Are the ghosts of old emotions still pulling your strings? Are you held back by feelings and reactions leftover from the past?
Most of us have bits of stuff tucked away in the cupboards of our minds
-- stuff which, like all junk, may have been relevant once but now is
just cluttering up our lives.
I was once helping someone who had so much clutter, she hardly
had room to live. ‘But it might come in useful!’ she wailed whenever
she thought of throwing anything away. Well, the deep emotional brain
works on much the same basis. Whenever you’re really stressed, it goes
on red alert. It stores every detail of the situation as danger signs.
And from then on, maybe for years, maybe for life, it keeps a sharp eye
out for anything that reminds it of that situation. It keeps the whole
episode alive in your unconscious. It’s a valuable survival system,
learning from past danger to keep you clear of future danger. But so
often, past learning just isn’t appropriate today. Often, this system
has you reacting to the here and now in ways which you learned when you
were five or six!
Every single thing stored like this is a stress. You’re using up
brain energy (and your brain uses a fifth to a quarter of all your
energy, so this is serious) looking out for reminders of fearful things
which happened maybe twenty years ago. Also serious is that the more
your unconscious is focussed on watching out for past dangers, the less
you’re free to look around the world as it is now, or envisage the
future. You’re too busy looking out for tigers to notice the flowers!
I’m describing traumas, of course. And if any major ones have,
unfortunately, happened to you, you’ll know all about it! Things like
car crashes, medical horrors, sudden death, assaults, war. But there
are less dramatic sorts of trauma which can affect us just as
profoundly, and for just as long. As social beings, to be rejected by
our mothers or our social group has been death for many millions of
years. So the emotional brain also freaks out over interpersonal issues
like bullying, rejection, humiliation, unfairness, injustice,
abandonment, and stores these things too as dangers.
Jon
was very talented but lacked confidence to take his career a step
further. Like many creative people, he was dyslexic. At primary school,
his reading difficulties had led to a gang of kids taunting him:
‘You’ll never amount to anything … you’re a loser.’
Samantha had been ostracised for two years at secondary school. Ten
years later, she went on a trip with a group of friends but fell ill.
She was miserably aware that she couldn’t keep up or share their
enjoyment. Once again, she felt the odd one out. She had a series of
panic attacks.
Zoe’s first love had cheated on her. She’d been humiliated and
heart-broken. Now in her 30s, every relationship since had been
blighted by her lack of trust and suspicion.
Angie’s father had been violent and alcoholic. She remembered
terrifying shouting and banging. Now she was hampered at work because
she couldn’t do anything which might lead to confrontation.
For all these people, the original incident was still alive in
their deep brain. Jon’s unconscious could hear those jeering classmates
like it was yesterday. Samantha panicked at any sign of being left out,
because the pain of those years of isolation was still with her. Zoe
‘knew’ that every man would betray her, and if her current boyfriend
showed no signs of doing so, then she’d drive him to it. Angie was an
anxious doormat, childhood fears aroused by even the thought of raised
voices.
Whenever an emotion hits you ‘out of the blue’ -- a sudden surge
of depression, anger or anxiety, an adrenaline flutter in your chest or
dread weight in your diaphragm -- that’s a sign this deep alarm system
has been triggered and your feelings are controlled by ghosts from the
past. The system is so powerful that it’s difficult, often impossible,
to reason yourself out of it. Time and new learning can heal, of course
-- but often slowly and imperfectly. And if you keep tripping over old
mental clutter, why wait! Here’s how to clear some of this junk out ...
Try these D-I-Y ways of turning past hurts into -- just plain memories.
(If your past is more than you can bear to work on … don’t try. Find a
therapist who uses Rewind or EMDR -- probably a Human Givens, NLP or
hypnotherapist.) To check progress, start by deciding how much the
memory upsets you on a scale of one to ten. Then repeat one or both of
these techniques daily, till the emotion scale is virtually zero. (Also
powerful is the emotional freedom technique -- www.emofree.com.) Just
15 minutes a day is all you need.
Move the feeling
- In a quiet, alone space, close your eyes and envisage a situation
or think about some specific event or person, and ask yourself: ‘What
am I afraid of?’ ‘What am I angry about?’ You’ll feel a physical
reaction. Your guts may churn, your throat close up, your shoulder
muscles tense, whatever. (Describing the feeling in words can stop you
getting too caught up in it.)
- Let out long slow breaths as you focus your attention on that
feeling and gently massage the spot to soften it. You will sense that
the trapped energy in that spot wants to move and leave your body
somehow. Let it! If it seems stuck somewhere on the way out, massage
that place.
- Do this two or three times, till you don’t feel any unpleasant
sensation as you think about the issue. Then imagine you’re breathing
the issue in deeply and then out through the top of your head, to fully
let it go.
Write the story
- Choose an event that’s been bothering you, and that you haven’t
wanted to talk about. Write it as a story, with a beginning, a middle
and an end. (Don’t do this with positive experiences -- you don’t want
to feel more distant from those!)
- Focus on three questions: What happened? How did I feel about
that? Why did I feel that way? Don’t look for deeper meanings -- that
can be counterproductive..
- Don’t worry about grammar or spelling. And if you hate writing, then tell the story aloud to yourself.
- Retelling the experience may be tearful, but as you make the events into a story, the pain will ease.
As you clear away that old mental clutter, you’ll feel lighter,
freer. And surprised and delighted to find the potential and strength
which you’ll reveal as old hurts heal and unwanted junk is finally
binned!
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