Dealing with Anxiety; Anger; Fear
Dealing with Anxiety, Anger and Fear
Before we build resilience, we need to find, mend and come to terms with the (unconscious) choices taken that lead/led these emotions to their expressions.
Helping clients understand what they feel; help them change sensations of body to change feeling; understanding choice(s) that lead to the expression of that emotion; internal and external expressions; imprints and categorization of mind; patterns and thought forms.
picture by Tengyart from unsplash.com
Basic Emotions
During the 1970s, psychologist Paul Eckman identified six basic emotions that he suggested were universally experienced in all human cultures. The emotions were happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger. He later expanded his list of basic emotions to include such things as pride, shame, embarrassment, and excitement.
Emotions are just expressions, a feedback that it expressed by the body through sensations and feelings. They are categorized, labelled and filtered through the mind and called anger; rage; worry; anxiety or fear. We have certain feelings which connected to thought and thought processes which in turn connect to somatic processes of emotional expressions. Through our state, the unconscious mind and its signals along with our thought patterns (and imprints) prompts us to have an experience of an emotion. The feelings and sensations are not the same as the label we assign to emotion but repetitive thought and automatization of our minds through habits and learning have created labels for each emotion and what they mean. What truly is felt, its intensity and extent along with the finer components of our internal reference structure may be far away from the label, what’s more every person experiences differently each nominalization, also known as emotions.
Features of Conscious Mind
- Can recall up to seven or more chunks of information
- Is sequential and operates in sequence pattern
- Is organized, logical and linear
- Operates in waking state and is most active then
- Controls voluntary movements
- Is aware of the now
- Utilizes cognition
- Seeks solutions and is orientated towards outcomes
- Analytical
- Has limited focus
- Is the domain of language
Features of Unconscious Mind
- Stores your whole experience and all your memories (past representations)
- Has simultaneous processing
- Makes judgment based on intuition
- Makes associations
- Experiences feelings
- Is most active in sleeping and dreaming states
- is accessed in altered states
- controls involuntary movements
- utilizes wisdom of body
- creates solutions
- binds the physical body
- communicates through sensation
The Unconscious Mind and Emotions
As briefly stated above, our unconscious mind expresses itself through feelings and sensations in the body, as well as habits and habitual practices, for example: feeling pain, feeling dizzy etc.
The conscious mind tries to make sense of the environment internally and externally, naturally since its domain is language and structure, it assigns labels to these unconscious processes. Emotions felt in the body are sensations and through our mind and filters we nominalize this experience and express it as emotion. When this is done, we loose touch with the true feeling and may find ourselves too busy trying to explain an emotion and forgetting or even at times altering the original sensations/feelings experienced in the body at certain locations.
The key to change lies within the unconscious mind restructure and bringing it forward as homework for the conscious mind.
picture by Gaelle Marcel from unsplash.com
Submodalities
This is an NLP term, briefly stated it means the finer components that create structure of our internal representations- so how we encode our internal pictures, sounds and feelings to create meaning for our representations. The power here lies in change, if the structure can be changed, then so will the meaning.
According to core NLP research, each person’s brain seems to code emotional significance differently through variations in mental “image” or representation. Examples found include people whose unconscious minds place black borders around bad memories, people for whom visual images seen dimly are less compelling than those seen brightly, people for whom a subjectively “good” memory is accompanied by one kind of sound whilst a “bad” memory is accompanied by another, and so on.
Submodalities listed according to the three representational systems:
Visual:
Black & White or Colour
Near or Far
Bright or Dim
Location
Size of Picture
Associated / Dissociated
Focused or De-focused
Framed or Unbounded
Movie or Still
If a Movie-Fast/Normal/Slow
3 Dimensional or Flat Loud or Soft
Near or Far
Internal or External
Location
Auditory:
Stereo or Mono
Fast or Slow
High or Low Pitch
Verbal or Tonal
Rhythm
Clarity
Pauses Strong or Weak
Kinaesthetic:
Large Area or Small Area
Weight: Heavy or Light
Location
Texture: Smooth or Rough
Constant or Intermittent
Temperature: Hot or Cold
Size
Shape
Pressure
Vibration
Integration and Transformation
picture by Suzanne D Williams from unsplash.com
Wholeness :
Through integrating the unconscious mind and the conscious; tackling the frame of reference, understanding the choice(s) to be made and the willingness to take the necessary steps to a whole and unified self.
Awareness:
When one is unaware, one is separate, in separation we build walls and defences and keep the loop of pain, emotions and other imprints, not understanding the prison we create unconsciously.
Choice:
What choices have we made to be here and what choices will we make to change
What is our intention
What is our goal and outcome