This post is a follow up from last month’s Mental “Health Food” that raised the question: Why don’t we apply the same standards and value for filtering out unhealthy thoughts, as we do for filtering out unhealthy foods? I find many people logically understand that if they eat something unhealthy they get that it will make them feel awful, and therefore avoid eating foods with undesirable consequences. Yet, this same logic is not equally applied to filtering out unhealthy thoughts which make an individual feel awful. If you wouldn’t eat stress inducing foods all day long, than why would you allow yourself to sip on the ?I’m not good enough, ?or I am bitter and angry, it’s not fair? Stress-Slurpee all day long? Unhealthy mental and emotional states equally create stress in the body, just as a harmful diet can ? both equally wear and tear the body down day after day, year after year with undesirable consequences.
If you are truly looking to be healthy you don’t want to minimize, numb out, ignore, or try to overpower your mental and emotional health by focusing solely on your diet and exercise. As a human being you FEEL and THINK all day long ? so your mental and emotional well-being is an essential component in your total health.
?I’ve come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic (mind-body-emotion) component. Recent technology innovations have allowed us to examine the molecular basis of the emotions, and to begin to understand how the molecules of our emotions share intimate connections with our health and are indeed inseparable from our physiology. ? Neuroscientist Candace Pert
In this post we are going to explore why it is difficult to simply muscle mind yourself into only thinking healthy thoughts and editing out stress-inducing ones. If you find yourself struggling to stop negative emotions and thoughts, and are running a daily internal dialogue that causes anxiety, anger, stress, depression, or other health problems etc? please don’t beat yourself up. It is not easy to just stop stressful emotions and thoughts on a dime. Why? Because hot-blooded thoughts often have Achilles Heel triggers attached to them, and these triggers are not easily undone because what birthed them and sustains them are unresolved memories of traumatic and/or repetitive stressful events that contain an enormous amount of trapped stress and emotion within them. These triggers are fully loaded and powerful, which invariably can bind an individual to the past imprisoning him/her to that stress. Left unresolved Achilles Heel triggers grow more and more sensitive over time causing increased stress that often leads to physical symptoms in the body.
To understand why these Achilles Heel emotional and mental triggers are so powerful picture a large reservoir of water in your mind say the Hoover Damn. Behind the dam is an amazing amount of pressure. The reservoir took time to fill up, but overtime the pressure began to build and once full the force behind the dam grew to be enormous. Achilles Heel triggers are like a dam, they have an accumulation of trapped emotional kinetic energy behind them, and once triggered an overwhelming amount of emotions and strewing mental tangents gets released inside an individual ? temporarily overtaking an individual’s logical, reasoning mind. Have you ever gotten triggered and had your emotions completely take you over causing you to react in the heat of the moment? Have you ever felt an illogical response rise within yourself because of how someone or something triggered you? If you are human you should be nodding your head yes’that is unless you happen to come from planet Vulcan!
Actually, I totally agree with Spock; emotions are definitely illogical. Buuuuut, I would like to equally surmise that your emotions are incredibly meaningful; they induce beautiful shades of color and depth within the experience of your life, while also playing an essential role in being a biological feedback system providing crucial information to your conscious awareness. Emotions impart a momentous gift with a great deal to teach you about yourself as they alert you to what repressed stress patterns require your immediate attention. As an empowered individual your aim is to recognize that your emotions are incredibly powerful, but in the same breath to know you don’t have to be ruled by them ? your emotions are not the WHOLE of who you are. Within you is a much wiser, poised and powerful source of self-healing consciousness to tap into.
I like to think of it like this: your Lower Mind registers the problem, feels the emotions, has hot-blooded thoughts about people and circumstances, and then these biological indicators act as important signals requiring higher levels of thought, perception, questioning, and discovering solutions to your problems. This elevates you to the realm of your Higher Mind. Each of us has a Higher Mind; it is your inner-sage and inner-healer that can resolve and self-heal the stress within your pain. If you resolve your pain by learning, growing and evolving through it, your pain suddenly becomes fuel for your life rather than chains that hold you back. This art of transformation is accessible within every person thanks to the Higher Mind. ?If you have the ability to think low level perceptions and ordinary thoughts, then of course you can rise to a higher perception where self-healing and wisdom resides.
Emotions and hot-blooded thoughts are powerful and biologically sensitive for a reason. For instance, let’s say growing up you had a parent who was incredibly hard on you. Perhaps you were criticized all the time ? nothing you did was ever good enough, nor did you measure up to his/her incredibly high standards, whether it was grades, sports, needing to have a clean perfect room, or perfect outer appearance, etc. Or perhaps, you grew up where one or more parents had a violent temper, mental health challenges, was physically abusive, or had substance abuse problems. You never felt fully safe and secure growing up. Other traumas could be the death of a parent, divorce, mom or dad losing a job, or having to move to a new school, state or country. Or perhaps you grew up being bullied by peers, or everyone else seemed wealthy while you lived on the wrong side of the tracks.
To a sensitive developing psyche these experiences create stress patterns and triggers when left unresolved over several decades can easily develop into physical symptoms in the body such as:
- Anxiety
- Anger Issues
- Insomnia
- Adrenal Fatigue
- Depression
- Headaches/Migraines
- Digestive Issues
- Bladder Infections
- Eczema
- Conflicts in Relationships
- Weight Issues
- Back Pain, etc.
The body and mind are not separate, which is why specific forms of stress lead to specific forms of disease in the body. The body and psyche were separated out in the 17th century when Rene Decartes, the founding father of medicine, made a necessary deal with the church to grant him legal permission to dissect cadavers if it was agreed that the human body was separate from the mind, emotions, and spirit. Ever since then the human being in the Western world has been predominantly divided into two separate spheres that are never supposed to overlap. Makes logical sense right? When you are nervous you experience that as an intellectual concept floating next to yourself, right? Right? Never in your stomach!
Let’s say you struggle with a daily self-ridiculing inner dialogue. You constantly beat yourself up. You believe you have to figure out how to make everything work, that you have to do things perfectly, that you can’t make mistakes, that you need to say the right things in social settings and do perfect and amazing work, or be a perfect parent?..
Where does this inner dialogue come from? Why are you so hard on yourself? Did you pop out of the womb feeling this way about yourself, or did you grow up in an environment where you were at the receiving end of a lot of criticism or bullying? The point is: logically we know we can’t be perfect, but internally we have a deep guttural fear of messing up or failing. Sure there is a lot of social pressure to succeed, but the deep underlying need, fear, or anger comes from something much more personal.
Get curious and create a healthy detachment for a moment – what is your Achilles trigger? What sets you off on a mental and emotional tangent? What is a daily or weekly emotional and mental charge that you feel RUN by?
Chances are unless you are from planet Vulcan you’ve got one. If you have questions I will do my best to answer them below.
Bella Dodds is a Integrative Health Coach. She uses advanced methodologies that allow her clients to get to the core root of stress creating disharmony in their physiology and psychology. You can contact Bella for a 15 minute complimentary consultation to discuss areas of in your life you would like to improve using her Higher Mind Health methods. Bella works nationally and internationally via phone or Skype. To set up a consult click HERE. Serious inquiries only please.
firsd
Great post Bella.
Mind-fitness is not something our culture values very highly yet it pays massive dividends.
Cheers
I am often haunted by stupid or insensitive things I’ve said to people. I’m not a fantastic verbal communicator and I am naturally shrewd and logical about things. I don’t always empathize with people on an emotional level and that can alienate me, and predispose me to saying dumb shit. The problem is that I remember the incidents months, years, decades later! They still bother me.
Thank you so much for this article, Bella. I found it very thoughtful and thought-provoking. I just have one point of divergence with you: While I agree that current negative thoughts are often fueled by dammed-up old emotions, I think that a response of healthy attachment, rather than healthy detachment, is what ultimately heals chronic negativity.
Trying to transcend emotions, in my experience, usually means rejecting parts of yourself that are hurt. Feeling is healing. As a therapist I’ve seen that allowing yourself to fully experience and tolerate the “yuck” is constructive and helps permanently heal old injuries so that the transcendence you speak of is not an act of will, but a natural and effortless evolution.
Hiya Tina yes actually I do agree with you! I try to make my posts concise so it is hard to tie in all my thoughts on this subject!
Emotions are essentially vibrating charges of energy we can’t see them but we can certainly feel them. I agree it is important to feel them, understand why we feel them (as they can feel quite overwhelming and illogical at times) and then create a healthy space…with enough to learn from them. A common ‘yucky’ feeling is rejection. No one loves this feeling and there are infinite ways we can be rejected in life…my practice is geared toward activating the Higher Mind to see how rejected played a vital role of growth in someones life.
For some it helped them to become more independent, closer to family and friends, inward and reflective, reconnecting to their truth and authenticity, move on and start a new path in life…for others it might be fuel to have a successful business where they can interact with more people – so the rejection ignited them to be on purpose in life.
When an individual see’s the many unexpected benefits CONNECTED to pain…and graceful self-healing shift happens and pain is replaced by wisdom, growth and purpose. It is truly there every time.
Thanks for bringing this up and sharing other pathways. I certainly believe there are infinite ways to the center and self-healing : )
Today, like every other day
I wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t go to the door of the study
And begin to read a book.
Instead, take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty of what you love
Be what you do.
There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
– Rumi
Heya Prancie
Do you notice any similar threads on how you feel about it? Repeating emotions and perceptions about what bothers you even though they are decades apart and various characters…
It is not what happens it is how you perceive what happens. If you have thoughts and emotions that linger and clamp on…there is actually valuable information for you below the surface of the ‘story’ …
This post reminds me of a show called Black books where Manny, played by Bill Bailey, is looking for the little book of calm. He swallows it by accident and is told that it has scarred up a lot of his insides and that he has a 30 percent chance of surviving the surgery. Then, by a miracle, he assimilates the little book of calm into his whole being and goes around saying things like ” if you’re feeling under pressure, do something different, roll up your sleeves or eat an orange.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgqjTN9_TE
So people can have both extremely self destructive thoughts about themselves and extremely good thoughts about themselves at the same time. Sometimes, like in stephen Fry’s case, this manifests itself as Cyclothemia or a light form of bipolar dissorder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqMcAeLWO9c
Cognitave dissonance can also form as a result of having both love and hate for a subject. Hence the term love hate relationship.
Along with that I think a working knowledge of how the brain makes descisions is best to quickly catch yourself when someone makes themselves habitually unhappy.
Oh look a quick 5 minute working knowledge. No need to sit through a Robert Sapolsky Seminar unless one wants to hear his excellent speaking voice.
That isn’t to say further knowledge is dull, but maybe if you haven’t dedicated your life to the brain or health it is a little over zealous to pursue a memory of the detail in such a seminar and the education that is very demanding. But only maybe. Dissorder>help when it’s more like Dissorder> was it just stress?> What can I do to help myslef> Why should I have to pay for this?
Here is the 5 minute working knowledge Sorry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy0P5AYwFao
Thanks for the clips! :)
Migraines are not caused by emotional pain from our past. Migraine is a genetic, neurological disorder, just like epilepsy or multiple sclerosis.
Hi Rachel thanks for you comment. Actually many diseases have been pegged on genetics but fortunately with the last few decades of research of epigentics it is now understood that a very small percentage of diseases are due to faulty genes and that it is the stress of the environment (mental, emotional, and toxins) that effects gene activity. Genes are not self-emergent, which means they act only when signaled from the environment. Here is a quote from Mind Over Medicine:
“We use to think that some people were blessed with good genes, while others were cursed with what some in the medical community insensitively referred to a piss-poor-protoplasm. In fact, few diseases result from a single gene mutation. Less than 2% of diseases such as cystic fibrosis, huntingons chorea, beta thalassemia, result from a single faulty gene. Only about 5% of cancer and cardiac disease patients can attribute their disease to heredity. This means that the majority of disease processes can be explained by environmental factors to which the cells are exposed.
I have worked with a client who had weekly debilitating migraines where she had to isolate herself in a dark room every week. We identified the conflicts of stress and she found how some of her greatest stresses lead to great gifts and opportunities in her life. When her mind saw that within her challenges were also profound benefits making her stronger, more independent, a world traveler, and great artist – she resolved her stress and her body was able to self-heal and her migraines went away. Once her triggers were resolved her body no longer was in conflict.
I would not be surprised if genetics made people predisposed to migraines, but stress is most definitely a huge migraine trigger.
I think we all have genetic weaknesses, but lifestyle is very much involved with whether they are expressed or not. For one person emotional trauma/stress might cause chronic migraines, for another chronic depression. Without the trigger, maybe neither would have appeared.
I have just been diagnosed with pyroluria and two MTHFR genes. This explains my decades of depression and anxiety. It also explains why no therapy or medication could help me! Just throwing this out there in case someone else might think to look into it and get tested. I can see it in my family also. I think the work you’re doing is awesome but just wanted to say sometimes it can be genetic.
Nicole if you were ever curious about the biological stress associated with these symptoms from a META-Health perspective I’d be happy to email them to you.
Your comment is interesting. It’s a little like the chicken and the egg. What came first. The emotional issue and build up of symptoms, or the genetic mutations that keep you from completing the methlyation cycle properly and caused symptoms. Seems like they can feed on each other. I’m waiting on the same tests with a feeling of potential relief if I have MTHFR gene mutations, not because I want to blame my genetics for my problems, but because I want to know why all my nutrition and emotional work may not have been enough. It hurts to try and fail at healing. At the very least the genetic information helps individuals like yourself (and maybe me) stop casting about, trying every regimen out there trying to get well. Hopefully you can work around these gene mutations and find your path to healing.
why half of my post didnt appear I dont know. but if somone could delete this one I can try again.
This post reminds me of a show called Black books where Manny, played by Bill Bailey, is looking for the little book of calm. He swallows it by accident and is told that it has scarred up a lot of his insides and that he has a 30 percent chance of surviving the surgery. Then, by a miracle, he assimilates the little book of calm into his whole being and goes around saying things like ” if you’re feeling under pressure, do something different, roll up your sleeves or eat an orange.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgqjTN9_TE
So people can have both extremely self destructive thoughts about themselves and extremely good thoughts about themselves at the same time. Sometimes, like in stephen Fry’s case, this manifests itself as Cyclothemia or a light form of bipolar dissorder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqMcAeLWO9c
Cognitave dissonance can also form as a result of having both love and hate for a subject. Hence the term love hate relationship.
Along with that I think a working knowledge of how the brain makes descisions is best to quickly catch yourself when someone makes themselves habitually unhappy.
Oh look a quick 5 minute working knowledge.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy0P5AYwFao
No need to sit through a Robert Sapolsky Seminar unless one wants to hear his excellent speaking voice.
That isn’t to say further knowledge is dull, but maybe if you haven’t dedicated your life to the brain or health it is a little over zealous to pursue a memory of the detail in such a seminar and the education that is very demanding. But only maybe. Dissorder>help when it’s more like Dissorder> was it just stress?> What can I do to help myslef> Why should I have to pay for this?
^ again this messed up it’s only posting half of what I wrote and then the end.
I can’t help but think that there isn’t a need for improving the methodology of mental health professionals, but that maybe there is a lack of good mental health proffessionals in general.
in my experiance I went to a school reccomended doctor Michael something. He told me to hop on one foot and then immediately diagnosed me with ADHD. Then I went to another doctor for a while because my dad was trying to advocate for me in school and this new doctor David Schrumpf said that my problem was that I had short term memory loss. All this time I just generally didn’t like school. I didn’t make any unreasonable descisions or develop any drug habbits or get in any fights so I can’t say myself that I have a mental condition as such but my dad wanted to push the point to get me some sort of help in school. Later on though after I was finished with Schrumpf I found out he was convicted of sexual abuse.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-11-01/explore/ph-ag-schrumpf-1102-20111101_1_home-confinement-abuse-alford-plea
I was never abused thank goodness, but it makes me think that one gets lucky no matter what their circumstances. I think if you truely want to help people with modern stress problems there is no solution that doesn’t end in some sort of ideology. So perhaps it’s more important to realize that ideology has been seperated from important issues in modern culture than to complain about how at some point the church had a heinous idea about seperation of mind and body that really doesn’t permeate into modern culture.
There are of coarse more serious cases of mental illness that people are born with that have nothing to do with stress as a cause but can certainly make somone stressed. In this case the working knowledge of the brain may not apply to these people and they may need serious help like people with autism.
I feel like what this post says is Stress>Dissorder>help when it’s more like Dissorder> was it just stress?> What can I do to help myslef> Why should I have to pay for this?
This it the second half of what I said ^^^ . so sorry for all the long psts .
Great post. Between the two of us, we’re definitely giving Star Trek some play on 180D. Fascinating.
Haha that is hilarious! Spock is awesome. I’ll find a way to throw in a Yoda quote soon. Oh the ever wise YODA.
I disagree that emotions are illogical. Unless you have a disordered mind, they happen for a reason. The trick is to act and not react. Unfortunately, a lot of people have been taught to behave in a certain way or have had their emotions invalidated so that they have learnt to adapt instead of dealing with the situation. Undoing this is not easy and requires time and energy but is necessary for that person’s well being. This is why avoiding dysfunctional people from the start is a good idea, but unfortunately for many people those disordered people are their relatives, teachers etc.
Interesting that you mentioned Descartes and his mind/body duality. The work of Damasio and others have shown that when damaged brains cannot process emotions properly, then thinking is impaired. Among a whole list of things, they cannot make survival decisions fast enough. The assumptions upon which the character and mental abilities of Spock are based are faulty. May be not if you are half Vulcan but definitely if you are human.
James,
Talking about disfunctional people, I saw that episode of “Black Books” and Bill Bailey is very funny, as are the other comedians. An even funnier episode, ‘Hello sun’ was when Fran took up yoga and Bernard saw a shrink. That one sends up health woo.
I’m becoming fond of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy type approach to dealing with unhelpful negative emotions. It’s the modern scientific analog to Buddhist mindfulness.
In this approach when you are feeling trapped in negative emotions, it’s because you are struggling to directly change them which is impossible. This will be a never ending war that you can never win, because emotions are not a material object that the brain evolved to manipulate intentionally. It is better to accept your emotions and the thoughts that come with them as your brain’s innocent attempt to be of service and then turn your attention to what you value doing in the present.
The brain feels a negative reinforcement reward by struggling as if you had just sprinted away from a dangerous animal by releasing adrenalin and endorphins when you engage the distressing emotions as an enemy to get rid of. This is how we get trained to feel distressed when unhelpful thoughts appear and try to control how we feel through unhealthy behavior.
The truth is there is little that is worth constantly running away from in the modern urban world. It is better to focus your attention on what you want to go towards and embrace and the behaviors that will move you in their direction. Then as distracting, disturbing thoughts and emotions stream through your mind you can choose to loosen your grip on them if they are not useful with mindfulness techniques and then get back on the path to what is important to you.
So my take would be that emotions are neither logical or illogical, but they may be useful or not useful depending on what is currently important to you.
This is totally correct. Emotional responses can be become automatic and they are elicited based on similarities in the current situation to significant (either positive or negative) events in the person’s past. They may not be helpful in the present but they are elicited because something in the present resembles something important in the past. And I agree completely with Stephen Hayes that it is our resistance to these emotions that perpetuates them. We react with fear to the emotions themselves, as if we are really overcoming them by refusing to acknowledge or express them. They are having their influence anyway and it lasts much longer than if we just acknowledged them and expressed them. But it is habit to fight them, it is not conscious.
One of the most helpful things I learned in therapy was to face my emotions rather than run from them. I had a lot of painful emotions locked up inside. A lot of us do. They have to be acknowledged and released (which admittedly is a really tough thing to go through, but essential). You can’t just gloss over them because they will bubble up to the surface in other ways.
Any time I start to feel anxious and stressed now, I have learned that it is pretty much always due to me trying to avoid something. Once I just decided to sit and think through it and accept and face whatever it is, the stress and anxiety dissipate. This often involves dealing with very uncomfortable emotions, but it truly is easier in the long run just to face and work through it and allow your emotions to express themselves.
In our society, I see a lot of avoidance and running away from issues/problems. Addictions, drugs (both illegal and prescription), always going going, eating disorders, obsessions, are all in my opinion the results of people avoiding rather than facing their pain. In the end it just leads to more chronic emotional pain (and physical problems, too) than facing the darn thing to begin with (which is a lot of acute emotional pain).
The Spock line and joke really stood out! … Curious of your thoughts about what I said after:
“Actually, I totally agree with Spock; emotions are definitely illogical. Buuuuut, I would like to equally surmise that your emotions are incredibly meaningful; they induce beautiful shades of color and depth within the experience of your life, while also playing an essential role in being a biological feedback system providing crucial information to your conscious awareness. Emotions impart a momentous gift with a great deal to teach you about yourself as they alert you to what repressed stress patterns require your immediate attention. As an empowered individual your aim is to recognize that your emotions are incredibly powerful, but in the same breath to know you don’t have to be ruled by them ? your emotions are not the WHOLE of who you are. Within you is a much wiser, poised and powerful source of self-healing consciousness to tap into…If you resolve your pain by learning, growing and evolving through it, your pain suddenly becomes fuel for your life rather than chains that hold you back. This art of transformation is accessible within every person thanks to the Higher Mind.”
Emotions are beautiful and they are also challenging – my whole purpose for why I do what is I am dedicated to helping people take ugly, yucky, challenging and difficult emotions and turn them into something beautiful and meaningful. As all things in life are evolving and advancing so to can we use our emotions in beautiful ways – we don’t have to manage them when we learn to embrace them essential teachers.
Curious of your thoughts on turning difficult emotions into inspiration…
I essentially agree with much of what you’ve said, especially about feeling the emotions and tapping into them because they are there to help you tune into something. I agree that the emotions themselves should be viewed as positives because of this. I would just want to make sure that people are processing the negatives before trying to put positive spins on things.
If you think about someone who was abused as a child, for example, I really believe they need to truly feel and sit with and process the anger and sadness and everything else for awhile (and people can avoid this for years and decades because it hurts so much). They can acknowledge some positive aspects simultaneously, such as they are withdrawing from others because their body is trying to protect them, or their anger is tapping into something for good reason. Then after more of the emotions are worked out, they can look for some other positives, such as their emotions resulted in they have learned first-hand how not to act as a parent, or that because of the abuse they ended up going through therapy and becoming so much more self-aware, or it led them to a career as a teacher, or whatever. But I am of the belief that you gotta face the negatives and sadness, too, before giving things the happy face treatment.
Hey Real Amy, Yes I completely agree – feeling is healing and being fully present with emotions is very important. Resisting and repressing pain creates all sorts of havoc in the body as well as a ripple effect of unwanted pain and challenges. I had a client who felt guilt most of her life, until she realized that she had nothing to feel guilty about and 30+ years of guilt was replaced by anger, which was excellent and essential for her to feel to create new boundaries in her life, and a new sense of self worth. I felt it was best for her to feel anger for months or longer – whatever she needed, until she was ready for the next layer. Anger certainly serves a healing purpose.
When an individual is ready to no longer be weighted by the same emotions and the same mental record player – than learning how to transform pain into purpose is freeing and absolutely life-changing which is something I am dedicating my life to teaching people how to do.
Glad you brought up the importance of first getting in touch with what is really there – I absolutely agree. It is essential. There are infinite ways to the center and to heal : )
Excellent post. I have noticed that since I learned how to say what was bothering me in a non-destructive script, that I am much happier, and I don’t let things fester.
Awesome Alisha! Amazing how powerful a simple shift can be.
Hi,
I have recently been exposed to a method called Faster EFT. It helps you release emotions and feelings quickly without having to analyze or know much about why the emotion is there. It can also help with eliminating false beliefs which can improve our lives tremendously. You can Google Faster EFT and see over 500 videos on how to use it. It is very easy and effective.
I was just going to post the same info RSD. It is difficult to get in the habit (and especially when one is fighting negative thoughts all the time!), but I did find a practitioner a few years ago, and found that I was able to reduce my extreme (over)sensitivity to noise almost overnight by using faster EFT.
A couple of links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ8Y6bf0kbo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=derk0wdtkoA
plus another 500-600 free videos on youtube…
Would love to hear what others think about this.
I love EFT … I saw faster EFT online somewhere, will check it out. I like a transformation inside out approach to healing. I find working with where and why you have stress in the first place – and then working to find the greater meaning that arose from that stress not only gives you new access to untapped power in your life it also transforms your story – PERMANTLY. Then I like to use EFT to clear out the extra static and reprogram the subconscious with positive beliefs. All fun and good stuff. Healing is fun and rewarding in the purest sense. Will check out the links too :-)
You’ve seen EFT work?
I don’t know much about Emotional Freedom Technique (not to be confused with Emotion Focused Therapy) but I’ve been getting back into reading a lot about psychology and emotional healing lately and I’ve recently come to understand something that makes me inclined to believe what you are saying. What I’ve come to understand is that to resolve a problematic feeling it is not at all necessary to have an episodic memory of the events that initially caused it and it is not necessary to even have a full conscious appreciation of what the feeling is about. I heard an interview on shrinkrapradio.com with Robert Scaer (episode 321) where he talks about getting rid of a tic that he’d had all his life. He saw Peter Levine and did a single session of somatic experiencing and the tic was gone. During the session he didn’t make any effort to go over the event and describe it. He only had to activate the memory and allow his natural reaction to run to completion. No analysis was required. No narrative was required. It turned out the tic had developed after he was in a car accident where the other car hit his car on the side where he soon after developed the tic. It was just the self-protective reaction trying complete itself. Many people believe that emotional reactions are the same as this motor reaction of attempted self protection. If they can’t complete naturally they can be unknowingly triggered over and over and over throughout one’s life. Instead of a tic, one may feel a continual troublesome emotion, or only the beginning of what would have been a proper fully felt emotion if it had been allowed to complete.
TMS71
Have you heard of the book Waking the Tiger? It talks exactly about what you are speaking of. Allowing the body to run it’s course and release the trauma out of the system. In nature animals do it all the time to release the tension from a high sympathetic state. I actually use to do Myofascial Release Therapy which allows the facia to shake and get the stress out of the system. It is profound and beautiful work – very healing for the body and you don’t have to consciously know what you are releasing.
My experience is that there are infinite ways to the center for healing. Different periods in your life require different methods, and different symptoms require various angles to support the body to heal.
Yes I have experienced EFT to work. It can be brilliant! It doesn’t work as well for me as the Demartini Method, but again to each his own. :-) And sometimes EFT works much better for me the DM, NLP or Advanced Clearing Energetics. Healing is an art … you follow the moment, surrender and go where the inner genius takes you.
Hi, thanks for the input! I looked it up. It’s interesting though I don’t understand rationally how it works. How do you choose what to say when you’re just generally a high-strung emotional person? :P
Hi Luce,
You can say whatever it is you feel stressed about. Often times layers unfold and underlying stress reveals itself.
Best to gauge it by referencing whatever you feel stressed about with a scale on 1-10… after tapping for 5-10 minutes see if your stress has gone down on the scale. Sometimes it can go up because of a more stressful issue you have become conscious of. If so tap on the next level. For me I prefer ending with self-healing and empowering statement :-)
The Tapping Solution is a good read!
Negative emotions are probably a symptom of disease, not a cause. I was plagued by brutalizing and suicidal thoughts for years. I spent endless hours in a futile attempt to eradicate them, which only made me feel worse, since it was impossible. No book was going to take them away. No moralizing life coaches. No affirmation tapes. No faddish mental health therapy.
Eventually, I found I’d had years of untreated severe sleep apnea. Getting actual rest radically reduced my negative emotions, but didn’t do away with them. My doctor found I had severe deficiencies of zinc, folate, and vitamin D. Vitamin D levels are supposed to be at 30; mine was at 6. He gave me proper supplements, and within months those horrific thoughts I’d dealt with for 35 years just melted away.
Let’s not make ourselves feel inadequate for being unable to police our own thoughts.
Negative emotions are probably a symptom of disease, not a cause. I was plagued by brutalizing and suicidal thoughts for years. I spent endless hours in a futile attempt to eradicate them, which only made me feel worse, since it was impossible. No book was going to take them away. No moralizing life coaches. No affirmation tapes. No faddish mental health therapy.
Eventually, I found I’d had years of untreated severe sleep apnea. Getting actual rest radically reduced my negative emotions, but didn’t do away with them. My doctor found I had severe deficiencies of zinc, folate, and vitamin D. Vitamin D levels are supposed to be at 30; mine was at 6. He gave me proper supplements, and within months those horrific thoughts I’d dealt with for 35 years just melted away, without the herculean efforts I had been putting into it making them stop for years on end.
Let’s not make ourselves feel inadequate for being unable to police our own thoughts, or control things that may be fundamentally out of our control.
As I just wrote above my experience is that there are infinite ways to the center for healing. Different periods in your life require different methods, and different symptoms require various angles to support the body to heal.
That is brilliant you found out what your body needed and got the perfect care.
Sometimes you go through the body with movement and diet as the primary focus and other times you go through the mind and emotions.
I don’t believe there is one right way.