Tag Archives: emotions

Healing and our Brains, Moving to a stress-free reality

A Recipe you may find tasty

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I was recently talking with someone about how to have a better life, one in which returning past issues did not get in the way of being productive and happy, generally speaking. In the course of our conversations, a rough recipe for progressing in this direction developed. While I don’t consider the recipe definitive and welcome feedback so I can refine it, a good starting point it certainly will be.

Figuring out how to begin when we want to move from where we are to where we want to be is often a challenge.  When we have not dealt with certain events in our lives and our feelings related to those events, these feelings and thoughts tend to accumulate within us and start to have an impact on our thought processes and behaviours.  We’ll be puttering along in our everyday life, something will happen that triggers an exaggerated emotional response and eventually we’ll realize that we are feeling just as awful as we felt ages ago in a similar situation. “What the…??” we might ask ourselves, having thought  that issue X had been long gone and yet here it was popping up into our lives, uninvited and disruptive. Regardless of how much we try to fool ourselves, any unresolved issue from the past can be triggered back into our lives at any moment. All it takes is the right trigger. What follows below is a recipe for consciously dealing with those past issues in a systematic and caring way so that they get resolved and lose their potential to cause more problems.

Know where you are going

A journey without destination is fine so long as you don’t mind the wandering. In our case, this journey is more like baking a cake, hence the recipe analogy and the need to define some sort of desired result or outcome. A destination/outcome for this journey could be something as simple as “I want to spend much less time feeling sad and much more time feeling peaceful.” Or it could be something along the lines of “I want to remain calm and centered when someone does or says something which today would trigger anger in me.” The destination is important, but there is no need to spend a lot of time on defining the “perfect” or most important destination. Pick any destination/result which will enhance your life and then follow the recipe below until you get there or reasonably close. You can always pick another destination in the future, and repeat this process/recipe as many times as you like. Each time you consciously release stored feelings, you will lighten your load and there will be a cumulative effect.

Ingredients Needed

Like any recipe, it helps to have some basic understanding of what is involved before beginning. You’re going to need some ingredients and some will have to be prepared in advance of the recipe itself so you don’t get bogged down in the middle. Each of these ingredients will help the other, so they are all important and interdependent. At the same time, being human, you are allowed to cultivate these ingredients as you go along, so there is no need to have them all “perfect” before starting.

Patience –  All personal growth/change takes some time. Sorry, no magic instant cures here. And, truth be told, most of the instant cures you’ve heard about don’t work that well, if at all. There might be one that truly does exist, but it has yet to become a panacea, so in the meantime, let’s just accept that we’re going to have to take some time to get to our destination. After all, we have spent most of our life until the moment we start to effect change establishing patterns and habits and world-views and beliefs which are so ingrained that we hardly notice them. Be patient, and don’t try to become someone new in a few days – life does not work that way. Think of how a ship turns at sea – it takes some time, but it turns, gently and steadily, until it is in the right direction. Sudden change = disruption, water splashing all about, and struggle against what is there. Change is also not about abruptly stopping what we have committed to in our life, but about evolving toward a balance between our existing commitments and our envisioned future.

Awareness – If we are not aware of where we are, it is next to impossible to get anywhere new, except by accident or happenstance. When we embark on a journey of change, we need to notice where we are, notice what is happening inside us, and notice our progress.   Becoming aware of the need to make changes in our life is the first step, and  once one does this, one becomes more self-aware all the time. The main things that we will be paying attention to on this journey are what I call the BETIS: Body Sensations, Emotions/Feelings, Thoughts, Images in our minds, Sounds or words we hear in our heads. Each of these is a form of inner communication and once we start paying attention to them, we are on our journey.

Persistence – If you seriously want to get to a better place, then you must do the work involved, as often as it takes. It can be hard to move on from a habit or reaction to which we have an established connection.  But, as the saying goes, when you wake up in the morning, you are faced with the same swamp as yesterday, filled with the alligators of life to fend off. One of these days, you will start to drain the swamp and that will aid in the alligators disappearing. Draining the swamp is key to being alligator free or at least reducing dramatically their presence in your life.

Acceptance – Accept that it is human to feel anger or any other feeling. You are human and we humans have emotions.  Do not try to control your feelings or resist them. Just feel them, notice them, feel them, notice them. Eventually, if you accept and allow those feelings & thoughts, they will dissipate, on their own. If you try to suppress them, control them, or make them go away, you will only delay this process and will be fighting with yourself, which usually results in frustration and feeling drained.  Yes, we live in a world in which we are taught to fight with our emotions, and look how well that is working… not!   Acceptance also means that you do not try to make sense of anything that happens at this time. Whenever you have strong emotions your brain is designed to help you survive and there will be more confusion than clarity.  Once the feeling has been released, you’ll have plenty of time to think clearly, so give yourself a break and just accept the feeling as it is, without analyzing prematurely. You can stop trying to figure it all out – the answers you seek will come in due course, as any confusing mess will disappear once you release the stored emotions.

Allowing – Your journey is not about trying. It is not about effort, but about allowing.  Feelings which are uncomfortable are normal and human. Allowing them to arise and then flow through you and out of you is the only way for them to pass, even if that takes a while. Do not try to stop yourself from feeling or thinking. Fighting your experience only delays the resolution you desire.   Allow yourself to feel anger and other feelings that you might normally avoid because they are uncomfortable. Allow yourself to feel them for as long as it takes for the feeling to flow through and out. There are techniques such as AER which can speed up the release process around a feeling, but you can also simply sit with the feeling. It is human and natural to feel anger, sadness, guilt, etc.  If you often feel guilty when you say NO, well that is just being human. What is also human and needed is to allow yourself to feel any emotion and then move on without judgment of having had that feeling.

Focus –  Concentrate, as best you can, on just one feeling at a time. Feelings are often interlinked, but if we pay attention to just one at a time it is easier to notice it fluctuating and eventually dissipating. Notice what is arising in you emotionally when you pay attention to your inner world. Those emotions are what will keep you in the old. Releasing them, will enable you to move a little bit ahead on your journey.   When you have released a feeling, you can take a break or allow the next to arise. But do not worry if feelings jump around, seeming to increase and diminish. They are like bundles of energy in flux, and when you allow them to flow, they will discover that you are OK with them being and OK with them leaving, and they will go on their way.

Time and space – Setting aside some time and having a space in which you can take this journey is very important. You want to be able to be relaxed and to be undisturbed for at least 30 minutes each time. Invest in yourself by putting aside the time and finding a private secluded place to relax and notice.

Commitment – When you start paying attention to what is happening inside, a lot of buried feelings will probably want to come to the surface. They want to escape, to be free and your role is to allow that to happen. Starting on a journey of self-healing is often like opening the door to the basement – you never know what you might find down there, and it is often more than we remember having put down there. For many people, feeling something that has been buried for years can be scary or uncomfortable at first and there will be a tendency to stuff those feelings back down. Stuffing feelings down inside us only results in more pain, as the pressure will build until it suddenly explodes. Staying committed to the journey is critical, even when it feels hard to do. The reward is freedom from each of the stored feelings that you will release and their reduced impact on your life.

Impartiality – Judging our feelings as good or bad and reacting to them only causes us to have relationships with them which keep them stuck inside. Being impartial or neutral or non-attached to these feelings will greatly facilitate the release of them. So, just notice them. “I am feeling sad”, for example. You are not your feelings, so it is not correct to say “I am angry” as that suggests a permanent condition rather than the temporary experience you are really having.

Emotional support – As anyone who has seriously tried to do anything new has discovered, most of the people around you will find it hard to accept your attempts at change. They will resist them overtly and covertly, all under the guise of wanting “the best” for you. They can’t help themselves – they want things to stay  in the “devil-known” zone. You will find it much easier to effect the change(s) you desire if you have an ally, someone who will be on your side and encourage you to stick with it when the going is not so smooth.

Environmental support – If you live in the middle of a whirlwind of activity, or eat junk food too often, or have any other elements of your life that are constantly disruptive, then this journey will be harder. Diet, for example, has been shown to have a direct effect on your mental state, so eating foods which give you a mental boost, both for mood and for concentration, will be an essential part of the support you create around you. For some interesting reporting on the diet connection, see the film Super Size Me in which the author finds himself feeling lousy after eating a lot of fast food.

How to bake your new life

Now that you have a notion of the ingredients needed, you can bake your cake, embark on your journey. Here is the recipe, and it is very simple and straightforward:

All you have to do is pay attention to your inner world and allow whatever feelings come up to be just as they are and then  flow out of you. That is it. The “tricky” part is that the normal human approach to life is to avoid discomfort, and so we normally do not willingly sit with our uncomfortable feelings, allowing them to be and to flow out of us. We run away from them, distract ourselves, medicate ourselves, stuff them down and out of sight in our inner basement. For this journey, it is crucial to pay attention and stay in the feeling, no matter how counter-intuitive that may seem at first. Eventually, like riding a bicycle, you’ll be doing this naturally.

To begin, write on a piece of paper (or copy this to a word processor and print it):

ALL FEELINGS ARE NORMAL AND HUMAN.

IT IS OK TO FEEL WHAT I AM FEELING.

JUST FEEL ONE THING AT A TIME.

ACCEPT WHAT COMES UP  – IT IS ALL PART OF BEING HUMAN.

ALLOW THE FEELING TO BE.

ALLOW THE FEELING TO LEAVE.

STICK WITH IT UNTIL IT LEAVES, AS BEST I CAN.

WHATEVER I AM ABLE TO FEEL TODAY IS OK

Have this paper in front of you when you are in the process of being fully aware, to remind you that it is OK to feel whatever you are feeling, as millions of other humans have felt before you today and millions will feel tomorrow.

Now go and bake

Go to your secluded place, get comfortable and if you want, listen to the guided relaxation meditation found on this page:

http://www.vibert.ca/mp3/

Here is a direct link that you can use to download it directly:
http://www.vibert.ca/mp3/relaxation-meditation-with-Robert-Vibert.mp3

As you listen, you will notice the BETIS I mentioned above. Just notice them. If you find yourself getting distracted, just notice that. If you don;t want to listen to that recording, then sit in silence or listen to some instrumental music.

To track your progress, start a journal and note down what feelings come up during an awareness session, giving each feeling a subjective intensity rating on a scale of 0-10 when you start to pay attention to it, and then when you finish noticing it for that session. Perhaps it will be 6/10 when you start and 4/10 when you finish. That’s OK. Perhaps it will be 4/10 when start and 6/10 when you finish, and that’s OK, too. There is no right or wrong, there is only noticing what is there. Just the act of conscious noticing is enough to facilitate the natural human process of release of those long stored emotions.

Do this noticing each day if you can. Notice what comes up for you and allow it to flow through and out. Just do your best, whatever that is for you each time. No judgment, no analysis, just notice and just be.

After a while of doing this awareness exercise, you will start to notice that some feelings that used to pop up don’t do that so much anymore or not so intensely. Others will arise for their turn at being released. You’ll get a bit closer to your destination each time.

Copyright 2010 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved. Constructive feedback and suggestions welcomed.

Healing and our Brains, Moving to a stress-free reality

Stressed out from wanting things to be a certain way?

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As we grow up, we absorb and create a worldview based upon the various cultural and environmental influences to which we are exposed. This worldview evolves as we develop, as we are exposed to new information and particularly as we have emotionally charged experiences. This worldview then becomes part of our perception of how the world is and how it should be. And, that is one of the main times when we start to experience stress.

Each day, we look at the world through the filter of our worldview, and when it does not conform to that worldview, a certain amount of discomfort arises in us. For example, if we expect that people will be polite to us when we buy something, and the person who serves us a coffee is curt and seems uninterested in us, we can think that there is something wrong with them. We may start to feel upset, disrespected, indignant, etc. All of these feelings arise as a response to the conflict between our expectations and what we encounter. It is the rare person who realizes that one’s expectations may be totally different from the “normal” behaviour of the other people we interact with.

This default response of feeling discomfort when we encounter a discontinuity between our expectations and the outside world is often due to the sense of insecurity which can be triggered – we come to a shocking conclusion: the world is not what we expect and feel safe with; it has become an uncertain place.

People can invest an enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating a level of perceived security. We build houses with strong doors, security systems and live in gated communities. We establish routines for commuting and working to follow each day. We put on good luck charms, talismans and clothing which we associate with safe prior experiences. We eat the same fast food at home and when we travel to other countries. All of these actions and more are designed to help us feel safer, and that seems to be a fairly normal human desire. Stress is generated when this sense of security is disturbed by some element of the outside world. Our indignation about the “rudeness” of the coffee server is actually a maladaptive attempt to restore “order” to the world. We attribute the responsibility for our feelings to the outside world when we really are just reacting because of our internal emotional triggers. We think “if only the people around us lived up to our expectations, then we would feel safer, as all would be as we expect and in fact need it to be.” The reality of our daily experiences is that change is constant and the world does not live up to our expectations. And yet, we hang onto our expectations for dear life.

Why do we hang onto these unrealistic expectations?

Given the constant exposure we have to new experiences and information, it would be reasonable to expect that our worldview should evolve constantly, and as a result we would have little if any stress from unmet expectations. That does not seem to be the case. We form the various pieces of our worldview early on and seem to cling to it desperately, with an ever increasing amount of stress being generated as we struggle to reconcile what we expect and what we encounter. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we keep expecting the world to work the way we want it to and resisting that it does not.

Brain research has shown that we actually will override what we are seeing with what we want to see. And, I’m sure you’ve had an experience of someone telling you (probably in other words) “Don’t confuse me with the facts – I’ve made up my mind!”

There are two main reasons why we hold onto our worldviews:

The first is our need for security mentioned above. Humans are designed to seek out homeostasis and therefore resist change. Our systems are always trying to return to a state of comfort. We can try very hard to overcome this, but basically we tend to evolve from one state of stability to another, and we want the transition to be as quick and painless as possible. People do experience major changes in perspective, particularly after very intense events and near death experiences. If we were to examine their systems, we would find that almost all have moved from state X to state Y, both of which seem safe to them. The transition process itself may have been very dramatic, but we humans usually end up in a new state of perceived safety and well-being which may be radically different from the prior state. We could be living as a fiercely free spirited individualist one day and be settled into a long term committed relationship the next week.

The second reason we cling to our worldview regardless of the evidence to the contrary is the emotional glue that holds our expectations in place. Much of our belief system and opinion collection is based upon a series of experiences during which we form beliefs and ideas/opinions. These experiences will have emotional content for us and this is what glues the memories and beliefs and worldview together.

Here’s a simple test – think of 5 important events in your life, any 5. You may want to write them down to make it easier to track. For each one, imagine yourself back in that event, as if you were having the experience now. Notice what you were seeing, what you were hearing and what you were feeling. Do this for each event in turn. It is extremely probable that for each important event you will have had at least one strong emotional response. Perhaps for one you felt really happy and for another very sad. The exact emotion is not that critical – for each one that you easily recalled and were able to imagine, there was a strong emotional component. This is what I call the emotional glue that holds those memories in place. You probably can recall a lot of details of each event and even feel the corresponding emotions as you revisit them.

You can test the opposite of this – take yourself back exactly 3 weeks to one of the meals you ate. If you can’t remember much about that meal, it was most likely that it had nothing very emotional happen during it. It was more than likely just like so many other benign events of your life – ones that came and left without any real impact on you.

This emotional glue is a double-edged sword. It holds in place all those memories of positive events from our past, but it also holds in place all those negative ones as well. All of these events, the feelings that arose in them, the thoughts that were formed and the resulting beliefs and opinions all helped to create and to shape your worldview. And, after a while, each new experience tends to reinforce your worldview. Every time that worldview and its component expectations are not in alignment with your current experiences, you will tend to become stressed as you go through the process of reconciling the two.

Sometimes, we can become aware of parts of our worldview which do not really serve us anymore. We may have a vague sensation about the futility of our constant negative reaction to people who do not do what we expect. We may want to be more tolerant. The challenge then is to move from where we are to where we want to be without triggering all of our self-preservation mechanisms, To make this move, we need to let go of the emotional glue which holds the old and unresourceful expectations in place.

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to release the emotional glue which no longer serves us. Humans are fully capable of releasing any emotional glue and the attached beliefs and opinions and reactions, even though it may seem like something a bit out of the ordinary to do the first time or two. The heightened speed of change in the modern world, as well as the bombardment of negative news stories has created a more intense than normal climate of fear, and in a fearful environment, we tend to hang onto everything, including that which no longer serves us. The process of releasing is greatly enhanced by a facilitation process such as AER.

The process of letting go of the emotional glue that holds in place an unresourceful expectation is actually quite straightforward. First, one notices any time when one is feeling frustrated, for example, with a low-intensity life event such as standing in a line-up at the grocery store. One pays attention to the feelings which come up with the frustration, and then when the time is convenient, one lets go of those feelings, one by one, using AER to facilitate the release process. There is neither censoring nor judgment of the feelings which arise – they are noticed, accepted and released. Any analysis of why one might feel anger and sadness mixed with the frustration, for example, is left until after the feelings are released and one can think clearly.

As one releases the accumulated emotional glue, an amazing thing happens – expectations become softer and more in tune with what is actually there. No effort is needed, as there is no resistance to the world nor any struggle to reconcile an expectation with what is happening. Are you ready to let go of some of your old emotional glue, unresourceful beliefs and ideas?

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved

Healing and our Brains, Moving to a stress-free reality

Excuse me, my past is calling…

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Excuse me, my past is calling

by Robert S. Vibert

Has this ever happened to you?  There you are having a perfectly normal conversation with someone and all of a sudden your past calls you up, grabbing your attention and hijacking your focus! Those uncomfortable feelings from the past surge inside you, maybe prompting your stomach to knot up, your face to flush, your body to feel strange. Or maybe it is an emotional response that pops up, with anger, embarrassment or sadness flooding over you.

You knew that it was your past calling, using it’s speed-dial right to your core, right?

Maybe the feelings were so strong that you missed the connection and thought that these were feelings caused by whatever was happening in the present. This is one of the most common things we humans do – conclude wrongly that our feelings (emotional and bodily) are solely about the present.  Hey, popular magazines are always telling you how to “deal with” these feelings, but based entirely on the current situation. This “what to do when this happens” approach ignores the profound impact that our past has on us. There are numerous studies which show how the experiences of our early years have significant effects on us for the rest of our lives (or until we resolve those injuries).

Those who have resolved past issues find that new problematic situations have much less, if any, impact on them as the cumulative effect is now absent. Our past no longer gets to mess with us, throw us off balance or trigger all those feelings that we would prefer to not have.

On the line to the past

Although there is a huge industry of babble-therapy – excuse me,  talk therapy, that has people tell their stories over and over, that approach is popular mainly due to some good marketing. Edward Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the main developer of public relations, invested a lot of time, money and clever marketing techniques in promoting his uncle’s ideas on human psychology as valid and useful. Psychotherapy became accepted and then preferred. This steamroller of “talk therapy is the best way to solve your problems” continues today to be promoted in films, TV and other media, even though there are numerous other methods which are as or even more effective.

One of the major issues that people have with talk therapy is that clients are often called upon to talk about what is bothering them. There are a few major concerns one should have with this, including

Examining our past in detail is often a futile effort, as many influential events are not stored in our brains as conscious items, especially when they happened during our earliest years – how much can you really recall of your time as a baby?  And, even if we do have some conscious memories of a traumatic event, the story is pretty much irrelevant anyway as our brain keeps changing the details. There are many influences on our memories, and the conclusion of those who study this area is that memories are unreliable indicators of what actually happened. In fact, if you take the approach of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) or hypnotherapy, one can rewrite or overlay an awful story with a better one. (There is a better approach than this application of “good memory” whipped cream on “bad memory” cow patty.)

The other major concern is the PPE (Problem Processing Engine) in our brain which will invent a reason for these feelings so that we can “solve” that problem of where they came from. Someone in a position of authority (“therapist”) asks us to talk about our problem (uncomfortable feelings) and our PPE will kick into high gear trying to “figure out why” we feel that way. The answers it comes up with are often superficial and shallow, along the lines of “I feel this way because Johnny said something nasty to me.” Applying a little emotional detective work to this initial conclusion might reveal that the feeling actually has nothing to do with Johnny or what he said but really arises from some incident that occurred ten, twenty or even fifty years in the past. Our PPE is good for many things, but emotions are not problems per se , so it often reaches the wrong conclusion about what gave rise to the feeling.

Talking about some issue or painful event mainly serves to reinforce those neural circuits so that memory is kept alive, along with all the pain that is associated with it. This is actually counter-productive, as the goal should be to move on from the pain, not keep that fire stoked.

The bottom line is that while talking about something painful does offer some relief (we feel acknowledged and accepted by the listener if they are skillful, and we may learn that others have had similar feelings which means we are not uniquely cursed), this is really only temporary as evidenced by the extensive number of talk therapy sessions “required” to feel better and the reports of those who finally resolved some issue using some other approach after years of “therapy”. Of course, feeling better is what we reach for when we are in pain, but just feeling better for a little while is only a stop-gap measure, not a real and long-lasting solution.

The normal human revulsion to the concept of constantly dredging up the pain of the past in the hope of fixing it and the much better results obtained from methods which aim to liberate the person from the pain instead of teaching someone to “manage it” have combined to lead many people to look for problem resolution approaches that are fast, effective and cost-effective. And, fortunately, they are finding them.

Disconnecting from the past

How does one disconnect from that call from a painful past? The principles are the same no matter what specific technique one uses. These are the principles embodied in the Awareness Expression Resolution process:

  1. Become fully Aware of the pain. Notice it, as it is, without judging it or wanting it to go away or trying to figure it out.
  2. Acknowledge the pain. It is there every time you look, so you gain nothing from denying it or avoiding it other than delaying the inevitable encounter.
  3. Accept the pain as normal and human – we all have pain and it is entirely likely that many, many people have felt exactly the same as you. Accept it as it is, with no attempt to rationalize, explain or understand it.
  4. Allow the pain to be and allow it to go. Feelings come and go and if we allow them, they will flow through and out of us. Pushing it away will only create more neural connections to it, keeping it firmly in place.
  5. Express the pain. No need for any big production here – just writing it down or saying it out loud (alone or with a trusted person) is usually enough. No need to tell the story, just report on the pain itself – “I feel sadness” or “I feel anger” are good examples of simple, clear and precise expressions of the pain. If a name or exact description of the pain escapes you, then use something generic, such as “I feel yucky” or “I feel down” or “I feel stuck.”
  6. Experience the pain, for a few moments. While there is no need to stay in the pain for longer than a few moments, it is necessary to experience it just long enough for the brain circuits where it is stored to become engaged and then release it.
  7. Consciously Release the pain.  Let go of it and let it go on its way. Think of this as being like letting a pebble drop out of your hand. You do not throw the pebble or make it go away – you simply let it fall naturally when you open your hand. Painful feelings can be released just as easily.
  8. Stay in the process until you reach full release – there is nothing left of the pain and the memory only contains data, not emotional content. You can see the scene but are no longer involved or emotionally engaged in it – it is like a boring movie that has no interest to you anymore.  At this point, that pain is resolved and you have reached Resolution with regard to it.

Reaching Resolution on an issue is the key to not having this pain from the past speed-dial you in your present. Once you have released the emotional energy around an event from the past, it can no longer make that call to you in the present. As one releases more and more of the painful episodes from the past, the present becomes more pleasant and balanced – there is little if any interference of the past and its pain and whatever happens today is seen and responded to as just that today. This is much better than responding to a current situation with today’s emotional response compounded by past pain from similar situations.

Free of our past pain, we start to see people as they really are, with our vision and interpretations no longer distorted by past pain and memories.

The main thing getting in the way of more people using this sort of approach is that we’ve been sold two erroneous messages which make it hard for us to accept the simplicity of just letting go of the past:

Life problems take a long time to be solved and require a lot of effort.

We need to understand why we feel a certain way in order to get past it.

Both of these messages are baloney. I know of many people who have released painful memories in minutes. And, they did not need to talk about their past or pay someone thousands of dollars or euros to effect that release or give them some explanation. They just needed to commit to trying a little experiment and allowing themselves to take a walk down Release Lane.

Releasing stored pain from the past is really something that needs to be experienced to be understood – no volume of words can describe how free one feels after releasing some past pain that has been calling us far too often.

Copyright 2011 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved.

 

AER is a system to enhance the natural human release mechanism. One of the recorded AER sessions is available for FREE at my Facebook public page. Other AER recordings are available for the low cost of $10 each.