MISS YOU SO MUCH, A Pathway To Healing
by Marilyn Michael
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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.
The Physical Brain
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.
Managing the Eruptions of Thoughts
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.
Managing the Eruptions of Emotions
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.
The Working Brain
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 patternsbut 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 thesteps you need to take and guide you through the steps.
Programs that are based on the method called NeuroTherapy 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.
In the midst of the most extraordinary experience of your life, you felt no emotion, you felt removed from what was happening around you and you responded completely from instinct. Though, in this instance, triggered by extreme circumstances, you experienced a state of ultimate mental focus and calm.
This reaction for most people is usually only set off by a perceived threat to survival. Emotion is stimulated to greater degrees than in normal daily activities. At those times, your perceptions trigger amazing changes in your brain and body. A chain reaction is set off throughout your body's systems. This chain reaction is referred to by names such as the fight or flight response or the human survival response. A way of thinking about it would be as though it is an ANCIENT ALERT.
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 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.
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.
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SUBVERBAL SHIFTING is a registered trademark of The North American Institute of Clinical Therapy, Inc.
Ask for more information on the audio tape program;
Miss You So Much, A Pathway to Healing
