How We Can Lose Direct Control of Our Emotional Process

You have total control of your emotional process up to the point you start trying to take total control of your emotional process.

You may want to read that again.

This paradox is difficult to see by the tired mind of someone who has been at war with their own emotional system for a prolonged period of time.

Have you ever lived or worked with someone who had a desperate need to prove they were what they already were? It can be exhausting.

The moment you see your own emotional energies as a problem is the moment your unconscious mind starts the internal battle of freezing those energies inside your body to prevent the 'bad stuff' from leaking out.

We do this 'freezing' by using the built in organic electrical resistance system - the reticular system - to hold back the electrical signals coming up from the body (starting with the Reticular Formation in your brain stem).

In order to directly control your emotions you must first understand you cannot directly control them. You can delay them - but you should do this in the knowledge the only thing you can control directly is the process by which you manage their appropriate release later. Once an emotional response is produced in the body you have no choice but to find a way to release it or it will make you sick. Let me say that again: the only aspect of the emotional process you have any control over is that of appropriate release.

It is one of those areas in life where doing the opposite of what you think you should do is what gets you where you want to be.

The 'Loss of Control' Tipping Point

There is a tipping point at which the management of an emotional response shifts from being consciously and deliberately managed, by the thinking brain, to being an automated reaction driven by the emotional brain. In the case of someone suffering with an obsession or a phobia this kind of reaction occurs whether you want it to or not and before you can consciously interrupt it.

This tipping point is reached when the management of the emotional signals entering the brain shifts from what is known as the 'long processing route' to the 'short processing route'.

The 'long route' involves incoming sensory signals being sent upwards into the upper thinking brain for processing. Here we have 'association areas'. Incoming sensory signals are mixed and matched with information already known and trusted. After full association has taken place (through good old 'thinking') we have integrated the new information and can make sense and meaning of it. Any emotional energy attached to the issue is discharged through the activity of your right pattern-making brain and any valid data is processed by your left rational brain. The issue is then either forgotten or stored in our long-term memory and we no longer pay attention to it.

It can take some time for this association process to complete. If we are not willing to complete this process, however, and are not willing to think about the sensory information coming in, the denial of the information to the thinking brain can lead to us forcing the new information into the sensory 'short route'.

The 'short route' means the raw signals get sent downwards into the emotional brain for emotional processing instead. There is no 'association and integration' processing going on down there, unless it involves an emotional response being released somewhere along the line. This shift in processing route is very difficult to reverse. Difficult, but not impossible.

At the Centre of Both the Long and Short Routes Sits the Thalamus

Two Thalami, resembling the appearance a half-walnut, sit between the upper thinking brain and the lower emotional (limbic) brain. They act as the centre-point of your Perception - how you 'see' things.

Your Perception is a culmination of all the discussions and relationships going on between several brain parts, all of which have a slightly different way of seeing. Your most powerful brain part in this decisional process is your left neo-cortex - your conscious logical thinking brain. This brain part has the power to refuse permission for an emotional response to be processed by your upper thinking brain.

Problem is, once permission for release 'upstairs' has been refused the logical brain loses the right to influence how the emotional signals are processed by the lower brain. It becomes a question of losing the rights because at some point we refused the responsibilities of engaging with our own emotions.

The Thalamus is our main sensory signal router - it receives all of your visual, sound and touch signals before either your thinking or emotional brain parts get to see them. The Thalamus filters incoming signals on the basis of what the brain parts around it are telling it they see. They also tell it what kind of signals they are looking for - and it goes hunting for them in the incoming signals.

If your conscious thinking dislikes one of your own emotional responses so much you refuse to accept it as a part of you you may then refuse it permission to enter your thinking brain, this forces those signals downwards.

Your emotional brain now tries to manage your emotional process in regard to this particular stimulus using other emotional responses - as a result your internal emotional system generates a self-perpetuating internal war making you constantly tense and, because your conscious brain is no longer involved in the process, your thinking becomes confused about what is happening. The emotional responses are taking place without your conscious involvement other than your being informed 'you are having an intense emotional response!'.

This confusion further reinforces the idea that something is wrong and the Thalamus will continue to identify your own emotional responses as an urgent, threatening issue requiring further urgent emotional responses - and it will send any and all related signals coming in straight down into your emotional brain for processing.

How Do You Undo This?

In order to resolve the problem you must reverse your approach.

You start to engage with and allow for your emotional energy to come up through your body and enter your thinking brain so you can start the association process. Doing this will allow you to regain a sense of control because it forces the sensory signals back up the 'long process route' and the thinking brain eventually regains the ability to say no to producing the emotional responses in the first place.

Unfortunately by now you will have established a very effective unconscious set of arguments as to why this is a bad idea - and these ideas are absolutely committed to the belief that what you are about to do will kill you. The decision to allow the feelings to come up may now generate panic attacks and strong emotional responses designed to make you change your new direction.

Your unconscious believes you are about to do something the equivalent of going into a cage with an unfed lion.

If you are willing to repeatedly go 'into the cage' step by step, through the process of exposure therapy, you can eventually throw the organic switch in your brain that will lead to the removal of the emotional problem and future incoming signals will automatically be sent through the long route - but the transition involved is a much more intense and painful journey than if you had processed the original signals using your thinking brain in the first place.

The question is: how much do you want control of your emotional process back - even if it is indirect?

Come and start a conversation with me on my blog at http://managemesystems.com or mail me at carl@managemesystems.com.

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