time with it, started to fight it and then turned that fight into an unconscious long-term habit supported by secondary emotional responses that defend against the undoing of that habit.

This habit actually restructures both your brain and your emotional release system.  Specific emotional responses are blocked from leaving the body while  thought patterns are created that act like 'shields' trying to stop you from thinking about certain areas of life.  But like any other habit it can be reversed if you're willing to pay the price and give it the time required.

Here's an example of a strategy you can use to remove the initial obsessional worrying process:

Step 1:  Focus On the Door Lock

Accept it is not your thoughts but your feelings that keep driving you to pay attention to the lock. The feelings we're talking about here are feelings already present in your body waiting to be released - I'm not talking about deliberately generating new feelings.  If when you focus on an object you have feelings automatically come up they are already present in your body and they will keep asking you to pay attention to the issue they represent until they are released.

Step 2: Explore Your Feelings and the Issues to Which They Relate

Explore the threat of burglary and how you would react; explore the threat of feeling stupid after the event if you forgot to lock your door; having the police come round and point security issues out to you that you should have been thinking about and did not - explore the embarrassment all that entails.  Explore the issues and feel the feelings in depth. Do this consciously and this reduces the need for your unconscious emotional mind to keep getting involved.

Step 3:  Tell Yourself You Would Cope if These 'Terrible' Things Happened

Because you would.  You would hurt; but you would cope.  The feelings you have while imagining the scenario are roughly the same as you would have if the scenario were real, if you can cope with the imagined scenario you can cope with the real version.

Step 4:  Accept that Locking the Door is an Important Thing You Need to Concentrate on When You Are Doing It

Sometimes the reason we worry is because we are distracted by other things fighting for our attention and our memory of having performed an important act is blurred.  Our unconscious is telling us we did not pay enough attention to the door at the time of locking.  What is happening here is your unconscious is working in line with your deepest value systems and reminding you to keep in line with them.

Step 5:  Replay Issues and Release the Emotional Responses Attached to Them Until They Stop Grabbing Your Attention


Do not wait until the issue reappears and you say 'oh no, not again'.  Set aside a regular time slot each week where you deliberately go searching for issues; deliberately seek to feel the feelings attached.

Step 6:  Do Not Self-Criticise

Self-criticism about this process is like telling yourself it is wrong to feel pain when you cut yourself.  Almost all people I have met who worry or who develop anxiety disorders tell themselves 'I have gone wrong' on the basis of their experiencing negative feelings.  You get a broken leg, it hurts physically.  You imagine a harmful life event, it hurts emotionally.  It is not desirable, but it is not 'wrong'.  When you catch yourself telling yourself this, challenge it.  The self-criticism needs to be repeatedly stopped when it surfaces - eventually it will be become a habit not to do it.

Step 7:  Rinse and Repeat

If you follow this process over and over again you will find your worries eventually disappear.  That lock no longer keeps grabbing your attention.

To summarise ...

I guess what I'm saying here is the more you deliberately fester on a worry the less it worries you and eventually it completely fades.  The more you fight it the more it keeps demanding you pay attention to it.  Self-acceptance is about accepting your emotional responses and allowing them to release from your body.

HOW TO GET RID OF AN OBSESSION WHEN YOU'VE DEVELOPED SECONDARY EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

Unfortunately you won't be able to follow the above 7 step process until you've removed your secondary responses and this involves taking your conscious thinking down into your unconscious mind repeatedly to pull back up those issues you refused or were unable to deal with earlier.  You must now brave the 'shields' your unconscious has put in place to prevent you from doing this.

Repeatedly experiencing secondary emotional responses, which are very intense, until the unconscious starts to transfer the handling of the information over from the unconscious to the conscious mind is easier to do as the unconscious stops regarding the threat as real.  Discharging the intense emotional charge naturally leads to this transfer taking place but for this process to begin the conscious mind must start to see the development and removal of an obsession as a natural process.

It can take months and sometimes years to get to this point.  OCD and obsessions are powerful conditions and the speed of recovery depends on how much daily work a sufferer is willing to put in.

In the case of a door lock obsession, for example, the person concerned has to go towards the door lock in their mind (in an obsession the image that terrifies is contained in the mind) and release all emotional charge attached to any underlying worries and issues.

Does this remind you of a situation you have had or are having?  Please leave a comment below.

Regards - Carl