SURVIVING THE EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION
THE NEW MEDIA ATTACK AND COUNTERATTACK ON OUR PSYCHE AND HOW TO HANDLE THE OVERLOAD
It feels as if half the world is under a spell, blind to the trickery and treachery of those who would mislead us all. It is a form of hypnosis using trauma repetition, fear, and the mockingbird media. Every news channel repeating the same words, every social media platform screening and adjusting what you should be seeing on your feed.
It is those of us who took initiative to strike out and find alternate views, alternate sources, and began digging for some semblance of truth who began to see the hypnotic spell we had just stepped out in front of. Yet that did not stop the onslaught of mis-information and psyop agents infiltrating our spaces.
And when all that noise of information penetrates our world, we feel we cannot help our triggered reactions and deeply distressing emotional crises. We are fighting to “rise above” it all, yet the gut punch hits from out of nowhere.
How do you survive all this and stay grounded? How do you continue to be focused on your life and the things most important to you? It’s possible. You only need to know how to stop trying to fight back against your own emotional biology.
There are several steps I have learned and worked with over the decades of coaching. Sure, back in the day I was as into New Age arts and positive affirmations as the next one of you. But I soon began to notice the Catch 22 of positive affirmations. My brain was too smart, too aware!
When I was trying to force my brain to focus on lofty, positive thoughts, it would only serve to underscore the exact lack of what I was trying to create. A simple test for me as I had always struggled to keep my weight in check. I had written on a sticky note “I am naturally slender and healthy.” It was stuck up inside my medicine cabinet, so that every time I opened it to reach for my toothpaste, I saw that affirmation. Pretty quickly I became frustrated with that damn sticky note. It was not transforming a thing. It was actually making me feel worse!
Why? Because my brain did not for one minute believe I was naturally slender. So seeing that note would trigger my brain to think, “ridiculous - just look at all the genetics of your family around you.” Or some other immediate denial, like “you’re still in a size 16, girl.” That is the problem with all those positive affirmations we repeated constantly throughout the 80s and 90s. They were constant reminders of LACK.
So now what? I began with taking a very objective look at various aspects of my life around me to see exactly what was fact versus my thoughts about those facts. Anyone remember the old tv show, Dragnet? Officer Joe Friday was always redirecting the person he was questioning with “Just the facts, mam.”
STEP ONE
Facts are neutral. They have no adjectives to describe them as good/bad. No adjectives at all! There are no emotions tied to facts. Fact just are what they are. A client might come to me and tell me her entire life has been a struggle because of her crazy, negligent mother. Is it a fact her mother was/is crazy and negligent? She will insist and tell me all her family members would back her up. She would even then begin to share instances with me to PROVE she was right - her mother was crazy and negligent.
But the fact, the true fact, is this. She has a mother.
That’s it. Nothing more. Absolutely neutral.
Neutral until she chooses what to think about having a mother. See what happens there? Her mother is the fact. All the rest - allllllll the rest, are her thoughts that she is choosing to think. It’s the story she has spun around in her brain for decades about her own upbringing and her mother.
What if her mother beat her brutally? If there is proof, that is a fact. It is not made “right” by being a fact. A child being beaten is never acceptable. We are not letting anyone off the hook here. What we are doing is separating facts from the emotional story.
All her thoughts above were thus:
My mother is crazy.
My mother was negligent.
My entire life has been a struggle because of her.
I would then help that client look objectively at all her thoughts and in fact, her entire story about her childhood and upbringing. We would work on a lot of separation of thoughts from facts over time. Over time, she might begin to see a few things from a different view. She may begin to choose different thoughts that she actually believes. That is the important part right there. Her brain needs to believe the new thoughts she chooses. She can even think to herself, I think I can begin to believe that . . . . . .
You can do the same with any news article, any new information about the world around you. Headlines today are not the “just the news and nothing but the news” headlines of yesteryear. It is a constant source of amazement to me what is being passed off as journalism. Because of my profession, I can look at a news headline and immediately see there are only one or two facts MAYBE and the rest of the headline is made up of opinion and emotional manipulation.
Why is it important to see the difference between facts and thoughts? Because of step two in creating your world around you.
STEP TWO
We all thinking around 60,000 thoughts a day. We are mostly unaware of nearly all of them, as it should be. The number of thoughts and calculations it takes for the brain to send the signals down your arm to your hand to pick up your cup of coffee, bring it carefully to your mouth, and tilt it just so to take a sip is not something you want to be fully aware of. But there are thoughts we are replaying on a daily basis that you will want to start exploring and evaluating. Many of these are thoughts that you’ve been automatically thinking for decades without even questioning why or if they are serving you well or not.
How do they serve you? Every thought carries an emotional charge. Some so negligible it doesn’t matter. Some thoughts are like napalm! You think a particular thought and simultaneously your brain sends a vibration down through you, it triggers the release of a cascade of chemicals and hormones throughout your body that creates all the bodily sensations and feelings that make up the emotion.
I have proven this to past clients by taking them from one thought in their brain to another and then back to the first thought again while having them be hyperaware of what they are feeling as each sentence runs through their brain. When they “get it,” they are astonished. It’s true. Any thought of immediate life-threatening danger triggers something like this:
Adrenaline releases from your adrenal glands so you can MOVE.
It also triggers release of stress hormones and sympathetic nervous system.
This leads to bodily changes that prepare us to be more efficient in a danger.
The brain becomes hyper-alert, pupils dilate, the bronchi dilate and breathing accelerates.
Heart rate and blood pressure rise.
Blood flow and stream of glucose to the skeletal muscles increase.
Organs not vital in survival such as the gastrointestinal system slow down.
You feel “fight or flight” responses and FEAR.
It’s an extreme example. But all emotion is created just this way. So let’s say you turn on the TV and see someone talking who is distressing to listen to, or a news story that is upsetting.
Sit down, close your eyes for a second and see where you are feeling this in your body. What are the locations?
HOW does it feel? Hot, cold, tight, heavy, light, vibrational? Is it a fast feeling or a slow feeling. What color would that feeling be?
Breathe into it. Is it moving to another place in your body? Ask the same questions. See if you can put a name to what you are feeling. Is it fear, anger, anxiety? What’s going on.
By the time you can name it, it is beginning to dissipate. One of the most astonishing things I learned through this process is an emotion that is not being resisted (which is what I was doing with my emotions most of the time) will only last about 90 seconds. I KNOW! Hard to believe because you’ve gone to bed mad and woke up the next morning still mad, right? Only because you didn’t sit down and process what you were mad about and didn’t allow yourself to feel MAD. Experience it and let it move on through.
So this is really only half of the process I teach for creating your life. But this is such a critical piece and it is really how you can stay grounded throughout the turmoil and yes, even hypnosis that is going on constantly around us. We are a world at war. No question. I’m seeing it in every country.
So it is more important now than ever to teach these tools. When you are feeling emotionally overwhelmed, it is time to sit down and do a download of all the thoughts swarming you. A blank tablet and a pen. You might need a prompt at the top of your page - like “I’m feeling really ________ because:” Set a one or two-minute timer and begin writing as quickly as you can every thought that pops in your heard. Good or bad. Don’t edit. Don’t think “oh that thought has nothing to do with this.” Just WRITE.
When the timer goes off. Stop. You can then take a look at all those sentences running around your mind. Start noting the bare facts. Joe Friday style. No emotion, no adjectives. Then you’ll be able to clearly see the thoughts. Pick out one that feels especially uncomfortable, let it run through your mind and follow the energy of the emotion. Go through the emotion as described above.
If you are satisfied that you allowed the emotion fully and got to understand what it was, you might want to look at that sentence again and ask yourself why you are choosing to think it. Is there any other way to be looking at it? If you do find a thought you might chose instead, test it. Test it by seeing how you feel when you play it in your mind. You’ll know if you believe it or not.
Do not expect the old thought to just “disappear.” No way. Your brain has been firing on those neurons for a long time now. It’s a “go to” thought in your brain. But you know what? You’ll begin to notice it when it does fire! You’ll be thinking to yourself, “oh, there’s that upsetting thing I tell myself again! But I decided I’m not focusing there.” That’s how it begins to shift.
This is but the very beginning of the work I’ve been doing for myself and teaching others for years. You can become very good at it. You can dig into any area of your life using this! Over the years I’ve examined a lot of what I had just accepted as a kid and kept playing in my mind over the years. I’ve examined my food beliefs, my money beliefs, relationships, you name it!
But lately, I’ve been fighting back against the insanity we’ve all been experiencing in the world over the last two years, to keep myself one step ahead of the facts. You can too. Just keep a notebook close by.
Great stuff!
Love it, great exercise I will be using.💞