Your beloved pet, your intimate companion of many, but too few years is
sick or dying. This is the time of your pets life when it needs your positive
emotions and energy the very most. But instead of strength, it feels your fear
or your sadness of it’s impending transition. It is confused and does not feel
nurtured.
You have lost your pet and are trying desperately to
move on. You want to remember the peacefulness and joy thought of your pet
always brought you, but sadness and loneliness are always there.
We will and we must face fears and mourn the losses in our
lives. That is healthy, that is part of growth and transition. But excessive
fear, grief and pain in difficult times or at the time of any transition is not
only painful, it is physically unhealthy. It keeps you stuck at the time of an
important opportunity for change.
What happens within you that triggers fears and stress when
your pet is sick? What happens when you mourn the loss of a beloved pet
companion? Why do sadness and loneliness linger at the time of a pet’s death
stopping us from moving on in positive ways and even finding another pet? And,
of most importance what can you do to stay strong and positive?
Controlling
the eruption of thoughts
Thoughts
stimulate your emotions. If your pet is sick or is gone, it is hard to stay
physically calm and mentally clear. Important pieces of advice for your mental
health are “concentrate”, “stay focused”, “keep your mind in the
present” Unfortunately, knowing you need to stay focused doesn’t
consistently stop the eruption of your thoughts.
Controlling
the eruption of emotions
When
you are comforting a sick pet or comforting one that is dying you desperately
want to stay positive, stop worrying and control your fear. You don’t want
your pet to feel those emotions. But, controlling the undesirable eruption of
emotions is not something you can choose to by willing it with your conscious
mind. Your emotions are made up of electrical and chemical reactions that
directly affect your central nervous system. These eruptions of emotions affect
both your brain and body.
WHY IT
HURTS SO MUCH
There is a new way of thinking about your brain and your
brain’s interaction with your body. Thoughts and emotions, the brain’s
mental functions, are now seen as composed of electrical and chemical reactions.
Controlling emotion-triggering thoughts and maintaining more
emotional strength in the face of the illness or loss of your pet, requires
learning more about how emotion happens in your brain and body.
Your central nervous system, including your brain, spine and
nerve network, is composed of about 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) nerve
cells called neurons. Short fibers called dendrites extend out from the nerve
cell body and collect messages for the cell. A long fiber called an axon passes
the message along to other nerve cells at a junction referred to as a synapse.
Combinations of chemical transmitters (the messages that make up your thoughts
and emotions) create electrical charges that propel the neurochemical messages
from the axon of one cell to a dendrite of another cell across small gaps called
synaptic clefts. This space across which these chemical messages must leap is
less than 2 millionth of an inch wide. The message crosses the synapse in less
than 1/1,000th of a second this is about 500 times faster than a blink of an
eye. Your thoughts and the emotions that they trigger are traveling fast and
frantically throughout your brain.
The squiggly, gray matter you can actually see when a brain
is exposed is called the cerebral cortex. The part of your brain beneath that is
referred to as the subcortex (sub referring to under the cortex).
Within these areas are numerous structures. For the purpose of learning
about maintaining emotional energy and managing emotions better in the face of
the sickness or loss of a pet there are brain structures located in the
subcortex that are important.
Practicing your brain’s ability to concentrate is essential
for effective and healthy brain responses of any kind, including the thoughts
you have and the emotions you feel. Many sources on improving mentally emphasize
that concentration is a key but they rarely go on to explain how to effectively
focus your mind when you need to and how to recreate that state of focus.
Thoughts trigger emotions. If your pet is sick, thinking
about the future triggers fears. If you pet is gone, thinking about the past
triggers sadness. Effective programs helping you make desired changes in how you
respond in the face of the sickness or loss of your pet involves how you think.
You must train your brain, making the mental changes necessary for thinking
clearly and calmly (controlling thought eruptions.) This involves practicing
concentration.
What happens in your brain when you use effectively practice
concentration? You trigger activity in the middle or subcortex area of your
brain.
A little structure
called the hippocampus becomes active in inhibiting or suppressing your
attention. When that part of your brain becomes active to inhibit attention,
there is a shift in the activity of your higher brain area, the cortex, away
from the left hemisphere into the right hemisphere. This shift causes a
narrowing of your attention to things going on around you and you think less.
There is another
structure in your mid brain or subcortex called the amygdala. An important job
of that brain structure is to play a role in turning your attention on again.
When you stop concentrating, activity in the amygdala is involved. This causes a
shift in the activity of your higher cortex away from the right hemisphere back
into the left hemisphere, your window to the world. Concentration is terminated
and your focus of attention is widened.
Now
that you have a simple understanding of how concentration happens in your brain,
you understand one reason why using effective mental training, practicing
concentration is so important in helping you better manage how your brain and
body respond in the face of sickness or loss of a beloved pet. Your brain is not
trained to effectively and easily quiet the thoughts that trigger your stress
and emotions or shift out of the thinking areas. It needs to be trained to
concentrate.
Negative
emotions concern your ailing pet and are not healthy for you when sustained for
long periods of time. The second thing an effective program must do is help you
make the mental changes necessary for managing the negative emotions you feel at
the sickness or loss of a pet is more directly quieting emotions (controlling
emotional eruptions.)
You must strengthen your brain’s ability to diminish
damaging electrical and chemical reactions of negative emotions like
frustration, or anger. You must train your brain in such a way as to clear the
body reactions that cause those emotions. To understand how this happens, it is
helpful to have a graphical understanding of how your brain functions in
effective and not so effective ways.
Remember how thoughts and emotions occur. Electrical impulses
push neurochemicals from cell to cell throughout the brain. Knowing that makes
it’s easier to understand important things about how your brain works also,
how and why feelings of fear, sadness and loss may seem uncontrollable at times
in the face of the illness of loss of your pet.
Normal
Functioning
Normal functioning of
the brain would be smooth, coordinated movement. The chemicals move
across the surface of the brain propelled by the electrical impulses at a speed
and intensity directed by your varying and fluctuating thoughts and emotions.
Stress
When stress increases
for any reason, the pace of the activity speeds up. The chemicals of thoughts
and emotions still maintain the same patterns but move faster and faster
throughout the brain propelled by more intense electrical charges.
Losing
it
You
can now understand a stress headache, or out of control emotions in the face of
a loss. There is a semblance of order to the movement of the electrical and
chemical activity but it is frantic and moving in a less than healthy or
effective manner.
The
Rest of Your Body
It’s important to
understand that this electrical and chemical activity is not isolated to your
brain. The electrical impulses push the neurochemicals of emotion from cell to
cell throughout your entire body. As famed neurological researcher Candice Pert
once said, “even your big toe knows you are angry.” The cells of your big
toe have some of the neurochemicals of the emotions you feel. In the case of the
emotional pain felt in the face of illness or loss of a pet, this frantic
activity in the ballet of the brain can clearly be a factor effecting your
nerves and muscles in a damaging way and sustaining your intense emotions.
It’s
Necessary to Train Your Brain
What does this
understanding of your brain’s activity tell you about how to remain
emotionally strong in the face of loss? Out of control emotions mean your brain
may be constantly running at an extra fast pace. Most people haven’t
effectively learned how to slow the brain and diminish emotion-triggering
thoughts. The electrical and chemical activity that is at the basis of your
thoughts is moving throughout the cells your brain and body in a manner that
gets in the way of a focused, clear mind needed to manage emotion better.
Living
Healthfully With Your Loss
Think back now to the
initial discussion about the two key abilities critical for facing the illness
or loss of a pet in a healthier manner, the ability to control the eruption of
thoughts and control the eruption of emotions. Understanding how thoughts and
emotions occur in the brain and body should help you see that concentration, or
controlling the eruption of thoughts, requires specific activity to happen in
the brain. That activity only happens easily and consistently if it is
practiced.
Further, the importance
of an effective program of mental training in the face of your fear or loss
should be clear as you consider the illustration of emotions as electrical and
chemical reactions occurring throughout your brain and then through every cell
of your body. To bring about or more importantly to sustain a
positive feeling or way of thinking, you cannot merely decide to
feel or think that way. You must train your brain to diminish or change the
electrical and chemical activity that stimulates your negative feelings or ways
of thinking.
Pathway to Healing
Though many sources speak of the importance of getting past your grief
and of healing emotionally, a pathway enabling you to do that is rarely given.
An effective program must go beyond explaining the steps you need
to take and guide you through the steps.
Personal therapy and
audio programs that are based on the method called NEURO-THERAPY Training
introduce a pathway of steps that include the technique of SUBVERBAL SHIFTING®.
This mental training technique stimulates a simple but amazing Ancient Alert
mechanism within your brain. It actually trains your brain, shifting it into an
ultimately calm and focused state, free of the eruption of thoughts and free of
the eruptions of emotions.
The
Ancient Alert
Many people can remember
extreme moments in their lives, often in the midst of survival situations when
what their brains were perceiving was extremely overwhelming. You might remember
the moments before a car crash or in the midst of falling off something or a
time when you experienced an extremely frightening situation unfolding around
you. What happened to your perceptions was the most unusual and amazing brain
response possible.
You might feel major anxiety and sadness surrounding the illness or loss
of your pet. Clearly, though that level of emotion would not come near the level
of fear you would feel upon perceiving a car coming at you. It takes a more
extreme emotional trigger for the mind and body of most people to shift into
that state of extreme focus. An extreme trigger is required to clear away
emotion and cause responses to emerge purely from instinct. SUBVERBAL SHIFTING
offers a way of triggering the Ancient Alert through mental training.
Healing
When an effective mental training program uses SUBVERBAL SHIFTING, it
enables you to clear the physical and chemical reactions triggered by your
anxiety or sadness. You will learn to focus in your mind. Triggering the Ancient
Alert reaction in your brain trains your brain and body to experience the
optimally focused, emotionally clear state.
Many books or programs talk about the experiences of others
who’ve lost beloved pets and tell you things to do. Unfortunately, what you
need to do is diminish your stress and emotions and you cannot will that,
knowing isn’t doing. A program that regularly helps you train your brain in
healthy ways, practicing it in concentration and clearing the physical and
chemical reactions of negative emotions truly offers a pathway to healing is
essential.
You can comfort your ailing pet; you can have thoughts of the beloved pet
that has died without the awful pain. Using effective mental training you truly
can move beyond your fear and sadness and grow in positive ways from your
experience.
ã 2006 North American Institute of NEURO-THERAPY
(www.TherapyoftheFuture.com)
SUBVERBAL
SHIFTING is a registered trademark of The North American Institute of Clinical
Therapy, Inc.