Emotional Healing Challenges Ideas, Beliefs, Attitudes and Reveals Your Values

When a person has decided they are finally ready to start the healing journey they may find various aspects of the journey unclear for a while until they realise they have to challenge and change their ideas, beliefs, attitudes and values – and how all of these interact with each other.

Ideas

An idea is a snapshot map - usually an image.  Ideas tend to be easily shared and universally acknowledged as to what they are with other people.

An idea can be an image of something we are moving towards, something we wish to create or the map of a journey we are thinking about travelling.

We are able to share and test our ideas easily with other people and there can be common agreement on what the idea looks like.  Individual differences arise, however, when individuals assess the impact of each idea differently and you find an idea you are exploring is something someone else will not even consider.

For example I can share with you a simple three stage idea of an exposure therapy plan and you will understand it clearly – but while I automatically accept the idea as workable you may assess it as the most stupid and dangerous thing a person can do.

We are capable of storing thousands if not millions of ideas over a lifetime without being too concerned about their accuracy.

Several ideas you may like to think about when it comes to removing an emotional disorder include:

• emotional issues are driven by trapped emotional energy rather than the original trigger that produced them


• an emotional response you are currently having in regards to an event happening several years ago may be a liar because it is based on a problem that no longer exists


• even if it is lying the energy has to be released through the past event as if it were temporarily true right now in order for the body to stop wanting to resolve the issue being lied about..

The nature of ideas starts to change when we select an idea from the many available and either decide to apply the map it offers to the way we manage our emotional lives or we see the idea as something to fight..

Beliefs

Beliefs are ideas with roots.

Those roots are fed by emotional responses based on a mixture of real-life experiences and imagined scenarios (mostly imagined scenarios, if we are being honest).

They are also supported by other ideas held in our brains – ideas that show, for example, what happens if the idea is applied for a short time (a day); a medium period of time (few weeks ) and strategically (five years to a lifetime).

We believe certain things will happen if we apply an idea for long enough – the decision as to whether or not we apply a new idea depends on how convinced we are the idea will produce a desired result and how desirable that result is compared to the discomfort of the journey to get to it.

Beliefs are concerned with the truth or otherwise of a map.  If we follow the journey represented to us by the idea will we find the destination promised or the threats we were warned about?

Beliefs about a thing are really only concerned with two questions – should we move towards or away from the idea?

If I were to say to you that, as you approach your emotional disorder, uncovering it layer by layer, you will eventually see that you have been deliberately keeping the disorder to prevent some terrible thing from happening, rather than because you are hiding from your own ‘demonic self’ – would you believe me?

The decision which direction to go in, towards or away from an idea, decides your attitude to the problem.

Attitude

In past times ‘attitude’ was the name given to the method used by a predator to stalk its prey.  Whether you want to move towards an idea or away from it decides your general direction; but attitude is about the route you expect to follow to get there.

What we know about attitude is once the journey has started the attitude sometimes needs to change as reality dawns.

For example, you may be looking for a straight path to emotional wellness but the path turns out to be a crazy-paving path instead and you sometimes find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere (at least you think that way at the time).  Other times you find yourself where you want to be without knowing quite how you arrived.

If I suggest to you the first part of your journey towards emotional healing, particularly if you have a serious anxiety disorder such as obsessions; OCD or phobias to clear, is to go speak to your doctor and establish a supportive team because this is going to be a long journey and you need their help – would you do that?

Or would that be too much of a delay?  You could do what I did and spend the first three months doing an exposure therapy plan alone then rushing to the doctor for confirmation that your ‘mammalian freeze response’ is a normal part of the anxiety process and not instead evidence you are going into a diabetic coma.

Values

Values are the things  we regard as most important in life and without which life would not not be worth much (they are still just ideas, really).

Values are both about the destination and the journey.  They are how we wish to travel, and why.  Our Self-Image is a value system based on who we see ourselves as now, who we wish to be and how we get to be that person (in most cases we already are that person and we just do not know it yet).

In order to be properly lined up mentally and emotionally you need to understand your values and how you work with them right now – if you are not lined up inside the gaps will show.

You can see this in social organisations where what the organisation is set up to achieve on behalf of others is not how the organisation travels itself – for example I remember watching a television programme where a doctor treating insomniacs was trying to get his 110 hour working week reduced.  The doctor was crumbling as he worked to help others.

It is easier to see this in others than it is in ourselves but, for an individual, this lack of congruence may show for example in how a person really concerned about the safety of their family acts like a vicious bully to keep everyone ‘safe’.

Because your values become unconscious over time you may forget what they are until they are threatened by a life event or the behaviour of someone else.

When your deepest value systems are being challenged you are at most risk of developing emotional disorders because if the challenge repeats over time you will react more and more strongly; to the point you become sensitised (over-reactive).

Once you become sensitised you lose sight of what your underlying values are and become more concerned with your sensitised state.  You know you are over-reacting and become suspicious as to why.  You now see YOU as the threat.

Truth is you felt your deepest values were threatened and became compelled to do something about it – but in reality there is nothing you can do and now you are stuck in a Catch-22 situation.  All emotionally pumped up with nowhere to go.

How would you value my advice if I told you that valuing the well-being of other people above your own well-being – even if they are, for example, your children - puts you at serious risk of becoming emotionally ill?

Although we cannot remove our value systems, nor should we wish to, we can re-prioritise them.  In order to become emotionally well you may, for a long time, have to keep re-visiting and challenging what  you value.

You must always value your long-term emotional well-being above that of others - you are of no use to others if you do not do so.

Have I challenged any ideas, beliefs, attitudes and values here?

Regards - Carl

What is Emotional and Cognitive Sensitisation and why should you know about it if you have an anxiety disorder?

Sensitisation

‘Sensitisation’ describes a point at which we become more than normally reactive to a certain kind of stimulation.

We can become sensitised at three main levels:

• physically
• cognitively
• emotionally.

Physical sensitisation can be seen in conditions such as allergies (eg hay fever) where our body activates an auto-immune system reaction to a physical substance it has identified as a threat in a similar way to how an infection is identified. 

The substance concerned may have previously produced no such reaction.  Some allergy reactions may be so severe they actually threaten the life of the sufferer (eg asthma).

Where an allergy develops in childhood a sufferer may grow out of it but if it develops in adulthood recovery is rare.  Thankfully medication and avoidance strategies help.

Other examples of physical sensitisation are the reactions we get by simply touching the same spot on our skin repeatedly (lightly with a pin does a good job of this) and RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) whereby nerves are irritated and inflamed by repetitive micro-movements.

Cognitive sensitisation is the root initial cause of conditions such as obsessions and OCD.  It is a process in which new thinking networks are set up in a bid to eradicate an unwanted thought or sets of thoughts.

Paradoxically this repeatedly generates the unwanted thoughts because the new ‘hunter’ thought patterns are designed to identify the target needing removal and recreate the unwanted thinking in order to do so.  It is a self-defeating process..

We do not deliberately set up these additional thought patterns, by the way – we do it without realising what it is we just did.

Frustrated at our lack of success we may then become emotionally sensitised in a bid to win the war against these unwanted thoughts and their attached emotional responses..

Emotional sensitisation – the powerhouse that maintains all anxiety disorders. 

Primary emotions are the emotions we produce in direct response to a real-life or imagined trigger.  Sometimes, however, a primary emotional response is based around information we do not want to accept as real and if we reject the information we also tend to reject the primary emotional response attached to it (the reverse is also true – if we reject an emotional response we also reject thoughts attached). 

In a bid to push the unwanted Primary emotional response away we produce a Secondary emotional response.  Secondary emotional responses are the underlying driving force behind emotional issues.  They create the same self-replicating model as that created when trying to un-think thoughts but this time it is a battle of energies within the body. 

The Primary and Secondary responses trap each other into a continuous fight within the body.

All Three Levels of Sensitisation are the Result of Over-active ‘Feed-Forward’ Mechanisms

Our physical auto-immune system creates and distributes new anti-bodies on the basis of a single previous attack.  If it makes errors by producing antibodies in regards to substances we actually want to be around it has the argument that producing antibodies unnecessarily five times, and getting it wrong, is better than not producing them the single time they are needed.

Our anti-thought and anti-emotional systems use cognitive bias and emotional hyper-arousal as their search and reaction tools for (allegedly) dealing with unwanted thoughts and feelings prior to their having any harmful affect on us.

Cognitive Bias

Scientists have conducted tests on various types of people that show our brains filter incoming information according to the way information is already being prioritised and processed by them. 

One such test is called the Stroop Colour Word Interference Test in which subjects are asked to write down the text colour of various words presented. 

The test reveals those words related to our current cognitive bias catch our attention and this leads to an increase in the time it takes to identify the text colour.  Smokers slow down when it comes to smoking-related words; anxiety sufferers slow down when it comes to anxiety-related words.

Because the thoughts we wish not to have are linked to intense negative emotional responses they deeply affect our memories and dominate our thinking as we struggle to get rid of them.

They are prioritised in our cognitive bias and this bias then seeks information from the environment on everything regarding these thoughts. 

Other tests have shown that even ‘positive’ information about slightly related issues will be fed into the network of fearful images and thoughts once this anxious cognitive bias has been established.

We are now cognitively sensitised and it is a self-replicating process.

 Hyper-Arousal

Hyper-arousal is a state in which a creature is on emotional high alert while constantly scanning the environment for any sign of threat.

We are at greatest risk of becoming hyper-aroused when the actual threat appears at irregular intervals.  If we know when a threat is due to appear we will adjust to the rhythm of its occurrence - but if we are not sure ‘what happens next or when’ we can easily go into the hyper-aroused state.

In this state we feel ‘jumpy’ and minor things trigger off intense emotional reactions.  We can remain in exhausted preparation for an alleged ‘battle to come’ like this for years.

These systems are ‘feed-forward’ mechanisms meant to prevent damage from an unwanted intruder – but they create the problem themselves.

Thankfully there is a way to escape the condition – De-sensitisation.

Cognitive and Emotional De-sensitisation

Systematic De-sensitisation (also known as Exposure Therapy - I am sure there are other names for it as well!) concerns itself with removing Cognitive and Emotional Sensitisation by repeatedly facing the triggers to which they are related and then entering the emotions and thoughts attached to those triggers repeatedly until the response becomes ‘habituated’.

Habituation is the point at which an unwanted emotional response becomes extinct and no longer compels our thoughts to keep paying attention to it.  At this point we have become emotionally neutral to the trigger.

This may sound like some kind of ‘scientific approach discovered in the 1960s’ – which was when studies on it started becoming most popular – but the truth is it has been a part of the human condition since humans have existed and the same pattern is adopted by the rest of the animal kingdom – particularly for mammals – in order to heal from it.

In simple terms the process is:

• you are frightened of a place because you once spotted a predator there
• for whatever reason you have to go to that place but you are reluctant because it is still highly likely there is a predator there
• you go to the place a lot of times and find there is no predator but you are still very emotional about the place
• eventually because you have continually repeating evidence there is no predator your Unconscious adapts to the new information and you stop being frightened.

This reverses both cognitive bias and hyper-arousal – and the good news is if applied with disciplined determination it is often successful and prevents further recurrence.

We learn to let go of thoughts about unpleasant things as they pass through our Conscious and let go of emotional responses so they can pass through and out of our bodies.

So Why is this Simple Process
so Difficult when it Comes to Healing Anxiety Disorders?

No-one wants to use this healing method unnecessarily because it is time-consuming, mentally confusing and always painful.  It is painful on several levels: painful thoughts; painful feelings and can produce really unpleasant physical reactions (such as change in stomach acid balance and heart palpitations).

However, if a person has tried other available methods without success they may then choose this more painful route because they decide they need to get on with it and are willing to try anything.

As a sufferer changes their sense of direction from avoidance to going into their feelings and towards their unwanted thoughts they find their arguments against doing so suddenly come to life and imagery arises that causes them to feel much worse than the emotional place they were at previously – the thing to focus on here is the difference. 

Any change in approach and in feeling intensity should be seen as progress – even if it feels worse.

The reason for the increased intensity in feelings is because we have begun to release trapped emotional energy.  One day you will find the majority of your cognitive bias and emotional hyper-arousal has gone.

You are left with a much deeper understanding of life and who you are in relation to it.

Self-Awareness is Everything

If you use De-sensitisation to remove an anxiety disorder you will most likely be able to identify the circumstances (your environment and how you reacted to it) you were experiencing when your sensitisation occurred. 

This is the genuine feed-forward information you need to focus on to prevent the other types of self-harming feed-forward systems establishing themselves again.

• Were you caught between two or more sets of values and did not know what direction to take for the best so remained frozen in a painful place?
• Was there a period you felt powerless or dominated by someone or something in life?  Did they create an environment in which you did not know ‘what was coming next or when?’
• Did you worry yourself sick about something and this set you up for sensitisation?
• were there certain types of thoughts which you thought you should not think?
• have you come to accept your most intense feelings and come to realise these are linked in to your most important value systems and arise when your values are threatened?

When external reality presents the kinds of environments that lead you into this kind of situation again you will either acknowledge and move away from those environments or you will re-interpret them so you do not react in the same way.

Here’s a short YouTube video on the Stroop test:

Regards - Carl

What Shape Do You Give Your Emotional Responses?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tone

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

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

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

Time to Enter the Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Realistic?

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

Regards - Carl

I Have an Anxiety Disorder. How Should I Think So My Emotions Work Logically Instead?

Think Big; Think Small; then Try Your Best to Think Nothing at All

Think Big – the Whole Emotional Process

It is your logical thinking brain that asks the question ‘How can I make my emotions work logically’.  Let us take a look at a few facts about your logical thinking brain.

A Few Things to Know About Your Logical Left Thinking Neo-Cortex

Thinking – the process whereby electrical signals strung together in our brains create the illusion there is coordinated speech going on in our heads – exists in two small areas of your left cortex; here we will focus on the main one – your left frontal neo-cortex.

The purpose of your left frontal neo-cortex is to act as a well organised naming and indexing system which files away quick reference representations linked to imagery in our right neo-cortex.

For example we can think the word ‘church’ in our left neo-cortex and this can link up to a picture of a church in our right neo-cortex (our picture/pattern brain) and then we can take that further by remembering our own personal experience of a church and the people we knew there and then the conversations we had and the emotional experiences and it goes on … all starting from the word ‘church’ in the left neo-cortex.

Our thinking left neo-cortex is full of these kinds of well organised representations.

The Ego – our thinking protection and control system

The ego is a mechanism designed to protect our current representational structure - we regard this structure as ‘the truth’ for us as individuals.

Without our version of ‘the truth’ and the establishing of belief systems related to these representations we would have no ability to control our behaviours.

Our left neo-cortex creates stepped memories and instructional patterns which it then expects us to follow behaviourally.  Because of this controlling function it is only natural that when an emotional disorder presents itself the thinking mind assumes it is a problem caused by incorrect thinking to be found and changed in the thinking neo-cortex..

Your left neo-cortex, however, has certain characteristics that make it unsuitable for processing your emotions:

Characteristics of Your Left Neo-Cortex

Primarily, It is the emotional blocking brain part. In order for you to be able to think consciously at all your ARAS – your Ascending Reticular Activation System – blocks the the flow of emotional and visual signals coming up from your lower Reptilian Brain.  If this blocking did not occur you would never be able to wake up.  By doing this it ‘activates’ your conscious neo-cortex (both left and right) to pay conscious attention to the outside world.

If we took away your ability to block your emotions you would be unable to develop anxiety disorders because anxiety disorders are caused by habitual emotional blocking using the ARAS.  Without this blocking ability you would repeatedly have to surrender to the emotional responses as they left your body whenever you produced them.  Your thinking would be forever being closed down whenever this happened.

So, asking your thinking brain to resolve an anxiety disorder problem is a bit like asking the owner of a restaurant full of vermin to organise their own health and safety inspection and give themselves a clean bill of health.

Your thinking brain has a vested interest in not doing what needs to be done and is trying to convince you not to do so because it gets shut down for long periods when you do and it hates this – and it hurts.

During sleep both your Reptilian Brain and your right neo-cortex (your conscious pattern making brain) are active in releasing emotional energy through ‘dreaming’,  but when you are consciously awake and thinking most of this activity is suppressed.  Day-dreaming is the act of partially opening up the relationship between your right neo-cortex and your Reptilian and Limbic brains so they share imagery while you remain conscious.

Just pay attention to any self-critical comments that come up when you start thinking about your emotional states and what you are hearing is your ego fighting against  the truth it knows it is going to have to face eventually.  It tends to regard anything that does not follow its own rigid organising process as silly.  You can retrain it to think differently by showing it the logic inherent in your emotional process as a whole rather than the emotional content of the process.

A few more things about your left neo-cortex:

Your left neo-cortex is:

• judgemental and expects incoming information to link to information already stored.  It resists what it believes not ‘right’ as it attempts to match new information with old


• unable to work with a piece of information it has not named – any unnamed thing we are unsure of will keep grabbing at our attention until it is fully named, understood and then indexed as a representation


• impatient – it is time conscious and processes information at the speed of speech  (it hates emotional work because it is time consuming)


• concerned with Convergent Goal Setting – that is, with condensing and closing things down (you cannot get more condensed and closed down than a name)


• concerned with communicating with the outside world, rather than the inside world.  It adopts quite a lot of belief systems from the outside world and attempts to impose them on your inner world in the form of shoulds


• biologically designed to store the information it records in straight linear patterns with memories based on past experiences.

So when we ask the question ‘how do I make my emotions work more logically’ what we are really asking is how do I make the rest of me work the same way as my left neo-cortex?

You cannot achieve this directly, ever.  But there is a way to do it indirectly.

Just to repeat - although the content of your emotional system is not logical; your emotional system itself is.  Once your left neo-cortex has worked with your right neo-cortex (your pattern mind) long enough to see what really needs to be done it will be more willing to get out of the way of the process and allow itself to be temporarily shut down so the right neo-cortex can be allowed to do its job of processing emotional energy.

Following on from satisfactory emotional release the thinking left neo-cortex finds itself working much more effectively and sees the logic in the new way of doing things.

A Few Things to Know About Your Right Pattern-Making Neo-Cortex

Your right neo-cortex has an advantage over your left in that it never really sleeps.  During sleep your left gets switched off but your right neo-cortex communicates with the other visual parts of your brain, mainly your lower Reptilian Brain, all the time.

These two brains together discharge most of your emotional baggage collected during the day.  However, this process does not discharge the intense emotional charge attached to anxiety disorders such as obsessions and phobias.  This is probably because the imagery involved is stored in the Limbic Brain, and not in the Reptilian Brain, but also these areas of the brain are classed as ‘genuine things to be afraid of’.

Primarily, your right neo-cortex is the emotional releasing brain. It does not think with words – it thinks in patterns; in imagery – both internally generated imagery created by the imagination and in memories of external imagery from external life.

The right neo-cortex works in ‘reflections’ – reflections are similar to the scenes of a movie – they contain meaningful dialogue; action and emotional energy.  If the right neo-cortex is allowed to work with a reflection for long enough it will strip and release the emotional energy attached to the reflection and transfer the unemotional data contained over to the left neo-cortex for naming and indexing.

This is why in most cases looking in our current thinking for the solution to an emotional disorder issue is the wrong place to look – our current thinking is a record of the data stripped from past experiences.  The answers to our emotional issues are found in our right neo-cortex most of the time.

Your right neo-cortex:

• works with experiential information (imagery with feelings attached) to explore patterns and the connections between them


• is able to link up seemingly separate pieces of information and create meaning out of them – identifying connections and rhythms


• processes this information very slowly – when it comes to processing blocked emotional energy the right neo-cortex can take a long time because first the energy must be unblocked; then sometimes it completely floods the brain and then the information contained in the blocked feelings – such as the issue which caused them – takes some time to emerge as an insight


• shows us things we do not want to see because the messages do not fit in with our ‘logical’ plans – for example that the partner we love does not love us


• is divergent in thinking – it likes to open and connect one pattern with other patterns – it is concerned with the future, not the past


• communicates mostly with our internal world


• is biologically designed to store the information it records in clusters – I think of these clusters as ‘lands of the mind’.

One other thing to say here is your right neo-cortex sees, but it does not think.  It experiences and sees the experience and communicates to your lower brains what it sees in pictures.

Your left thinking neo-cortex cannot communicate with your lower brain parts directly – they do not understand the language.  But what it can do is use words linked to pictures in the right neo-cortex and then the right communicates those images downwards.

That is the Think Big part of the equation – the overall model of why the right neo-cortex, your picture mind, is the mind you need to start working with.

Think Small – to heal an emotional issue focus on as few things as possible as intensely as possible

When you decide to heal using systematic exposure therapy (or just plain unsystematic exposure therapy by just facing the triggering issue and the emotions attached come what may) there are only a few things you need to focus on – and concentrated focus is the most crucial but difficult thing to do.  You need to turn your focus inwards and go towards:

• the feelings (you will sense there is a place inside, or even maybe to one side of your body – I know that sounds weird but that is how it sometimes feels) coupled with


• the  image or issue.

If you have an obsession you have no other option but to take this approach when applying exposure therapy but with a phobia you can go into the feeling as you approach either the external trigger or an imagined inner version - most phobia sufferers I have spoken to can practice self-therapy using just their imaginations.

As always, I would recommend if you have a serious anxiety disorder you seek professional support from your doctor first.

What if I just have feelings I want to get rid of and there is no attached imagery or trigger?

Think small again and go just into the feelings repeatedly – this will be very difficult.  What you find eventually is that imagery starts being generated and you should then focus on that.

Sometimes the imagery generated is not related to the issue that triggered the emotional response but is an image designed to help you in the release process..

The closer to the central core of the feeling you move the faster you dissipate the energy driving it.

Trying to Think Nothing at All

The simple truth is that an anxiety disorder is nothing more than an intense emotional charge stored in the body displaying the fact by flashing imagery at you through one of your right neo-cortex pattern-brain clusters.

It is quite natural to suspect there are all kinds of hidden issues, thoughts and feelings going on inside yourself when suffering with this kind of condition but if you take that kind of self-mistrust as a given side-affect of the condition itself there will come a day when you master your emotional system and logically remove any emotional problems you have.

Regards - Carl

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

Five Subtle Benefits Gained from Seeing a Person Centred Counsellor

During my healing process from complex OCD, phobias and panic attacks I saw three Person-Centred Counsellors spread out over a six year period.

The third counsellor I still see on a monthly basis for emotional maintenance - I find the experience so beneficial (even lottery winners can benefit from seeing a counsellor every now and again!) and as a part of their professional practice counsellors themselves are required to have professional counselling sessions in order to remain emotionally clear for their clients.

The first two counsellors I saw were provided for short periods by my doctor but the third I met through work and this coincided with my being ready to start the healing plan I had designed for myself.  In my day-job I act as a referrer, occasionally passing people on to a counselling team and I have an Intermediate Certificate in Person-Centred Counselling - this qualification is enough to understand the role of a Counsellor but not to practice professionally as one.

Trained, experienced counsellors of this type are guided by a number of ethical principles, one of the most important being the principle of client autonomy. This principle establishes that you decide the direction of your counselling sessions. Person-centred counsellors may suggest options for you to consider when you get stuck or when you ask them for advice, but they are unlikely to make final decisions for you or design and recommend a healing plan for you - that is your job.

The role of a counsellor of this type is to help you learn to become expert in understanding and working with yourself, rather than in your coming to regard them as the 'wise and wonderful guru of the inner me' who can give you the secrets you need for self-governance (they may well be this amazing character but it is not what they are employed to do).

There are a number of ethical and professional conduct principles which Person-Centred Counsellors are trained to stick to and at your first meeting they will explain these to you.  In this article I want to highlight five powerful, almost unconscious, services they provide which you will probably not see advertised or even spoken about during your sessions, but which I became increasingly aware of during my healing process:

• Acceptance Coach


• Living Mirror


• De-clutterer


• Personal Cheerleader


• Reliable Milestone Marker.

Acceptance Coach

These Counsellors are trained in the principle of unconditional positive regard (UPR) - this means they spend time entering into your viewpoint of your life and respect your right to be you. Their role is to achieve empathy with your experience - 'wear your shoes to the point they feel where they pinch'. After a couple of sessions with a counsellor who achieves this with you something magical happens. You unconsciously notice this professional person, who you respect, finds your internal horror stories easier to accept than you do. Things you find unacceptable about yourself they find perfectly normal.

In this way a counsellor can lead you towards accepting experiences you previously could not accept in your Unconscious Mind. This affect stays with you long after your counselling sessions have ended and quite often the act of discussing the 'unacceptable' will create an insight for you that prepares you more fully for the next session. The affect is so deep that when you are not with your counsellor and you are facing up to difficult emotional issues alone it is as if that level of acceptance remains with you and you are able to become your own counsellor.

Living Mirror

Summary and reflection skills are used by the Counsellor to demonstrate you are being actively listened to - this professional person has no personal agenda other than to support you in yours.  They will not support you in committing criminal acts or other really harmful behaviour, there are formal boundaries and requirements in place, but equally they will not try to impose their personal beliefs about 'what you should do next' .

Your feelings, and the content of what you say, are taken seriously. Subtle things hardly noticed by you as you say them may be presented back to you as open-ended questions for you to explore further. When this is done in a non-judgemental way it validates your experience of life and helps clarify the realities you live with. You may be lightly challenged where the information reflected back to you appears to conflict. For example if you laugh whilst relating a particularly painful experience the counsellor may ask you to explain what is behind the laughter - this enables you to identify your underlying thinking processes and beliefs more clearly for yourself.

I remember once a relative taped me while I was talking to myself at home and played it back to me - I had no recall at all of this self-talk and was really surprised about how unaware I was of the verbal chat coming out of my mouth.  Sometimes the only person not listening to what you are saying is you.  In counselling what you say and feel is summarised and reflected back to you for clarification.

A good counsellor (and I have never met a bad one) will seem to disappear from your conscious awareness at times because you become so wrapped up in the process and they are so good at being there for you it is as if your minds were fully working together.  The sense of this other mind working with yours can remain in between sessions as you start to pay more and more attention to yourself - you become much more self-aware.

De-clutterer

Sometimes the first ten minutes or so of a session may be used to clear out your emotional baggage of the day before moving on to the longer term issues. The Counsellor will not tell you what to believe or clear out of the way - you will decide this. They are trained to support you, not tell you what to focus on.  On occasion my counsellors were 'emergency support' if something really painful had happened recently and had distracted me from the long term work I was doing on healing my anxiety disorders.

These new emotional emergencies sorted out much quicker with my having counselling support already in place (pity we do not have these folks to hand when our anxiety disorders start to develop, eh, but the truth is we are blind to what is going on inside of us at the pre-disorder stage).

Personal Cheerleader

Counsellors are not just there for the unhappy experiences - they can help you acknowledge yours wins too. There may be things you have recovered from and you wish to celebrate the recovery but it would be inappropriate to do so with the people in your personal life - that relative you have finally forgiven for stealing your christmas present money ten years ago - how appropriate would it be to tell them you had nightmares of cooking them over a slow heat on a gas cooker all that time but they can rest easy now?

Or why not tell your mates how you have overcome obsessive imagery related to the throwing of children out of windows?  Not a good idea, is it?  I have actually lost friends following on from telling them I had recovered from a phobia of lampposts.

It really is important to celebrate your wins and sometimes your counsellor will stop you to make sure you do this.  It is so easy to move straight on to the next emotional issue you have to deal with without acknowledging your progress.  This leads me on to the next benefit of the counselling experience - Milestone Marker.

Reliable Milestone Marker

You may have come a very long way - but have not mentally registered much of it.  This may be partly due to short-term memory loss and also to emotional non-relativity.

When undergoing periods of intense emotional self-work it can be almost impossible to think clearly.  I found myself going through phases where just to put one word down on paper was difficult.  I recorded a lot of my experiences using simple mind maps and these would later remind me of things I noticed during the healing process - which meant going through extended periods of intense emotional exposure therapy.  Intense emotional states blank memory due to your brain being in 'emergency mode' - it works the same for emotional disorders as it does with any other life event triggering an intense emotional response.

Similarly, your Unconscious Mind tends to focus on how you feel right now.  It does not automatically tell itself how great you feel compared to last year.  If you feel a bit rubbish today you may not see any benefit in telling yourself to think back to a time you felt ten times worse - but you will if you do it.

Sometimes my day-job can be quite intellectually stressful.  I just remind myself of a time when I earned a living in a place where people smashed broken bottles over my head when they got drunk - makes my current job look like the best job on Earth.

Your Counsellor has a fully functioning memory and will occasionally remind you of how far you have come - both in terms of your intellectual understanding of yourself and also in terms of how what you feel now and how it relates to how you felt when you first started seeing them.

And there is more ...

Person--Centred Counselling is not just about going and talking to someone - the affects of this process are subtle but over time you will notice fundamental changes in your Unconscious.  Self-criticism fades and is replaced by an acceptance of what it is to be human.  You will find yourself more supportive of others because at some point you decided to better support yourself.

The time and money you put into getting counselling support is an investment in yourself that can benefit you and others for the rest of your life.

Regards - Carl

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

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

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

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

• Objective


• Subjective.

An Objective Versus Subjective Viewpoint Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You and I have just shared an Objective Viewpoint.

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

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

Objective Viewpoints as Maps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subjective Viewpoints as Experiences on the Map

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

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

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

• the triggering issue


• your emotional response to it.

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

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

Mood and Emotional Disorders

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

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

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

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

How did you get this way in the first place?

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observation is everything.

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

Confused?  Why Not Seek Advice?

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

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

• they demonstrate they understand our experience


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

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

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

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

Regards - Carl