CHAPTER 6

Change Your Emotional Channels

If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.

—Dean Smith

Gabriella’s teenage son is driving her car—and driving her crazy. She can’t sleep until she hears his keys in the door at night because she’s sure he’s going to get in a wreck, and who knows whom he’s got in that car with him, and she hopes it isn’t that Raymond kid because she can tell just by looking at him that he smokes weed.

To make matters worse, college expenses are looming, and she’s scared that she’s not going to have enough to cover it all and if she can she’ll probably never take another vacation as long as she lives and damn her ex for giving a dime to that other woman’s kids. She’s tried to solve the problem by taking on additional freelance clients, but one of them is an incredible pill to work with, and when she tried to tell her mom about it last week, Gabriella saw this vacant look that made her wonder if Mom is getting Alzheimer’s, and if she is, forget getting any help from her siblings. Gabriella just knows it’ll all be on her.

Sound familiar? Is there a similar Stephen King–worthy horror show of worries flipping through your mind? If so, there’s a way you can hit the pause button on that awful mental movie and recondition your brain to see the world in much less fearful terms.

Gabriella’s situation was understandably scary and overwhelming. But we knew that if we could help her shift her focus of attention, she could calm her mind and problem-solve without harming herself in the process. Then she could learn how to shift out of scary and worrisome thinking, learn how to change a dead-end life pattern, and condition her brain to run smoothly.

We introduced Gabriella to neuro-repatterning, a tool that could revolutionize her quality of life. Why neuro-repatterning? It’s a powerful and effective strategy that reconditions your mind and regulates the stimulation of your emotional circuits. By becoming aware of which circumstances activate which emotional circuits, you give yourself more of a choice in how you act on these feelings and how to activate opposing circuits, which gives you the freedom to understand and respond to others more appropriately.

Through neuro-repatterning you can develop more control over your emotions, dissolve worry, transform negative ideas, and balance the intensity of your internal states. You simply need to figure out what events or thoughts trigger your worry and retrain your brain to react less intensely to those thoughts and events by turning on a different circuit. With practice, neuro-repatterning works at a deep level to improve your focus and pinpoint your optimal zone for happiness and productivity. Your reality is malleable when you learn what to do. This is also a tool that will ultimately help you get ready to move into optimal states of consciousness.

We’ve already established that our limiting beliefs are generally formed by our childhood experiences and supported by the three pillars of the architecture of belief—our biolog y, our mindset, and our default internal state. Limiting beliefs are not only problematic because they often keep us from attempting to achieve goals, however, but also because over time they create negative life patterns that spread into broader areas of life. One of Gabriella’s limiting beliefs was that she was the only person who would properly take care of her mother. As a result, she not only worried about her mother, but also never asked her siblings to take on some responsibility or confronted them about pitching in their fair share of the work. She was uncomfortable sticking up for herself and reluctant to engage in confrontation with difficult people. Another of her limiting beliefs was that she would never have enough money. Consequently, she also had a life pattern of over-functioning from thinking she was responsible for everything and everyone, and it drained her energy to do other things.

Let’s look at how Gabriella developed her limiting beliefs and life patterns. Gabriella grew up in a household where there was never enough money to go around. She was the oldest child whose parents put her in charge of her younger brother and sister. Her parents had to work a lot to make ends meet, so she took the role of a third parent. Of course, she often couldn’t get her siblings to mind her. Her parents did the best they could on a limited income but criticized her for not getting her siblings to behave when she was left alone with them. Gabriella always felt under pressure to take care of more things around the house than she could. When her father died, her responsibilities intensified, and Gabriella had to juggle caretaking and cooking for her siblings. Unable to develop her own social network and often alone, she came to the conclusion that everything was up to her. Afraid to rock the boat through any adolescent adventure, she developed a cautious life pattern. She was a model teenager, following the rules to a tee without indulging in any of the typical adolescent adventures or experimentations. And all the while, deprived of the virtual oxygen of friends, spontaneity, whimsical thinking, and big dreams, her life energy was shutting down.

Gabriella’s isolation continued into adulthood. Though her siblings were functional grownups, as kids they had never been taken to task when they didn’t do their share of the chores around the house. They continued this pattern by not helping out with their mother.

Gabriella felt unappreciated at work, too. She had a good job, she was underpaid for her level of expertise. But rather than asking her employer for more compensation, she would take freelance work to supplement her income. The additional money helped, but the extra work hours were exhausting. Meanwhile, her husband brought in an income but left her to do most of the child rearing, preferring to be the “fun” parent when he spent time with the kids. Gabriella’s resentment grew. Eventually he left and they divorced. Ironically, he married a woman who expected him to be a full-time father to her children both financially and emotionally.

Gabriella came by her predicaments honestly. Her life experiences had led to limiting beliefs that had morphed into life patterns that left her overburdened, unable to set boundaries, and incapable of getting her needs met. Worry was her constant companion. Her life energy—a force called chi in some cultures, or élan vital in French, and crucial to enjoying life—was depleted.¹ She was numb, dissociated, and disconnected. She was an overworked, underpaid, exhausted single mom and still her mother’s primary caretaker. Something had to give.

How the Past Affects the Present

Every thought and mental state you experience creates chemical reactions. When you are negative you flood your organs with norepinephrine or adrenaline; when you feel joyful and grateful you activate the feel-good chemicals called endorphins. When you enter your habitual mental states, you develop a routine practice of being and feeling a certain way. What are yours? How positive are they? If you have been angry with someone for years, you have conditioned your internal state and your body’s responses to staying in resentment or disappointment. What do you need to do to let go of the past? The more you ruminate about what happened, the more you live there and not in the present. When you think about a past event that still carries an emotional charge (whether it’s a good thing like winning your school spelling bee or a bad thing like getting dumped), your brain re-creates the same pattern as when the event occurred, reinforcing the exact pattern of neuronal firing and wiring. Worrying about the past keeps the past showing up at your front door. As you keep repeating the same emotional state, you train yourself to fire the same automatic pattern. Eventually you develop a habit that makes it very hard to see that life is giving you brand-new experiences that don’t necessitate the same kind of behaviors and emotional states. By reacting inappropriately to these new stimuli and experiences you can force the present to start replicating the past. When you live in the past, it is difficult to have or appreciate new experiences. And yet we need new experiences if we are to grow.

What Do We Really Need?

The experiences and relationships of our youth tend to influence the circuitry of our emotions, forming the neural foundation of our inner lives and shaping our capacity to regulate our feelings. Early attachment conditioning establishes the neural patterning of emotional systems that remains in place across a lifetime.² When caregivers respond appropriately to children’s feelings by soothing negative states and encouraging positive ones, children learn how to calm themselves and develop secure attachments. Adults with secure attachments have the ability to be both intimate and connected and be independent and separate. Developmental researcher Allan Schore demonstrated that the brains of children with secure attachments develop differently from insecurely attached children. People with insecure attachments feel overly worried about the separation when they need to be apart from a partner and may cling to relationships. Or they may feel so worried and hurt when experiencing separation they will ignore the partner as a way of protecting themselves against anxious feelings.³

Caregivers influence the attachment styles of children through their psychobiological attunement. The way they gaze at children, their nurturing sounds, the frequency of their touch, the stability of their moods—all of these affect whether and to what degree children are able to make healthy emotional connections. Connecting is just one of several primal human needs. Fortunately, we can build connections as adults even if we don’t develop them in childhood. Neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to adapt by building new neural pathways—means we can use mental training to establish a sense of internal security and fulfill our unmet needs.

Human needs are the innate psychological essentials for living. They include the need for security and order, the need for novelty, the need for growth, contribution, status, and the need for feeling connected to a community. When any of these are out of balance, we feel out of sorts and worry that something is missing in life. As we have established, unmet needs also tend to signal negative life patterns.

Whether your needs are met or not will affect your brain’s EEG. When you feel hopeless you may have high Delta frequency, which makes your mind fuzzy. If you learned a life pattern of insecurity as a child, your Beta may be turned on high in sympathetic arousal, making it difficult to calm down. At times you may find yourself bored with work and feel a need to grow in a different area. Your Theta frequency may rise as you emotionally check out. Delta may rise if you are not connected to a community and contributing your time and expertise. Feeling like you matter is important, and feeling unimportant may lead to high Theta and being dissociated in a parasympathetic downward spiral, which can turn into depression. The times you feel in the flow of life, it is likely your needs are being fulfilled and your EEG is in balance; when your needs are not met, it is more difficult to shift your internal states and pull out of self-destructive moods and mindsets.

Human needs attach to seven different emotional circuits, each coded with their unique language. They are Seeking or Curiosity, Rage, Fear, Lust, Care or Nurturing, Panic, and Play.⁴ These emotional patterns are often triggered by familiar phrases we heard frequently in our youth, and once activated can immediately shift our thinking and motivation patterns. For example, depending on the voice inflection, the question “What’s that?” can trigger fear or curiosity. In addition, these automatic processes can unconsciously direct lifelong behaviors and relationship dynamics. If you know how to coach your brain circuits to work for you, however, you can shut down worry.

Let’s look at these emotional circuits up close:

1. Seeking/Curiosities: When this circuit is activated, you experience curiosity, novelty, anticipation, excitement, intentionality, and a directed purpose. You also seek accomplishments and rewards. Children are constantly activating this circuit because they naturally love to explore their environments. Adults trigger it when they open to explore new ideas, places, events, and interests. Seeking can also activate cravings and addictions, because it releases dopamine, which gives us a wonderful feeling that we often want to keep having. Someone who has a balanced Seeking circuit will be dedicated to an endeavor; someone who is out of balance is frequently bored and compulsively sets new goals. When this system is underactive due to psychological pain, depression sets in. This circuit needs stimulation to activate an interest in living. It also contributes to the flow state, a peak performance state of mind that we’ll explore in detail in Chapter 9. Because this circuit helps you explore the world, you can call it your Pioneer.

Need: Curiosity and novelty.

Positive Life Pattern: “I have the desire to learn new things, be open to new experiences, new relationships, and adventures.”

Negative Life Pattern: “As soon as I achieve something, I must go on to the next level.” “I need more novelty to feel satisfied.” “I need substances, food, or things to feel good about myself or my life.”

2. Rage: This circuit activates feelings of frustration, thoughts of blame and contempt, memories of being hurt and having been misunderstood and maligned, and the impulse to attack an offender. It promotes self-protection in dangerous situations. Rage immediately shuts off the Seeking Circuit, which is why we can lose perspective and experience tunnel vision in this state. You could call this system your Protector.

Need: Well-being, security, and justice.

Positive Life Pattern: To protect; defend; overcome fear; place yourself in harm’s way to protect others; take necessary actions you wouldn’t normally choose to take, such as in war.

Negative Life Pattern: Rage can cause us to become unfocused and do more damage than is necessary to protect ourselves or others. Unfocused rage can lead to being less effective. “No one tells me what to do” or “I must retaliate.”

3. Fear: A circuit that activates the flight, fight, or freeze responses, as well as worry and rumination. Under threat, it activates to mobilize or immobilize a person in the presence of a dangerous person or event. You could call this circuit your Safety Manager.

Need: Safety and security.

Positive Life Pattern: “I pay attention to potential danger or threats.”

Negative Life Pattern: “I will be easily harmed or judged.”

4. Lust: This circuit stimulates movement toward intimacy and sexual expression. It turns on in response to visual and verbal cues, or hormonal fluctuations and physical touch. You could call this system your Lover.

Need: To experience sexual release and physical touch, which is best experienced in a bonded relationship.

Positive Life Pattern: “I can connect sexually and be interested enough to please a partner and accept being pleased.”

Negative Life Pattern: “I must have sex to feel connected.”

5. Care/Nurturing: This circuit enables us to express empathy, nurturing, and tenderness. Caring is important for affiliating, attaching, and connecting to others. You could call this system your Community Builder.

Need: To express warmth and empathy toward another, which builds a personal community.

Positive Life Pattern: “I can care for others and can be cared for.”

Negative Life Pattern: “I can’t set boundaries with others” or “I am dependent on others to take care of me as an adult.”

6. Panic: This emotional circuit activates in response to separation if we have not learned how to be alone. It may be triggered in an emergency situation when a person is in great danger of dying. You could call this system your Lifeguard.

Need: To maintain affiliation and connectedness.

Positive Life Pattern: “I can activate in the face of imminent threat.”

Negative Life Pattern: “I will die if the situation becomes slightly threatening.”

7. Play: This circuit activates the feeling of joy and its expression in laughter. Play eliminates stress and regenerates you with better life balance. A person must feel a sense of safety to activate play. You could call this system your Recreation Director.

Need: Fun and laughter.

Positive Life Pattern: “I can see humor in most situations and enjoy playing and having fun.”

Negative Life Pattern: “I can’t stop playing computer games” or “I can’t be serious.”

Take your cue from Gabriella and identify your own life patterns. What do they tell you about your unmet needs? Write down your unmet needs and describe what you think you need to do to meet them.

Because we are not always consciously in charge of our inner states, taking note of what emotional shifts we experience during the day and what circumstances turn on our worry can help us gain more control over our mental states. By learning how to turn on and off emotional circuits, you manage life more easily and diminish your worries. With conditioning, you will be able to activate the right circuits you need to deal with life circumstances.

Apply Neuro-Repatterning

Neuro-repatterning helps you regulate your feelings so they are no longer out of control. Just like learning how to play an instrument or develop an athletic skill, you must practice mentally and physically by building new brain connections. When you have a strong feeling and learn how to reduce its intensity, you loosen the connection of behavior to the feeling. This allows a new positive thought and behavior to connect to the emotional state. Neuro-repatterning can help you change your focus of attention so you shift out of scary and worried thinking, change a dead-end life pattern, and condition your brain to run smoothly.

All seven emotional circuits are important for getting along successfully in the world. Curiosity, Play, Lust, and Nurture, in particular, are antidotes to worry. Fear, Rage, and Panic can be helpful to stimulate you to action when you need to take care of yourself, but they have to be managed so you don’t get over-aroused and react inappropriately to situations. Using neuro-repatterning to make even a small adjustment to a negative emotional charge can go a long way toward interrupting a habitual pattern of reactivity.

The Steps

The next time you start to feel worried or upset and find yourself fixated on a mental horror movie about everything that will surely go wrong, start the neuro-repatterning process by asking yourself: What’s going on? Why am I so worried about this? Just replacing your worry and fear with curiosity, and taking the time to answer the questions will immediately reduce the intensity of your emotion. It gives you a chance to side-step the negative feeling and shift into one that is easier to manage and more productive.

The next step in neuro-repatterning is to stop moving and take stock of your body. Where do you feel the emotion? Is there pressure anywhere? The answer is likely to be yes, so focus on the pressure and try to remember where or when else you’ve experienced it. This information can give you clues about why you’re reacting the way you are. Remember: As we discussed in Chapter 3, we internalize the moments when our emotions are formed, and so our past informs our current emotional habits and triggers our reactions. Then take a deep breath and exhale several times until you get into a calmer state.

Once you have replaced worry with curiosity, step three is to ask “What do I need?” Let’s say you realize that you need to feel nurtured. The appropriate response would be to take steps that could trigger the emotional circuit that will fulfill that need, such as making a pedicure appointment or scheduling a dinner date with your partner, no kids allowed. Once you begin to feel better, you’ll be better able to problem-solve.

The fourth step is to mentally call up your Pioneer (Curiosity), Lover (Lust), Community Builder (Care), or your Recreation Director (Play). Ask yourself: What do I want to explore? Who do I want to be sexual with? What group do I want more time with? And what play activities do I want to engage in? Imaging yourself acting on each these desires will help you practice turning on the relevant circuit.

Remember: You cannot hold two emotional states at once. This is a trick you can apply to all kinds of emotions. Humor or play can easily dissipate worry, anger, or fear, which is why one of the best remedies for a bad day is to watch children play and laugh. Just the act of smiling changes your muscles and starts moving your brain circuitry from one state to another. Changing your physiology always changes your mental state, so the idea is to expose yourself to something that won’t fuel the circuitry that is causing you pain or trouble. You want to turn on the neurocircuitry that will serve you the best in any situation.

You can also try this exercise when you have a negative thought: Ask: Does this help me? If not, refocus your attention on relaxing your tongue and imagine breathing through your feet. Now ponder your future possibilities without making any negative judgments. Notice the relief you feel. You have just turned down your sympathetic nervous system and turned on a curiosity circuit.

Plan of Action

Back to Gabriella. After moving through the exercise above, we asked if she was willing to look for the exceptions in her limiting belief that everything was up to her where it might not be true. She was. And that was a coup, because finding her curiosity was the first small step she needed to take to shift out of her frustration and despair. She thought back to when she insisted her siblings help her with their mother, and they finally did.

Second, we asked her to think about what her family truly needed from her, and what she only thought they needed. What could she let go? She thought she could hover over her son less frequently.

Third, she really needed a community centered on something that gave her a sense of pleasure or comfort, such as a cause, a hobby, or a place of worship. Where did Gabriella think she could find a group that would embrace her and make her feel as though she belonged? She loved to paint and joined an artist group that met regularly for social interaction and individual art projects.

Fourth, we suggested she find a mentor. She evaluated her network for someone she could hang out with who was expert at the skills she needed to learn—setting boundaries, asking for help when appropriate, and confronting others when needed. She chose her Sunday School teacher, who frequently presented talks on Eastern psychology and who was both kind and had good personal boundaries.

From the first time Gabriella practiced the neuro-repattering process she reported feeling comforted and relieved. The curiosity she applied toward figuring out the root of her issues revealed answers she’d never considered, and once she saw them in the light of day, they seemed small and manageable. The future looked brighter to her.

She started dealing with conflict and expressing her needs. Instead of allowing herself to bathe in the Rage circuit when one of her clients had a ridiculous list of demands, she turned on the Play circuit, which helped her keep her good humor. Rather than work harder and keep silent while seething with resentment, she found a gentle way to set a boundary, responding gently, “For the sake of this project, let’s figure out what you want and what you need, and go from there. But we have to fit into my time frame. ” Her client was taken aback but Gabriella’s tone was so warm and confident that he responded, “Sorry, I’m really stressing over this. Let’s figure out what is reasonable.”

Develop Inner Stability

One thing we really wanted to help Gabriella experience was inner stability. We enter a calmer state when we turn on the emotional circuits appropriate to our environment and circumstances. When your brain is satisfied with this composed state, it begins to stay there longer. The calm mind/body state works well as your default state, the inner place to which you return after an upset or a joyful experience. When you practice switching circuits, you are more in control of yourself, or to use another phrase, you’re nonreactive. The resulting inner stability has been described through the centuries as mastery of mind, enlightenment, calm mind, or inner strength.

To get there, much like in martial arts, you begin to find this inner strength physiologically by stabilizing yourself through standing equally on two feet. Then, feel your balanced center 2 inches below the belly button. Imagine you have a powerful energy moving from the universe through the crown of your head, down to the power center located 2 inches below your navel, and then into the earth. When you stand poised in this position, you are stronger. Ask someone to try to push you over. It’s impossible. Once you memorize that feeling, you should use it when you feel yourself reacting emotionally: Shift your focus to your power spot 2 inches below your belly button and imagine breathing from there. Your inner power and resolve to stay non-reactive shifts your brain circuits from Fear or Rage to Calm strength. It takes some practice, but once you master this technique it will be hugely effective in helping you stay in control.

Though it is natural to worry at times, and it is great to embrace your feelings, you don’t have to stay in the middle of them. Your inner resources construct a personal shield of inner stability. These inner resources might include courage, confidence, clarity, an ability to develop contingencies, or awareness. Carry this shield with you wherever you go. No one will know it’s there, but you’ll find that negative or problematic situations bounce right off you.

Interpersonal Neuro-Repatterning

Your friends, family, and colleagues respond to your brain’s activity. If you function from a closed and inflexible inner state, others will respond in defensiveness and struggle rather than cooperating with you. Conversely, if you are calm and adaptable, others will move toward you in a positive manner.

Healthy relationships help buffer you against bad brain patterns such as meltdowns, or as we like to call them “trips to Freakout Land,” and negativity. The more honest your relationships are, the better feedback you receive about how you interact in both positive and negative ways.

As Gabriella reached out to others and set appropriate boundaries with her siblings and clients, her limiting beliefs began to dissolve and her life patterns changed. People invited her to events, her siblings helped with her mother from time to time, and as she took more time for herself, she felt energized and it seemed that she had more time in her day for satisfying work. When her siblings disappointed her by not helping out, Gabriella took it as a minor inconvenience, not a full-blown drama. But she didn’t let it slide, either. She let them know that she still expected their participation, and after a while they became much more dependable.

The best measure for intimacy is the frequency of positive interactions you experience with your partner and family, and your mutual willingness to ask for and receive feedback about the quality of your interactions. To measure that quality for yourself, just be aware of which internal states you experience when around others. That is, do you notice more negative reactivity around certain people than others? When you really resonate with someone you feel an easy flow of acceptance and well being; you frequently share laughter. When this happens, it means your brains are in synchrony.

There is evidence of interpersonal neurobiology in all relationships. Everything you say to another person has a neural effect. Emotions tend to be contagious. When we are around negative energy, we start to feel sad or anxious. When we are around upbeat people, our energy rises, our mood is great, and we want to be around that person more frequently. A key to feeling great is to be selective with whom you surround yourself.

Expect the Best

As a person begins to meet needs, change states appropriately, and reprogram life patterns, the world reflects these changes by people reacting differently, and this new response reinforces the new behaviors. Jean Houston, author, scholar, philosopher, and researcher in the human potential movement, reported a conversation she had with Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, that sums up what we have discussed in terms of needs, beliefs, and life patterns. Jean told Margaret that she seemed incredibly lucky; really wonderful things always seemed to happen to her. What was her secret? Margaret replied matter-of-factly, “I expect them to.”

In a nutshell:

1. Curiosity calms Fear, so ask yourself what you are really afraid of when you’re fearful.

2. Play, which includes humor, changes anger. When it is appropriate, try to see the humor in a situation that may be making you angry.

3. Empathy shifts Anger and Fear. Practice nurturing yourself or another person before if you begin to react negatively to your thoughts or their words or behavior.

4. Deep breathing calms Anxiety and a worried mind unless you allow yourself to get to an emotional state where you can’t calm yourself down, so practice breathing early and often when you feel the slightest hint of the worry movie starting up in your mind.

5. The key to a successful life is learning to modulate your emotions by knowing how to trigger your emotional circuits at will.

Power Thought: When you learn to replace one emotion with another, you can get your needs met and gain a sense of control over your life, so there’s no need to worry. Ever.

Profound change is possible when we learn to shift our brain circuitry from ones that hold us back to those that serve us well, practicing the states associated with those circuits, fulfilling our needs, and creating an environment that reinforces our optimal states of being. In addition, these processes help balance life by clearing frantic activity and making time for self-care activities such as the ones we will discuss in Chapter 7.