Part one:
In the chapter from the book: “life between consciousness and soul” – called: “The neurosis as a flashlight” – it was written that neurosis itself is not the problem but is the way the body found to get reed of it. And it is exactly the code of those materials of the neurosis – from which, the higher self could be built.
Most artists are swinging between being under negative emotions and in the rest of the time they transform the hurt emotions (in this case) into a higher state and then they can create.
What is being talked about here is to take the materials of the neurosis (here; the emotional hurt feelings) and to sublimate them to creative energies.
It is possible to block the neurosis but it would leave the person in a level below average.
Usually the swing is not between being subject to E.H. and a creative level, usually the oscillation is between a good mood and a bad mood, it is happening on the same level, there is no jump in a level. It is not vertical but horizontal. (But this horizontal leap – hardly happens).
William James, in his book: ” The Varieties of Religious Experience” –writes that real religious visions and transformations happened often to neurotic people.
Also, Carl Jung in his book: “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” is writing that during his spiritual path – he almost lost his sanity.
Now, there are methods that help in the case of repressed E.H.
The first one is called: ‘Focusing’ Focusing is a psychotherapeutic process developed by psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. It is focusing on ‘felt sense’ which is bodily sensation through which we home on a feeling or emotion which was buried in a certain part of the body. This bodily felt “something”, may be an awareness of a situation of an old hurt. The main concept here is that any repressed emotion is anchored in a specific body part, and focusing on it might cause a release of the repressed emotion. What the therapist does is to focus on a particular emotional hurt (such as: ‘why do women abandon me?’) and both of them are searching for it in an area of the body that houses the emotional hurt, and then they work together on that area to release the repressed emotion.
It is the focusing in the emotional hurt (in this case) which brings with it a physical and emotional relief.
The therapist is instructing the patient how to do an ‘evacuation of space’, which means: to separate between him and the experience of E.H. – so that during the surfacing of the E.H. the patient can look at the hurt from a safe distance (as different from sinking into it even more).
There is also another, very different method called: ‘Psychodrama’ It is conceived and developed by Jacob L. Moreno, MD, Psychodrama employs guided dramatic action to examine problems or issues raised by an individual. A protagonist is chosen to portray the person who raised his repressed emotional problem. If there is sufficient support in the group for the protagonist to work it is likely that the current scene would be enacted as it happened, with an emphasis on hurt emotions evoked for the protagonist. And through the protagonist going through what caused the repressed emotion – the person who brought his issue – is experiencing a kind of almost a breakdown and then a great release of the hidden buried emotion.
Another effective means to deal with E.H. of another, or of oneself is: Empathy; empathy is a ‘feeling with’ someone – being able to put yourself in their place as if you were them, and feeling those feelings. Emotional empathy is when you quite literally feel the other person’s emotions alongside them, as if you had ‘caught’ the emotions.
Compassionate empathy is what we usually understand by empathy: feeling someone’s pain, and taking action to help.
The name, compassionate empathy, is consistent with what we usually understand by compassion. Like sympathy, compassion is about feeling concern for someone, but with an additional move towards action to mitigate the problem.
Compassionate empathy is the type of empathy that is usually most appropriate – in E.H. cases.
There is a higher kind of empathy – Spiritual empathy which is defined as a direct connection with a ‘higher being’ or consciousness.
What is common to all the methods is: awareness; the only way to meet the emotional pain is through awareness, which creates a distance between you and your emotional pain, and only than you can elevate above it.
Being able to look at yourself from the outside (and see yourself the way you are) – frees you from the identification (leads to personal involvement) that glues you to you.
On the whole, the emotional pain could be met either through awareness or identification. Meeting through awareness decreases emotional pain, this is done by sublimation of the cause for emotional pain into consciousness understanding.
Before, it was written here, that the awareness approach decreases the pain, but how does it work? The most important word is: neutral; to come to it in a neutral way, not for, not against, not subjective. And it is very difficult, for there is nothing more subjective than emotional pain, and exactly because of that the approach to emotional pain should be approached, as much as possible, neutrally.
There is a certain point in the process of becoming aware of the emotional pain’s cause – this point transfers the person from being buried in his emotions – to be free in his consciousness, than there is a great relief, and the man feels freed from the consequences of E.H.
Then, (after the process of transferring the E.H. is completed) he doesn’t feel pain anymore but there in him a feeling of elevation. And this is because he went through a process of transmuting E.H. into consciousness understanding, this is quite a miraculous process, it is sublimating the powerful energies of the emotional pain – to a neutral conscious energy. And then everything which was painful before, creates a great jump upwards, and together with the relief there could be also an inspiration.
The person is suffering emotional pain, and all the time he (or a friend, or trainer, therapist or consciousness teacher) needs to tell himself in a calm and clear way: “let’s try and understand this”, again and again, and then at one moment it clicks and it switches into an ordered consiousness level, as opposed to the wild and chaotic emotional level of before.
And then comes the relief from the emotional tyranny, as though we get a much larger breathing space.
It is not an easy process, it is a kind of ‘Quantum leap’ from the emotional level to the consciousness level.
The moment you understand the real root cause of something – you are no longer under its power.
But there is a danger, of not passing through ‘the bottle neck’ between the two levels, and then the pain will only increase, because it got attention (which wasn’t enough to pass through the bottle neck), and attention is ‘food’, is an impression, which will intensify the E.H.
And mostly, a person in this state might not even know about the three stages that he can pass; stage one: emotional hurt. Stage two: emotional pain. Stage three: personal involvement.
It is important here to clarify that not every personal involvement is caused by E.H. one could be in personal involvement even from a pending job interview. The same with identification; one can identify almost with anything, even with actors in a movie in the television, in fact we can identify with almost anything we are in. So E.H. doesn’t have to lead to both; identification or personal involvement, but it is very difficult not to let the E.H. deteriorate into at least one of the two.
When a person gets emotionally hurt –it is very easy to identify with the injustice, and with the pain. And identification – is an express train to personal involvement.
You could not eliminate getting hurt. What you can do is decrease identification (by looking at yourself from the outside) and block becoming personally involved (by certain technics).
Now, there is a very significant difference between the processes of identification (with the E.H.) and the endeavor to sublimate it to an understanding. In identification the person becomes ‘a dot’, meaning: he shrinks to the small size of his identification (and it is very compressed there). If the dot gets an awareness directed towards it – the ‘dot’ gets enlarged again and then the person can see the real proportion of his identification in relation to original issue, and from here come the relief. What is most disturbing about the surrender to E.H. and emotional pain – is the loss of proportions.
The passage from a dot to a greater space is what allows the relief and the becoming free from the slavery of the identification. The subjective identification with the E.H. contracts the person into the small point of the emotional pain. But the moment one passes the ‘bottle neck’ between pain and understanding, the giant spring of the emotional pain gets free from the prison of the identification.
But if the person doesn’t have this counter balance to the identification, than the E.H. would win. And what could act as a ‘counter balance’ is only a cleavage to wisdom and love of truth.
On the whole, there are three possibilities: A. E.H. is dominant. B. love of truth will have the upper hand. And C. the person could not deiced.
People could continue to experience E.H. (and the emotional pain as an accompaniment), what is needed is to go through a transformation, from being locked in negative emotions – to a consciousness wisdom. It is a kind of an alchemy, and the more the repressed negative emotions are painful and poisonous – so would the consciousness relief be more intoxicating and powerful.
The emotional pain is positive vector. The identification (and the personal involvement which follows) is the negative vector, and what is missing is the neutral vector (consciousness understanding) that connects to the identification and neutralizing it.
The person needs to be the neutral vector towards himself, and this means to be an observer. In other words; the moment a person would have a strong enough observer – he would have a triangle (instead of a bipolar prison: E.H. and emotional pain) and this would free him from being trapped in: E.H. The addition of an observer (which operates on the neutral vector) transforms the experience of the person from being two dimensional into three dimensional experience.
The most important work (in dealing with E.H.) is to give the observer space and to let it become a central figure in the selfhood.
Which means that– we shouldn’t take it personally. The neutral approach takes any pain in a non-personal way, the three dimensional person needs to have a certain distance from what is happening to, and in, him, and even than it still hurts, but you are not centered and based in it, the distance brings perspective and in relation to it – the E.H. is almost nothing.
We need to take this material in the perspective within an existential meaning, in other words: the characteristics of the existence of the individual in our world is of: loneliness, alienation, absurd, and angst. A person that understands what is waiting for him, and is prepared for it – will decrease the proportions of his emotional pain. And so, the solution to a psychological-emotional problem – is in the philosophical dimension.
The more there is the admission in what it means to live an existential life – from one hand, and the love of truth – from the other, so people will succeed to pass through the bottle neck between the emotional pain and consciousness understanding. Actually, to do a quantum leap of conscious and spiritual – elevation.
Part 2:
This elevation of E.H. into the consciousness level – can hardly be done by oneself to oneself, it is more effective if this process is done by someone who is on a higher level of consciousness. But then it should be done within a dialogue, with no difference hierarchy between both.
It is important to understand that repression and consciousness are two opposites.
Repression is being created from the instinct that was supposed to distance the person from pain, it is true on the physical level as it is true on psychological-emotional – level.
The process of consciousness is not automatic as repression, it is a kind of swimming against the stream of forgetfulness, getting lost and the blurring of unpleasant elements.
Consciousness works is done, at first, by eliminating the sinking of unpleasant experiences to the abys of the (lower) sub-consciousness.
There is a possibility for a developed consciousness to draw out of the subconscious repressed elements. So if the person has gone through a process of inner work – there is a dual tension here, because from one hand there is a refusal to expose the repressed elements, and from the other hand, if there is a developed consciousness, there is a motivation there to get reed of the repression by a conscious exposure.
The process of repression is there in order to survive, and the process of consciousness is there in order to develop.
Becoming conscious is not in the natural flow of things, it needs to go against the natural flow of: sleep and blurring. So we feel very comfortable in repression.
Part three:
There is a stage between getting hurt and being identified with the hurt – in which the one being hurt can intervene by awareness and guided imagery. The awareness does not allow the hurt to get into one’s system. But how does one cope with the pain? If one does not meet the pain consciously – it can ruin his life.
There are only two ways to meet the emotional pain; through consciousness or identification. The second increases the pain, the first decreases it. As it was written- the way to deal with E.H. is by transformation of the emotional pain into conscious understanding.
There is a significant difference between ‘digging’ in an emotional wound and between passing it through the ‘refinery’ of the consciousness process. ‘Digging’ in it, by talking about it, gives the pain power.
And still a big question remains; what happens in the consciousness plane? Why and how consciousness does it? (Consciousness, and not logic, nor rationality or an intellectual understanding!).
The most difficult thing about the sublimation of the emotions is still seeing it not form a personal point of view. The moment we succeed to see the E.H. not from a personal view point – there begins the shifting to the consciousness level. At that moment, of the turning point – there is great relief, the pain is gone and the person feel released. It is a real transformation.
The way to reach this state is mainly by being neutral and persistent; saying again and again: ‘let’s try to understand this” – until it tilts and tips over and then you regain the right proportions of the E.H. and then the ‘lad’ of the E.H. turns into the ‘gold’ of high consciousness.
When a person is under the E.H. – he sees the passage into the consciousness level as a black hole, and not as a birth channel into another dimension. And just before the passage through this bottle neck – the pain is greatest.
Three things are helping in this process; one is to develop, over time, an ‘observer’, and second is to love truth more than the love of the ego, and the third is to admit to oneself that he is in identification and even personal involvement with the E.H.
One of the ways to realize or recognize that one is in personal involvement about the E.H. – is by his confusion and disorientation in the thinking system. And together with the instinctive resistance against trying to understand the pain – it makes the process of transformation – to be very difficult.
By analogy – the E.H. is like grape juice the and the observer is like yeast, when mixed with the juice, it changes its state of matter into wine (higher state of consciousness).
There is fear of looking at our E.H. in a neutral way, because maybe many skeletons will come out of the Cabot… But the opposite is true; only when we look at ourselves in a neutral way – would the ‘skeletons will become much smaller.
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Quotes:
Take all the time you need to heal emotionally. Heal at your own pace. Step by step. Day by day.
– Karen Salmansohn.
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Listen. People start to heal the moment they feel heard.
– Cheryl Richardson.
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The scars you can’t see are the hardest to heal.
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Healing doesn’t mean the pain never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.
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Gabriel