Tag Archives: stress

Moving to a stress-free reality

Are you going to be dead right?

1 Comment

There is an interesting concept I’ve run into a bit lately – being “dead right”. You are “right” about something, but you ended up “dead” in the process of proving or obtaining your “rightness”.

Let’s take out a scalpel and slice into this concept a little, shall we?

Let’s start by looking at the concept of being right about something. “Being right” is another way of saying that one person has somehow figured out the “truth” about something and is the most correct in their interpretation of an event, a situation or some object. This approach often involves one person claiming exclusive ownership of this “truth”, and can include trumpeting of this advantageous position. Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson has written extensively about the dangers of being infected with the Plato Truth Virus, that concept of absolute truth which ignores the gray areas in life.

Let’s imagine that someone was actually able to figure out the complete and total truth about something, even though in my experience that happens so rarely as to be almost worthy of a Nobel Prize. But, for the sake of this discussion, someone has actually discovered all the nuances of what happened in some particular situation, including the thoughts and emotions of everyone affected by this situation. Now that they have this remarkable knowledge, what do they do with it? If they are caught up in the notion of “being right”, they will start to try to convince others of two main things:

  • the importance and exclusivity of the complete truth as discovered by them, and
  • their exclusive and exemplary status as owner of that truth.

Sounds totally alien, doesn’t it? You’d never do that, would you?  Of course not. So, we’ll just talk about those other people who argue with you all the time about their ideas and opinions.  🙂 See, that is one of the interesting things that happens – others have mere ideas and opinions, but most of the time we have the splendid truth, the cold hard facts, the glorious reality – all of this in our head. Funny thing how that happens…

And, actually, many people don’t even worry about having all the details before they convince themselves that they totally understand a situation. Their “truth” is based on whatever amount of information they deem necessary to jump to a conclusion. What follows is the same – they start to convince others that they own the truth.

Why do we believe so passionately that what happens inside our heads is the “truth” and what popped into the head of someone else is merely an opinion, and probably an ill-informed opinion at that?

Maybe this happens because we believe our thoughts and identify with them. Rene Descartes has a lot to answer for in this regard, with his notion of “I think therefore I am.” Many people today go around identifying with their thoughts, no matter what those thoughts are. They don’t question these thoughts nor do they examine what constitutes them, where they came from or if they have any real validity. (A good short article on this is here.) Once we identify with something (including our thoughts), it can seem like we are losing a part of ourselves if that something is going to go away or is being potentially discredited.

Another possible reason for being so attached to our thoughts, particularly those which seem to relate to being right, is that most of us have a deep-seated need to be accepted and acknowledged by our tribe. OK, we don’t live in tribes the same way as we once did, so now we could consider the whole world to be our tribe given the power of modern communication channels. Since we usually consider our thoughts to be an intrinsic part of ourselves, we can have a need for those thoughts to be accepted and acknowledged by others, as that also grants us acceptance of ourselves.

If someone questions our thoughts, aka our truth, our self-acceptance and the exogenous acceptance we get from others feels threatened and so do we. What happens when we feel threatened? Our hard-wired protection circuity goes into action, switching most of us into fight or flight mode and we start defending those oh so precious thoughts of ours as if to given them up was to cut off a part of ourselves, like an arm or leg.

Once we get into this protective mode, our systems are stressed and we start to suffer the well-documented effects of stress – heart problems, diminished healing responses, etc.

Another consequence of getting all defensive about our thoughts (I mean our truth, of course), is that we start to create conflict with others. Instead of listening open-mindedly to what others think and being willing to accept that our thoughts are not actually the final and complete truth, we are in a determined fight to the finish. The finish is often a hollow victory, unfortunately. We may “win” the argument, but what have we lost?

In some cases, we will lose the friendship of those around us. Even if they remain friends with us, we may lose their respect, as we can be seen as too argumentative or competitive. Few people want to be constantly engaged in battles of the “truth”, as they are taxing on our system. Instead of having friends who are willing to engage in discussions which will enrich our understanding of the world as we share our respective insights and observations, we can be driving them away with our need to be right. We get to be right, in our heads at least, but the friendship ends up dead.

In the end, what we were wanting, acceptance and acknowledgment, can be what we lose the most of when we constantly argue as if our lives depended on winning and we impose our need to be right on others. The funny thing is that we often see the others who are engaging us in conversation as the cause of our stress as they are not agreeing with us and we end up pushing harder and harder to get them to accept our truth over theirs. If we did not have such a strong need for our truth to be accepted, we would not stress ourselves over it and the convincing of others.

Drain the emotions and the stress goes away

Fortunately, we can take another approach which will not only reduce the inevitable stress we generate for ourselves when we “own the truth”, but help us have a better life all round. This approach involves releasing, using a system like AER, all the strong emotional responses that arise when we are in situations where we feel the need to have our ideas accepted as the truth. By releasing these stored up feelings, we can begin to see our thoughts for what they are, thoughts which are not us. We can also engage in conversations where we don’t have to impose our ideas on others but can listen and integrate new information and perspectives. We can reach a place where we see that knowledge is ever evolving and fluid, not static and contained only in our heads.

Releasing pent-up feelings leaves us feeling lighter and healthier, and we can become much more flexible in how we see the world.

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved

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

Stressed out from wanting things to be a certain way?

Leave a comment

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…

1 Comment

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.