The world, inside and out

Stressed out from throwing your arms in the air?

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:40:23 +0000

For far too many people, the world is a place full of boulders. Every day, they bump into these boulders, feel frustrated and then perhaps defeated and then stressed out. What would it be like if they could actually experience the world as a place of opportunity instead of obstacles? Wouldn’t that provide much more opportunity for a life that would be happier and calmer?

Let’s take a closer look at what often happens when life’s little challenges are seen as major problems. Imagine that you buy a new bicycle and discover after riding it for a week or so that some of the nuts need tightening. You go to your toolbox and grab your wrenches. None of them fit properly on the nuts, and perhaps you feel tension rising inside you. After all, you’ve had these wrenches for years and they were used successfully by your father before you. Frustrated, you call the store where you bought the bike and demand to know what is going on. Perhaps you are silently steaming at all the time that you are wasting on this. Finally, someone explains that the bike uses metric fasteners, and your tried and tested Imperial measurement wrenches will not fit properly. At this point, some people will feel so upset they might try to return the bike to the store, demanding one that is made using fasteners that their wrenches can fit. They might be verbally abusive with the clerks, and vent loudly to all who will listen, perhaps even waving their arms about in the air.

What’s really going on here? Is this reaction appropriate to the situation? Is the store to blame for the type of fasteners used on the bike? Would someone be justified in feeling all upset and angry over this situation? Is there some sort of crazy conspiracy to annoy them? Or is something else going on, beneath the surface?

As some of you may have guessed by now, trying to return a bike because your wrenches don’t work is an overly intense reaction for the situation. However, when someone is in this state of mind, with emotions being felt intensely, there is no point in trying to reason with them. After all, their body has already shifted much of its resources to the survival part of the brain and body core, and little logical thinking is possible (or happening) at this moment.

Why would someone get so upset over the fact that metric fasteners were used? The answer lies in their stored emotions and memories. Because their emotional kettle is almost full to the brim with emotional responses to situations in the past when they also felt similarly, it does not take much fresh frustration for the kettle to boil over. We humans constantly access our stored data banks to evaluate each new situation. We look in the data bank, which holds visual, verbal and emotional memory components, to see if we’ve seen this sort of situation before. If we have, we then tend to automatically respond in the same fashion as previously, without thinking.

If we have a very pleasant memory of feeling good when someone gave us a gift of flowers or chocolate, for example, we”ll access those stored memories and emotions in a flash when we see these same things again. This can be very useful and enjoyable when what we access is pleasant or heartwarming. On the flip side, it can be rather disheartening if what we recall are unpleasant or painful stored feelings and memories.

So, when you are confronted with a situation which appears in some way to be similar to a prior negative one (and even more so if there are numerous prior ones), it is normal to have the same feelings arise, and for your kettle to boil over. This boiling over can be expressed in anger, frustration, sadness, pain, guilt, etc. And, until such time as you empty that particular kettle, you are going to keep adding to it with each fresh situation.

Empty the kettle

Releasing stored negative or unpleasant feelings is the only way to experience fresh negative situations without them becoming overwhelming. People often try to suppress these built-up feelings as a coping mechanism for when they get too strong, but that is a stop-gap measure, and it does not work. Those feelings lie just beneath the surface, waiting to be triggered and to join in with the recent ones, overflowing from the kettle.

Releasing these stored feelings, or emptying the kettle, if you will, is actually not that hard. However, given our well documented human tendency to avoid unpleasant feelings, the process of emptying the kettle is not so intuitive. To empty a kettle of stored pain, for example, requires that one not only acknowledges the existence of the stored feelings, but that one remains present to the discomfort they bring long enough for them to dissipate. There are techniques such as AER which are designed to accelerate this dissipation process, but they are not so widely known yet. Most people keep stuffing down the unpleasant feelings, hoping they will go away on heir own and then suffering when they don’t.

Just buy or borrow a metric wrench already!

For those who are not emotionally engaged in the situation, it is easy to suggest logical and rational solutions, such as buying some new wrenches. However, these suggestions are falling on ears which are only tuned into fight, flight or freeze type responses – people who are in an emotionally intense situation are not going to even hear what the other is saying, let alone be able to think about it or act upon it. Don Ferguson, a therapist who works with couples, remarked at a Smart Marriages conference in 2008 that talk therapy does not help those suffering from trauma, as it addresses the prefrontal cortex while the intense emotions and memories are mainly stored elsewhere in the brain. When dealing with stored emotions and feelings, talk therapy usually has little effect, offering a sort of drive-by relief at best. In fact, constant surface level recalling of traumatic incidents by talking about them can re-inforce those brain circuits, keeping the stored emotions well energized.

While we might not feel much pity for people who engage in dramatic expressions of their discontent when the world does not go the way they want, we can at least try to see that they are being pushed in a certain direction by their stored emotions. Yes, like everyone else, they need to take responsibility for their actions and empty that kettle so their over-reactions become more moderate and appropriate responses. Their reaction to what life serves up each day, which looks to them like a stream of constant problems which are almost insurmountable, is a result of unresolved past issues. There is no need to analyse these responses – they feel anger about something, for example, and that is the kettle to be released, before it boils over again.

There is also little to be gained in trying to figure out why someone feels a certain way while that feeling is present. The feeling puts them into an intense emotional state and at that point, they are literally incapable of rational thought. Empty the emotional kettle and the possibility of analysis of the situation arises. For many people, though, as soon as you drain the emotions from a kettle, there is little interest which remains in the situation and what was a hugely important situation a few minutes earlier. Without a lot of emotional content, the situation becomes benign or even banal.

Learning how to release stored emotions, emptying those kettles, is not hard. Using this approach to situations in which you feel frustrated means you stop finding yourself stressed out over what are really minor situations, but which appear larger when that kettle is full. You’ll also be less likely to wave your arms about, mad at the world, and getting all stressed out.

Are you being seen?

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:14:08 +0000

Did you ever notice the tension that arises in you when people are not seeing you for who you are, but are only noticing something about you? Even worse, they may be only paying attention to something over which you have little influence, like your eyes, your height, your employment history.

They “see” you, but they don’t really see “you”.

I witnessed a dramatic example of this a few years ago at a retreat workshop. Amongst the various people attending was a woman who would meet most western standards for being attractive. She was tall, shapely, pretty and blond. She was also invisible to most of the other people attending at any level beyond that of her appearance. This became blatantly apparent when we were asked to do an exercise in appreciation – everyone gathered around her as she sat on the floor and spoke to her words of appreciation. What I noticed was how she started crying as one after another people told her how pretty she was, how nice she looked, and words to that effect. She blinked back the tears for a second when my turn came and I said her tears were welcome. The comments about her physical attributes continued and her tears flowed again.

Some of the people around her had a smile on their face, and I suspect they thought she was crying tears of joy. I was not so sure, and when I spoke to her later that day, my concerns were confirmed. She had been crying from feeling not seen for who she was. We talked a little that day about how people were always looking at her only long enough to notice her physical gifts, and were ignoring the rest of her. She had pretty much resigned herself to a life of being invisible, alone in the crowd. Not too surprisingly, as we got to know each other a little better over the course of the workshop, her inner reality was slowly revealed and she said her good-byes with a beaming smile as she climbed into her husband’s truck for the drive home. All it took was for someone to actually pay attention to her with a desire to see “her” for who she was.

I’ve seen this surface-surfing played out in other situations as well, and sometimes it is self-inflicted. At another workshop, one of the participants introduced himself as a recovering alcoholic. Within moments, it was like someone had erased the memory of almost everyone present, as from that time onward, he was referred to as “the alcoholic”. No more information about him was solicited, and most people seemed content to put him in that box.

Why do people focus so much on the exterior?

The question that arises here is why do humans have a tendency to quickly put people in boxes and then leave them there. Certainly there is a survival instinct at work – in caveman days, we had to quickly size up the threat level of some new person who approached the tribe. But this only provides a partial explanation, and it does not account for the way that people often focus so much on the surface.

One possible reason why we do this is the need to keep a certain distance between ourselves and others. Most of us no longer live in very small communities, and cannot reasonably be in close emotional contact with everyone we meet in a day. Using a form of shorthand, we label people and then move along to the next new input in front of us.

Another possible reason is that we are responding to a perceived insecurity on the part of the other person. This is particularly true when we praise someone for that which they have little control over (putting aside cosmetic surgery and make-up for the moment). We may think that we are providing some sort of appreciation to the other person when we compliment them on their looks, but in fact it is a poor bargain. It looks something like this:

“If you notice my physical aspect and tell me flattering words about how nice I look, I’ll pretend to like that, even though I am only getting crumbs instead of what I really want – sincere acknowledgment and appreciation for who I am as a person, a recognition and acceptance of my intrinsic worth.”

There are a number of compilations of what people need to survive and flourish, and this one is a good example. All these compilations refer to some basic needs we humans have to be Accepted, Acknowledged, and Appreciated. When people comment on the physical aspects of someone, they are making token gestures of appreciation. They often think that if they do not flatter the other person, then that person will feel insecure and not accepted. This concept is greatly promoted by those who want you to buy their products and services so you will conform to a societal model of attractiveness. Every day, we are bombarded by messages about how we need to look and act like “supermodels”. What exactly is so “super” about a “model” that is actually airbrushed and digitally enhanced. Even “supermodels” don’t match the image of what they need to look like.

Even Celebrities want to be loved

One of the most poignant things to observe these days is the quest for celebrity-hood. So many people are constantly promoting themselves, directly and by association with other celebs, jockeying for position on the ladder of celebrity-hood. They adopt a persona of breathing rarefied air, only socializing with other VIPs and somehow being “special”. I suspect that underneath all this posturing and publicity-gathering activity is a deep-seated desire to be really seen for who they really are. Like all humans, they desire the love, acceptance and acknowledgment that brings true tears of joy and well-being. Even those who are sincerely realistic and humble about their contribution to the arts can find themselves caught up in the tide of needing to become someone more “celebrity-like”. Stepping aside and letting that tide flow past is possible, but one needs to be aware of it and act according to one’s inner guidance.

Our modern world, with all its trappings of the latest fashion and gadgets, provides poor surrogates for that which we truly desire and thrive upon. The pursuit of a new pair of Manolo Blanco shoes or a big screen TV or an electronic gadget like an iPhone may bring a temporary sense of thrill (the chase!) but it pales in comparison to actually feeling truly seen and appreciated. In the hectic daily rat race, we lose sight of what we really want and are overwhelmed by the flood of advertising, direct and indirect, that purports to show us what we “need”.

A simple gesture can mean a lot

The next time that you notice yourself about to say some flattering statement about some surface aspect of someone, see if you can stop for a moment and find something more significant and meaningful to mention. Notice something about them, as a person. How can you know what they might want to hear? Take a moment and ask yourself what about you do you want appreciated. Most of us look for the same things from others, including:

Acceptance of who we are,
Acknowledgment of our individual being,
Appreciation for how we contribute to the world being a better place, and a
Sense of connection to others.

If you take the time to notice how positive or upbeat or relaxed you feel when you are with someone, and then tell them that instead of commenting on their hair, you will be talking to their being and their heart. If you are addressing someone who is in some way a celebrity, tell them how their work touches you instead of the usual “you are so talented” or “you are so beautiful”. Go ahead, plant some seeds of true appreciation.

Dr. Gary Chapman has some excellent research on the Five Languages of Love, in which he examines how couples can learn how best to relate to each other in ways that each will truly appreciate. Chapman says that many of the issues that couples face is simply due to their not speaking the same language of love – he’s doing the dishes and what she really needs is more time to be held. This same principle can be extended to everyone you interact with – notice something real about them, something intrinsic.

What do you really want?

It is perfectly normal to be a bit confused about what you want from others. After all, you are bombarded with messages which are designed to shape your thinking, telling you that what you want is someone who meets some template that was created by those who sell you “enhancement” products and services. You constantly see images of people speaking platitudes as if they meant something, and you see people pretending to like them. The volume and intensity of this propaganda is only increasing and it causes a lot of stress as we all know deep down what we want, and yet we don’t get it very often.

Take some time, notice what feelings come up for you when you ponder what you’d really like to have. Release any feelings and thoughts that get in the way of that vision, using something like AER. Then start the ball rolling by investing in the positive and true appreciation of others. Notice what there is to be noticed about them, their contribution to the world and their way of being. See them in the way you want to be seen. They’ll be a little surprised at first, but many will join the party given a little time and encouragement by example.

Stressed out from wanting things to be a certain way?

admin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:06:10 +0000

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?

Stressed out from trying to Manage Emotions?

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:25:35 +0000

It is common to hear professionals in the therapy realm talk about the need to manage one’s emotions. Other terms for this include “emotional mastery”, “emotional control”, and “emotional freedom”. The premise in each case is to treat our emotions as something that are distinct from “us”, regularly get out of control causing us problems, cannot be allowed to be fully expressed, and generally need to be subjected to some control by our superior intellect.

We humans think this way because we seriously believe that our prefrontal cortex, the “executive” part of our brains, should triumph over the more “primitive” parts of us. Curiously enough, this sort of thinking could only exist for those who have a prefrontal cortex… After all, the role of this part of our brain is to provide the ability to plan, reason, concentrate, and adjust behaviour. This is akin to asking a fox what is the best way to guard the hen house: of course our reasoning motor is going to argue for the supremacy of reason over emotion.

The funny thing is that this same logic seems to disappear when we have fallen in love or experience intense fear or any other time our emotions arise strongly. The notion of controlling or managing/mastering (politer terms for controlling) our emotions is that our thinking motor (aka head brain) does not like the power of our emotions to push or pull us in various directions. So, when things have calmed down, it plots to over-through the emotions with ploys, tricks and connivances. This is a great idea, the thinking brain thinks, and each and every time, it is defeated – as soon as another strong emotion surfaces, it gets put on the back burner while the emotion takes over.

No wonder the psychotherapeutic world is replete with all kinds of practices designed to help the brain try to lord it over the emotions, which mainly originate from the heart and body. These practices are attempts of the brain to regain full-time control of “us”. These practices come in many guises, but are easy to spot – if they propose a way to manage or control emotions, you know what you are looking at.

Allow instead of fighting

Here’s a novel concept – allow your feelings/emotions to flow through you, without trying to control them. This probably sounds scary, as there may have been situations in the past when you got “overly” emotional and did or said something you later regretted. The key here is the “overly” part. Calling something “overly” implies that it is excessive, which is of course a judgment.

The funny thing is that a twisted bit of logic is at work here, one that we could expect to invent when we are perhaps 5 years old, but that our head brain should have realized was no longer realistic a long time ago. The faulty logic is assuming that having had one intense emotional incident with some sort of negative outcome means that all future emotional incidents will be equally disruptive to our lives and therefore we should suppress those emotions as soon as they appear. This logic underlies a lot of the emotional management/mastery approach and it actually makes things worse than better.

Starting from the premise that all intense emotional incidents are bound to cause us some sort of pain or embarrassment, we end up only allowing our emotions to be partially experienced and then we do our best to avoid feeling them. We stifle the experience and instead of the feeling flowing through us as most other creatures do, it gets stuck inside. Our system is not really designed to store up all these feelings indefinitely – this is not a question of storage capacity, but one of health. Both our emotional and our physical health are affected by stifling emotions – we get stressed out, we get heart attacks and our immune system is diminished. A web search for “health impact of negative feelings” turned up nearly one million hits, which is an indicator of the importance of this.

And, the fact that we have stored up all these partially expressed emotions from various incidents means that the next time we encounter another similar situation, all those feelings are going to want to come to the surface. This is the main reason for us “overly” reacting to situations – we not only have the current emotion that is natural and relevant, but we automatically add to the mix all the previous instances of that particular emotion. These stored feelings come flooding up from storage and swamp our nervous system. If you manage to pay attention to yourself the next time you have a very intense emotional reaction, you’ll probably notice memories of past situations with the same emotional content. These are the stored emotions stuck inside us, wanting to be released and allowed to flow out.

Instead of stifling the expression of a feeling, it is far healthier to allow it to flow through us. There is a caveat, however. If you have not been actively “draining the batteries” of the emotional energy stored inside you, then you are most likely to get overwhelmed by the flood when a situation arises. The fix to this is very simple – undertake an active releasing program to free those stored feelings from captivity. AER is designed to facilitate this releasing. All you need to do is notice as you go through your day what feelings come up for you quite strongly and release them, one at a time. Emptying the stored emotional energy leaves you lighter and more agile in future situations. Once you have released a stored emotion, your response to a new incident will be proportional to the situation instead of an over-reaction.

As you embark on this voyage of releasing, your need to control your emotions will diminish as you enter into a healthy relationship with your emotions. After all, you don’t need to manage or control something that is a balanced natural expression of your reality in that moment. To reach this state of personal grace, you do need to release the stored up emotional energy before it really weakens your immune system and causes you any more uncomfortable situations.

Stressed out from working too hard?

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:05:15 +0000

Did you ever wake up one day and realize that you’ve been working way too hard at something? That there is a much better way to accomplish the exact same thing, with much less effort and struggle?

This waking up happened when I was listening to a recording of a relationship therapist talking about how he gets people back on track. He mentioned that they have to “do the work” and how it took a lot of commitment, and one had to be in this “for the long haul”. I was not exactly thrilled by this labour-intensive approach, to say the least.

Overall, his approach was one which contained a lot of concepts that I hear commonly promoted:

- success is the result of persistence and much hard work,
- having a better life takes a lot of effort,
- changing your behaviours requires serious, long term work, and
- the process of personal change takes place over a long time.

My well-considered, totally scientific, and peer-reviewed reply to these concepts is “phooey”. Now, before you think I’ve jumped ship into the camp of “all you need is to think positive thoughts, say some affirmations and invoke the all-powerful Law of Attraction” crowd, relax. Having created a couple of rather successful companies in my former life as an entrepreneur, I know from personal experience (and a fair amount of related research) that neither the “work long and hard for many years” nor the “magic wishing bean” formula is what is really happening when people get more of what they want in their lives.

In a nutshell, what I have observed is that when people are able to achieve personal and business success, it is a result of several factors, including:

- doing the right things in the right order at the right time
- making appropriate mid-course corrections when needed
- having a vision of where they want to go, and some solid plans on how to get there
- being mainly free of any internal blocks to success.

This last factor is a key one, as anyone who has self destructive bad habits and/or beliefs will not be able to succeed, no matter how much effort they invest. They will continually find ways to stop themselves from obtaining that success, often at the last minute. More information on this can be found here.

The importance of altering the influence of self-sabotaging habits, thoughts and beliefs is not new – people have been talking about this for many years. In fact, one of the most famous books of the past century was Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, a work with much influence on many of the modern approaches to self improvement and success. While it certainly contains many useful and empowering concepts, this book, and much of the self-improvement industry, concentrates mainly on cerebral changes without giving much consideration for the rest of our being. It is sort of like trying to improve a car’s ride by properly inflating one of the four tires, and neglecting the other three. It is possible that the car will drive a little better with that one properly inflated tire, but the goal of a better ride is unlikely to be achieved if the other tires are under or over inflated. The same thing happens when we only focus on improving our minds, and neglect to take care of our bodies and our hearts.

The other potential problem that arises when one focuses exclusively on improving one’s thought processes in order to institute personal or professional change is that the likelihood of disappointment is higher – all the eggs are in one basket. If those efforts to improve thought processes are not successful, then one could feel more like a failure than a success.

Must… Work… Harder…

There is a phenomenon in which people often re-double their efforts when what they are doing does not produce the results they want. They see no other option than to “try harder”. I was in that place at times during my life, so I know what frustration can arise when one tries and tries and still doesn’t reach a goal.

The paradigm guiding these sorts of approaches can be expressed as

Awareness + Effort = Success

We become aware of something such as a bad habit that we have, and we then expend a lot of effort trying to either suppress it or convert that habit into something useful. Maybe we put up notes around the house or office, reminding ourselves to not do “X” or to always do “Y”. Maybe we create some home-brew aversion therapy, punishing ourselves each time we catch ourselves doing something we decided not to do any more. Or maybe we tell ourselves what we want to be, trying to visualize it and repeating these affirmations day after day. And, to add to our self-inflicted labours, we analyze and study relentlessly our habits, beliefs and thoughts, trying to figure our why we do “X”. No matter what particular approach we adopt under this paradigm, the underlying principle is the same: change takes much effort and time and is a struggle.

For many years, I laboured under that illusion, like so many others. I “worked’ at change. I used many techniques and “tools of the personal development trade” to try to shape my thoughts, to attempt to convert them, to instill what I wanted in place of what was there. It was a lot of work. It was often a struggle, and it generated disappointment any time I was not able to advance as fast or as fully as I wanted.

The funny thing is that I was following the script that so many personal growth systems claim is the answer: work at altering your thought patterns to match those of the successful people and you will become successful. What is rarely, if ever, mentioned is that this sort of struggle against our existing beliefs and patterns not only wears on us, it is expensive in terms of emotional and physic energy. It is almost like having a tug-of-war between your two arms – how can that result in a real victory?

Fortunately, all this “work” taught me something very valuable – success was not obtained through the sole application of awareness and effort and that struggling with myself was actually counter-productive. I discovered that rather than trying to use force and willpower to get myself somewhere, I could get there doing something rather different – I could relax.

Let go and flourish

After trying so many of the effort-based approaches, I came across a path that is so simple and yet so effective. This paradigm can be expressed as:

Awareness Deepened + Intentional Release = Possibility = Success

In this paradigm, when we become aware of something about ourselves that we want to be different, such as a habit or belief that does not serve us, we deepen into a full awareness of the experiences around that situation. We notice how we are when we are involved with it, paying attention to our body sensations, our feelings and emotions, our thoughts, etc. Having noticed what goes on for us, we then intentionally release any of the emotional and mental glue that holds that unresourceful habit, belief or thought in place. At the beginning, it may be a bit hard to figure out how to release this glue, and that is where a system like AER can help a lot. Once we intentionally release any emotional and/or mental glue, it suddenly becomes possible to consider all sorts of new possible approaches to our projects and even to our beliefs and worldview. Projects which were hard become easier. Motivation is easier to find and resistance to success and change lessen, often dramatically.

For example, if I was considering applying for a new job, and I was very nervous about it, the old paradigm would have me trying to psyche myself up for the interview, perhaps cajoling myself into a sense of false confidence. I might have talks with myself, rationalizing my fear in an attempt to minimize them. I might repeat over and over some sort of mantra-like affirmation such as “I am worthy of this job”. These are all common coping mechanisms being applied to try to wrestle feelings into submission using mental processes. This could be an exhausting tug-of-war, with much expenditure of effort and time and great potential for stress to be stored up from the process.

With the Intentional Releasing paradigm, one would simply start by noticing any tension in the body that arose upon contemplating the interview, set the intention to allow that normal human feeling to flow out, and then use an integral release technique such as AER to facilitate the release of the tension. If anything else arose, such as thoughts of self-doubt, these too would be released in turn until all the “stuff” that was coming up and bothering us when we contemplated the job interview was released out of our system. This releasing process is not one of struggle or effort, but one of allowing normal accumulated stress and feelings to flow out. Instead of feeling worn down by the effort, one feels relieved to have let go of the blocks.

While there are a few things that can slow down this release process, such as any attachment to beliefs and feelings, etc., most people quickly distinguish between themselves and their feelings, thoughts and beliefs, and are quite happy to let those that do not serve them any longer to flow out.

So, if you have been trying hard to shape yourself into a better person or achieve a challenging goal and have found it a tiring and stressful process, consider using the new paradigm of releasing instead.

So, how does that make you feel?

admin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:26:36 +0000

OK, I admit it, the title is a trick question. But don’t be surprised if you got onto that track of thinking that “something makes you feel a certain way.” These days, it is the thing to do, promoted by therapists, counselors, moms and dads, teachers, popular music, etc., etc.

And, crazy as it might seem at first blush, that line of thinking is just plain silly. (I actually had some much less nice words to describe this concept, but good sense got the better of me.)

We unfortunately live in times of little personal responsibility. For quite a few years now, we’ve been encouraged to blame others for our actions and now for our feelings. We blame our misbehavior on our early years, our lack of nurturing as a babe in swaddling, our absent parent. Heaven forbid that we might have something to do with our actions today – no, it is far easier to blame it all on something or someone in the past.

A quick Google search turned up thousands and thousands of references to songs which have the words “you make me feel”. Actually, I fudged – there were more than 3 million hits on that phrase! Listening to modern music is like being brainwashed – endless references to how someone made someone else feel good, bad, upset, ecstatic, and more.

The expression “that made me feel…” has crept into our language so much that we take it for granted. And, like a mind-virus, it has taken over some of our critical thinking functions. Instead of understanding that our feelings arise inside us, we are constantly telling ourselves that somehow someone or something outside us is causing us to feel a certain way. Did you just hear that “boggle” sound? That was my mind…

Some people might think this is just nitpicking over language. However, there are lots of studies that show that we are influenced by the language we hear and the language that we use.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany

The current propaganda is that our feelings are generated and controlled by others. This means that we are not responsible for them, and so when we act inappropriately as a result of our feelings, we can always blame it on someone else: “They made me so mad I punched the wall.”

Say this sort of thing to yourself often enough, and you’ll start to believe it. Instead of owning your feelings, you’ll spend your time blaming others for how you feel (and act), and end up feeling … powerless and stressed. How else could one feel when someone else can make you feel a certain way at their whim?

Take back your power

The funny thing is that all you need to do is take ownership for your feelings and you get all that power back. Rather than saying that someone else made you feel a certain way, you state the more accurate truth: they said/did X and as a response, you felt Y.

Let’s try this on:

Joe said that I was lazy and I felt mad.
Jill made a face at me and I felt sad.
Billy paid little attention to me and I felt ignored and hurt
Mary said I was silly and I felt ashamed

and so on.

The key thing here is that by stating the actual relationship between the exterior event (actions or words spoken to us) and our inner world response, we start to see how we are not subject to an outside power, although we can be influenced by exogenous (outside of us) elements. Notice that a cause -> effect relationship is not being used here. Instead, we state that something happened and then how we felt. This differentiation is also particularly important, as our response/reaction to an external event can vary tremendously. One day we can be very upset by something and the next we can shrug it off, depending upon our mood, our level of distraction, our hormonal levels, etc.

The other thing that can really affect our response to a situation is how much emotional pain we still carry from prior similar situations. If we carry little pain, either from not having had much history of this sort of situation or by having released that pain using a technique such as AER, then our response is likely to be moderate. If we have lots of accumulated pain, we are more likely to get really upset and or hurt.

Talking and thinking about how we respond to situations reinforces our sense of ownership of our responses. No longer are we blaming others for how we feel – we are owning those feelings and noticing them arise in us. And, as a result, we can also own our actions. We get back our power in relation to our feelings, and we can actually have less stress, since we are not in a position of having handed over our power to others.

“Man’s unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden. Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”
Viktor E. Frankl

So, the next time someone tells you that you made them feel a certain way, ask them where exactly on them is this magic button to make that feeling appear – it may be on their elbow… Tell them you want to make a note of it, so you can use it in the future.

Yes, you’ll probably get a puzzled look in response, and maybe you’ll have to thank them for giving you so much power over them, so they start to see what is really happening.

Are your thoughts causing your stressful feelings?

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:25:10 +0000

There is a prevalent theory making the rounds, time and again, that your thoughts are what create your emotions and therefore your stress.

One of the expressions of these is what is called “Appraisal Theory”, which has been summed up as follows:

Event ==> thinking ==> Simultaneous arousal and emotion

Back in the day when I believed that the mind was supreme, this made perfect sense to me. After all, we humans are the thinkers, which is supposed to distinguish us from all other beasts. Hey, we have really old books that tell this story as well, and it just feels dang good to be top of the heap, don’t it? Stop noticing how we slaughter each other by the millions and how nasty we can be to others – it is best to ignore all that conflicts with our idealized vision of ourselves as simply wonderful.

Well, truth be told, I’m not so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed any more, which is another way of saying that I no longer automatically accept that humans are so much better than other species. Yes, we’ve managed to develop incredible technology so we could leave our trash behind even on the moon… Yes, we’ve polluted and ravaged the landscape to such an extent that there are few places left on Earth which are not damaged in some way.

OK, we have also done lots of good things, but if we are going to be relatively objective, we need to own what we do that is not so pretty or a good subject for polite conversation.

If we accept that even though humans seem to do a lot more thinking than dogs, for example (although your mileage may vary, depending on the human and canine subjects used in a study you might undertake), it would appear that this thinking is not always giving us a better world.

Ah, you might say, what we need is better thinking. Well, that would be an improvement, of course, but there is no guarantee that just because you are going to be thinking better that your actions are going to be congruent with these “better” thoughts. I know lots of people who can talk a good talk and who obviously are quite developed in the thinking department. They also happen to be less than optimum in the acting department – they don’t walk a good walk. Maybe you know someone like this too – a brilliant mind, but not so good to interact with.

And this is just one example of how I find less than satisfactory the concept that it is always our thinking that triggers our emotions. I would argue that there is a three-way street on which our physiological environment, our cognitive thought processes and our emotional responses are all interacting constantly.

A few examples from real life:

Imagine that you are standing outside and it is raining, cold and you are getting soaked and feeling rather clammy. You don’t need to think about this situation to feel miserable – you just feel it, as a normal result of your environment.

I would venture to say, given how the weather is the starting topic for so many conversations, that people generally respond to their environment without thought – they feel the environment acting on them and their emotions pop up in response. One can change one’s emotional and mental response to the environment, of course. But that is grist for another mill, fodder for another cannon, etc., etc.

Another example of this is when one eats something that tastes really good. This bite of Bill’s blueberry pie that I just ate triggers in me a feeling of comfort. I did not have to think about it – the pie enters my mouth and my taste buds signal “yum, good!” to me. And, as a result, I feel good about the pie and about Bill. I don’t have to think gratitude – it just comes up as a response to the good taste and texture.

When I think about this body and emotional response to the pie that I am enjoying, the feeling of gratitude can become more intense, of course. In fact, eating the pie triggers good thoughts about Bill. The communication is in all directions – from my body to my emotional centers to my mind. They interact with each other, back and forth.

Let’s look at another example – you are driving along and your car hits a slippery spot on the road and for a moment or two, is out of control. Before you have time to think “Oh Dang!” or something a little stronger, your body and emotions respond to the situation. Your body, probably guided by your enteric brain, starts telling all of you – “holy jumping jelly beans, we’re outta control here!!!!” It also floods your system with those infamous fight or flight chemicals and maybe you break out into a cold sweat and your heart is racing. You feel fear both emotionally and viscerally, and way before any thoughts can arise. Your mind can say anything calming or rational it wants, to no immediate avail – you are still reacting to the situation and until those chemicals that are flooding your system start to subside, not much calming is going to happen.

The same thing happens with people who are upset – while in that state, they are not thinking rationally – they are experiencing their upset and will continue to do so until they start to settle down. Their thoughts are greatly influenced by their physical and emotional state. Again, we can see that no matter what the starting point, our bodies, our minds and our feelings are interacting and influencing each other constantly.

Another example is when you are feeling some heart-based emotions. These emotions, whether of love-sickness or heartbreak, trigger all kinds of non-rational thoughts and result in all kinds of out-of-the-box actions. Go on, tell someone in love to think logically and see what happens.

Now, I’m not dismissing the notion that thoughts can trigger feelings. We can find plenty of examples of that, too. Someone sees a bully pick on a child and thoughts of disgust can arise which lead to anger and then some intervention action.

Less Chicken and Egg

I think the world would be a much better place if we spent less time on chicken-egg-what- came-first notions which place one part of us in a superior position to the other parts. Our minds can do a good job of analyzing, understanding, comparing, etc., but they are not designed for loving, for caring, for empathy – that comes from our hearts. If you ever try to drive a car using your mind instead of allowing your body to handle the majority of the work, you’ll find it rather tiring rather quickly.

Remember that we have lots and lots of neural networks in our head brains, heart brains and enteric (gut) brains. Even though many, many people have been convinced that “it’s all in your head” that just ain’t so. All three of those brains talk to each other constantly just as our thoughts, emotions and body sensations constantly interact.

So, if you are feeling stressed about something and someone tells you it is your thinking that is to blame, smile and know that they have only got one piece of the picture, one nibble of the cookie. There is a lot more going on with us than simply our thinking triggering emotions – any one of the three parts I have mentioned can trigger a response in the other and influence, often enhancing or diminishing, the response that the other part is having. We’re not machines – we are complex organisms with all kinds of internal systems, many of which we have yet to properly discover.

Like a lot of people, I have tried many cognitive approaches to improving my life – I have a wealth of books and courses done on this. The stark reality is that my emotions are not dictated by my thinking, nor are yours. I can’t think myself happy when I am feeling sad, and when I am feeling happy, sad thoughts are nowhere to be found.

What I have found really useful is to acknowledge my complexity as a human and use the appropriate tools for the specific. I use AER to release stressful emotions which in turn releases stressful thoughts, both of which help hold in place non-resourceful beliefs.

You think, you feel, you act, you be, you respond – and therefore you are. Help me spread the word – Rene has done enough damage with his “I think therefore I am”.

Are you stressed because of someone’s potential reaction?

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:22:51 +0000

I’ve written about how we can get stressed over what might happen, when we jump to conclusions. Here I’d like to focus on one variant of this situation, the one in which we can almost forecast what is going to happen when someone reacts to what we say or do and, as a result, we stop ourselves from acting.

Restricting ourselves from doing something (which includes saying something) in order to avoid the reaction we anticipate getting from someone is quite a common occurrence. For example, we don’t talk to a third party because we are worried that our significant other will get jealous and punish us. We don’t mention to the boss that the operations plan they have prepared is almost certain to fail, because we don’t want to experience their wrath and perhaps even get fired. I’m sure you can think of lots more examples…

This avoidance of other people’s potential reactions is pretty normal human self-preservation in action. Why would anyone want to be subjected to the slings and arrows of those who react negatively to benign events and facts? For most of us, there is no good reason to willingly inflict pain and suffering on ourselves.

So, as a result, we walk on eggshells, we detour around situations which are potentially uncomfortable, and we generally restrict our lives. We also end up with more stress, as we are constantly monitoring our actions and words in an effort to not trigger some undesirable reaction from someone. This monitoring and expectation can in fact lead to tremendous stress, and ultimately result in an unhealthy relationship between us and the other person.

There are at least two stress circuits engaged in this example. There is our stress and there is the stress of the other person. Let’s take a look at each.

Our stress

As mentioned above, our stress mainly arises because we anticipate something negative is going to happen.This anticipation is based upon our prior experience with this person, and incidents in which we perceived that they were reacting negatively to something linked to us. I use the word perceived, because we can interpret someone else’s reaction as negative when it is not.

Humans come with some pretty fancy brain circuits for saving time and doing pattern matching. We see a chair, and even if we have never seen that particular chair before, and it has legs shorter than any previous one we have seen, and a slanted back, we can identify that it is a chair. This is thanks to the marvels of our brain circuits for matching the pattern of a chair with this image and then seeing enough similarities to identify the form and use of the object within a very short period of time. These circuits also enable us to instantly recognize as human all kinds of people.

These same brain circuits can cause us to mis-perceive actions and expressions, especially when cultural elements come into play. For example, in some places in the world, a particular hand gesture is friendly and in others rude. Differing cultural interpretations of gestures and facial expressions has caused many a problem over the years, and diplomats are now taught what is and is not appropriate action in each country they visit. A quick search on the internet turned up this page with some examples of how differently people will interpret something as apparently benign as using your fingers to form a circle. Where these brain circuits really can get us into trouble is when we assume that we know what another person is feeling based upon our brain databanks of previous experiences.

We see someone smiling and could assume that they are happy. In some cultures and for some people regardless of cultural origin, smiling can signify embarrassment or confusion or anger. In fact, for the same person, the same facial expression or gesture can mean many different things, depending upon their emotional and mental state. It is not wise to assume that what we see means what our brain circuits instantly tell us it means – we could be really off the mark.

Now, if someone is smiling, and laughing and tells us in a cheerful voice that they are really happy, odds are that our initial interpretation is correct. But if we only have one bit of evidence (their smile), and we assumed they were happy, we would be indulging in single factor reasoning – drawing a conclusion based on insufficient data.

The same thing happens when we read a message from someone and conclude that they are in emotional state X. They might actually be in emotional state Y, but our pattern matching is hard at work, saving us time and yet leading us astray.

In an episode of the Kung Fu TV series, there is this bit of advice: “Recognize that all words are part false and part true, limited by our imperfect understanding. But strive always for honesty within yourself.” - Master Kan

The best way that I have found to be more certain about how another is actually reacting to what we are doing is to gently ask them. We may even discover that the frown on their face is not because they are unhappy, but because they are puzzled. Just because our speedy pattern matching brain circuits are telling us how to interpret their response, does not mean that we actually know. And, the crazy thing is that people have spent years thinking that someone always gets upset when they topic A is brought up when in fact they were not at all upset. They may have just been sad, for example, and it looked like upset on the surface.

If you think that someone is going to get upset every time you do Action G, and you don’t verify what is actually happening, it is quite likely that you are going to end up stressed. You’ll be seeing something negative happening in the future and wanting to avoid it. This anticipation and viewing of the movie of the future might even trigger stress responses in your body, as the mind can barely distinguish between reality and imagination – look at how you react to a scary dream or a horror movie. There is no scary person there in the room and yet your body is reacting as if there was, with your heart rate and breathing changed, and perhaps some sweaty palms…

Now if it was possible to simply think that the other person was going to react totally calmly to whatever you are considering doing, then all would be well. Unfortunately, we’re not wired that way. Our brains in our gut (enteric brain) and in our head are connected and store up all those memories and associated emotions from past occasions when we interpreted negatively something that was happening. The part of our head brain that does the thinking is not the same as the part that deals with emotions, so just trying to think your way past a fear does not work – you’ve got the wrong circuits in play. (This is why the AER process for Stress Elimination involves more than just thinking about an emotion when we want to release it.)

In order to start afresh with an openness to what are possible responses (positive, negative and neutral) from the other person, we need to de-energize those brain circuits that store our past interpretations and emotions. Once these memory circuits are de-energized, we are able to contemplate from a more neutral starting point. We won’t have past experiences crowding in and telling us that it is written in stone that we’re going to get a negative reaction if Person X hears Topic Y.

One of the many ways that we can feel stressed in this scenario is when we start to feel resentment about not being ourselves around that other person. I’ve seen many cases of people being able to discover a brand new way of relating to someone by releasing the stored emotions and memories concerning this person and giving things a fresh start, without the influence of pattern matching.

The other, very common form of pattern matching which can lead to stress is when we pattern match experiences with different people to someone new. We see what looks like a familiar pattern, maybe get a feeling about it, don’t verify to ensure that appearances and perceptions match reality and voila, person X is now seen and treated exactly the same as one or more people from your past.

Their stress

We’ve seen how complex this whole area of stressing over how another person might react can be. But, we’re not done yet.

Let’s say that the other person actually does react badly whenever you say or do something. They shout at you, or give you the prolonged silent treatment, or say negative words about the subject, sneer at it, belittle it, whatever. If you assembled an independent group of observers and asked them to evaluate the reaction you get, they would vote in the majority for it being considered a negative response. And, they would say the same thing consistently over time, so you have an accurate observation of the pattern of behaviour.

More than likely, this reaction that you are getting is the result of the stress being experienced by the other person, and triggered by whatever you are doing. Much of the time, when people react strongly to something, it is because they have some unresolved issue that has been triggered. Don Miguel Ruiz calls these wounds and they certainly behave as a wound would.

Imagine that you hurt your leg, cutting it on a sharp edge. Until it heals fully, each time you touch that wound it will hurt and while it is still healing over, can be re-opened and start bleeding again. Our emotional wounds are much like this. The main difference is that emotional wounds are not as easy to spot as physical ones. At least, not so easy at first. Having worked with a fair number of people in the role of facilitator of their emotional release work, I have seen first-hand many times how some issue appears in a form different from its reality. Someone may be sad, for example, and yet appears to be angry. Someone else may be grieving and come across as rude. These surface expressions are not the real feelings, but are masking feelings that seem to be easier to have than the others. The whole discussion of empowering versus dis-empowering feelings is going to need another article to cover it properly, but suffice to say that some feelings, like anger, feel better to us than others, such as grief.

It is entirely likely that when someone responds negatively to a neutral or positive action of yours (I’m still including what you say as an action), you are not seeing their real reaction to your action, but actually some issue of something like self esteem, a fear of rejection, etc.

Like most people, they blame how they feel on the outside world. And since you are the person who is doing something which triggers them, touching that unhealed wound, they direct their negative response at you. Animals with injuries do the same thing to protect their injured parts – they snarl and snap to keep you at a safe distance. It is not about you, but about them protecting themselves. And, for humans, there is going to be a lot of stress involved.

The solution for these people is the same as for you – release the stored emotions and all of a sudden things start to look different. It does not matter what these stored emotions are about – if they are inside us, they stress us and distort our perspective of the world, ourselves and our possibilities.

So long as we hold unresolved feelings inside, everyone in touch with us suffers in some way.

Are you going to be dead right?

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:43:00 +0000

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.

Stressing over what might be…

admin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:49:06 +0000

Have you ever noticed how easy it is for some people to get all concerned about something that might happen? It does not seem to matter if the probability of this “something” actually happening is incredibly low. In fact, there does not seem to be any mathematical relationship between the degree of probability and the intensity of the stressing.

Just so we’re all clear on this concept, let’s dissect it for a moment, as if we were in high-school biology class. Don’t worry, we’re not going to be touching all those “icky” bits.

Stop for a moment and notice if you started to … … actually stress just a little over the thought of what we are about to talk about being as “icky” as you might have found the dissecting of innocent critters in some biology lab. Oh, that wasn’t you, right? OK, on with the show then. But I’m watching your stress-o-meter, so beware.

Here’s what we’ve got, basically :

- a person

- the present moment

- a possible future

- a thought or two about that possible future

- reactions to those thoughts about this possible future.

Put all these ingredients together, shake well and bake for 20 minutes on medium and depending on the reactions, you could have stress present. This stress arises because we humans react to these thoughts with emotions and feelings and when these reactions include fear, anxiety, worry, etc., we get stressed.

There are some philosophies which say that if you stop having those thoughts, you stop having reactions to them. I like that idea, except… turning off your thoughts or changing them around can take a lot of willpower and effort. Here’s where I make a confession – I’m lazy. So lazy, in fact, that I don’t want to spend all that time stressing myself about making those thoughts go away. I am a big fan of meditation, but for most people it seems to take a long time to reach that point where you are able to watch your thoughts all the time. Most of the rest of us seem stuck with having some delay between the thought arising, reacting and then entering observer mode. I keep working at it, but maybe there are other options available for the here and now.

There are what I call mental systems such as NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) in which thoughts that can trigger emotional responses are constantly “re-framed” into something benign, basically by changing your perspective on them. This approach works some of the time, but often I suspect it requires another fairly hefty investment of energy, as one has to figure out a better way to look at things while emotions are flaring up.

The fact remains that our feelings can pop up quickly after we have a thought and once those feelings are engaged, it becomes harder to think straight. That is because when we get emotionally excited, particularly by thoughts that trigger a fear/anxiety response, our bodies switch over to fight or flight response circuits and blood is diverted from the rational part of our brain to the more survival oriented parts. In other words, your logic circuits are being starved of blood just when you want them to figure out a better way to perceive the thoughts that are running around getting you all worked up.

I’ve come up with a Plan B – drain the energy out of the exaggerated emotional responses and then one can think clearer. OK, I snuck in the concept of exaggeration with regard to the emotional response. It really is a topic for another article, but many times we over-react to thoughts and situations because we have a whole warehouse of unresolved situations stored inside us. Until we resolve them, these situations and their associated thoughts and feelings keep popping up asking for our attention. So, until they get resolved, they bring their energy to the party when we start to speculate about a possible future. The worry we feel is often not just the normal worry about potential future situation X. It is also the accumulated unresolved worry from past situations that we have yet to release.

Given this, we really could benefit from draining those lingering feelings when they arise. That is where releasing techniques such as AER (Awareness Expression Resolution) come in handy.

In Plan B, when we have a thought about the future and some reaction occurs, we notice it and use AER to drain the energy out of it. Voila, this potential future is now visible in a much more realistic manner. And, the potential to get stressed over what might be is greatly reduced.

I wish you well on your journey.