Dealing with Ingrained Negative Emotions

I’m Dr. Dave Kirkpatrick with Quantum Techniques. Today’s topic is working with long ingrained emotional patterns that people want to move past. With QT, we have a variety ways of looking at trauma, spiritual attachments, and all of the various non-physical things that can stand in the way of people moving towards full health. If there is a specific trauma or incident to be released, QT can fairly easily deal with it. What’s more difficult to handle is the long-term, gradual constant pattern that is ingrained within emotional patterns.

I’ve found some success by taking the QT tools and using them within the framework developed by a very successful coaching trainer, Brooke Castillo. This isn’t completely original to her, she’s synthesizing what most of the experts in the field have said – your reaction starts not with the emotion, but with a thought. We have tapes running in the back of our mind. Frequently that thought is unconscious, but that thought is what triggers the emotion, which leads to a reaction and the subsequent undesirable results. We typically focus on the emotion, but we have to get to the mental tape, the underlying thought that is behind the emotion. If we get to that thought, we can then test whether that thought is accurate, and whether it has always been the case. We can visualize and experience where it was not the case, and we can re-frame the situation with a positive thought.

Here’s an example – one of my clients had an overbearing mother and she felt that her mom was always trying to control her. In her other relationships, she experienced many things that were intended to be helpful as a controlling aspect, and she always rejected them. What she was aware of was the anger, rage and the oppression, rather than the underlying thought which was “I’m being controlled.” Once she could be conscious of the underlying thought about her being controlled, she was able to re-frame it as “Someone’s trying to help me be better and I have the choice to follow their advice or not.” She was able to react neutrally and positively to the same stimuli that previously she had found very oppressive and enraging. The basic idea is that it is not sufficient to find the emotions; you must discover the underlying thought. Sometimes that sounds like an emotion or vow, but it’s what is in that mind tape, and is often subconscious. Identifying and challenging it, and then re-framing it, has generated significant results in long-term patterns where my clients have otherwise had difficulty.

I offer that to you as my tip of the day. I wish you good health!