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

Emotional Disorders and Fictional Stories – Four Viewpoints Travelled

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

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

• the Objective viewpoint


• the Subjective viewpoint


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Objective Viewpoint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK – back to the Objective Viewpoint:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Subjective Viewpoint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambivalence

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards - Carl

Emotions Come with a Purpose, a Role and a Need – You Can Use this Knowledge to Heal Phobias and Obsessions

Emotions have a purpose, play a role you ultimately decide the nature of and have their own universal driving need.  Understanding all three aspects of your emotional responses will help you in their management and removal.

Emotional Purpose

Your emotions are concerned with three things:

• defending your territory


• maintaining your current territory


• managing the risks involved in expanding your territory.

In the animal world control of a specific territory as a source of food and safety for the period it takes to raise new offspring is a survival-strength issue.  This is the same for humans but in addition we also use the same emotional responses in defending intellectual property such as our ideas, our hopes and relationships.  All products, quite often, of the imagination.

Anything you are capable of imagining you are capable of attaching a survival-strength response to if what you imagine is linked in to your deepest values.  If you value the freedom of having a mobile piece of territory, for example, you may really value your car.

The science of Proxemics studies the emotional effects on people of their environments and how those environments are arranged around them (it is closely related to the study of body language).  What Proxemics tells us is that the distance between you and a possible threat makes a difference in your level of emotional intensity when you have a reaction to the alleged threat.

A threat within your ‘intimate space’, within say a foot of your body, produces your most intense reactions.  If you have a phobia this will occur as you approach the external object to which your phobia is attached and you will notice it gets more intense as you approach.

In the case of an obsession the imagery you are afraid of is at the centre of your intimate zone – in your mind.  For this reason obsessions are among the most distracting types of emotional triggers you can have.

Even here, though, the issue is one of territory.  A phobic person has that problem because their Unconscious believes they have entered predator territory as they approach the feared external object or environment while the sufferer of an obsession has an Unconscious belief a predator (the unwanted image) has entered their mental territory and needs forcing out.

Although these reactions are fed by imagined scenarios they produce exactly the same emotional responses as real life events would.  The trick of getting rid of these conditions is to  treat them as if they were real life events but use the same tool that created them to remove them – your imagination.

Thankfully you do not have to recreate the real life events themselves in order to get rid of these conditions.  A person with a fear of elevators can use an empty elevator (sometimes even just an imagined elevator or a small cupboard) and a person with an obsession is both blessed and cursed by the fact the whole issue sits inside their own body and mind.

Having been produced in order to deal with an alleged territorial issue an emotional response needs to make itself known by being expressed.

Role

The overall purpose of an emotional response is to get the body to move physically in a direction in order to perform a specific, survival related act.  Three examples:

• anger


• disgust and


• fear.

Anger is the response to a threat of losing territory and the urge to take it back.  If the territory is being repeatedly threatened or taken away the response can turn to one of blind rage.  If you are having this response you will see at the centre of it the urge to move forward and then take back something you regard as central to your survival.

You will temper this reaction according to circumstances, but at some level the animal part of you is reacting to losing important territory.  How you mentally change the context of what you see as your territory alters the intensity of your reaction.

If you decide to become self-critical for feeling anger at the loss you may turn this anger inwards and it becomes depression.

Disgust is about an undesirable predator infringing your territory and dirtying it with their physical and behavioural habits.  It is about poisoning your territory.  The urge here is to push away and reject.

You can have a disgust reaction to bad food but also to unacceptable behaviour impacting your values.  Disgust is an ‘I have had enough’ response.  If you become self-critical at feeling disgust you can develop a fear of it and it can turn into an obsession.

Fear is the urge to avoid a predator entering your territory or to avoid the threat of a predator when you enter their territory.  Fear is about moving away quickly when the predator appears.  If you become self-critical of your fear you will hold it in place using both anger and secondary fear and you create phobias and panic attacks in this way.

With all three emotional types self-critical behaviour will keep the emotions trapped in your body.  Trouble is, the role of an emotional response is to express itself by getting out of your body.

The way to express an emotional response is to give it what it needs.

Need

Emotional responses only have one need.  To escape you.

If, however, you have identified your own emotional responses as predators encroaching on your mental territory, also needing to be got rid of, you will find yourself with more than one emotional response to deal with.  You will have to spend some time changing the way you see your emotional process so you no longer see it as being full of predators and no longer produce the secondary responses designed to hold them at bay.

You’ve got to let them cross your land and go out the other side.

Just because you know the territory being defended exists only in your imagination does not mean you can ignore the need of the emotional response wanting to leave your body.  The triggers may not be real but your responses are and you must take them seriously.

When you reject an emotional response as unworthy of release it fights you in order to meet its need – it looks for any external stimulus that barely resembles the original trigger to project itself onto.  When a trapped emotional response keeps begging for release you will find yourself having strange thoughts.  Thoughts of evil things happening; painful thoughts that are not the ‘normal’ you.

We call this projection.  Projection is where people take an emotional response created in one experience and project it onto an unrelated situation later.  This can happen with all our emotions and is a signal the emotional response is creating alternative thinking routes through which it hopes to escape your body.  Projection does not work very well – it is better to identify the original thought-path that created the response and allow the emotional energy to escape through that.

Purpose, Role, Need

Set aside a safe place in a room where there are no distractions.  You may want to use objects or imagined scenarios as tools onto which your attention can focus.

Allow your emotions to project onto those tools.  This may seem like a very strange and unrealistic thing to do – but your emotions will not agree with this view.  They will come up.

Acknowledge their right to ‘defend’ your territory – even just temporarily during the projection process.  Even though you know they are lying to you about the alleged threat, let the energy express itself at the target tool – let projection take place.

Do this repeatedly, until the energy has projected and expressed to the point the need of  your emotional response has been met, whether it is a normal emotional response or a phobia or an obsession or any other anxiety disorder, one day your emotional response will be gone.

Regards - Carl

Emotional Disorders - What Controls Your Conscious Point of Focus?

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

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

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

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

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

• pictures


• shapes


• sounds


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

We can also reverse this process.

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

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

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

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

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

Cut It Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Orientation Response and your


• Emotional Alert System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Emotional Alert System

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

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

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

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

Want to Switch the Vicious Circle Off?

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

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

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

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

Regards - Carl

Completing Cycles

I’m a bit of a positive newsletter junkie and Jack Canfield is one of my favourites.  One thing I’ll be writing about in the future is how anxiety disorders and other emotional problems are nothing more than incomplete emotional cycles we need to complete in order to heal.

It’s not mentioned here but Mr Canfield does an excellent line in journal management skills – journaling can be an effective element of your cycle-completion-system as it helps both in releasing emotional energy and in transferring the ‘data’ involved in an emotional release so it ends up making sense in our logical minds.

I’ll be writing much more about ‘cycle completion’ in the future, in the mean time I hope you enjoy his article:

The Cycle of Completion: Making Way for Success
by Jack Canfield

Do you live in a state of mental and physical clutter? Do you have a bunch of unfinished business lurking around every corner?

Incomplete projects, unfinished business, and piles of cluttered messes can weigh you down and take away from the energy you have to move forward toward your goals.

When you don't complete tasks, you can't be fully prepared to move into the present, let alone your new future.

When your brain is keeping track of all the unfinished business you still have at hand, you simply can't be effective in embracing new tasks that are in line with your vision.

Old incompletes can show up in your life in lots of different ways...  like not having clarity, procrastination, emotional energy blocks and even illness. Blocked energy is wasted, and a build up of that energy can really leave you stymied.

Throw-out all the clutter and FEEL how much easier it is to think!

Make a list of areas in your life (both personal and professional) where you have incompletes and messes, then develop a plan to deal with them once and for all. Fix and organize the things that annoy you.

Take your final steps in bringing closure to outstanding projects.

Make that difficult phone call. Delegate time-wasting tasks that you've let build up.  Some incompletions come from simply not having adequate systems, knowledge, or expertise for handling these tasks. Other incompletions pile up because of bad work habits.

Get into completion consciousness by continually asking yourself...What does it take to actually get this task completed?

Only then can you begin to consciously take that next step of filing completed documents, mailing in the forms required, or reporting back to your boss that the project has been completed.

The truth is that 20 things completed have more power than 50 things that are half-way completed.

Finishing writing a book, for instance, that can go out and influence the world is better than 13 books you’re in the process of writing.

When you free yourself from the mental burden of incompletes and messes, you'll be AMAZED at how quickly the things you do want in life arrive.

Another area where you'll find incompletes in your life is in your emotions. Are you holding on to old hurts, resentments, and pain? Just like the physical clutter and incompletes, your energy is being drained by holding on to and reliving past pain and anger.

Remember, you'll attract whatever feelings you're experiencing. So, if you're stuck in revengeful thinking and angered in muck, you can't possibly be directing energy toward a positive future. You need to let go of the past in order to embrace the future. Letting go involves forgiveness and moving on.

By forgiving you aren't releasing the other person from their transgression as much as you're freeing yourself from their transgression. You don't have to condone their behavior, trust them, or even maintain a relationship with them. However, you DO have to free yourself from the anger, from the pain, and from the resentment once and for all!

When learning to forgive, make sure to complete the cycle.

Acknowledge your anger, your pain, and your fear. But also own up to any part you've played in allowing it to happen or continue. Make sure to express whatever it was that you wanted from that person, and then see the whole event from the other's point of view. Allow yourself to wonder what that person was going through and what kind of needs he/she was trying to fulfill at the time.

Finally, let go and move on. Every time you go through this process you're learning how to avoid letting it happen again!

I'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Success Strategies. Until then, see if you can discover ways to immediately implement what you learned from today's message.

(For more insight on this subject, read Chapter 28 titled
Clean Up Your Messes and Incompletes in The Success Principles)

© 2010 Jack Canfield

Jack Canfield, America's #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul© and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you're ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com