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

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,

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

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

Acceptance through Normalisation is Key to Healing Anxiety Disorders

In order to fully remove serious emotional problems and maintain a generally happier state we may need to challenge and change our ‘global view’ of emotions as a whole.  I call the transition from the globally non-accepting to accepting viewpoint of intense emotions ‘Normalisation’.  All emotional problems, including emotional disorders such as obsessions and phobias, are very normal life events.

They are undesirable, but normal.  Trouble is, sufferers are extremely good at hiding their suffering for very long periods of time (by the way, they are also good at healing and never telling anyone about it).  You may be surrounded by people suffering with emotional illness and not know it.  A survey carried out in the US a couple of decades ago produced results that shocked the government - it revealed over half the population could be classified as mentally or emotionally ill.  Think your emotional condition is an isolated and unusual incident?  Think again.

In my day job working in education I see three to four people a week with intense emotional problems such as phobias;  long term depression; anger issues and OCD - and I do not work as a counsellor or a psychiatrist.  They see many more.  I might see a person with a broken leg once or twice a year.  Yet I have never heard a person with a broken leg refer to their situation as abnormal.  Painful? Absolutely. Inconvenient? Definitely.  Abnormal with lots of self-criticism?  Never.  When I talk to people with emotional illness they make 'my condition is abnormal' comments continuously - and so do those around them.

I suspect the real reason we tell ourselves emotional problems are abnormal is because we, and society, just wish these foggy hard to sort out problems did not exist and by denying them access to our view of what normality is we can put them on hold for a future rainy day.  Unfortunately having an emotional problem makes every day a rainy day.  Broken legs have to be dealt with there and then because we cannot function in the outside world if we do not - but emotional problems?  They will keep - as long as we all decide they are abnormal.

Once we open up to the need to heal our emotional problems, however, we naturally have to declare our condition real and the transition to normalisation starts to happen - but it comes at a price that includes:

• accepting sole ownership for developing your self-management skills


• taking repeated risks


• expanding your pain barrier


• developing your learning process.

Accepting sole ownership for developing your self-management skills

Sole ownership of your emotional well-being lies with you.  You become the detective, the evil scientist experimenting on yourself, the decider, eventually your own skilled healer. There are no shortcuts and no immediate external rewards so your motivation to do this long-term work comes only from you. Let us add personal cheerleader to the list of new roles you need to develop.

Others may help with advice, with additional cheerleading and with other subtle things over time (for example counsellors support our unconscious transition to normalisation by creating an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance which you then pick up on).   Ultimately though the whole thing is your responsibility to carry out alone on a day by day basis in between seeing those helpers and advisors.  You decide when emotional healing should start and when it ends; this normal responsibility is the same for all of us.

Taking repeated risks

When you want to heal from an emotional disorder for the first time in your life you must learn how to disconnect from the outside world and risk going within - into the 'you' that is at that moment a very painful you.  When you get there you will be the only person who arrives.   As you approach these places inside they release more intense painful energies sparking ambivalence - the internally painful state in which two emotionally supported belief systems collide with each other.  I'm going in, do not go in; I am right, you are wrong; this will kill you, so why has it not killed me before?


One belief system craves change while the other wants to keep the status quo and screams 'you are making things worse!' and goes on to show you images of failure and how things could end in disaster if you continue.

This is both frustrating and frightening.  What if you get it wrong?  What if you get to a place inside and find you are trapped in a worse place than you were before you decided to take this journey and this worse place becomes your normal day to day emotional setting - would it not be better to stay just as you are?  What if you get inside an emotional response and discover you are evil and always will be? Maybe you will open up an emotional response and it will compel you to attack someone (anxiety disorders such as obsessions and phobias are built around the need to prevent these things happening - but you will not know this unless you are willing to take the risks).  We go through the same risk taking process as bungee-jumpers and parachutists do - it feels exactly the same.

We may not survivie - but we do.  Do it often enough and you will find the alleged risks just make you giggle a bit when the warning signals appear.  'Oh, that old chestnut'.  As you develop confidence in taking the 'going-in risks' you develop the understanding this is normal.   You do not remove the risk-taking process, you embrace and normalise it.  It works the same way for all of us.

Expanding your pain barrier

I have never had a broken leg and no, I do not want one thank you - but if I did have a broken leg and I recovered from it I would have expanded my pain barrier.  That is, I would have expanded my understanding of what I can go through without it killing me and would know what actions need to happen to get me back to good health.  Negative emotional responses tend to travel along the same nerve routes as our physical pain system and for this reason they register as though they were actually physically hurting us in our brain - but they do not and we can only learn about our emotional limits if we are willing to experience them.

Although what we feel is real, the pain created is actually based on our perception of an event rather than the reality of the event.  When we refuse to accept the nature of an external reality we do so with the intention of attempting to reverse the external reality and most emotional pain is about preventing or undoing something in the outside world that cannot be undone.  When we want to stop or undo our own intense response we may have limited self-management skills and make the mistake of using yet another painful emotional response designed to undo the first - now we have an emotional disorder.

All emotional responses are normal - there is no such thing as abnormal emotional pain.  It is how we work with our emotions that causes or relieves our pain.

If you had a close encounter with a lion and your fear caused you to move quickly away from it you would not stop to criticise your fear as it did the job of speeding you up and temporarily narrowing your thinking down to look only for an escape route - you would want it to do that.  You would accept both the external reality and your response to it.  You would be grateful to the response if it kept you alive.

The same system reacts in regards to other external situations but if we do not want to hear what the response is telling us about our external reality (for example it may be telling us to leave a harmful relationship but we are torn in our decision because we have a strong dream of having a wonderful relationship instead) we cling on to it; we wrestle with it and pin it down - and it fights with us in its determination to protect us but we refuse to see it for what it is and the message it contains.

It is absolutely normal for our emotional responses to transmit pain when we are in situations potentially harmful to us - if we are unwilling to experience the pain when it first appears we risk having to endure it for much longer periods later.  This is a rule of life.

Developing your learning process

Whatever you pay attention to improves learning and then what you learn improves what you are paying attention to.

Chances are the reason you became emotionally ill in the first place was because you made some bad external decisions for yourself and had no idea that was what they were - you found yourself trapped and powerless and began to self-criticise.  Learning stops the self-criticism first then it helps you release the emotional responses from which you gain insights and what you end up with is a route map for what decisions you should be making in the future according to the kind of person you are.  When you start working in this way you learn to trust yourself and the results give you confidence.

You learn a space exists between having an emotional response and taking external behavioural action.  As children we learn the limited model of 'have feelings: take action', but when we become much more powerful as adults this belief system scares the hell out of us so we turn to suppression.  Instead we need to develop the model 'have feelings; go to safe space to safely release feelings while gaining the insights contained in them and then take necessary actions'.

You learn that putting yourself first is very good for other people - how strange is that?  Strange but normal.

By seeing your emotional problems as normal and agreeng to work with them like you would any other real-life problem area you learn what lies beneath your immediately available day to day thinking is not the 'hell' you once saw it as but an amazing, commonly experienced resource most people are too frightened to access.

Break a leg.

Regards - Carl