02/06/2024
EMOTIONAL STATE MANAGEMENT
The problem arises from the mind’s inability to process everything in consciousness so most of what humans do is done in a portion of the brain colloquially referred to as the ‘unconscious’ mind. The good part of that is that the conscious mind is freed to deal with things that demand attention: Where will I sleep, what will I eat, how will I prevent myself from harm. Unfortunately things can get out of balance where we need to have access to learned or unconscious process in order to achieve an optimal outcome but the conscious mind no longer as access to these processes if it ever did. And so, any procedure that works to resolve anxiety, depression, phobias, neuroses and worse will of necessity soften the boundary between conscious and unconscious.
To shed a little light on this process we can dig a little deeper and find that the programming languages of the brain are coded as a matter of sensory input, IOW the software of the brain is coded in pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes. The process of resolving a persistent unwanted state is not terribly far removed from the reverse engineering process that us utilized when working software is ported from one platform to another. Software is first decompiled, rewritten, recompiled, installed, then tested.
Another consideration is that humans tend to get stuck. In this case the problem is not an undesirable state it is simply a lack of flexibility, an inability to move from misery to exuberance when it is appropriate to do so, so what do we do?
Initially it is a process of exploration – how does the person know that s-he is feeling what he is feeling. Answering this question alone can have profound effects for it not only tends to create flexibility it helps to decompile a running program while softening the boundary between conscious and unconscious. Having the person deliberately generate states, both desirable and undesirable, is usually sufficient to complete the process. And please notice that at no time do we deal with content. That is personal and private and should forever remain personal and private. We deal only with structure. What is the structure of ‘X’ and how is it different then the structure of ‘Y’? In this manner we can bring any and all of a person’s unconscious processes into consciousness for updates whenever needed.
Along the way we will ask questions such as are there visual images associated with that state, are there sounds, where do you feel the feelings?
So, step one of this process is all about how we do the things we do. Answering that question gives us almost unlimited control over processes that were previously out of our conscious control. Now we have the ability to have literally any emotional response to anything, to increase or decrease the frequency of things that are over or underutilized, to create an emotional baseline that resembles bliss squared.
Step two of the process asks the question – when do we do the things that we do. Do we do them only in the daytime or only at night, only when alone or only when we are with another person or persons, only when hungry or only when satiated, only when at ease or only under duress? By identifying the triggers that have taken us to problem states we can remap those triggers to ‘automatically’ take us to resource states.
That, in a nutshell, is the NLP approach to emotional resource management as I understand it.
Thanks for reading.
DCR
