Teaching People to Manage the Damaging Mental and Physical Effects of Emotions
Audio version of the discussion below:
People today live in a constant state of physical and chemical reactiveness to internal conflicts, impulses and insecurities, a state of DIS-EASE.
Traditional psychotherapy has attempted to deal with what are negative emotions primarily, through intellectual means.
NeuroTherapy Training is a powerful method of mental training teaching people and guiding them in ways that release them from the damaging effects of negative emotion, both mental and physical.
In this time of world-wide crisis, tools like NeuroTherapy Training are needed more than ever in the toolkits of professionals helping people manage their responses to life.
A New Look At Fear
NeuroTherapy Training is a method of mental training that more directly modifies the physical and chemical responses underlying emotion; the physiology of emotion.
A basic, assumption of NeuroTherapy Training is that fear is the primary human emotion and motivation. (Fear being a response to a clear and present danger.) In the modern world, people experience fear more directly in the form of anxiety. (Anxiety being a response to an imagined, undefined or unknown threat.) When something threatens you, your body reacts physically. Your central nervous system comes alive with electrical impulses and a flood of neurochemicals. These physical and chemical responses are referred to in NeuroTherapy Training as the physiology of emotions.
In NeuroTherapy Training the word fear refers to all nature of negative emotions. The concept of negative emotions is further distilled to refer to a mentally stimulated occurrence of physical and chemical reactions that are damaging to the organism.
Both fear and anxiety cause a readying of your body for fight or flight. In both fear and anxiety, your body mobilizes itself to meet the threat. Your muscles become tense, you breathe faster and your heart beats more rapidly. This fear or anxiety response was designed to trigger a short-term response to “danger.” It becomes unhealthy for your mind and body when you sustain it for long periods of time. When humans lived in more primitive times, fighting Sabertooth Tigers, the stimuli were primarily for fear. When the danger passed, these intense reactions of the body passed.
Fighting “Mental Tigers”
As the brain evolved, conscious processes emerged to fend off “psychological danger”. As humans evolved, their world became more complex. Attacks or assaults requiring responses were no longer, in fact rarely, merely physical.
Fear turned into anxiety requiring psychological responses. The conscious analytical realm of the human brain eventually began to trigger physical and chemical responses to psychological assaults, mental tigers, not just to physical assaults.
Human interaction became more complex and communication evolved. The human brain developed concepts of a past and a future. This fear-turned-anxiety was the physical and chemical responses of the body to stimuli such as hurtful comments by others, worry about the future, guilt about past actions, and insecurity in the face of social situations. These anxiety responses became referred to by many names, fear, guilt, low self esteem, anger, frustration, etc.
Human interactions and mental sophistication continued to evolve. Imagined, undefined or unknown threats, mental tigers, were now triggering intense physical and chemical reactions in the body. Ironically, the brain or thoughts themselves, rather than external threats, had now become the stimuli for the physical and chemical responses of fear. The anxiety reactions, though not as intense as those of physical, survival fear, were of the same nature and the triggers for anxiety were now constant.
Emotional reaction to daily life has become a prison for humankind.