engine ecr

© copyright Ian White 2015 1

What’s Your Engine – Your Inner Influence? Find Out What Really Drives Us from Within

(and why it Matters – A LOT!) Understanding the Dynamics of ‘Deep Emotion’ - an ECR Precursor

© 2015, Ian White Self-publishing

ISBN 978-0-9871869-1-1


1 How ‘Feeling’ is Learned 2 How ‘Feeling Memory’ Happens 3 The Habit of Feeling 4 Pathways to Your Past 5 Mind Body Connection 6 The Territory of Feeling 7 The Chemistry of Feeling 8 Descartes's Error 9 The Avatar

10 Why it all Matters

This is called an ‘ECR* Precursor,’ implying that it is a short course needed before practitioner training as an ECR practitioner. In some ways it is exactly that. But it’s also for everybody. Most of us spend our days looking after our jobs, the rent, the bills, our cars, our hobbies, past-times and sports and the hundreds of other things that require our attention, but do we spend time thinking about the complexity of how our minds and brains work?

*Emotional Core Reframing

Do we think about just what power our subconscious emotional archive might be having over the millions of choices that we have to make and how we live our lives today? If you do, then you’re not part of ‘the tribal spellbound.’ But most people know less about these issues than they do about the coming week’s television programs. For all of us, though, it is necessary for us to get some understanding of ‘what’s going on’ in the human mind before we can CHANGE what’s going on.

And this is why I am pleased to offer its contents to anyone who wishes any positive improvement in their life at all. Perhaps the short ‘Why It Matters’ chapter at the end is the most important part.

So, this is designed as a short quasi-educational presentation that describes:

1. What the meaning of emotion and human feeling is -

2. How it develops and stabilizes from early preverbal times to now -

3. How it mostly makes no sense to any adult perception; professional or otherwise -

4. WHY IT MATTERS to us in the present adult world

We think we know who and how we are. In our society we pay much more attention to the importance of the conscious ‘thinking’ ego-centric mind than we do to the unconscious emotional mind – the ‘affect matrix.’ The term affect is defined as “a class of human feelings and emotions which may not be able to be verbalized;” affectology is the study of how significant affective learnings and habits are in the running of our mental, emotional, attitudinal and physical lives. The information contained in the study of affectology is securely based on the findings and research contained in the growing field of affective neuroscience (as distinct from neuroscience per se).

http://afxwhite.wix.com/ecr-splash

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This presentation introduces you to the major underlying principles of ECR, or more precisely, the science that underpins the ECR approach to personal development in all facets of your life. It is designed specifically to ease you into a completely new and different way of thinking about human emotions and feelings, where they come from, and how it is that we can say that the common and time-worn (or time-“worn-OUT”) methods of psychotherapy and talk therapy (that is, analysing affect points of origin within your life story) is an almost impossible task that must eventually be bypassed. But, we would hope that by reading this introductory presentation, you will realise that affectology and ECR present apparently new material in a way that shows that it is in fact ‘age-old’ material. And, like the way of the Tao, or Zen, we must return to the beginning in order to complete the cycle of being. As the philosopher Goethe rightly said,

If you miss the first buttonhole, you will not

succeed in buttoning up your coat.

In therapy – in personal development – we say that in order to change anything, you need to be AWARE of it and understand a little of how it works. At the very least, acknowledgement is required.

Welcome to a new look at the old world of the human emotional matrix.

Chapter 1

How “Feeling” is Learned

Emotion and Feeling

To clear up some misconceptions or confusions, we need to settle on some word definitions. In the affectological view of things, emotion is a symptom of feeling. So when we talk about feelings we are referring to the mind/brain dynamic that drives emotion:- in other words, a core response that lies below and before emotion. Because feelings is a word that’s used in many areas today, we’d prefer to refine this even further and mainly use the term affect, which (again) is defined as ‘a class of human feeling that may not be able to be verbalized.’

In the Beginning; before words

Note the term, ‘Before Words.’ This is what affectology and ECR focus on to the exclusion of almost everything else. Coming to a realization that you were once a ‘baby’ – or if you believe in salience and sentience before birth, a fetus – then the impact of a realization that you spent a huge proportion of your life learning to be who you are ONLY on an affect basis (before cognition and language) can be nothing short of a shock. Then, to discover that you didn’t leave those learnings behind is even more of a shock. And finally, to discover that much of your life – not only in the emotional sphere – is today


influenced by those learnings AND that you don’t know it, AND that you cannot define or analyze how that’s working, AND that no amount of talk therapy can ever get to the nub of what’s driving the negative forces in life; well, that’s not just a shock: it’s astonishing! But there’s no need to feel powerless over these non-verbal affect learnings that still exist today. There is a way to change them through ECR – to grow them up; to mature them – and that way is through a process that involves ignoring words and attempts to define the complex trail of learnings that connect the older ‘infant’ part of you to the newer adult part. So, reviewing this above, we come to explaining the word we use so often in affectology and ECR, and that word is preverbal – before words. It alludes to what we in the ECR and affectology r4ealm describe as being the “Core:” a core that is deeper and much different to what we usually describe as being a “known core.” Every detail and theory that makes up the concepts of affectology is formed around and supported by existing affective neuroscience, its research and findings. In The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, prenatal researcher, Dr Thomas Verny clearly states that “the unborn child is a feeling, remembering, aware being,” and at six months of foetal development can understand – or at least ‘feel’ – its mother’s emotions.

Prenatal neuroscientists show that even at a stage as early as 22 weeks (into gestation), the unborn child has the capacity – and uses it – to store information related to emotional (affect) experiences that it might be having, even in utero. The research proposes that at this stage in development, the limbic brain (see later in this chapter) and its associated neurological links, through the central nervous system, have become fully formed, and it’s inconceivable that the complex neural system remains idle until we, as adult observers, “think” it should activate.

In his immensely important book, From Conception to Birth, the late Dr Tony Lipson (Department of Genetics, The Children’s Hospital, Sydney) stated:

“What are the facts? When does the spinal cord communicate with the processing and thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, where the grey and white matter resides? It is only when the vital connection between the spinal cord processing center, or the brain stem, and the brain itself is made at 22 – 23 weeks that feelings of the senses such as warmth, light, sound and pain have any real moral (or conscious) meaning and form part of experience. The spinal cord can then communicate with the true brain and vice versa, both responding to movement, feeling and position and presumably, albeit unconsciously, able to have memory which will influence the person for the rest of its life.”

Human beings begin to develop abilities to think and experience in more sophisticated ‘reasoning’ ways, much later in life – at a time known as the verbal emergent stage, and that’s anywhere between 10 months and 2 or 3 years’ of age. And even older. The bold new breed of affective neuroscientists, LeDoux, Damasio, Goleman, et al, have reached the definite conclusion that we human beings lay down our affect, or emotional personality during that stage in our development where we have no words, and our experiences can only be emotional or feeling experiences.


Affect Brain Structure

We can now go on to look at the ways in which the brain processes and stores affect memory and emotional encodings by first looking at the physical structure of that part of the brain most implicated in the process of emotional – or affect – memory. You, of course, understand that the study of brain physiology is vast and complicated, so it’s appropriate to say at this point that our look at the affect brain complex is merely summarized in this short presentation. Because we are investigating the brain, this does not mean that the role of mind, spirit, or even soul is denigrated, but we are merely having a look at the processing neuro-engineering that allows our lives to be either enriched or impaired by our subconscious (unconscious) minds and our emotional experiences.

The “Affect Neuro-machine.”

Emotional and affect responses stem from storage facilities housed in particular centers of the brain, contained within a part that is called the limbic brain. It is the centre of our subconscious emotional and affective processing and contains areas that give birth to our emotions, lay down and retrieve preverbal affect memories, and attend to our emotional comfort or ‘balance.’ The processes involved in affect memory storage are truly unconscious – that is, that they are below or beyond our capability to consciously understand them; at least, using words and word-oriented thoughts. That our emotions and feelings arise from a primal functioning area of our brain whose main, and sometimes only, task is to maintain emotional comfort and the means of returning to emotional comfort and equilibrium (stable affect attributional state).

A TERMINOLOGY NOTE: If I must refer to “the unaware aspect of mind” – and I must – then I prefer to use the word ‘unconscious’ rather than the more common ‘subconscious’ because of the ‘sub’ prefix implications. ‘Sub’ refers to below. This in turn implies inferiority in the hierarchical importance chain. There’s nothing inferior about that aspect of the mind that is being investigated here. In fact, by the end of this book, you may realize its superiority in our lives, even though you might not want to accept that our “thinking – conscious” does not run the show. But it doesn’t. And if it does, stop reading! Just “think” all your problems away.

The Limbic System

The limbic system of the brain is made up of many neural centers that go to driving the complex that is responsible for most of our experiences that are not a product of exercising conscious will. Experiences such as the restoration of conscious and episodic memory, and affect or emotional memory and trace-bridging to our earliest unconscious affect memories – our primal affect encodings (see later chapter).

The Emotion Centers


Neurologically, the structures that are important to affect memory are processing centers such as the hippocampus, the hypothalamus and, most importantly, the amygdalae. The components of the limbic system are linked and interact in an amazingly complex way, with all its components working together simultaneously. BUT, it’s important to the affectologist to understand that emotionally charged information and material is processed, stored and consolidated initially by the amygdalae, a pair of small almond-shaped neural complexes (singular: amygdala) at the anterior aspect (front) of the limbic system.

The “Spark” at the Beginning.

So, let’s now have a peek at the process involved in this storage. I could use any example of an experience at any time early in our lives, and for the sake of this example, let’s not talk about ‘in the womb’ experiences, but use perhaps an early infant experience. When the young baby receives an emotionally charged stimulus (and this is registered merely as DISCOMFORT or DISEQUILIBRIUM), the information is carried instantaneously to the amygdalae by various neural pathways. It’s important to say that this information is merely basic – basically uncomfortable, that is – and cannot be processed by the baby in any sophisticatedly analytical way. The amygdala then does its job of storage of that affect memory (in some ways, its ONLY job is the housing of emotional memory). In the limbic brain, the two most significant bodies in the process of storing memory are the amygdalae and the associated center, the hippocampus. The amygdaloid-hippocampal pathway is responsible for overall encoding of data that we can call unconscious memory. The hippocampus records memory of events and objects as facts, while the amygdala assigns emotional content to those facts. While the hippocampus is relatively slow to develop its full capacity to interpret events and episodes – that is, many months – the amygdala is immediately capable (also prenatally) of encoding and storing information about feelings and reactions to those feelings.

Affect Memory

Let’s expand on the example of the baby above. Remember that we are not settling on any one time or life-era in the development of the child, but using this baby example to show how fragile episodic memory (as opposed to affect memory) can be at any early stage in development. Let’s say that at one point, the baby of, perhaps, just a day or so of age (just an arbitrary age) experiences a discomforting stimulus. This may be something as simple and benign as a change in its auditory environment; perhaps the parents with raised voices in the next room (not an argument), or an airplane flying low overhead, or some sudden noise like a dog barking or something dropping or crashing. It’s evident that all these experiences do not constitute ACTUAL trauma or danger to the baby, but it’s also obvious that this stimulus can create discomfort in the baby’s experience: – negative emotional arousal. It is natural that this is so – see the ‘fight or flight response’ in chapter 5. Note that the baby has never experienced this sensory input before. It’s a “first-of” experience.


Through the processing centers of the limbic system and surrounding bodies (the thalamus and the sensory cortex), this information is sifted and registered as naked discomfort, setting in train the same neurological dynamic that happens whenever we establish ‘something to be remembered’ as part of our life experience. When emotional arousal occurs, particularly in any discomforting way, the limbic system becomes alarmed and unleashes a flood of stimulating chemicals, mostly norepinephrine. Norepinephrine empowers the memory, ‘burning in’ the emotionally charged crisis. This burning in is called taloning. It’s important now to say that in the taloning process, it's not the detail of the event, or the ‘story’ (verbal narration) of the episode that’s burnt in, but simply the sense of the emotional experience. This part of the brain is interested only in basic affect stability, and as such, must create a reaction or a response to the ‘destabilizing alarm.’ At such an early age, we are incapable of rational strategies even if we understood what the discomfort is about (which we don’t), so the only reaction available to us is an emotional or affect one. We respond to the alarm or discomfort with a feeling. The feeling produces a secondary stage to the process; an emotion, something that is perhaps more complex and definable from an external perspective. This emotion may go on to manifest as a behavior – an action (this may be crying or agitation or the opposite – the appearance of ‘shutting down’) designed, as a primal unconscious reaction, to get attention, and that action, in the majority of cases, causes us to get our basic needs met, whether by being re-comforted by our care-givers or by having the discomforting stimulus removed. And it’s at this precise point that we develop an unconscious construct that says, “when I feel any level of discomfort similar to this, I need to react in this way in order to get my needs met and my emotional stability restored.” But, remember that “react in this way” describes a primary response that is affect-only. It’s important to be aware of the fact that the PRIMARY response of a feeling is the most significant to the limbic brain. The secondary and tertiary responses of emotion and behavior are, in any case, driven by that primary feeling or affect response. In affectological terms, this constitutes the process of encoding affect response experiences that are designed to provide us with a template of how to respond in the future. This basis of initial learning and affect memory will influence us forever, going toward the initial building blocks of our emotional matrix, or our feeling subpersonality – our “sense of self.” But the most important thing to remember about this section is that our building of emotional and feeling experiences and the unconscious memory (encoding) of them is a far cry from being the vague and gossamer-like process that so many of us think. There is no mystery. We LEARN our primary feelings and emotions.

Unconscious Activity

We know that all processing of emotional memory, its recorded experiences, the primal reactions, encoding and taloning takes place in the limbic system. All limbic system activity is unconscious – that is, it takes place in a way that is entirely separate and distinct from the rational processing abilities of our conscious, cortical, executive brains and minds. In neurophysiological terms, affect encoding is not influenced or affected in any way by the rational centers of the brain, the polymodal (cognitive) cortex of the brain. This, of course, points out that affect taloning and encoding has no rational basis and cannot be analyzed at any time later in life. It exists only as a reactive feeling memory at unconscious level.


Millions of words have been written about ‘the subconscious’ or the ‘unconscious mind’ and its relevance to our experience. Material repressed in the subconscious was, of course, the basis of Freud’s propositions and teachings; Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious have gained traction in our society, and most therapeutic approaches hold to some definition about how the subconscious mind fits in with the scheme of things. The sheer fact persists that unconscious means un-conscious. There’s no such thing as a knowing of one’s subconscious or unconscious mind or its contents. The moment a cognitive construct (idea) related to the unconscious comes to our awareness, it is no longer unconscious. So, we do not define the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘subconscious’ in terms other than that part of the non-aware processes of the brain and mind that create our emotional reactive self, store the information and access it at a later time.

Chapter Wrap-up: We talk a lot about ‘emotion,’ but in affective neuroscience,

emotion comes second and is formed out of more influential affect, or feeling experience.

Affect memories and emotional memories are stored at unconscious level in the amygdalae in the limbic brain. These are laid down very early in our life – may be prenatal, but are certainly preverbal (before word-use).

They are very probably (almost certainly) the result of the baby misinterpreting whatever stimulant causes discomfort.

Chapter 2

How Feeling Memory Happens

All in the Interpretation

We’ve discussed that by the time any human being develops the ability for rational thought, verbal constructs or conscious level memory, they have already laid the foundations for how they experience and respond to the world at an emotional or affect (feeling) level. This is because in our early development we can only interpret the world around us at this level, and these unconscious foundations or emotional matrix will then influence all our future emotional responses and reactions. It’s unavoidable. We are empirical beings, and all our decisions and present day learnings are influenced by and based on previous learnings – particularly in the affect realm. Developmental psychologists and researchers have, in the last few decades, had a hard look at just how the preverbal infant processes information and builds a long-lasting (perhaps life-long) emotional sense of self depending on those early life imprints and encodings. Infant


psychiatrist, Daniel Stern’s book The Interpersonal World of the Infant is a seminal work in the development of an understanding about how we humans process information and environmental experience at an early age. The research shows that all preverbal memory could only be interpretive in the present moment, and that often, when we are so ‘sure’ of our old memories, we are merely applying our adult egocentric desire to ‘be of good memory’ There are two aspects of Stern’s research that support the affectology proposition. These are the issues of amodalism, and RIGs (Registrations of Interactions that have been Generalized).

Amodalism

Great word, isn’t it. It doesn’t exist in my dictionary, but breaking it into its literal constituents, it simply means without mode, ‘mode’ meaning the sensory modes of sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste. In our investigation, without mode really means without specifiable and distinct mode. It’s a “mish-mash” – a messy or confused mixture of different modes of sensory reception. As adults, particularly since the unfortunate advent of psychoanalysis, we make what are fairly arrogant assumptions that we can scan back and perceive what it would have been like when we were such-and-such an age. The fact is that we were not the same person as we are now when we take into consideration our chaotic means of information-reception. We can NOT interpret as adults, the actual experience of just what modes of sensory input were relevant (or otherwise) to us as preverbal infants. Nor can we re-interpret any event, episode, or our behavioral response to it. Our qualities of experience, because of amodal receptivity, were global, embracing all modes of perception, rather than any specific sensory mode. Consider the implications of this when we scan our personal history. What part of you/us is convinced that we can remember the exact details of events and sensory input in those early years? We submit that it is the adult, ego-centric, ‘need-to-know-at-all-costs’ part of personality that is convinced that it’s possible … It’s not. We’ll now look at the aspect of input experience at preverbal age that underscores this concept of the ‘arrogance’ of narrative therapy. That aspect is:-

RIGs - Registrations of Interactions that have been Generalized.

When we juxtapose the understanding of amodal perception and amodal sensory input with the probability that the amodal sensory experiences are then “generalized” and “re-interpreted interactions” before they are registered in such a way as to form the basis of encoding and imprinting,. This notion that the preverbal infant mostly misinterprets stimulating information, generalizes it and then encodes the information is what constitutes the term known as RIGs. Stern attests that “specific memories are deviant exemplars of a class of events.” The intention of this comment is to say that as adults, we cannot retrieve specific and exact memories from preverbal times without them deviating from actuality because they were subject to global amodalism and that the encoding was the result of a RIG.


At best, we can never be quite sure that memories of events are authentic. At worst, we can be quite sure that all memories are corrupt, not by intention, but by amodalism and RIGs.

The Nature of Feeling/Affect Memory

Our investigations have shown us so far that we begin our emotional life at a time well before we are capable of any verbally oriented thought or experience. In affectology, the first affect encoding is called the Actual Point of Origin (APOO)*, referring to that experience (amodal, global and representative) from which all future learnings generate. Science tells us without equivocation, that this APOO must occur around, or shortly after, the period of time when our Autonomic Nervous System becomes a bio-constructive reality (somewhere around 23 to 25 weeks into gestation) – a time when it is obvious that we have no capacity to relegate experiences to constructs that result in verbalization. On the other hand, Narrative Point of Origin (NPOO)* is that experience (usually an event) that can be recalled at conscious (memory) level and be verbalized. In terms of developmental science (and affectology), this cannot be the real point of origin of our primary affect learnings. Actual POOs and narrative POOs can never be the same.

*APOO and NPOO are acceptable scientific terms used to denote extreme differences in points of origin as memories (one unconscious, the other, conscious).

If this is the case, then verbal construct memory of early life is thrown into doubt, and we’ll look at that in the next section. On the other hand, the encodings that relate to APOO experiences remain authentic and largely intact later in life, in the way in which they were originally learned. So, affect memories are concrete, remaining basically unchanged by rational conscious effort. To read more about how science (if you accept quantum and chaos theory as science) maintains that initial affect encodings remain to a large extent intact over our life-time – or at least are largely influential, you may like to go to this page of the ECR information website.

Is Memory Authentic?

What’s in a memory?

By now you should be questioning one of the cornerstones of classical analytic psychotherapy, and in fact, any therapeutic approach that employs “talking” in relation to remembering earlier emotional issues. And that is the principle that verbalization represents truth. There’s no doubt that we can remember recent events and episodes with relative clarity and authenticity. But this idea of authenticity of memory fades into oblivion when we begin to look back over all that we’ve learned about just how fragile and (probably) misinterpretive earlier life emotional learnings were in the encoding.

Chapter Wrap-up:

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In this chapter we have seen that ‘affect memory,’ or, unconscious emotional memory, just doesn’t ‘happen.’ We have seen that there is a significant – in fact huge – difference between what we usually think we know is ‘memory’ and actual unconscious preverbal affect memory.

This unconscious preverbal affect memory is stable when it is ‘taloned’ by the amygdala, but is almost certainly a neurological memory that has been formed within the dynamic of amodalism and misinterpretation of the stimulating environmental factors.

Preverbal affect memory is never what you think it is.

Chapter 3

The Habit of Feeling

Like with all things in life that we learn, we learn them once; if they get our needs met, we automatically repeat them. Once; twice, and a habit is formed. We become victims of the habit of feeling a certain way, in spite of whether it “makes sense” in the present dynamic or not. In your present life, every feeling is a HABIT!

The Origin of Feeling Habits

A habit is defined as any human action or reaction that is unconsciously automatic and that we cannot change through an act of conscious will. When we review the information in the last two chapters, we can see that early life affect encodings do, indeed, form the basis upon which we can begin to develop our feeling habits and build that substructure that we call the “emotional (or affect) matrix.” Much research has gone into the study of preverbal neuroencodings. We know that the proposition of the Actual Point of Origin (APOO) to our feeling structures and emotional learnings mimics the manner in which we learn anything in life; - that is, we experiment and experience an action or reaction, we ‘store away’ the response that works for us in the moment, and discard that which does not. This, in effect, is the way in which we learn how to walk, drive a car, nod our head, tie our shoelaces – in fact any action or reaction that is automatic today. This, then, means that the way in which we learn our feeling reactions is an almost identical ‘point of origin’ dynamic to the way we learn anything. This notion that we learn our feelings, then make a habit of those feeling responses, is a fundamental concept supporting the study of affectology and its practical application, ECR.

Habit Development

The fact that our automatic actions and reactions that are a part of our lives now (the car-driving, the unconscious hand gestures, for instance) were encoded at some point in the initial


learning is significant when we compare this to our ‘feeling learnings’. Just as we use the original encoding of just how to synchronize our feet with the gear-stick, and our clutch pedal with our accelerator pedal, to build an automaticity of action so that we eventually do these things without conscious thought, we use our preverbal affect encodings to build our emotional sub-personality. Let’s look at the early experience of the preverbal infant that we addressed in Chapter 1. We’ve established that any negative emotional arousal will cause an action or reaction that

serves to “get our needs met” and is encoded as an unconscious memory that is taloned at amygdala level (see The ‘spark’ at the beginning – Chapter 1). This creates the template for future response to discomfort, and so, when we experience any other discomforting stimulus at a later time, whether it’s an hour or a day later, our reaction will be identical to that which worked and got our needs met in the original encoding. And, like later life learnings (the “how to drive;” “how to walk,” and the like) we adopt an automatic remembering of the initial encoding. In other words, it makes no sense to not utilize that which proved to be a successful reaction initially, and probably proves to be similarly productive, at least for a while until it has been encased in the ‘habit categorization.’ Over a short period of time, perhaps only days, the adoption of this template of ‘what works’ becomes automatic, and has no rationalization attached to it. This, then, obeys and fits the definition of a habit, so insisting that we perceive the development of feeling (affect) response patterns as being habitual. It is for this reason, affectologists hold firm to the notion that all our feelings are learned, and that all our affect responses are indeed habits. This fact is vital to the clinical procedures that characterize ECR – that human beings have an undeniable capacity to relearn anything that’s been previously learned, and that feelings are not necessarily static concretions – that they are variable.

Habit Establishment before Thought, Reason or Logic

An interesting (and perhaps frustrating) aspect of contemporary socio-professional culture is that the prevalence of preverbal affect structures is a given; has become accepted by the neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic community, particularly given the strength of the research that shows this to be true. But it’s also a puzzling scenario in that the acceptance of an emotional matrix – an affect substrate that is a part of every human being – is largely ignored in preference to verbal analytic approaches to therapy. Many of us simply do not understand the significance of the formation and existence of the emotional matrix as it affects our lives today. So, let’s investigate. In order to make sense of the proposal, let’s use another real life example. We’ve established that science is telling us that prior to the verbal emergent stage when we learn to use words to tell self-stories, we experience our universe in non-rational and interpretive ways, thus building a ‘set’ emotional matrix that is not defined by words, nor able to be described using words. Can we propose that at verbal emergent stage, when our mind processing changes to the near-rational and verbal, that we suddenly assess our past years’ learnings and say to


ourselves (rationally), “my earlier affect learnings don’t suit my way of processing any more, and therefore I must delete those learnings in order to grow up to my present age”? Of course we do not; we simply proceed in our living experience with our earlier matrix largely intact and influencing in a non-verbal way, all that we continue to experience and learn. This is the nature of the human empirical process: – that all our learnings are influenced by previous learnings. This constitutes what the affectologist knows to be an aspect of our emotional selves that still exists at unconscious level in either subtle or profound ways. ECR Practitioners know the origin of the oft-heard comment from clients, “there’s something going on emotionally that I just can’t put my finger on!” or “I can’t quite describe how I feel.” Our emotional matrix is formed prior to thought, reason or logic, and pretty much exists in the same form today as it was learned at preverbal stage in development. It is a “feeling habit.”

FURTHER NOTES: This presentation in this form and for this purpose denies us the logic of going too deeply into the neuroscience and complex workings of the hyperdimensional chaos that is the human developing mind. It may be enough to offer you here the fact that the progress of the continuum of learning that the emotional mind goes through can be described by the word PERSEVERATION. Perseveration in psychology is defined as automatically and unconsciously persevering (repeating) an action or reaction long after the original stimulus that created it has been forgotten or lost, or at least, no longer exists. So, ECR talks a lot about ‘perseveration’ as a determinate in the long process of growth of your hidden affect subpersonality. ‘STRANGE ATTRACTOR theory’ in Chaos Theory is an apt way of describing the progress of affect learning and its influence and may be read about here. The other detailed aspect is the notion of STATE-DEPENDENCY. This says that even today, the existence of initial affect learnings ‘live’ in the unconscious mind in the SAME STATE as when they were learned; that is, non-verbal. The ego mind thinks it should be able to know and describe, but it doesn’t and can’t.

Unconscious Parts Drivers

One of the elementary concepts of Affectology is that which we call “Parts Drivers.” In advanced affectology theory, practitioners study at length the conceptual underpinnings of the large variety of ways in which we humans have learned tasks and responses at an early age that still provide functions that are essential for the maintenance of a stable state of emotional balance. The limbic brain has a strong tendency to protect initial affect learnings encoded in the amygdala as ‘the’ status quo of the manner in which emotional reactions should play out. Consequently, the automatic actions of the limbic system’s affect center(s) constantly tries for an equilibrium that refers to a time when such responses were learned, but have little to do with one’s existence in a present world. It can be said, then, that emotional learnings are most often OBSOLETE.

To simply dip our toe in the water, let’s accept that it’s endemic in human behavior that people (all of us) often utter words like “there’s a part of me that wants to …..” or “I seem to have a part of me that wants to sabotage my life,” or words to that effect. These words are closer to

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the truth for an affectologist than they might at first seem, yet they indicate a temporal dissociation (not connected in time) dynamic that may very well be the source of all present problems. The lengthy study of parts drivers can best be exemplified by looking at only two highly

interesting drivers; (1) that part of us that learned at a very early age that in order to survive, we must GET ATTENTION, and (2) that part of us that learned at an early age that we cannot survive without finding ways to get others to do everything for us. The latter may be called the ABNEGATING RESPONSIBILITY parts driver.

Both these learned tasks (that go on to create their respective parts drivers) are essential to the early infant in order for it to exist at all. Think about that fact! In affectology and ECR, while we investigate the full range of possibilities related to parts drivers – including practitioners’ parts drivers – we are always aware of the existing traces of both these parts drivers that can wreak havoc with even the best forms of narrative analytical therapies. And we do not propose, of course, that these parts drivers are used on any conscious or intentional level, but that their effects at unconscious level are still being manifested in some ways. They were, after all, formed with a singular intention in mind: – emotional stability! Glancing at these two (above) parts drivers really only looks at what forces may be at issue at that preverbal affect encoding level, and as such, are relevant to this presentation. However, in ECR practical work, we are well-attuned to the existence of complex AVOIDANCE parts drivers that unconsciously fight to maintain our status quo – no matter if it’s destructive in present life, and SABOTAGE parts drivers that might fight to correct the system BACK TO its original status. These parts drivers are not ‘reasoned.’ They do not say, “oh well, that’s OK; life is different now and we’ll let things change.” They are locked into a non-cognitive, preverbal affect fight to keep the system ‘as is’ so as not to allow for disintegration of a mind system that was originally established as emotional-stability-based. And survival-based. In the next chapter we will look at the mind-mechanisms that insist that we are still influenced today by preverbal infant learnings created at affect and parts driver level.

Chapter Wrap-up: In this chapter I have aimed to help you understand that ‘feeling’ or ‘emotion’ just doesn’t HAPPEN.

Deep affect memory is the beginning. APOO affect memories are stable and they remain largely stable.

Through the dynamic of PERSEVERATION, they build as emotional habits, in much the same way as behavioral or operational habits do – by repetition. But repetition that is below our awareness.

Initial affect memories influence to a greater or lesser degree, every reaction subsequent to them.


We create hidden parts drivers (affect habits that can thwart any desired attempts to change the status quo).

All emotions are habits.

Chapter 4

Pathways to your Past

The Affect Bridge

In previous chapters we’ve talked about initial learnings being ‘automatically repeated’ because those learnings got our needs met; they ‘worked,’ so we repeat them. They ‘perseverate.’ This is a commonsense proposition. But affectology theory is built around the fact that there’s a specific mind-mechanism that creates that repetition and perseveration. And ECR is, in turn, built on the fact that that mechanism is a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon – something that we are “doing,” and is therefore variable and changeable, rather than something that we ‘are;’ unable to be changed. Several decades ago, the psychotherapeutic world proposed (and defined) that the action of a therapist applying a technique in which a ‘regressive connection’ is established between current emotions and the first experience of that emotion, should be called the affect bridge. And psychology ‘invented’ the affect bridge technique. But a commonsense look at this should reveal that this is not something that a ‘therapist’ can do to a client, but that an affect bridge exists in natural form in any event, and that this is how we automatically perseverate (repeat) responses, whether they are of an emotional nature (anger, panic, etc.) or of a mechanistic nature (driving the car, walking, nodding the head, etc.). So, AFFECT BRIDGE refers to that process of naturalistic ‘calling upon’ predetermined response patterns in order to respond NOW in a way that we learned worked for us. We do this by ‘tracing memory,’ at unconscious level, to the original encoded material in regards to the dynamic of response. This (affect bridging) is the system that we employ whenever it seems appropriate for us to respond in a feeling or emotional or affect-oriented fashion to any given new stimulus. And this goes for all of our positive affect responses as well. For example, the process of being able to relax ‘in the now’ is the product of unconsciously remembering (via the affect bridge) that we have at some time in our existence experienced that (relaxation), and we can call upon the natural trace-memory mechanisms to automatically re-experience the sensation – without trying, without the effort of consciously rebuilding the experience. And our body follows the process – and relaxes. In spite of the complexities of explanations of whether hypnosis or trance exist in everyday life and how we operate as human beings, the fact remains that the process of affect bridging


is, indeed, technically described as a naturalistic hypnotic phenomenon. We utilize it continuously – below awareness.

In the Present

But let us not run away with the idea that affectology proposes or ECR therapy utilizes classical regressive techniques that are akin to taking the client into their past. When we experience uncomfortable feelings or emotions, we have unconsciously bridged to encoded emotional memory that exists in the present! And this takes place every minute, every moment of our lives. It is constant and unconsciously ever-present within the dynamic of the emotional matrix. ECR operates from the practical concept that the past simply does not exist any more, and that all affect phenomena are present dynamics that are to be dealt with and re-learned in the present. While we adopt that as an operating principle that insists that there is no delving into that which we have established can be inauthentic and interpretive only (episodic memory of the past – see previous chapters 1 and 2), we accept ‘the past’ only insofar as its relevance to neuroencodings of all kinds. So, this explains, in part, the disregard that ECR practitioners hold for attempts to revive past episodic memories and their narrative description. The EVENT, as traumatic as it may have been, simply exists no more, yet the learned affect encoding (of the response) and the process with which that encoding is accessed (the affect bridge) is having relevance in the present due to (1) affect perseveration, (2) the theory of strange attractor influence, and (3) the very nature of state-dependency of present influences.

The Limbic “Time Warp”

We have looked at the dynamic of preverbal neuroencoding and it may be useful to also consider the temporal* nature of that encoding. At the time of establishing initiator encodings, the limbic brain does not include a temporal dimension to its “memory.” It does not register ‘time’ and creates a memory ‘without time’ or more correctly, a memory that begins its path of perseveration through real life time without consideration for any relationship with time.

*Temporal: time-based or chronological

This atemporal memory – and its continuance through perseveration – ensures that this timeless encoding “lives on forever” – unless, like the introduction of a new strange attractor, it is relearned through affect-directed means such as ECR, and so creating a new affect initiator that is removed from the previously trapped time orientation.

The Trapped Inner Child as a Problematic Metaphor

From an existential perspective, there is no inner child apart from a foetus* during pregnancy! Yet this – as a metaphor – has been used in many forms by many therapeutic approaches over the last few decades.

*Foetus: original English spelling of Americanized “fetus”

But we must understand that it is only a metaphor. The inner child movement has proposed all sorts of nurturing aims for the inner child that apparently resides in all of us. But, in his early book, The Dark Side of the Inner Child, Stephen Wolinsky proposes that an unconscious ‘part’ of us that is stuck in the need for original basic emotional stability, auto-hypnotizes us


to experience early encoded discomforts. This is what he proposes as being the dark side of the inner child, and that this side should be removed – deleted – rid from our existence. We ECR practitioners understand that ALL of what we learn and encode early in development is useful and has positive intention. The complexity of our unconscious layers of ‘parts drivers’ (see Chapter 3) insist that IF we want to use the metaphor of the inner child, then we must see this as a matrix of inner children, all of whom are doing a predominantly good job, merely needing adjustment to the way in which they operate in the present, rather than needing extinction. ECR is about balance in our current lives, not the removal of ever-functioning and often useful parts.

Emotional Hijacking

We tend to take for granted that we can ‘work on’ an aspect of our emotional reactions at a cognitive level, perhaps, for instance, attending workshops or writing affirmations, yet when it comes to the crunch and the trigger comes along again, this working it all through at the rational level seems to have been to no avail. Before we can blink an eye, the emotional rush appears out of nowhere and superimposes itself on our reasoning self. Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) calls this emotional hijacking, as the amygdala immediately signals the rest of the organism to react in the way in which the encoding originally occurred. It’s almost as if what we’d thought was months of good work simply does not count. That’s because, in the main, it doesn’t! We may then search around for someone else to blame. We perhaps blame the previous self-development program and think that it has sold us a broom that doesn’t really fly! But the

real answer is that we did not yet get to an understanding of the workings of the affect unconscious. This is the very reason for the existence of this presentation. To become aware! Attempting to change the way that you react emotionally must be dealt with at the emotional amygdaloid level, rather than the rational willful level. Computer buffs will understand me when I say that to do otherwise would be like trying to correct a basic anomaly existing in the DOS system by merely working at the Windows level. Can’t be done.

ECR maintains that correction to the way in which we encode emotional material and access it through automatic affect bridging can only be effectively altered by accessing ‘feeling structures’ at the affect level rather than working with perceivable thought and cognition structures at a narrative level. This supports the affectologist’s ‘feelings not thoughts’ mode of approach and the descriptive axiom, ‘Mind over Chatter.’


The primary contention in affectology is that rational thought and reason and their cousin, conscious will, are relatively powerless compared to affect bridging and the emotional symptoms of this powerful and immediate phenomenon.

Chapter Wrap-up: This chapter has shown us that there is a cognitive dissonance about

‘emotional memory.’

The human system remembers perseverated affect reaction and memory but not the content.

The reactions in the present are truly automatic, while any analysis of their causal path (Affect Bridge) is impossible.

The amygdala and primal affect brain centers simply hijack any conscious or cognitive efforts to moderate reaction.

Chapter 5

Mind-body connection

Our previous chapters have addressed the phenomenon of learning to feel in a particular way, the storage of that learning and its haphazard origins. The presentations have also been intended to illustrate that there is another way to look at the business of ‘therapy’, beyond ‘talking therapies’, and another way to look at the business of ‘self-improvement’ beyond ‘affirmations’ and ‘think yourself better’. The meta-systemic view of ECR (a broad view, but with a spotlight on preverbal affect) is that there exists another dimension to the facts relating to emotion and feeling, and that there exists in all of us, aspects of self that cannot be cognitively defined. But all of that information remains merely academic unless we look at what are the results of that phenomenon and exactly how our lives are affected by emotional learnings. In a time-honored way, we again draw on science in its certainty of the neural connectedness of brain, body, organs, systems and sub-systems. Is it really every thought that affects every cell in our body, or every feeling? If it’s the latter, what are the implications?

A Swift Tour Through the Development of the Brain

It may be worth pointing out here that I refer to the matter of “survival” in two distinctly different ways, each referring to a function of two different features of the brain. In evolutionary terms, the reptilian brain came on the scene first. It was, among other things, responsible for an animal’s physical and environmental survival (life, preferable to death). Later in the hominization* process, the mammalian brain developed along with its constituent part, the limbic system. The "old mammalian" brain evolved in our mammalian ancestors in an environment of constant danger of being killed by larger animals. Mammals that overreacted to signs of danger had better chances of survival than those who underreacted. So evolution selected in favor of amygdalae that overreacted to survival threats.

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html


*Hominization: the theorized evolutionary development of human

characteristics that set hominids apart from other primates

That's why some modern humans have amygdalae that are overly sensitive to perceived threats. Some people's amygdalae seem hair-triggered to generate strong feelings that drive emotional overreactions. In addition to strong feelings and emotions, the amygdalae stimulate the release of fight/flight and stress hormones (see “Alarm Bells”, below). A hugely interesting but indeterminate aspect of how these two ‘brains’ operate is what can be called a ‘freeze’ response. The reptilian brain has a highly effective freeze response that is directed toward physiological survival. In evolutionary terms, this “freezing” and remaining motionless may have been essential to escape detection by a predator. So, from that perspective, the reptilian brain can produce a “play dead” or freeze response. On the other hand, the later mammalian brain – or more specifically, the amygdalae – has potential to produce a similar reaction. But this is ‘same reaction, different process.’ The existence of well-developed neural pathways between the limbic system and the cerebral cortex (and neocortex) mean that an amygdaloid stimulus can cause a ‘play dead’ or freeze reaction of an entirely different nature than that of the reptilian survival reaction. This “deer in the headlights” style of stunned immobility probably results from some small cognitive influence brought about by an added neural pathway stimulation of the neocortex. Added to the quasi-trance-like state there can be a “what do I do now?” quality to the experience that can also be remembered at limbic level. Through perseveration of a similar response through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood, this ‘what do I do now?’ modus vivendi* can go on to contribute to many forms of helplessness and depression or depression-like personality and behavioral characteristics in adulthood.

*Modus Vivendi (Lat): A manner of living; a way of life.

So, owing to the brain’s developmental structure, the issue of ‘survival’ can have two quite different meanings; one, physical life-or-death survival, the other, a maintenance of equilibrium of a particular state of learned emotion (albeit obsolete). In the context of this book, and in ECR, the second meaning is the relevant one.

The Autonomic Nervous System Fundamental to our existence is the central nervous system (CNS) that carries electrical impulses to the entire body – a highly complex message system. The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is that aspect of the overall nervous system that is responsible for the transmission of signals to other systems of the body in order to create fluctuation and regulation of the somatic manifestations of those systems. Some of the more important systems that are affected by the ANS are: respiratory (lungs), pulmonary (heart and blood vessels), tear and sweat glands, digestive, metabolic, hormonal, immune, gastro-intestinal, genitourinary and auto-phagocytic (the body’s capacity to clear away extraneous cells). The ANS is responsible for the control of not only these systems, but every organ of the body that is part of those systems.

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Psychosomatic scientists and practitioners fully believe that every cell and organ of the body is directly influenced by, and driven by, the brain and its generalized functioning. Traditional Japanese thought was that every disease is caused by a dis-ease of the mind. ECR Practitioners accept (and operate from that acceptance) that there exists a direct neuro-physiological “drive pathway” from the amygdala and its emotional encodings via the limbic brain stem and ANS to every organ, every system and sub-system and cell of the body. This re-addresses a topic that we discussed in Chapter 4 – Emotional Hijacking – but it’s important to get the picture that reactions and ‘message drivers’ utilizing the autonomic nervous system immediately originate in the amygdaloid-hippocampal pathway, and are maintained by the information also originating from the amygdala.

Alarm Bells and Rest Times

The functioning of the ANS is basically divided into two distinct aspects, known as the sympathetic phase and the parasympathetic phase. We’ve all heard of the fight or flight response, so let’s look at what occurs during that phenomenon. Since the discovery of the fight-or-flight response in human and animal bio-function, much has been said on the topics of “stress” and the ANS; trauma and the ANS; grief and the ANS,

and so on. In times of stress, the ANS does indeed signal for the activation of the fight-or-flight response in order for the organism to be able to physically respond to immediate danger. When we anticipate danger or other stressful stimuli, the Autonomic Nervous System is immediately relegated the job of carrying signals to the many and varied systems within the body in order to produce an increased excitation of survival systems and a temporary shutting down of systems that are not immediately vital. This is called the sympathetic phase. During this phase, skeletal muscles tense (contract), breath rate increases, nervous alertness increases, and in order to deal with the extra required oxygen and nutrients, more blood is required, causing the heart to work at a more rapid

level. All these functional increases are, of course, servicing that requirement to fight or run in order to survive. The classic example of this profound reaction is ‘panic attacks.’ In order to provide the added energy to these systems, other systems and organs not immediately necessary for survival, temporarily shut down. The ANS signals a short break for the gastro-intestinal system, the urinary system, the reproductive system and the immune and auto-phagocytic systems. When the danger has passed, and the ANS is allowed to re-tune, the system enters into a relaxation phase called the parasympathetic phase, bringing about an increased effectiveness in those systems that have been shut down during the sympathetic phase.


Mental stress and emotional stress are both stimulants for the sympathetic phase of the ANS, and if we live our lives with a predominance of either, the ANS insists on the continued operation and excitation of the sympathetic phase. In our modern world, those of us who do not achieve relief from worry, stress, so-called repressed emotions or continued anger live with the results of high excitation of the sympathetic phase of the ANS.

Here’s a self-question for you. If you live with what is called a “low-index” stressor as your companion – that is, continually experiencing a low level of stress, either consciously or unconsciously known about, then what do you think this is doing to the activity of the body’s organs that are influenced by the ANS? Yes, I think you’ve got it … the whole affect-neural system is slowly but surely – for as long as you experience this low-index stress – nibbling away at the effectiveness of organs and aspects of what makes you healthy. Stress is a killer. And now you know how and why. Much research has been done on the ability of meditation and mental relaxation to return the ANS to its parasympathetic phase. This ‘rebalancing’ is also one of the fundamental aims of ECR.

Physical Effects of Feeling

ECR practitioners are not fond of maintaining that feelings and emotions actually cause serious illness, even though there’s strong evidence that supports this. They don’t deny, however, that emotion (affect) has an influence – either subtle or profound – on the creation and/or maintenance of these conditions. Returning to the information above about the direct connectedness of amygdala and body (via the ANS), we can now have a very brief look at how emotional stressors may influence and underlie many medical conditions. In spite of overwhelming evidence of the above, western medicine largely ignores the role of the emotions in the existence of the following few examples, opting for treatment only of the symptoms:-

Asthma – result of the excitation of pulmonary responses and constriction of lung passageways (affected by the ANS).

Eczema and psoriasis – result of degeneration of cells and associated feeder systems in the body’s largest organ – the skin (affected by the ANS).

Migraines – result of dilation of the blood vessels in and around the brain (affected by the ANS).

Stomach ulcers – result of reduction of maintenance systems in the alimentary tract during sympathetic phase (affected by the ANS).

Irritable Bowel Syndrome – the result of disintegration (lit.) of maintenance messages to the bowel (affected by the ANS).

Thoughts or Feelings?

Common scientific understanding seems to focus on the extreme results of the flight/fight response, yet more recent research strongly indicates that more subtle affect information ‘drivers’ at amygdaloid level also influence our body through the ANS. Our personal belief systems, for instance, create emotional energy; affect information that’s also stored in the amygdala. If we believe that we are destined (for example) to suffer all the negative symptoms


of menopause, then we will create an affect dynamic as a result of the emotional investment in that belief. That belief structure is processed by the amygdala, ensuring that those beliefs are physiologically manifested in the body – the organs, and in particular, the hormonal system. Common belief, by medical and lay people alike, is that these symptoms are caused by hormonal activity. The Affectologist does not disagree, but knows that the production of hormones is highly influenced by the affect material generated by our personal beliefs. Another relevant example of this is depression. In a later chapter (7) we will look at the chemistry of feeling, but I want to touch on the fact that depressed feelings are maintained by the amygdala’s subtle responses to our beliefs about depression, and so sends those signals to the body (see next chapter – The Territory of Feeling). So, we move further into our investigation as to whether it is every thought that affects every cell in our bodies, or every feeling.

Chapter Wrap-up: This chapter has illustrated the very definite and direct relationship

that affect storage and activation (in the limbic brain) has on every part of the physical body.

It has shown also that the ‘fight or flight response’ conveyed as part of the autonomic nervous system plays a hugely significant part in our long-term health, and that any perennial imbalance can have very serious results.

Chapter 6

The territory of feeling

Most people believe that feelings and emotions originate and are experienced in our brains. We simply take for granted that emotions are experienced cerebrally. This chapter presents the facts that all emotions are expressed and experienced somatically, that is in the body. This realization offers new insights into healing paradigms.

Closing the Loop

Following closely on from the information in the last chapter, let’s look at how the mind/body system processes its own internal information. Without an extensive study into neural networks, it’s enough to say that we know that the brain receives information from the body in complex but definite ways. When the limbic brain has signalled (from the amygdala) that a certain emotional response is necessary or critically appropriate, we have seen that the body responds. This immediate amygdala/limbic/ANS/body shock provides the primary message. The body then sends


information about “how it is experiencing” back to the brain. This information is immediately processed by the amygdaloid-hippocampal pathway, so reconfirming that the affect message has been received and the feedback loop is connected. The circle of information is closed. Although information reaches, and is processed by, the neocortical part of the brain – the thinking part – the information feedback is truly unconscious and serves to stabilise the initial response. Put simply, following an affect reaction in which the body responds, the feedback loop of information confirms to us on all levels that the emotion is stable (locked in), and becomes more difficult to destabilise (correct) through the action of the rational conscious mind.

The unconscious neural and biological systems are what are actually doing all the (automatic looping) work, while the conscious mind merely looks on.

The Source of Emotion

Notwithstanding the above, we need to understand that the whole brain is not responsible for the generation or experience of emotion or affect feeling, although it is responsible for a recognition and confirmation that emotion and affect is being experienced somewhere. It is important in the Affectological view, to see that although the mind and body set up a pattern of repetitive feedback of information, and that information is complex, the initial pattern is always established by the neuroencodings stored by the amygdala. Yes, we react to an external stimulus; yes, the whole brain is eventually implicated, including the neurochemistry, but the trigger source of emotional response messages is always the amygdala by dint of its previous learnings (as described in chapters 1 to 4).

A Somatic Experience

The brain recognizes and confirms that emotion and affect is being experienced somewhere. That somewhere, as we have seen, is in the whole body. To use two examples of this, let’s look at anger and depression. In these cases, the myth prescribes that they are ‘brain’ or ‘mind’ problems. If we subscribe to the idea that the mind embraces the whole body – the whole organism, and not just what’s inside the head, then the latter is half right. But anger is expressed entirely in the body. Following the initial limbic signal, the body experiences a flushing of the face, an excitement of the nervous system resulting in accelerated breathing and pulse, a clenching of the jaw, and all the other expressions of the “fight” side of the fight or flight syndrome. The rational mind is hijacked, and we recognize that we’re angry specifically because of what the body is experiencing. On the other hand, when the limbic brain signals a need for a ‘depressed feeling’ response, the body obeys the signals conveyed by the ANS, experiencing reduced vitality, sluggishness, lethargy and a general feeling of perhaps not even wanting to get up in the morning.


This set of somatic manifestations then, by the feedback loop, informs the brain of the experience, and stabilizes the acknowledgment. So, the territory of emotion is in the body, not in the brain.

The Role of the Brain

It’s not as though I don’t want to acknowledge the brain or its vital importance, but given all the previous information, we can see that the brain, in the case of experienced feelings and emotions, is the clearing house of the information that passes through it. While it is a part of the brain that is responsible for initial triggering of emotional responses, its job is done in the triggering, and acts just as the rest of the brain in its task of receiving, processing and re-distributing affect information.

This may bring into serious question the social and professional beliefs that the whole brain is the source of emotional and mental “disease.” We investigate the neurochemistry of emotion in the next chapter.

New Insights into “Healing”

The question now must be, ‘can any therapy effectively turn around the complex whole of what makes up the human in distress?’ Can pharmaceutical methods change everything merely by changing the brain chemistry? Can talking therapies change the complex mechanisms? Can so-called emotional healing therapies really bring about total healing through the discharge of emotional material? Can persuasive cognitive restructuring as experienced in self-development courses really bring about a completely different unconscious mind set? These are the questions that originally contributed to the development of ECR, where the re-learning of learned affect responses at amygdaloid level are the aims, and ECR focuses on our preverbal affect point of origin and the way in which those early preverbal scripts have perseverated and established themselves into our everyday present way of being.

Chapter Wrap-up: This chapter has shown us that we should never consider the whole of

the human being as anything other than WHOLE.

The brain does not exist in any vacuum. It operates and engages with the complete rest of the body and organs in order to work in a cyclic ‘information-exchange’ way.

Given that preverbal affect is a factor in establishing limbic reactive behavior, the same can be said for deep emotions.

Look to the body to register emotional status. Look to the emotional status to register whole health.


Chapter 7

The Chemistry of Feeling

Because ‘depression’ has become one of the greatest and most insidious scourges of modern society, in this chapter, we’ll look mainly at the issue of brain chemistry in relation to depression, bipolar disorder and their similar mood states. It is simply a useful example (depression) in showing up how modern medicine has skewed the reality in favour of chemical intervention. As we work through this chapter, bear in mind that the information presented about depression can be applied to the full range of our feeling states – perhaps not in exactly the same way in chemical detail, but the experience of what we call depression provides us with the best example from which to draw our picture of ‘the chemistry of feeling’. The information here is basic, but poignant enough to present the argument that the chemistry of the brain is not the precursor to all mood problems.

Chemical Imbalance?

Are feelings and emotions caused by our neurotransmitters and other body chemistry? Or is the production of our neurochemistry the result of the dynamics of our feeling states? We have seen in previous chapters (5 and 6) that it is the state of emotional balance of the whole person that has a huge influence on the production of all chemicals and hormones in the body. This does not only apply to our biomechanical aspects, but also to our neuromechanical selves. Early

pharmacological research found that laboratory specimens (rats, rabbits), when clinically encouraged to adopt a depressed mood state, showed a reduction in the levels of the neurotransmitter, serotonin (among others, such as dopamine) in the brain. This discovery led to a convenient but illogical proposal that this depression was caused by the low levels of serotonin. The debate still rages today, within learned circles, as to the ‘truth’ of that proposition, with affectologists holding to the logic that if we suffer a continuation of depressed feelings for any reason, then this in itself will bring about a reduction in the levels of serotonin in the brain, as the brain requires less serotonin in order to function at a lower synaptic rate. The opposite side of the debate is, of course, furiously supported by pharmaceutical conglomerates and those who seek the ‘easy path’ of relief from drugs.

“If YOU have a chemical imbalance then I have the expensive drugs here to fix it”, says the pharmaceutical company.

“If I have a chemical imbalance, and I believe that, then the expensive drugs are the only way to stabilize my life”, says the sufferer.

The position of affectologists is that whatever we have created, we can recreate; whatever we have learned, we can re-learn; whatever we have framed as our attributional style of mood, we can reframe. We have seen from all our previous information in this project, that


we form a non-verbal emotional “style” of feeling and being at a very early stage in our lives. This sense of self influences and predominates just how we grow to see ourselves and the way we feel about our circumstances and life, being the foundation of almost everything we are, from our emotional and mental habits, through to our attitudes and behaviours; even our physical attributes, in health and ill-health; in wealth and I’ll-wealth. So, our preverbally-learned sense of self ultimately influences the presence of attitudes such as negativism and pessimism, which have a tendency to create the sort of “stuckness” in depressed feelings and mood states that grow to become what the medical fraternity calls clinical depression. It’s the “stuckness” – the habituation and perseveration – that creates the reduction in serotonin, not the other way around. This argument brings the occasional volcanic response from those who choose to justify their depression and “blame” low levels of serotonin, and that’s understood. There is much emotional investment in the proposition that this is the case. The big problem with that argument is that, if that is the belief, then it follows that a life must be led always managed through the intervention of mood elevating pharmaceuticals – the legal “uppers.” The compounded problem with that is that all vestiges of self-responsibility for our state of wellbeing are removed from us and we become powerless in the face of the myth that “I am depressed because my brain chemistry is out of balance.” This does not detract, though, from the fact that cases do exist where the depressive state is the result of a genetic brain imbalance, an induced imbalance (from substance abuse) or, in rare cases, a chronic progression from unresolved early life abuse that has created a locked-in psychosomatic habituation toward constant depression. In these cases, we contend that the logical course may involve temporary and careful chemical intervention.

Mood Medicines

At this point in history, the use of antidepressants has become, sadly, a norm rather than an occasional exception reserved for exceptional cases. We’ll briefly look at the current group of antidepressants known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Zoloft, Prozac, Luvox and Effexor, to name just a few. In order to understand how these work, we need to have a brief look at how the neurotransmitters work. Simply put, the neurotransmitter chemical serotonin (as well as dopamine, norepinephrine, and others) is required to transmit electrochemical signals from cell to cell in the brain. Each transmission is called a synapse. Synapses occur at the rate of billions a second. The rate of synapses determine the level of mental activity of the brain, and the rate of mental activity determines the rate of synaptic activity. Chicken and egg. Serotonin is produced with each synapse and is absorbed by the receiving neuron when it’s done its transmission job. Pharmaceutical researchers have found that when chemicals containing certain mineral salts are introduced into the system, the receptors no longer absorb serotonin at the same rate as before. This creates an increase in the level of neurotransmitters, resulting in an increase in brain activity. The theory is that this in turn creates a heightened mood state and depression is relieved. This, then, is the function of SSRIs. It’s synthetic and dangerous.


Apart from going into the myriad possible side effects of this incursion (insult) into the body’s chemistry (not just the brain), it’s enough to point out two obvious results of ingestion of this type of antidepressant. Firstly, it constitutes mere clumsy management of the symptoms of depression, rather than a cure of any other cause than “chemical.” Secondly, the results of excess flooding of serotonin in the brain almost certainly create episodes of mania, and even violent tendencies, sometimes resulting in the sort of self-harm that they claim to relieve. At best, correct dosages can merely be guessed at, and all too often the trial and error approach creates more distress than the original depression. I’ll finish with a short story. Paul came to see me a few months after he’d been diagnosed with clinical depression and prescribed Effexor. His experience of depression had been mild at most. After several weeks on this SSRI, he started to experience episodes of heightened mental activity, high anxiety and periods of what he described as mania. His doctor immediately diagnosed him as having bipolar disorder (nee manic depression) and prescribed medication to control that problem. He was distressed that he seemed to be sinking into pharmaceutical dependency, when he had merely started out with mild depression. When I asked him if he’d had any manic or high anxiety experiences prior to taking SSRIs, his response was “never.” Yet, it had not occurred to him or (seemingly) his doctor, that there was a distinct possibility that he was now bipolar as a result of the taking of the antidepressant meds in the first place. We live in a dangerous age, where interference and impairment of our most cherished possession – our mind, our brain – is increasingly taken for granted.

Rebalancing

We accept that it would be irresponsible to argue the dangers of psychotropic medications without attesting to any alternatives. The study of affectology has led to the development of ECR, where the primary aim is to help bring about a balancing of mood states through re-learning early preverbal affect responses. Aside from this ideal approach, many other methods of rebalancing mind, body and spirit can become part of your life after experiencing ECR: that is, the ‘retuning’ and flipping of the switch on stuck preverbal (silent) scripts can in turn allow for a style of being where the following aids are easily incorporated into your life. Meditation has been shown to bring about definite rebalancing of the activity of the ANS. The simple activity of physical work creates higher levels of serotonin in the brain, as does increased involvement in sports. The act of laughing more increases endorphin and serotonin levels (and I mean belly laughing not just mouth laughing!). Many alternatives to chemical intervention are available to us. We need not simply accept that the pill is the divine answer. And after accepting a greater care about what you put into your system, then ECR is the real answer to freeing up from stuck preverbal scripts.

Chapter Wrap-up: This chapter has shown us that we can use the very common story of

depression as an example of the mistake of thinking that mood states and other life attitudes are the result of ‘brain chemistry imbalances.’

This is germane to this study simply because of the common attitude, “anything wrong with my emotions? That’s OK, I’ll take a pill.”


Chapter 8

Descartes’ Error.

Before we embark on any excoriation of poor old Renee Descartes, it’s appropriate to say that, like Freud (who also enjoys a measure of professional denigration today), his propositions were seemingly right for his time; and certainly, as any theological historian will tell us, religiously convenient. But, time passes, bringing further developments in logic and commonsense. Descartes’ Error is the title of a fascinating book by neurology professor, Antonio Damasio, in which he writes that Descartes’ philosophical proposition “I think; therefore, I am” has led the way to many of the emotional ills of today. Nobody can argue against the fact that mankind has enjoyed a certain amount of self-directed internal harmony for many millennia. Yes, we suffered the stresses and travails of the efforts to survive; the so-called instincts that we required to continue to live, develop and propagate, some of which were not comfortable; but it has been during the last VERY SHORT TIME in developmental history that we have been cursed with the afflictions, dis-ease and emotional disharmony that we almost take for granted today. Since emerging from the primordial swamp, we’ve survived without the mental, emotional, attitudinal, behavioral and psychosomatic problems that today characterize our species and require that therapists exist anyway. If this is the case, what has gone wrong? What is it about mankind that has made life today so fraught with the problems unknown to us a comparatively short time ago? The serious student of anthropology, historical linguistics or species-developmental psychology may be thrilled at the details of the minutiae of what took us from the trees to the moon, but, for our purposes, we focus here on the development of human thought and its relationship to emotion, feeling and overall health; Man’s desire to compartmentalize and de-construct the already perfect bio-machine. The history of ‘modern’ Western medicine, Western surgical techniques, and certainly bio-psychiatry and psychology is a very short one, particularly the latter two. Just a couple of centuries ago in the Western medical tradition, surgeons were considered to be little more than mechanics. Little was known of the workings of the body or its connection with mind and all the other systems contained within it. During the development of Western medicine, European thought was inclined, as it has been for centuries, towards ‘scientific’ explanation, and requiring ‘scientific qualification’ in order for any hypothesis to be accepted. As we know, scientific requirements are such that we may accept only those facts that are observable and quantifiable. But ‘mind’ or emotions, are not quantifiable, only the symptomatic manifestations that they may have on the body (psychosomatics).


I Think therefore I Am?

So Western medicine, in its mad downhill run of desire to specialize, readily accepted the philosophy of Rene Descartes, or at least accepted an aspect of his philosophy to suit its purpose.

No matter whether Descartes’ ideas were as concrete to him as most commentators claim, or not, the only thing that matters is that Western medicine has built its foundations on his dualistic theory of substance. He stated: “This ‘I’ – that is, the soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, and would not fail to be what it is even if the body did not exist”. This, in modern terms has been conveniently condensed to the familiar saying; - “I think; therefore I am.” And it is still attributed to Descartes, even though he said nothing of the sort. His theories were complex, and this famous (or infamous) statement did not mean, I suspect, what has been made of it, but what a boon for the scientifically-directed medical system of the 18th to 21st centuries! Protestations and condemnations aside, the fact remains that, in our society, medicine has followed this dualistic view, and generally applies itself ONLY to the scientifically observable machinations of the corporeal body and its tangible systems. Consequently, our medical paradigm offers little solace to those members of our society who wonder about, and seek help for, issues of existence that involve feelings, emotions, attitudes, behaviours and their physical effects (psychosomatics). In the main, it is claimed that they are “not observable, so cannot exist.” At the very outside, we may be able to restore chemical balance by the ingestion of psychotropic substances (they claim).

“This is Descartes’ error: the abysmal separation between body and mind, between

sizable, dimensioned, mechanically-operated, infinitely divisible body stuff on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible, mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgement, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of the mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism."

----- Antonio R. Damasio.

Whether he intended it or not, Descartes’ short theoretical statement has established itself as the unwritten ‘banner’ of the Western medical paradigm where, in general terms, a patient is no more or less than the sum total of all physical parts and systems, and a chemical/mechanical cause must be sought to explain our mood states.

What Really Drives the Bus?

Affectologists propose that the axiom, I think, therefore I am, drives psychotherapists and counselors – and by extension, all of us – to believe that if we cannot observe an aspect of self


from a quantifiable and explanatory perspective, then it doesn’t exist. Or, if it does exist, we can’t put it into words. And if we can’t put it into words, then it can’t be analyzed and understood. An unfortunate reverse corollary of the adage would go something like, “because the content of affect establishment is not something I can analyze with the thinking mind, and I cannot think it, therefore it doesn’t exist.” For ECR Practitioners, “I FEEL, therefore I am” is a much more fitting axiom when we understand the dynamics of the affect self, how we structure our emotional lives, and the invisible everyday hijacking by our feelings that have been studied in all the previous chapters of this course. FEELINGS drive the bus, not thoughts and verbalization.

Symptoms Vs Cause

Many therapies subscribe to the idea that ‘cause’ must be dealt with. I hope that we have shown that all too often, the cause is inaccessible to ‘thought’ or the spoken word. ECR practitioners work on the basis that authentic feeling cause is not inaccessible; it’s just not accessible through the use of narrative description. It’s often the simplest of metaphors that work the best, and the ‘symptom tree’ metaphor is one that affectologists hold dearly to. If we can imagine the human being, in all its complexities, as being a tree, then we can see that the readily visible aspects of that tree consist mainly of its leaves (provided it’s an evergreen). We can conceptualise that the leaves, being the most visible and recognisable equate with our ‘known’ aspects of self – what we can describe in respect of our problems, symptoms and illnesses, The conglomeration of leaves is our narrative self. If we correct or pick off unhealthy leaves, it makes no difference to the tree’s root system. And it’s the root system that forms the foundation of that tree – the ‘cause’ structure from which it has grown and on which it depends for its health. To heal the tree in its entirety, we must heal the root system first in order for the rest to flourish and naturally heal itself. To address only our ‘known’ and knowable symptoms is like merely picking leaves from the tree. To truly bring the metaphoric tree to wellness, we must embark on healing the feeling.

The Implications

The traditional Eastern medical paradigm is one that has adhered, for four thousand years or so, to the notions that the physical aspects of the body, its systems, the brain, the mind (and all its conceptual convolutions), the emotions and the spirit, are all interconnected, each depending on the other for sustenance, support, homeostasis and psychosomatic balance. We have seen that our earliest affect learnings influenced, through perseveration, all that was subsequently learned; that all of who we are today, through our conditioning and education, bears traces of the nonverbal affect self. If this is so, we have no option but to throw some doubt on the verity and authenticity of memory and self-perception, or any therapy that relies on the client’s self-assessorial statements to form diagnoses about past events, or even current experiences that are influenced by subconscious processes. But, “doubt” is the word, rather than denigration. Even though our propositions appear to negate the value of any verbalization at all, we do not claim sole ownership of effective


therapy. Psychotherapy and counseling – the narrative (talking) therapies – are very often effective, bringing relief through the cognitive processes of working through the intricacies of a client’s emotional and mental life. But affectologists are concerned that when they fail, it is because of the lack of recognition of the preverbal affect self and its influence on all that we are. Therapists and ‘change agents’ of all persuasions could well be persuaded to acknowledge and understand the implications of what has been, and still is, a significant blind spot in the professions:- the existence of the non-verbal affect matrix.

In the final analysis, affectology does not attack other effective therapeutic approaches, but proposes that there exists a component, a missing link, that requires contemporary acknowledgement and a greater place in the study of understanding the complexity of the human condition. Affective neuroscientists such as LeDoux, Damasio and Goleman have led the way; it now remains for all psychotherapeutic approaches to insert this important piece into the jigsaw puzzle.

Chapter Wrap-up: In this chapter, we have touched on the unfortunate idea that has

pervaded modern society – that the ‘thinking mind’ is the governing mind. This is largely the result of Descartes’ “I think; therefore I am” adage that has been adopted by psychology and post-Freudian approaches to determining human states.

The truth in all aspects is that “I FEEL, THEREFORE I AM.”

“Thinking,” because it is dissociated from preverbal affect, can never make a change to deep emotional states of being.

Chapter 9

The AVATAR

“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end

we become disguised to ourselves.” ……Francois de La Rochefoucauld

This quote from de La Rochefoucauld is incredibly important in presenting this chapter. Without suggesting that all that follows could be aimed at the relationship that we have with ourselves – that is, how we see ourselves and the tools we use to define what we see – then the text from this point could be construed as meaning the therapist-client relationship. You know, the “what’s it to do with me” response.


The fact is that it has everything to do with you; or maybe I should say, with both of you; - the conscious you and the subconscious you.

I’d like to introduce you to a character, at right, that you will hear about in this chapter.

In my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, and on this webpage, I address the fact that every person who attends psychotherapy, counseling, talk therapy (whatever you want to call it), in all probability, shows some sort of face to the therapist that is not his or her authentic subconscious self. In my ECR work, and indeed throughout this presentation, I have proposed that much of what drives us at the deepest emotional (response) level and maintains our personality, our self-beliefs, and our day-to-day existence is NON-VERBAL.

And when I say non-verbal, please accept that I mean it in its literal sense. I’ve tried to make this clear in previous chapters. The problem with ‘therapy’ (as we know it) is that in almost every case, it relies – not just heavily, but entirely – on your ability to verbalize your problems, your life, your experience of any symptoms or problems that might be ‘getting in the way of living the life you deserve’ and where it may have come from in the first place. If we look at the clear signals and data that are offered to us by affective neuroscience, we now know that our emotional (affect) matrix and the way we set ourselves up to experience the world are laid down long before we have the ability to form words and cognitive ways of self-recognition. Depending on who and what you believe, we set up our emotional self-assessment at anywhere from 24 weeks into gestation to some time into infancy. In any case, long before what the neuroscientists call the ‘verbal emergent stage’.

Since we then have no words, yet unconsciously REMEMBER the reactions that worked in our best interests (then) and form repetitions of those reactions and quickly build habits of them at unconscious level, science shows that we become who we are – at least as an emotional being – at a time when we ‘had no words.’ This, then, attests that the building of our emotional habits are what is called “state-specific” – existing today, more or less, in the state in which they were specifically learned and cemented in our subconscious character. “State-dependent” also defines that they are existing today dependent on their non-verbal character.

So it follows that if we are reacting and forming self-assessments today out of remnants of that which is learned before words, then they defy verbal description. I hope that after all our discussions in previous chapters, you are starting to see the circular reasoning I’m applying.

The whole of the work of ECR proposes that (a) much of the deeper subconscious emotional patterning that is driving mental-emotional and life problems cannot be described, analyzed, actualized, using words as the tool for reporting, and that (b) in our society, in post-Freudian times, we labor under the cultural habit of thinking we HAVE TO use words to describe our problems and the causes of our problems.

http://www.afxinfo.com/all-our-avatars.html


We enter the therapist’s rooms holding in front of us the face that tries to do what we believe it should do. … talk! And when we find we can’t actually delve deeply enough and ‘words fail us,’ why, then, we confabulate – try to make it up, either consciously or unintentionally.

This is why our friend in the picture above is significant to therapists, clients and online participants in the world of ECR. He represents the authentic unconscious affect person hiding behind the mask that our culture and our professions have insisted he build. The tape over the mouth represents the dynamic of ECR, where the client is disallowed from talking to the extent of wandering away from the true affect subconscious self.

So, what about the relationship with yourself, and why is this story about Avatars and the like, significant if you are interested in ECR as a means of emotional resolution for you? The fact is that everything we can say about the Avatar self applies also to the way you build stories that describe yourself to yourself, and what you might bring into therapies that are based on ‘verbal revelation’ and narrative reporting. I mentioned the de La Rochefoucauld quote that led this chapter for this very reason: do not fool yourself that you have not built some way and means by which you can disguise you to yourself. And subsequently, unconsciously disguise the truth to any practitioner/therapist.

And ECR (along with its previous form, Af-x®) is the only known approach that is created to find ways to circumvent the Avatar self and help you deal with your true affect sub-person residing at unconscious level.

Chapter Wrap-up: Our culture, and PARTICULARLY our professional psychotherapeutic

culture, has developed a deep and pervading respect for the spoken word, apparent attention to the client, and an importance on honoring autobiographical report.

This has created a situation (in therapy) where affect is ignored, and THE WRONG PERSON is heard and attempts are made to treat that which is not your true inner self.

Affective neuroscience research shows unequivocally that during our early life span, we become strangers to our preverbal emotional self.

While this is true of the way that modern psychotherapeutic attitudes perform, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are far too easily fooled by ourselves and enticed to consider that what we “think about ourselves” is correct.

This, at the expense of what we authentically feel about ourselves.

Beware the Avatar. Even your own!

http://www.whatisafx.com/


Chapter 10

Why It All Matters

This question of “why should I care?” or “why does it matter? I’m now an adult!” is one that has chased affectology, Af-x and ECR for years. Even though ECR began its life over three decades ago as a psychotherapy interested in helping with the rebalancing of emotional issues in peoples’ lives – in other words, mostly concerned with the sorts of symptoms we identify ‘therapy’ with; depression, stress, anger – the practice has become just as successful in treating people whose livelihoods depend on business decision-making and occupying a space in their minds where they operate at full potential. It’s not so usual for those people who are operating at either less potential or downright mediocrity to realize that much of their mode of operating might be influenced by hidden preverbal governing drivers. And just as importantly – or if you value your health, more importantly – there is less of a tendency to consider ‘emotion’ as being a quiet killer. But it can be so. If we review Chapter 5, we can easily trace the influential action of preverbal affect initiators throughout the physical body. For many reasons to do with Western medical specialization, we have grown to be a culture that does not readily see the connection between mind and body. But consider the path. If the deeply established affect storage system is out of balance, then this influences the way the limbic brain engages with the parasympathetic phase of the central nervous system. If the parasympathetic nervous system is out of balance, then this dynamic is transported to all organs and musculature and peripheral systems of the body. A mind out of balance means a body also out of balance. But then, this was the crux of the text in Chapter 5, so this must serve as a revision of that text; but to focus on you and your health in a more subjective way. I include two excerpts from scholarly articles that exemplify my concern that emotions do indeed have a profound effect on our physical health and longevity.

I mentioned the idea that low-index stress (subtle level of stress that may go unnoticed – as in attitudinal stress), may play havoc with your health, even to the point of serious heart and cardiovascular disease. Here’s a piece from the Journal of Preventive Cardiology:

Long-term (Low-Index) Stress Social and psychological circumstances can cause long-term stress. Continuing anxiety, insecurity, low self-esteem, social isolation and lack of control over work and home life have powerful effects on health. Such psychosocial risks


accumulate during life and increase the chances of poor mental health and premature death. Long periods of anxiety and insecurity and the lack of supportive friendships are damaging in whatever area of life they arise. How do these psychosocial factors affect physical health? In emergencies, the stress response activates a cascade of stress hormones that affect the cardiovascular and immune system. Our hormones and nervous system prepare us to deal with an immediate physical threat by raising the heart rate, diverting blood to muscle and increasing anxiety and alertness. Nevertheless, turning on the biological stress response too often and for too long is likely to carry multiple costs to health. These include depression, increased susceptibility to infection, diabetes, and a harmful pattern of cholesterol and fats blood, high blood pressure and the attendant risks of heart attack and stroke.

…Prof. Rajeev Gupta

This following extract refers to attitudinal conditions as they relate to our health. It is worth noting that the sorts of attitudes that are common to high achievers (anger, perfection, superiority, even hostility) fall within the gamut of the parameters described below. This is from the Public Access files of NIH – the National Institute of Health:

Psychological Trait Attitudes and Health Over the past few decades, our understanding of the health consequences of psychological factors has broadened to include both the detrimental associations of negative psychological factors (such as depression, anxiety, anger/hostility, acute and chronic stress) and the beneficial associations with positive factors, including positive affect and positive attitudes. Attitudes may affect CVD (Cardiovascular Disease) risk in several ways, by influencing an individual’s 1) adoption of health behaviors, 2) maladaptive stress responding resulting in direct alteration of physiology (i.e., autonomic dysfunction, thrombosis, arrhythmias), 3) development of traditional CVD risk factors, and 4) lack of adherence to therapy in both primary and secondary prevention. The overarching hypothesis is that attitudes, which originate in childhood and mature by early adulthood, may ultimately be responsible for a substantial portion of the burden of CVD. It is also conceivable that attitudes are important modifiable targets both for primary and secondary prevention of CVD.

…NIH – National Institute of Health

There are many such research reports available online to the public if you should care to investigate other affect and emotional psychological factors determining your path of health throughout your lifetime and right now. These are just two that point out that the knowledge most certainly does exist in Western medicine that emotion and attitudinal factors are ‘things to watch’ in our efforts to lead the good life – or I should say our efforts to lead a LONG good life!

Back to the question “WHY SHOULD I CARE?”

http://www.sajpc.org/vol7/vol7_3/emergingimportance.htm

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2943009/


In the title of this eBook, there is the phrase, Why it Matters. And this is in reference to our ‘engine’ – that which is driving us from a deeper emotional perspective. It’s unconscious. It’s hidden. It’s the ‘ghost in the machine.’ Whether we live our lives apparently happy and content to take a middle path in achievement or we spend a lot of our time striving for perfection, making more money, rising to greater heights in the things we wish to achieve, there is a glaringly good argument for the fact that we should acknowledge that the dynamics of ‘deep emotion’ (or as we have now established within this text, ‘invisible affect’) can and DOES play a part in our health. What greater signal can there be to start to develop a concern for ‘that which lies below’ and to take steps to balance the dynamic? Those steps? Change life-style and attitude? Maybe not. Take up meditation? Maybe. Participate in the ECR program? Definitely.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ

which it does not know how to use ….Arthur Koestler (Author: “The Ghost in the Machine”)

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This e-book contains material protected

under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any

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book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

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